(1) genes that promote autism are correlated with IQ and (Always Sunny parodied this phenomenon with Mac, who only works out his glamour muscles.). If missing, intelligence develops a lot less/later/incompletely? Judith Harris discusses this in one of her books. Also, it doesnt really look like autistic people are worse at mental rotation. Another, potentially related, possibility is that we are disproportionately likely to diagnose white kids with autism rather than other forms of mental disability. Good clarifying question. Auditory learning is therefore the only accessible means for learning prior to the bridging of other brain functions. r/slatestarcodex - Autism, rationality and intelligence I believe this is also the case for artificial neural networks, unless you are in pathological regimes that are too unstable to be useful. E.g. autism is effectively what we call people whose mental resolution (in the sense of pixels per inch) is too high. Or the dad may have left or tuned out because he couldnt handle the situation (but could have handled a socially inept kid who wont shut up about WWI airplane models). Id guess the funny people can be funny even when their jokes bomb, because they can make their failed jokes into a joke at their own expense? Some vaguely similar term like high functioning autism would be used. You tell them that the study that tried to address that question suggests that they are between one point one and one point two times as likely; in other words, at least 83-90% of their chance to die in any given year is baseline. The specific way the model plays out may be through perceptual intelligence out of balance with verbal and rotational intelligence causing autism (3% confidence), (The post is awesome, heres a few errata, feel free to delete this after reading.) Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems. And in a sport like wrestling, which is heavily reliant on locks, holds, and pins, having those weak points could easily allow someone to overpower you. Is there precedent for this tower-versus-foundation model being useful for any other health issue, or was it just made up specifically for autism? The high end should stay the same, in much the way that the high end of human lifespan is only a little longer now than in 1800its just that a lot more people make it to 90 or 100 with modern medical care. I think (as an interested amateur, not an expert) that the most plausible answer is that human intelligence depends on getting lots of stuff right. These numbers should be taken with very many grains of salt. Potential confounder: having a low-functioning autistic child is highly stressful and often unpleasant. Someone at the 99.0 percentile for intelligence would probably seem quite mediocre by SSC standards. for which certain genetic inputs might be extremely valuable but there are numerous different ways to arrive at the end point of being good at the game, and numerous different ways that even people genetically gifted in some important capacity can end up being bad at playing the overall game. Shes a real handful to deal with and that deters quality men from being interested in her. Meanwhile, placing people on the spectrum equalizes access to resources, including insurance coverage. Genes are not something where you can say, this is good, more of it will be better. (For example, a too-big head would kill mother and baby until modern times; now it just means mom gets a C-section.). linear or quadratic around the average and possibly tapers off sub-linearly on the tails. These questions interest me because I know a lot of people who are bright nerdy programmers married to other bright nerdy programmers, and sometimes they ask me if their children are at higher risk for autism. For each parameters, there are many alleles in different locations that can bump the parameters a certain directionmake the babys head[1] a little bigger, for example. And yes, I know the survey showed that the average SSC reader had an IQ of 138, but Im extremely skeptical of that finding too. This means autism risk genes must be doing something good. This seemed to balance out by late middle-school/early high-school. And we're taking resources from the prior group to give to the latter. Wheat something something something autism and schizophrenia. This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. Even if intelligence where a little lower we would have a lot more genius given the increase in population. control children (though see the discussion here) for some debate over how seriously to take this; I am less sure this is accurate than most of the other statistics mentioned here. Drink your Brawndo! The mean could easily shift without creating a bunch of geniusesit is probably much easier to raise the IQ of average or above average people, just through some relatively basic improvements and guidance. First, the studies. Sample: literally the whole of scotland. And an article by John Elder Robison pointing out that most of our data on autistic people come from children and the extreme cases. I really like this change. If the g factor and IQ gains from the Flynn Effect are negatively correlated, then does that mean that IQ tests are gradually being more and more poorly designed over time? It really made a difference for him to get to a school where he fit with the other kids. Yeah, your reaction is what I was scrolling down here to say, but you beat me to it. Intelligence seems much more similar to personality than height in terms of complexity and diversity of manifestations. (1) Genes associated with autism arent associated with IQ Well, I think its certainly a reasonable possibility, which in my experience appears to be true, that beyond a certain point, intelligence either directly causes weirdness or is reliant upon it as a foundation. Virtually everything has a failure mode. This post is missing a discussion of the changing meaning of autism. Im not a great student of philosophy, but I dont think most modern philosophers look at the writings of Plato or Descartes or Kant or Hume and think they were intellectual lightweights. The genes that increase risk of autism are disproportionately also genes that increase intelligence, and vice versa (~100% confidence), 2. Tongue in cheek (Swift Modest Proposal) style interventions given this model are: Book Review: The Perfect Health Diet I believe autism is largely genetic and the genes that are associated with autism mainly perform functional roles in brain development and brain function. Increasing numbers of autistic