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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28957 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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What do you think about the whole question of austim rates? I am listening to Trump's press conference from 2024/12/16 and at one point he talks about how he totally supports vaccines like the one against Polio, but he wants to research modern vaccines more thoroughly, and now we have 100 times the autism rates that we did back in the day?

My immediate reaction was to think that this is either false or just an artifact of reporting rates and aspects of modern society that have nothing to do with vaccines. But who knows, maybe there is actually some underlying real issue. I certainly don't believe that there is 100 times more autism now than there was back in the day, but I think it's certainly possible that maybe there's like 2 times more. Not saying there is, necessarily, but I find it credible at least.

My opinion is that most likely, supposed changes in autism rates have much more to do with changing social phenomena than with anything more on the biological level. The more humanity pushes mentally away from its instincts' origins back on the African savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago, the more one will see supposed mental disorder rates go up. The more stress is necessary to turn a human infant into a modern human adult, the more mental trouble is probably likely.

To be fair, this is neither new or necessarily a bad thing. I am not a Christian, but I believe that Christianity did a lot of good in changing human morality from "haha tough shit you're a slave who got crucified, the gods must hate you" to "even the lowest man can talk to God".

And in doing this, Christianity pushed us a bit further from the monkeys. Which maybe added some stress to us, but also helped us a lot... and in any case, the added stress might be made up for by the new morality's tendency to make society less scary than one based on blood feuds, which then in turn might even help unlock creativity and scientific revolutions and economic prosperity and so on.

In any case, not sure how Christianity did it, I like reading about early Christianity but I still have no clear idea how it won against its competitors. Yet it is pretty clear to me that it pushed us further from the monkeys, despite its supposed core being the rather unscientific idea of having faith that a man a while ago rose from the dead.

Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?

But back to autism... what do self-reported autists think about the genesis of autism? My personal opinion is that autism is probably almost entirely determined by genetics and early upbringing, yet there may be cultural factors that make it so early childhoood development is extra stressful, in part because it takes us further away from the monkey. Which would tend to more and more children becoming in some way abnormal, because they face more childhood stresses in being made into a modern human. Which is not to say that is necessarily a bad thing. Mentally so-called abnormal people in the modern West are probably much less violent on average than the typical person back in the Bronze Age

Is there any reason to think that autism is well-defined? If there is, is there any reason to think that autism rates have been rising? And to be fair, if the rates were rising, would that even necessarily be a bad thing? It's hard to say, most self-reported autists whose words I've heard expressed that they would rather not be autistic. So I guess making there be less autism in the world would be a good thing. I don't know, I do know that there is also a very small subset of autists out there who think that autism is more like a new Homo species, similar to the whole X-Men concept of mutant superhumans. I write all this as someone who has very limited experience with autism. I have known autistic people before, but to a very limited degree. Apologies for any offense. My understanding of autism is mostly limited to the 4chan meme idea of "autism", not to the medically-defined phenomenon.

Autism and schizophrenia can be modeled as opposing cognitive strategies—autism compressing into narrow, high-fidelity pattern recognition and coherence maintenance, while schizophrenia expands into wide, low-filter signal processing and generative variability—both shaped by environmental and informational pressures in increasingly complex systems. Autism appears to emerge as an adaptive response to cognitive overload, reinforcing structure and specialization, while schizophrenia highlights the fragility of coherence under excessive input and recursive noise. Rising autism rates may reflect selection pressures favoring pattern-matching and abstraction capabilities in high-information environments, while schizophrenia may signal edge cases of system instability where variance outpaces integration. Together, they illustrate a species adapting under selection for cognitive architectures that balance specialization and generalization, testing the boundaries of predictive processing and distributed reasoning in the face of accelerating complexity.

There is clearly something going on with autism. It could have always been there, and in the modern age we are suddenly finding it. Or, there is something environmental. We should investigate.

From Wikipedia:

Attention has been focused on whether the prevalence of autism is increasing with time. Earlier prevalence estimates were lower, centering at about 0.5 per 1,000 for autism during the 1960s and 1970s and about 1 per 1,000 in the 1980s, as opposed to today's 23 per 1000.[4][33]

So 100x we can at least say isn't just Trump's verbal diarrhea - that's 23/.5 = 46x ~= 100x.

I think the other responses about definitions shifting and such are a lot of it, but I wanted to at least point out that it's nominally pretty close to true.

The increase in autism is largely the result of diagnostic drift and increased awareness.

Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?

This is actually a question with a known answer; Roman(well, Greco-Roman) satirical literature aimed at as close to a popular audience as any literature in the Roman empire was addresses Christians. Lucian represents Christians as a known phenomenon in the ancient world at a relatively early date, and one of his protagonists becomes a Christian in a spoof. In Lucian's classic fashion, he narrates this after leaving Christianity.

It does not appear that the lowest literate classes in ancient Rome thought Christians were evil, so much as weird. Not WEIRD. Strange. We know Christianity was very attractive to women and the down-on-their luck. Christians were portrayed as near-pathologically nice people with funny beliefs(and AFAICT modern day pagan societies sometimes have the same view). We also know that they refused to do some things which the Roman empire demanded, and that this was a source of great frustration to the elites. Christianity's moral strictness is also documented at an early date, and the fact that this was rarely addressed in Roman literature probably tells us that this was seen as a good thing on at least an individual level, even if elites didn't like being told to improve their behavior.

This is very interesting. Really sounds like the closest parallel today (barring maybe the attractiveness to women and the down-on-their-luck) would be Mormons, and for most of the same reasons. Or do you think that's a bad comparison?

I don't see the Mormon comparison as particularly accurate today? I would have thought that the stereotypical view of Mormons is not that of selflessly compassionate people on the margins of society tending the needy, albeit with a distressing tendency to refuse political or civic loyalty. Rather, my picture of a stereotypical Mormon is more 'Stepford nice', if that makes sense? I picture polite people in clean white shirts who never swear and who are conspicuously observant of propriety. If I think 'Mormon', I think 'clean, upstanding, good citizen', and so on. Mormons have put a lot of effort into respectability.

