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Comment by nynx | Hacker News Reader

I find this type of science is infuriating. Monotropism as a theory of autism or adhd is equivalent to saying that “tendency to focus on a few things” is a theory of autism or adhd. You’re describing the symptoms, which explains almost nothing. A theory of autism would explain the underlying physical causes of the behavior.

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I read the whole article and I agree that the first sentence was a very poor choice as an introduction to the rest of the content.

However, it is an interesting article if you ignore that bit of bluster. The amount of overlap and traits commonly associated with ADHD and autism.

Eh, newtons theory of universal gravitation is still a theory, even if he had no access to particle physics, and even if later the Theory of General Relativity (among others) largely supplanted it. It’s also still useful (and used!) in most real life engineering situations. It’s rare where time dilation applies in say civil engineering.

That folks with Autism and ADHD may have large portions of their symptoms occur because they focus too much on some specific things, to the detriment of others - like emotional well being/regulation - can still be falsifiable (better than most psychiatric theories for sure!) and useful clinically.

Personally, it lines up with what I’ve seen and experienced.

That there is another (perhaps chemical, or brain structure) theory too doesn’t necessarily change that!

I don’t think it’s falsifiable until there are autism diagnostics that aren’t behavioral. Right now, they’re 100% behavioral, which that any theory that tries to cluster autism symptoms is hopelessly tainted by a recursive definition -> diagnosis -> definition cycle.

If intervention x results in y behavior changing in z% of the population (or not), would that count? I think it would.

Just because it doesn’t describe 100% of situations or work 100% of the time doesn’t mean it couldn’t be shown to produce useful predictions and work or not.

And yes, that isn’t particle physics type falsifiable, but it is medical treatment falsifiable. Kinda. Newtons theory never predicted Mercury’s behavior, but was still super useful eh?

They're Newton's laws of universal gravitation, not a theory. The difference matters because Newton's laws describe what happens in nature without positing a mechanism. Einstein provided the mechanism via general relativity, which is a theory.

Sure, but newtons’s laws also are far from universal, he just didn’t have the data to know it at the time.

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