kids at the high end, as some of the smart kids get too many overlapping IQ-enhancing genes that mess up something important. The Waterhouse study I linked above (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x.pdf) argues that even before the autism-aspergers lumping made things worse, ASD samples within single studies (let alone meta-analyses) were not useful for scientific inference because the autism diagnosis lumps together so many wildly disparate developmental and social issues. A lot of dog breeds, particularly those that are very small (like Teacup Yorkies), very large (like Great Danes), or otherwise very different from the default canine somatoform (like Pugs), tend to suffer from health problems at a vastly higher rate than mutts or more natural breeds (e.g. That figure seems very low to me, though it depends what exactly you define as incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic. If we take incredibly to be synonymous with top percentile, there would be 75 million people in the world who are incredibly intelligent. For example, the experience of people who are blind at birth and then are given sight as an adult vs. those who lost vision as a child and then have their sight restored as an adult. The selection findings are across historical time, not recent industrial time, and theyve found that IQ is being selected for as well. Some of the stuff she says about this seem a bit woo-woo, but interesting anyway. I get to see what happens to those kids otherwise, they become adults who ace every math exam, but are unable to buy pants. What will really make someone come off as intelligent within that group is going to be something like 99% IQ plus 99% along that other stuff. What led me to ask this is stories of people who were deaf from birth whod get cochlear implants as adults. I guess it depends on how you define weirdness; I define it as having interests, beliefs, or though processes that are significantly different than most people I dont think Ive encountered any extremely intelligent people for whom none of the above are the case. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent. If you have too many, your legs are bizarrely long twigs that you totter around on like a newborn giraffe, and youve just gone to far so you wont be a great runner. And at least a few of them were probably just lying outright. also didnt say anything about recruitment. Being 1.5 standard deviations less socially adept than the average girl might make you weird, but not problematic, while being 1.5 standard deviations less socially adept than the average boy might make you a classroom / societal problem. As an AI researcher, this actually seems pretty intuitive for me. Slightly differently: Being gifted makes it harder to take certain things seriously. This could also tie back in to socioeconomic status better off parents may be more likely to have kids diagnosed as having autism instead of some other less acceptable mental disability, which could also potentially explain the racial disparities. I would hypothesize based on this that autistic people usually have parents who are very good at exactly those areas that they have trouble in. You underestimate the potential of a good emulation, I think. Why is this the case? Right, genes are NOT good or bad. ABA research, like autism research in general, suffers from an appalling lack of rigor. Ive since backed off of it a bit, maybe not because I think its wrong but because theres possibly a larger and more interesting explanation for what we see, which is that both the collection of deficits that go with low-functioning ASD and the neural efficiencies that go with high IQ are both at least partially caused by a twitchier immune system, which in turn is creating a different profile of synaptic pruning as the brain develops. List of Probability Calibration Exercises - LessWrong Still, the IQ-boosting alleles produce autism instead of a more classical low IQ that genetic load alone would have had. Hence the need to go along with pointless social rituals. When people came to our defense, it was generally with an idea I didnt like too much: that maybe there were different types of intelligence and if we sucked at [x] we must surely be good at [y]like life was an RPG character generator or something. The same principle can be applied to genetic traits. I know it when I see it and all that. (Apologies for a machine metaphor that is certainly misleading, but better than anything else than I can think of.). She was born with the cord around her neck, and we had respiratory specialists on hand to assist. More, by that point your identity probably includes significant aspects which make the idea of becoming normal and predictable less personally palatable. 54K subscribers in the slatestarcodex community. My son was measured using the full Weschler and most of his scores were 96-99th percentile (thats VERY high). Now imagine that someone was in that condition but *couldnt* turn it off. So they went to one doctor, and the doctor removed gluten and dairy from her diet. However, I couldnt beat the Sophomore at 130 who was my workout partner in the weight room and only had 5-10 lbs on me in most lifts. But >39 repeats means risk of the disease. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. I am known as a word smith (and its an important part of my career, but Im not in journalism). I am simply saying that when you encounter lots of GS11+ people they are exactly like Comey. In most GWAS studies there has been little evidence of heterogeneity of association across phenotypic subgroups. An analogy: Imagine you have a sound system with a microphone, speakers, and a mixing board. If a high quantity of a good thing comes with a risk of problems that reduce the quantity again, then you could understand the ability to keep the problems at bay as foundation of the tower. This fits with my observations of my family (parents, siblings, kids) and other science majors in college. I recognised my son was different at about 15 months old. The post is laden with unsaid assumptions that do not make sense to me. In particular, the excess of alleles associated with higher intelligence and educational attainment was only observed in the higher functioning categories (particularly Aspergers syndrome and individuals without comorbid intellectual disability) and not in the other/unspecified PDD and intellectual disability categories. If the mums with low functioning autistic children, the ones I spoke to described the fathers as losers or deadbeats.