If I set the stereotypes aside and instead think about Mormons I actually meet, in that context what I mostly see them is actually a very strong effort to make themselves less recognisable - it is unusual that I talk to a believing Mormon for very long before I reach the part where they say, "See, we're just like you, we're Christian, we believe in Jesus, there are no differences!" In other words, in my experience they try pretty hard to play down the weird beliefs that make them different, which is not something I suspect a first or second century Christian would do vis-a-vis pagan Romans.

There’s some of the Stepford-nice portrayal, but here in north Texas, it’s way closer to what hydro describes. I’ve had coworkers gossip about the number of Mormons around. Never in a negative way—more like “wow, he’s literally the nicest person at this company” or “have you heard about dirty sodas?” “Weird” is definitely the prevailing sentiment.

Might be an outgroup/fargroup thing. Or maybe that secular liberalism has disarmed religious sects enough that people don’t feel threatened.

Yes, interesting – I think I agree with your distinctions, although I wonder if the Romans thought of early Christians as "Stepford nice," too.

Entirely possible! People often have different instincts around it as well - people have told me that I sometimes come off as a bit Stepford, even though I don't intentionally try for anything like that, and I find it a little creepy when other people do it. The point where politeness or outward kindness becomes creepy may differ from person to person, or according to cultural context.

That's certainly what Scott seems to think.

Of course, we know how Christians were perceived- altruistic, odd, generally upstanding, welcoming of converts, treat their subordinates well in sometimes baffling ways- and we know how Christians liked to represent themselves and thought their communities should behave. But what we don't really have is anthropological studies of how Christian communities acted among themselves. Like we can tell that Christian men in 200 AD generally treated their wives better than Pagan men did, but not a lot of concrete examples of what that looks like(I suppose the martyrologies are evidence that Christianity forbade or heavily restricted domestic violence, and there are records of the church fathers exhorting Christian husbands to be affectionate with their wives, but we don't actually know what that was like on the ground). We know the pagans thought becoming Christian when you were down on your luck was the sort of thing that made sense to do, but mostly from satires which present it as a natural thing for the down on their luck to do- we don't actually know what Christian charity looked like or how it worked(although we know pawning or selling possessions and giving the money to bishops to hand out to the needy was at least a thing that occasionally happened[and in Roman eyes would be seen as a comprehensible part of religious practice- with the exception that ancient temples would have kept such a gift for themselves], and that free food was a regular handout perhaps used as a recruitment tool). But how Christian charity was administered? Whether there were any measures taken to prevent dependency? Nada(and Roman satirists would have treated any help granted without recompense as being taken advantage of).

Worth noting that some of the New Testament gets fairly granular as to how things like charity was administered and what measures should be taken to avoid dependency, although I am not sure that necessarily sheds much light on what was always happening a century or two later.

I have zero doubt that people like Musk who apparently has Asperger syndrome have existed aplenty throughout history and some obsessive scientists and others were like that. Rather than new homo sapiens this is a part of humanity that has already existed. Additionally some of those traits fit more with male brain characteristics.

At some point you got a serious disease that seriously ruins people's ability to live an independent life. So there is a spectrum that is broadly defined, and can include traits that can help society and can include trade offs among the people who possess them, that in addition to detrimental socially, can lead to maybe being more clear sighted or more willing to work on a particular field. But certainly you are going to find high functioning autists who underperform in life and would be better off if they weren't autistic.

I would definitely change the autism that makes it impossible for people to live an independent life, but it is knocking massive Chesterton fence and also relates to feminization of society and the devaluing male brain (i.e nerds who are of course much more men is an example of this), to say that we would be better off if anyone who might fit in the broad categories, would be different.

It is possible that some sort of contaminants in modernity leads to more autism whether microplastics or something else. It could also be related to people having children at later ages which leads to more mutational load.

But the issue of the autism spectrum is more about classifying behaviors and people that in past ages wouldn't get a label. There is in fact a negative side to people who have those behaviors that get a label but it can have positive side as well, at least when it comes to uncovering truths of the world, and a subset of the people involved. Not always of course. The autistic trans people aren't uncovering a higher truth. Was the childless obsessive Newton, someone who today his behaviors might get him to fit somewhere on the autism spectrum? Perhaps. It isn't wrong that such behaviors can be identified but there is value especially who care about things and issues over general socialization, and of course those who combine both and could be discouraged if such pursuits are booed as autistic behavior which is used in a negative sense. It isn't wrong though that people who fit too much on the spectrum face difficulties.

I think some of the anxieties relating to this has to do with also the changes of modernity relating to more social isolation and the rise of feminism and decline of assumed monogamy as a default. When monogamy, that is the expectation of marriage and family formation was more of the default expectation, then a greater subset of men and even women who are bellow a certain threshold of extroversion and social skills had families with less difficulties than the same people encounter today where early marriage is less the default and there is more social isolation. This wasn't only related to arranged marriage but also people in church, relatives and friends doing match making for the sake of marriage and encouraging dates, that has also declined as a practice. So some of these people became more socially skilled due to the expectation of getting married under this system while today might be classified as having more autistic traits and probably are indeed higher on introversion. But because of the decline of social institutions and people spending more time with screens and isolated, we have these people living more isolated lives than if society was arranged in a different manner.

So it is complicated when it comes to the broad spectrum of so called labeled autism and what are labeled as autistic traits, and even the appropriateness of such labeling, while it is black and white simple that it would be better if they were different when it comes to people who can't live an independent life and aren't high functioning.

My thoughts:

  • It’s hard to determine the relationship between vaccines and autism because of the confounder variables: Asperger’s has nothing to do with what we are talking about and is mislabeled as autism; parents of children who exhibit signs of autism are more weary about getting vaccines, and this applies to siblings; wealthier Americans are more likely to be vaccinated, may be less likely to have autistic children before the vaccine, but may be more likely to pursue an Asperger’s diagnosis for extra time on child’s tests; the least healthy parents are the least likely to opt in to all vaccines and the least likely to take child to doctor regularly …

  • You can reliably give monkeys autism symptoms by disrupting the natural mother-child bond, for instance Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys. The mother-child bond has been disrupted due to (1) early schooling, (2) stressed working mothers, (3) a generation of women who are not acculturated specifically for loving and bonding with young humans. This may have multigenerational effect, who knows?

