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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Autism cures are a weird subject in my view, since it depends where exactly you sit on the spectrum.

Which of the following needs a cure?

Somebody with severe life-impacting autism who is happy day-to-day as a result of simply not comprehending their condition and having relatively simple needs & wants. Their perceived quality of life might actually drop if 'cured' from a POV of pure day-to-day happiness.

Somebody with largely high-functioning autism who's prone to depressive episodes due to their social difficulties but can nonetheless fundamentally function in society. Probably most people in the Motte with a diagnosis.

Somebody who's a borderline genius savant, who's accomplished great feats in their preferred discipline, but who is nonetheless incapable of functioning in broader society. Your Paul Erdos or whatever.

Especially acknowledging the spectrum is broad and that there's tons of points between these three. My experience of most 'cure autism' groups is that they're focused expressly on reducing the incidence of the first group of people who are totally unfit for society. Meanwhile as somebody in the second group, who comes from a lineage of other people in the second group, it does feel like a peculiar form of erasure. I've been able to parlay the trade-offs from being high-functioning autistic into professional and personal success, and whilst I'd love some sort of 'everything remains the exact same in terms of intellect and skills but suddenly my brain parses social cues intuitively' trade-off, I suspect that wouldn't be the case. Without even getting into the societal level trade-offs of 'alright we've cured autism, but suddenly we're running low on iconoclastic disagreeable genius inventors'.

I can't really remark on Deafness, and I'm sure there'd be similar arguments to be made that whilst Deafness is clearly a disability, there's a certain attachment to the culture of Deafness that exists, but I feel that Autism is fundamentally different since there's more of an associated trade-off than with most conditions.

Somebody with severe life-impacting autism who is happy day-to-day as a result of simply not comprehending their condition and having relatively simple needs & wants.

The answer to that is "utilitarianism sucks". This is not the first time utilitarianism has produced bizarre results because it can't handle blissful ignorance.

The simple solution is to consider the downsides to his caretakers.

Which layer of caretakers? The immediate family are the chief 'victims' from that POV, though it does raise a question of whether paid assistants can be considered to have downsides.

They're doing an ostensibly unpleasant job, but they're getting paid etc.

True, but this just takes the analysis a layer further. Someone is paying those caretakers - whether it be the immediate family or the State. If it's the former, the same applies, if it's the latter, there's diffusion of a downside across everyone who pays taxes.

Isn't that essentially the same as the one meme X-Men argument?

"We don't need a cure!" said the lady who could make snowclouds, to the teenager who killed anything she touched.

What ratio of snowclouds to touch-killing is acceptable, though?

I think even acknowledging that the illness exists on a spectrum, there still is no reasonable case to say "no, don't cure autism". If one feels that their situation is within what they will accept, there's no need to get a cure. We shouldn't force people to get cured if they don't feel they are sick, of course. But neither is it acceptable to deny a cure to those who may want one for themselves. Even the person who is just barely on the spectrum deserves the right to make that choice for themselves, after all.

The real life cures we're going to see are going to be embryo selection, so it's unlikely that any individual will be able to choose cure or no cure for themselves.

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