living in a papereclip maximizing orphan crushing machine that encourages isolationism and is being shaped for extracting every drop of value out if the public good, or potentially growth, to ensure the rich get richer, and that nobody can make accountability come close to our corpo overlords. Lots to make sure we are generally unhealthy, but why is the complaint always that the peasants are trying and not the system around them?

But let’s make sure to individualize the problem and say that having basic access to information or freedom is the problem, since we’ve gated the only options in information devices to be addictive gacha games and slop feeds that you have increasingly less control over. Kind of like stress fed cows.

The stress is all a complete mystery, and has nothing to do with the death of anti-trust or enabling/defending corporate abuses of the public good. Etc.

Only possible solution is to discourage, or reduce the autonomy of the peasants again.

The self diagnosing critique sounds more like complaining that the peasants without access are trying to find words that convey their experience without expert level accuracy, but psychology is one of the most fucked up fields of science out there, and certain old farts just really don’t want to update how we structure and communicate around these topics. Even clinical diagnoses is imperfect, and a we become more informed, your diagnosis or label may change. I’m pretty sure most people would love access to proper and more accurate resources.

Reminder that it wasn’t long ago that being gay was a mental illness because social priors can still overtake less refined scientific truths. Now that all the peasants are connected to information and contemplating their situation, the ones who get smacked into submission rather than being informed about things like sensory issues, you’ll inevitably have groups looking at the middle class reality and trying to address the difference in salience and treatment.

This gets more complicated when you look at subcultures of diagnosed and self identified labels. everything from aspie supremecy tribalism to uta frith wanting to ignore everything other than what she already knows because the formalism is still too vague and reshaping how we communicate the differences of autistic experiences is just too hard. Hand waving away what we now understand about precision weighting and the like, as if we don’t have good new tools for shaping exactly where systems become pathological, at what scale, and how that balanced with the current socialized reality around the context.

So you get a bunch of people who fit the system fuzziness associated with autism who haven’t had any particular system reach “profound autism” levels, or don’t have the comorbid diagnosis to make the pathological experience more intense or likely. This doesn’t mean they aren’t autistic and that it doesn’t affect them, or that they aren’t more likely to end up in certain pathological states.

I’ll note that even ‘neurotypical’ people can still end up in pathological states, but they would be more likely to look different. If we’re going to allow a concession to the aspie supremacists, there may be fuzziness that helps avoid being absorbed into a social delusion, as our species is naturally prone to favoring social beliefs over our own, but that could be more difficult if you have a perspective that doesn’t align as neatly. Basically the “chatgpt psychosis” on a social affirmation level rather that one credulous individual confabulating along with their sycophantic. Kind of like agreeing that being gay is totally a sickness and not just a shape that people can take.

If all of that sounds confusing, that’s why the existing dialogues are so unhinged.

USA is setting fire to a lot of research which also isn’t helping, but maybe we could supply better resources on the real complexity of the issue rather than just telling the peasant kids that they should just be okay getting skipped over because no adult had the available energy or social resources to do anything other than use violence against them to make the autistic traits less notable, and if their entire life is a miserable struggle that ends with self termination, there was just nothing we ever could have done i guess.

But uh, boo to the kids or adults making sense of their reality with noisy and limited resources, they’re totally the center of this problem for some reason. Speaking more broadly than to just this article.

Do agree with the advice that parents should be interacting with the content and trying to make sense of it, as well as following through to citations regardless of whether you get your info from AI, some streamer, or even some social framing built around the still limited science with a lot of opportunistic confabulations built into the current structure around labeling, communicating, or interacting with affected groups.

Adults should also be socially incentivized into actually keeping up with scientific literacy, since science is always actively updating, and all of our incentive gets absorbed by the local energy draws of individualized competitiveness and defensiveness.

The topic requires a high reading comprehension and a lot of time to be properly grounded within the different spaces and contexts to grow any kind of a clear picture, so we have kids making confident diagnosis with very little information, as well as so much critique around those kids that bullying diagnosed autistics or adults with heavily grounded and cited information around their self identification that you end up with a really big muddy gray area of accuracy, legitimacy, and need. like most things, we must apparently treat it like a binary reality and refuse to interact with in any meaningful way that would contradict that absolute binary.

We can actually interact with non-absolute confidences, it’s just much harder when rich assholes are spending a lot of money to get people fighting over extreme takes rather than cooperating to actually improve anything for anyone.

You are all appreciated.