  • the idea that the most STEM-brained men should mate with the most STEM-brained women is anomalous in history of humanity, this may have an effect

most STEM-brained men should mate with the most STEM-brained women

This is my wife and I. One of our sons has an autism diagnosis, in the > 99.9% good at math sense.

The mother-child bond has been disrupted due to (1) early schooling, (2) stressed working mothers, (3) a generation of women who are not acculturated specifically for loving and bonding with young humans.

Having looked at the historic situation around motherhood and parenting, particularly in early life, my guess is that the average modern western middle class woman spends much more time 1 on 1 with her young children than her predecessors a century or two ago.

the average modern western middle class woman spends much more time 1 on 1 with her young children than her predecessors a century or two ago.

From the survey data I've seen comparing the 1960s to today parents' time with their kids has increased, most notably and substantially for fathers, but also somewhat for mothers. (Though, we've only had the American Time Use Survey since 2003, and I don't know how much to trust the previous survey methods.)

Agreed; if anything, what’s abnormal about modern life is the paucity of different adults with whom we interact during early childhood. These days, it’s pretty much just parents and perhaps daycare staff, rather than all manner of extended family plus usually members of a religious community.

The significant recent rise in obesity suggests we can’t dismiss the possibility that the increase in autism is a genuine effect rather than merely a measurement artifact.

That is an interesting point, and apparently there is a linkage between autism and obesity.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4657601/

But this abstract seems unclear on whether it a common cause for both, or Autism leading to obesity.

I have come to the conclusion that the term as currently used is indescribably useless. Where once you had a number of conditions (autism, aspergers, PDD-NOS), there is now the one condition that covers an absolutely massive array of people with all sorts of different personalities, capabilities and needs. Yes, we now have levels in their place but they almost never enter discussion. Instead, the only differentiation comes between "high support needs" and "low support needs". In conversation however, this is almost always dropped - everytime someone mentions an autistic person, or autistic people, or themselves, one is usually referring to either of these groups, implicitly disregarding the other.

My view is that is we have a number of neurological differences that are grouped together under a single diagnosis, like a super venn diagram with multiple concentric circles, and a person can potentially appear in multiple places in the diagram. This means that it is possible for two people to technically be diagnosed with autism and have a minimal overlap of symptoms, or indeed any traits in common. This poses a number of problems. Firstly, normies expect the term to describe a specific kind of person and get confused/accuse you of lying when you say that you have that condition. Secondly, what paltry assistance you might receive is not tailored to your traits and so is useless. Thirdly, any spaces that might exist for you on paper in practise contain people who have nothing in common with you whatsoever.

Beyond that however, I think we have also expanded the definition to include borderlines (people who might have had one or two traits to a minimal degree that wouldn't have previously qualified) and the disability is being further co-opted by progressive, terminally online neurotypicals to ascend the progressive stack. In addition, we have massively damaged the development of children through lockdowns, so who knows if their brain is actually wired that way.

Personally, I do not know where my own endlessly entertaining brain disease comes from. I am inclined to think that I am one of those people who has it inflicted on them by GOD, THE VIOLATOR as a joke. The only familial link I have is a great uncle who was diagnosed with a number of learning disabilities in his youth (including dyxlexia) but towards the end of his life at some point received a diagnosis of autism. My mum and dad are both normal, my dad excessively so. My brother is "weird" but for the most part neurotypical, and any weirdness I think he accrued from me while growing up.

I dislike the way we treat mental disorders as if they work like bacteria or viruses. We even call them "mental illnesses." Strep throat presents in similar ways every time it appears because it's caused by a particular group of bacteria with particular traits. Autism isn't a species of microorganism, it's a cluster of behaviours observed in some humans. We can observe that many different people exhibit some or all of these behaviours without acting like they're all infected with a particular disease.

To continue the analogy: autism isn't the common cold, it's the act of coughing.

The word "disease" developed its meaning long before we'd figured out which ones were caused by infectious organisms. Congenital defects like osteogenesis imperfecta ("brittle bone disease") or deficiency syndromes like scurvy are central members of the term. Complaining that there is no microorganism that causes leukemia isn't going to stop people putting it in that group.

More to the point, comparing one single symptom to, as you already noted, a cluster of commonly co-occuring behaviors is a bad analogy. Coughing is one thing, but are you coughing alongside a runny nose, a sore throat, and a headache? (Probably just a cold.) Or are you coughing along with bloody sputum, chest pain, and weight loss? (Very concerning, might be lung cancer.) Similarly, a number of people exhibit a stereotypy - a repetitive movement or utterance - of some sort or another. But is it happening in a young child along with disinterest in social activities, extreme distress about particular sensory experiences, and an inflexible of routine? (Classic autism.) Or is it an older person, who has recently started losing control of their emotions and seems to have some trouble with speech? (Worrying signs of fronto-temporal dementia.)

My impression is that people have kids at older ages. Teasing out the differences between that and all other changes seems difficult.

The baby boom had extremely high fertility rates, however. So we should see lots of baby boomers who were younger children in their families with autism if this is a driving factor- do we?

I'm autistic, and I can tell that it runs in my family. My family tree has a lot of intelligent but eccentric people who likes model trains and such and have a silly form of humor. I've also heard "Coffee just makes me fall asleep haha" at quite a lot of family gatherings. Every time I watched trivia channels like "Who wants to be a millionare?" with my grandfather he'd know basically all the answers. My family also had a lot of criminals, mentally ill people (manic depression for instance), and millionares, so it's definitely not just autism and ADHD.

But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).

I don't know if autism is genetic, or if it's mostly caused by stress like you claim, and my family just happens to be high in neuroticism (which results in high rates of autism). I do think mental illness is on a raise though, as the modern society is less in tune with human nature. Couple this with the modern and much lower thresholds for diagnosis of mental disorders, and the effect is basically explained.

That we're less violent now is a more complicated topic. We might simply have removed most violent people from the gene pool over time, and oversocialization likely has a large effect as well (and the general drop in T levels is probably also relevant).

