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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2621 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I did read the Wikipedia page, but I'm also distinctly aware that, for any contentious topic, Wikipedia is ideologically captured and cannot be relied upon to provide a neutral answer. If there were a lot of psychologists, psychiatrists etc. who privately agreed that dyslexia isn't a real illness, and if there was a large community of people diagnosing themselves with it, I'm not sure if I'd trust Wikipedia to say so.

I am an unaware of any large body of psychiatrists considering dyslexia not a real illness. Nobody I know in my professional life has voiced such an opinion either.

My the-type-of-layperson-who's-interested-in-this-sort-of-thing-and-posts-here impression: There are enough examples of people with normal or even exceptionally good visual/spatial reasoning/general cognitive abilities and a specific inability to read (for a famous example, Jackie Stewart never learned to read, but was an international skeet shooting champion/Olympics alternate and one of the all-time great racecar drivers and claims to have developed a very good memory in compensation for his inability to read; less famously, New Zealander architect and engineer John Britten; also, many artists in both visual and non-visual media) that it seems to be proven that a neurological deficit that's fairly specific to reading exists. However, this population and populations with less-specific neurological deficits may not be natural kinds and, depending on the purpose/context, the less-specific deficit(s)/manifestation of the deficit(s) in common may be more salient.

You may get better answers in the SSC subreddit or ACX open thread.

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