Finally, I don't mind being autistic, but I do think autism is an illness. The overly systematic way of thinking, the need to be "correct" and find the "truth", the need to be in control, the hatred of ambiguity.. I don't think any of these are good or necessary. But I'm also completely disillusioned about technology by now, and by math, logic, rationality, the computability of reality, the value of intelligence, etc. If you ask me, intelligence itself clusters with mental illness and conflicts with human instinct (and therefore, more importantly, it conflicts with aesthetics).

If you're interested in how Christianity won and made us less violent and in how modern society conflicts with human nature, Nietzsches books covers all of these aspects. His criticism of systematizing philosophers like Kant might very well be a criticism of traits of autism.

Coffee just makes me fall asleep haha

This is a weird one for people to say is autism/adhd since there are entire cultures where coffee after dinner / late at night is completely normal, and they’re clearly not all or mostly autistic.

Actually, you might be right. I know it's associated with ADHD, and that ADHD overlaps quite a bit with Aspergers, but it might not be an uncommon trait in general, even in people without ADHD or autism. A related quirk is probably liking having the television running in the background, or concentrating best when listening to music (most people I know with these traits have had ADHD though)

My guesses of somebody being ADHD are usually quite accurate, but maybe I've gotten overconfident after all

I recall growing up the amount of after-dinner coffee my family drank (with or without something added)... it was about as common at restaurants as bringing around the dessert cart (I miss the dessert cart!), if not more so.

Finally, I don't mind being autistic, but I do think autism is an illness. The overly systematic way of thinking, the need to be "correct" and find the "truth"

I dislike my own autistic weaknesses (hypersensitivity to senses and rejection among them) and would shed them if I had the chance, but the one part I am genuinely thankful for is that I have so called "black and white thinking" (or, as I like to call it, having principles). I am amazed humanity developed any sense of indvidualism at all because the majority of people I see are herd followers and comply with any number of nonsensical things in order for the perceived security they get at great cost sometimes to their own personal fulfillment.

Neitzsche does not advocate for a retvrn to ye olden days where man only focussed on the superficial and the vibes. The end result of focusing on that would result in a world full of deanos, a terrible place where the Last Man reigns supreme and humankind cannot advance. His ideal was a merging of the master and slave moralities and something greater yet to come.

I like the sensitivity part, I feel like senses is how you feel alive, so sensing more means feeling more alive than most people, or at least I like to think so. And having strong principles is usually admirable, though bending is better than breaking at times. Putting oneself at a disadvantage like this is great for individual development, but some people enter into unfortunate brittle configurations where it brings them many disadvantages. If I were to describe your trait as something positive, I'd say it's "having standards". Having standards is a mostly good form of inflexibility (plus, it pushes for things to be better).

I sort of both like and dislike human superficiality. I suppose I can forgive deep people for acting superficially, but that I can't forgive shallow people for having no depth. One of my favorite animals are cats, they just chill and do what they want, but they're easy to understand, they lack the layered deception that human have. If a cat wants to talk to you, or if it doesn't, you will know. As an autistic person, this is much easier to deal with than most people, and I quite like socializing with young people for this reason. So I admire even people who act like cats, despite how easily self-determination is confused for egoism, and how easily being in tune with oneself is confused with superficiality (which might be why it's mostly young people doing this - they're less socialized).

One thing I dislike though, is people who live in "shoulds" rather than reality. This is probably you (and it used to be me) so I will try to explain myself. They might follow rules, not for the reasons that the rules were made, but simply because they're rules. Life is too context-dependent for this to be viable, for there's a lot of cases in which "shouldn't"s are actually harmless or even beneficial. It took me a while, but I have learned to love ambiguity and all the advantages that it brings. Undecided parts of life, those kept vague or unknown, are basically pure potential. Once you make them into something specific, you lose the flexibility of choice. And most importantly, unchanging things are an illusion, everything is in a constant state of flux. Instead of deciding that a person is an introvert or an extrovert, you can just decide to experience the person as they are - and not hold them to the restriction of either (and feel bad when they act against the model you made of them). Plus, if you live in reality rather than in formal definitions, you tend to be mostly immune to thought experiments and existential issues.

where man only focussed on the superficial and the vibes

He didn't advocate for hedonism and materialism at least. But I think he did like "vibes" when they were caused by strong instincts. Nietzsche likes the human body and its potential. But human beings cannot improve without some struggles and hardship, and most people probably won't seek those out if they can avoid doing so, at least those who do seem rare.

I'm autistic, and I can tell that it runs in my family. My family tree has a lot of intelligent but eccentric people who likes model trains and such and have a silly form of humor. I've also heard "Coffee just makes me fall asleep haha" at quite a lot of family gatherings. Every time I watched trivia channels like "Who wants to be a millionare?" with my grandfather he'd know basically all the answers. My family also had a lot of criminals, mentally ill people (manic depression for instance), and millionares, so it's definitely not just autism and ADHD.

But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).

I don't know if autism is genetic, or if it's mostly caused by stress like you claim, and my family just happens to be high in neuroticism (which results in high rates of autism). I do think mental illness is on a raise though, as the modern society is less in tune with human nature. Couple this with the modern and much lower thresholds for diagnosis of mental disorders, and the effect is basically explained.

My story is similar, dad's side of the family is Scots-Irish and riddled with alcoholism and autism. My grandfather and one of my uncles are both maybes, and my dad and my other uncle are definitely autistic. I'm more than old enough to have slid through the US educational system without ever being caught, though I did get some attention from a teacher or two that was sure that something was wrong with me along with plenty of, "not living up to his potential," type report cards. Took the Aspie test BITD, laughed at the ridiculously high score that I got out of it, not even understanding that "neurodiversity" was essentially a code word but definitely identifying with not being a normie. Hell, I even made jokes about all of the autism in the family! When I was formally diagnosed a little less than three years ago I just laughed and laughed. There was yet another thing in my life that was hiding in plain sight all along!

I agree that the changing criteria for autism is the primary driver for the huge increase in diagnosis rates, and combining it with Asperger's in the DSM-V further exacerbates that. I'd also say that we have a decent set of criteria for diagnosing autism, which of course is still separate from whether or not it's being over-diagnosed in children. On the question of whether or not it's an illness in and of itself, I personally don't see it that way, though to be fair I've lived with it all my life without having any precise idea of what it was. Rather I see it as a large set of mental trade-offs where things like hyperfocus can be incredibly helpful in some circumstances and brutally crippling in others, to the extent that we can often resemble the "this is fine" meme, drinking coffee at our kitchen tables while our house is burning down around us.

But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).

Yeah same for me. Generations of Engineers and other such types, very easy to diagnose my dad, uncles and grandfather with it on vibes alone but I was the first generation to receive any sort of a formal diagnosis. Just used to be socially diagnosed as 'being a bit of a nerd'

I'm not wholly convinced that there's a clear or objective definition here, or that 'the autism spectrum' isn't a concept that shifts and expands, changing the people included within it. I say this as someone who has never had a formal diagnosis of any mental illness, but who has been speculated to be on the spectrum before, and who has then gone on to have actual psychologists investigate and then dismiss the possibility. My experience has been that, while there is a fairly identifiable core, the boundaries around what is and is not autism are sufficiently porous that you should be a little skeptical around reported numbers.

I think that like a lot of other things, our current environment makes people much more likely to notice and seek help for ever more mild symptoms of mental illness.

First of all, the demand on the human brain in the twenty-first century are much much higher than in the twentieth let alone the 19th. We didn’t rely on our brains as much, most people did less skilled work, and so if something was wrong with your brain, you might never have noticed. It’s hard to catch on to dyslexia if nobody around you reads above a third grade level because you’re not that much off of the perceived baseline. In the twenty-first century, any such problem would be noticed and fixed if possible because almost all liveable wage jobs are at least skilled trades or reading screens as a primary task. If you’re struggling in school, people are alert to it because they don’t want you suffering for it. Autism, at least in the milder forms may not have mattered as much in the early days of humanity. You’d just be kinda weird or eccentric and so on. People learned to live with your symptoms. That’s Jim, the weirdo who knows the names of thousands of birds and only eats white pasta. He’s mostly harmless.

The other thing is that medical care and especially mental health care is much more available (I’ve said before that I think therapeutic ideas don’t work for normal people and may make them worse) so if you’re having specific symptoms of something or your child is acting weird, you go see a doctor and if it’s autism, it’s diagnosed and treated as well as can be managed.

Both together would clearly make almost any mental illness more prevalent in the 21st century than the 19th. Not because there’s actually more mental illness but because there’s more medical care available and people are using it more. I expect a big increase now that therapy can be done over texts.

I think people are mistaking “a little odd” with autism. Autistic kids frequently are non verbal etc.

The reason Asperger Syndrome was rolled into Autism Spectrum Disorder was because careful review of the diagnostic criteria found the only difference: autism had early mutism, Asperger didn’t. Both had high and low functioning people, often with sensory issues.

Both also have subclinical expressions, people who clearly have it but aren’t impaired enough by it to need treatment or medication.

Yeah I guess I’m being unclear. I see most of these traits as following the typical bell curve in which you can have everything from the very high end (in this case highly sensitive, with severe communication problems, and repetitive behaviors) to the very low end where you end up with something a bit like Sheldon Cooper who’s awkward, has very specific needs for an unchanging environment and has special interests. The thing changing in my view, not just on autism but adhd and the like is the threshold at which a parent might seek help, or at which a teacher might suggest a problem and thus the symptoms are diagnosed. In 1900, a kid with adhd was just ditzy or a wild child or something like that. In 1900, Sheldon is weird, especially if he memorizes the train schedules or something. But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease. And even if they did sort of understand it as a disease, they didn’t seek help as often as we do today, in part because medicine in 1900 was harder to access and in part because it was not able to do nearly as much as it can today. By 2024, we’ve gotten much better at medicine and medical care is generally more available. Add in awareness and concern about neurological disorders especially as we move to a knowledge based economy, and you have a society that’s more likely to seek medical intervention for perceived mental illness or deficiencies.

Another thought:

But in that era, nobody thought of this as a disease.

Psychological (software) and psychiatric (hardware) illnesses have historically been downplayed because of their invisibility. People fell through the cracks and died, or were caught in the social safety net and were institutionalized and forgotten. Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio, AC power, and the electric motor died penniless in a hotel where he kept pigeons in a coop. He was hailed as a great man, but had he known about his autism, he might have been even greater.

(The best explanation I’ve hear for Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” is that Gregor Samsa woke up disabled one morning, and the bug thing is just a metaphor for dehumanization and dependency.)

It’s actually a good thing the rates are going up because, assuming there’s no actual rise in incidence, they’ll get care because the medical industry has got a profit motive to provide them care.

For some it’s definitely a benefit. But my biggest concern is that a lot of these diagnoses are not only not true, but believing them can take a normal person and turn them into almost a basket-case simply because the therapies designed for serious mental illnesses don’t work, but can make things worse.

Having a depressed person focus on the depression and focus on healing might help, but if you take a person with a case of tge blues and make them focus on their feelings and think about it as part of them, you create a worsening depression. The person had problems that could have been solved easily, but it got medicalized. Or someone with poor discipline and organization skills gets diagnosed ADHD and has an excuse for not doing what they actually could have done all along, but chose not to. Too much focus on feelings over getting things done just seems to take minor problems and turn them into something serious and long lasting.

The other problem in FdB’s “gentrification of mental illness.” Especially when an illness is deemed a part of ADA protections, Theres often a push for people with extremely mild versions of the symptoms (and I’m wording it this way because I’m not convinced that the vast majority of new cases are actually that disease) to get their diagnosis and use the ADA protection to get ahead in life. Or Autism. The people who really actually suffer from these disorders often end up falling further behind because the stuff intended to make it possible for them to live a normal life are handed to people with no such disorders who then use that help to get ahead of their peers, let alone the kids who have actual mental illness. Worse, those with the real thing often end up facing the stigma of being told that they’re not trying because some normal kid they know got diagnosed with ADHD and got a phd in something and so the reason you can’t keep an office job and remember to answer the emails isn’t the ADHD, it’s that you’re lazy or stupid or incompetent or whatever. No, the guy who got his phd wasn’t really ADHD, and the guy who can’t keep an office job is, and now he has to try to explain that to a boss. Or the actually autistic kid who can’t have normal conversations gets compared to a kid with “autism” who’s actually is just slightly shy. I know people with ADHD, real honest-to-God adhd, not the gentrified version, and they can’t keep a job easily even with medication because they have a serious disability.

Ironic for all the talk of postmodernity that we’re coming into our best scientific (modern) understandings yet of these neural modalities and structural differences at the same time people are primed to believe them a coincidental set of symptoms overhyped by the sellers of snake oil.

On a side note, there are still battles over the reputation of Doctor Asperger: in 2015, it was believed he heroically kept the Gestapo from taking his clinic’s young patients, but as of 2023 it’s believed he himself sent low-functioning kids to extermination.

Autism (especially “AuDHD”) rates have been rising for the same reason that ADHD, BPD and so on rates have been rising. It’s an easy way to get powerful stimulant drugs and extra time on exams (since it’s usually now combined with an ADHD diagnosis), and in the age of ultra-zealous HR it’s a get out of jail free card for someone who says something awkward at the company Christmas party. Plus, like the non-binary thing, it’s a way of gaining more of the vital currency of victimhood and accessing a ‘special’ identity category in a society that worships those things.

There is no reason to believe that real autism rates are rising much, and what little rise there is is probably due to older parents at time of conception. But let’s also be clear - 10 years ago most people you met who said they were autistic or had aspergers were actually autistic. Today you meet relatively socially well adjusted people all the time who say they’re autistic, when 20 years ago no psychiatrist would even remotely have considered giving them an autism or aspergers diagnosis.

Oooh, I think your right. The timeline matches up with the passage of the ADA (which requires extra time on exams for disabilities, among other things).

I'm willing to believe that mild autism today presents more strongly because in the fifties if you were a weird kid who acted awkward and mildly rudely you got beaten until you stopped doing that.

I won't claim this would be an improvement over 'mildly autistic people get to be offensive in an awkward way'. But it would enable lots of very mildly autistic people to come off as normal.

What do you think about the whole question of austim rates?

I have a theory but i don't think you're going to like it. My theory is that members of the professional class (and to an even greater extent their children) are simply less developed than baseline human beings.

Did the average Roman of those days think that the Christians were insane? Did he think they were evil? Did he secretly sympathize with them?

Christians, like Jews before them, asserted quite strongly that the gods the average Roman of the day worshiped were false: non-existant and worthless at best, if not evil. This was unique to Jews and Christians, polytheist cultures in the region usually had an inclusive attitude towards foreign gods; not usually calling them "not real gods", but just ignoring them or sometimes adapting them within their own mythology.

This exclusive approach to God tended not to make monotheists very sympathetic to Romans.

The scriptures interestingly can go back and forth a bit on this. Some passages can be extremely 'disenchanting', firmly asserting that idols do not correspond to any kind of living or spiritual being, and have no power of any kind. In some places the New Testament seems to agree with this logic - for instance, 1 Corinthians 8:4, Romans 1:22-23, or the protest of the idol-makers in Acts 19:23-27 is remarkably materialistic. In other places, however, there is a sense that the gods of the nations may exist in some sense. Famously in Exodus, for instance, the Egyptian priests seem to possess magical powers of some kind as well (e.g. Exodus 7:20-24), and in places the New Testament also seems to flirt with this idea. Galatians 4 and Colossians 2 talk about the believers formerly being enslaved to "the elemental spirits of the universe", and while these are probably not gods in the proper sense (cf. Galatians 4:8), they do at least seem to be real, or possessed of some kind of power, even if that power is meagre and false in comparison to that of Christ. Indeed, that power seems to have been enough to make liberation from them necessary. This seems consistent with the various exorcism narratives in the gospels and Acts - whether 'god' is an appropriate name for them or not, the world appears to be populated with invisible spiritual powers, most of which are in some measure of rebellion against the Lord.

You can probably reconcile these perspectives to an extent - the world is full of hostile spiritual powers, and human beings deludedly believe that images made of stone and wood can influence these beings, or that the images come to contain power themselves - but I think it's nonetheless interesting that you can find the tension there.

Isn't this just a consequence of Christianity's curious choice to retain a legacy base of accumulated scriptures from hundreds of years as part of its canon? As you read between the lines of the Old Testament, it's possible to trace a gradual evolution from what was basically a standard polytheistic religion following the ancient Semitic pattern (multiple gods exist; our city/tribe's tutelary god is one of them; we owe him particular fealty and flattery because he is ours, and he will bring us success in battle against competing tribes and their gods in return; also don't think of slighting him or cheating with other gods, for he is very jealous) via gradual snorting of one's own supply (he really is better than the others, that's not just something we say because we have to) and dismissal of the competition (they are lesser/false gods) to something resembling the earlier Christian pattern (competing "gods" are more something like petty demons, evil and weak; our god is the God of everything, existing in a category wholly above petty city-state struggles). NT Christianity then simply continued this pattern, at a slower pace - I'm sure that if you had polled popes over the past 2000 years about their beliefs as to whether Baal Hammon "exists" and to what extent he can influence the real world, you would see a neat downwards trend.

As you read between the lines of the Old Testament, it's possible to trace a gradual evolution from what was basically a standard polytheistic religion following the ancient Semitic pattern

This definitely isn't true narratively (in the sense that e.g. Genesis clearly sets out God as the Creator God) but I don't think this is true textually, either, at least in the sense that the older parts of the Old Testament are more polytheistic and the newer parts of the Old Testament are more monotheistic. Wikipedia, which I assume is probably a good summation of scholarly consensus, lists the Song of the Sea as possibly the oldest part of the Old Testament. And the Song of the Sea has a fairly standard monotheistic (or, if you prefer, henotheistic) line:

Who among the gods is like you, Lord? Who is like you— majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?

The Song of Moses (again, one of the four oldest passages as per Wikipedia), has even stronger language, identifying other "new" gods worshipped by the children of Israel as demons or devils, and differentiating God from the gods:

See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand.

So it seems fairly clear that the earliest written parts of the Old Testament were already making a distinction between God and gods qualitatively, suggesting that the other gods were in some sense false. (Now, obviously, if you take the Scriptural narrative as a historical one, it definitely records that the children of Israel were in fact often polytheistic in practice.)

And as OliveTapenade points out, this sort of rhetoric (where the other gods are false gods or demons) doesn't gradually disappear, but reappears even in the New Testament. Interestingly (and to Goodguy's question below) my understanding is that some early Christian apologists centered some of their pitch around the idea that the old oracles had begun to die after the advent of Christ, which suggests that they thought a persuasive argument to pagans or post-pagans was "the old gods are out, the One True God has defeated them." (I guess pagans were primed for this, the death of Pan supposedly occurring under Tiberius' reign, chronologically close to the crucifixion of Christ). But in order to make those sorts of arguments, early apologists had to concede the existence of other gods of some kind. So the most maximalist monotheistic idea ("there are no other gods and pagan religious practices are all bunk") isn't really something that you see either in even the New Testament or the early Church.

To be fair, the sorts of people who make this evolutionary argument will typically point out that the Old Testament is not written down in the order in which it was composed (for instance, Genesis 2 is usually thought to be significantly older than Genesis 1), so we have to do a bit more work to determine which texts came first chronologically, and then discern the evolution that way.

They're no doubt correct to an extent here, but the risk is that the way we identify a text's origin comes to be a self-fulfilling prophecy - we might create a narrative for ourselves of development from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism, and on that basis alone assign more henotheistic-sounding texts to earlier strata. So some degree of skepticism is warranted, and classic forms of the documentary hypothesis have come under plenty of fire.

Incidentally:

Interestingly (and to Goodguy's question below) my understanding is that some early Christian apologists centered some of their pitch around the idea that the old oracles had begun to die after the advent of Christ, which suggests that they thought a persuasive argument to pagans or post-pagans was "the old gods are out, the One True God has defeated them."

There are some interesting examples of this! Here's one from the epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians:

How, then, was He manifested to the world? A star shone forth in heaven above all the other stars, the light of which was inexpressible, while its novelty struck men with astonishment. And all the rest of the stars, with the sun and moon, formed a chorus to this star, and its light was exceedingly great above them all. And there was agitation felt as to whence this new spectacle came, so unlike to everything else [in the heavens]. Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life.

The star of Bethlehem agitated the heavens, and destroyed the power of magic. So the people who might once have been in slavery to spirits, demons, or sorcerers have now been set free, and are ready to hear the gospel.

Merry Christmas!

(cf. also New Testament contempt for sorcerers, such as Simon Magus in Acts 8, or the fortune-telling girl in Acts 16:16-19. There may be a sense that the magic is 'real' - the girl's 'spirit of divination' enables her to immediately and correctly realises that Paul and Silas are apostles of God - but even so, it's bad, and Paul and Silas exorcise her and free her, much to the consternation of the girl's owners, who were making money from her power.)

To be fair, the sorts of people who make this evolutionary argument will typically point out that the Old Testament is not written down in the order in which it was composed (for instance, Genesis 2 is usually thought to be significantly older than Genesis 1), so we have to do a bit more work to determine which texts came first chronologically, and then discern the evolution that way.

Yes, I agree – that's why I focused on the Song of the Sea and the Song of Moses, since they're supposed to be composed early, as I understand it. From what I understand of mainstream Scriptural textual criticism, I'm a bit skeptical of some of the approaches you [edit:] textual critics employ (for the reasons you lay out), but I think it's interesting to make arguments with even significant concessions. Any other candidates of early Old Testament texts that come to mind for you?

Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life.

Beautiful. Merry Christmas!

I've read - and it has the ring of truth to me - that the earliest form of the First Commandment was thou shalt have no other gods before My face (that is, no (other) idols in Yahweh's temple/tabernacle/whatever).

I can see why one might think so, as a polytheistic precursor to the version we now have, but it's not in line with Judean polytheists' practice. When King Josiah of Judah decided he was done putting up with all this pagan nonsense, the Jerusalem temple had plenty of artifacts of polytheistic worship for him to burn, grind up, and/or throw into the river.

But if that is true, then how in the world did the Christians win?

Much higher fertility rate and offering a better deal to people who had some influence in Roman society but weren't particularly esteemed. I encourage people to actually read the church fathers talking about how Christians should behave- it's not really a mystery why lots of people shut out of formal power in Roman society but with a bit of influence really liked Christianity. They got much better treatment that way.

The first laws Christians used their newfound power to get passed under Constantine, after of course protections for themselves, were slave welfare laws. That attitude extended up the totem pole; 'not getting treated like dirt by your immediate superiors' is a hell of a benefit in a strongly hierarchical society.

Frequently the stubborn minority can outcompete the flexible majority.

  1. By being right 2) By being awesome.

My confirmation saint, St Adrian, was a Roman soldier, a jailer of Christians, who saw the courage of Christians he imprisoned and was converted on the spot.

Certainly I'm inclined to give a fair amount of weight to the "being right" hypothesis. Eschewing the spirit of impartiality for a moment, it is at least partly because monotheism is true, Jesus is Lord, and many (one may even hope most) early Christians behaved as if this were true.

That last part is especially important. All sorts of things are true but don't spread; all sorts of things are false but do spread. The conviction and behaviour of the witnesses matters.

Outbreeding and not killing their offspring. It seems to have been a numbers game.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1kfnGJR59lk?si=6XCpXAJytPo_8HS4

I'm not sure what part of pigeonburger's narrative makes it implausible that Christians might have done a good job of convincing pagans of this?

Indeed, on a more macrohistorical level, one of the observations I would make is that firstly polytheism seems remarkably fragile or weak in the face of robust monotheism, and secondly monotheisms seem remarkably resilient to each other.

Both Christianity and Islam expanded remarkably quickly and did excellent jobs of sweeping over pagan resistance - what efforts there were (sorry Julian) were mostly ineffective. Even factoring in that both Christians and Muslims used the sword and other incentives to an extent, they did this very rapidly. (And the sword by itself hardly seems to explain it - after all, polytheists are just as good at using brute force as monotheists.) To an extent we can continue to see this today, where traditional religions frequently don't put up much of a fight, looking through more recent evangelical or da'wah efforts in Africa or Asia. Hinduism is probably the only great polytheism to have resisted very strongly, and Hinduism has always had a bunch of quasi-monotheistic tendencies of its own.

Meanwhile, Christianity and Islam have both been noticeably ineffective at converting each other. There are a handful of exceptions (Muslims in Spain, Christians through parts of the Middle East), but for the most part, and barring a handful of individual exceptions, monotheist-to-monotheist conversions are quite rare. Judaism is also a strong example here. The biggest exception I think of here is Zoroastrianism, which did mostly collapse in the face of Islam (though it took a few centuries; most of early Islamic Persia remained Zoroastrian for a few centuries), and maybe you could argue Manichaeism or something as a Roman monotheism that also fell before Christianity, but in general it seems that when a monotheistic religion gets entrenched, it is extraordinarily difficult to convert people away from en masse.

Of course, today there's a third combatant in the ring in the form of atheism/secularism/irreligion, and it seems to be doing pretty well at smashing both Christianity and Islam. Perhaps in a few centuries my descendants will be discussing how zero-theism outcompeted monotheism just as monotheism outcompeted polytheism. But please forgive me if I hope that is not the case.

I think a big problem for premodern paganism was the lack of a Bible or Qu’ran as a way to unite the faith and to unify the practices and mores. Pagans were more open, but also less United and had fewer touchstones of belief — tribes outside of yours might not know your gods and even if they did, didn’t know the same mythology or worship in the same way.

It seems like substituting "Abrahamic religions" for "monotheistic religions" in your model makes it fit with fewer epicycles.

Perhaps, but then I think I would have to deal with a new epicycle - what makes Abrahamic religion different to other monotheism? If there's an Abrahamic advantage separate from just monotheism, what is it?

A pro-social covenant premise?

Abrahamic religions have a common premise that not only is [God] real and present, but that while love may be unconditional favor is not- if you / your collective society sins greatly, not only will god permit the outsider to overthrow you, but God may throw the first meteor. On the flip side, the way to earn / retain gods favor is a bunch of tenants / commandments that, coincidentally, happen to be good for healthy societies that can succeed in cooperation, unleashing those benefits of scale.

This sort of covenant premise is not inherent to monotheism. You could believe there is one god, but that it expects nothing of you and implies no type of action. You could believe there is one god, but they are eternally absent. There could be one god, but it hates you. There could be a god and a covenant, but the demands are less socially beneficial. Etc.

It's interesting to note that the other ancient monotheistic religion which survives to this day, Zoroastrianism, is also very pro-social and big on sin reducing the favor of God.

The difference is that Abrahamaic religions command their adherents to improve the world. Zoroastrianism does not; in Zoroastrianism the adherent is commanded to do charity, but it doesn't actually matter if that charity helps the recipient. There is no equivalent to teach a man to fish as there is with Christian charity, which is big on education, hospitals, etc in comparison.

Hard to tell since almost all modern monotheism is derived from Abrahamic religion, which itself probably takes its monotheism from Zoroastrianism. Even Sikhism which is the other major non-Abrahamic monotheistic faith was strongly influenced by Islam.

Sikhism is an interesting one to me - I wasn't terribly familiar with it until the first time I visited a gurdwara and heard a lot from a Sikh community in themselves. I already had some academic and practical knowledge of both Hinduism and Islam for context, and as they explained their history, doctrines, and practices to me it felt blazingly obvious what Sikhism is.

That is, and with apologies to any Sikhs here, to me Sikhism reads as what you get out of a Hindu reform movement in a place where there is a lot of Islam already in the water supply. There's a lot of it that feels midway between Hinduism and Islam, or as a kind of hybrid. If you come from a Hindu background (as Guru Nanak did), become convinced of the oneness of God in a way that goes a little beyond the soft-monotheism of a lot of Hindu theology, and are surrounded by Islamic influences but are not interested in just becoming Muslim yourself... well, it's fairly intuitive where that ends up.

Anyway, I don't think I would be convinced that Abrahamic monotheism ultimately originates in Zoroastrianism? I think there are Zoroastrian influences in the mix in places (the magoi Matthew references, famously, but also the Zoroastrian influences are especially visible on Islam), but the genealogy is too hard to trace through ancient Judah, I think. I find it more plausible that monotheism independently evolved in several different places historically - after all, if you glance at anything from Hinduism to European paganism to even Chinese traditional religion, I'd argue there are a number of proto-monotheistic trends that often seem to appear. Most of them didn't get to full monotheism the way that Zoroastrianism and Abrahamic religion did, but Brahman or Heaven or the Stoic vision of God or what have you are enough to make it plausible to me that concepts of a unitary divine can just evolve independently.

I feel compelled to point out that this is evidence Christianity is correct.

It only takes one contrarian sympathizer, if that sympathizer is the emperor. Constantine the Great converted and then started converting the empire.

*EDIT: As to how Christians converted Romans to subsist until that point; their attitude towards salvation was a big factor, as was the egalitarian nature of it all. That the lowliest of criminal could repent and accept salvation and be the equal of anyone else in Heaven is quite a revolutionary concept at the time. Romans and Greeks were making sacrifices and offerings to jockey for position in the Gods favors, only a few were going to be headed for paradise. As for the Jews, their texts were mostly concerned with what would happen to that specific people; what would happen to converts was not clear. But Jesus was clear; here is one God that only asks that you believe in Him and he immediately saves you, reserves a place in Heaven for you, and has you in as high a regard as anyone else who also accepted Him? Seems like a great deal! It's certainly a better chance at eternal life for the destitute and marginal than what they could hope for from the Roman and Greek polytheist worship.

As for the Jews, their texts were mostly concerned with what would happen to that specific people; what would happen to converts was not clear.

Most Jews circa 2000 years ago did not believe in an afterlife. They thought you had your material body and that's it. A select few people get to leave to be with God. The rest of us are dead forever or resurrected in a strictly material sense.

A 2011 South Korean study with unique methodology for the time suggested autism rates are naturally about 1 per 38, or about three percent, assuming no difference in rates by race. This research came at a time of greater awareness of high functioning autism at nonclinical levels:

The South Korean study probably produced such a high figure because it screened a lot of kids who seemed to be doing OK and included in-person evaluations of any child suspected of having autism, Grinker says. "Two-thirds of the children with autism that we ended up identifying were in mainstream schools, unrecognized, untreated," he says.

American rates have ended up about the same 1/38.

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