Author Archives: intellectualizing

Why it matters whether autism is a trait or a unified condition

I’ve written a lot about autism as a trait, contrasting this with a “single unified disorder” narrative.

To me, this is not a nitpick. It matters very much whether we think about autism as a “single disorder” kind of thing, or a “dimensional trait” kind of thing.

Take a popular media article from that came up on Twitter today, about the “Intense World” theory of autism. It’s called “What if people with autism are actually hyperfunctional?” and a sample quote is:

Now, a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience suggests that the brains of people with autism are actually hyperfunctional rather than stunted or impaired, and that if treated early in a very predictable environment, symptoms could diminish.

The article goes on to suggest that if autism has this etiology, it should significantly change treatment strategies.

This study is interesting, but it applies to only some autistic people. I don’t think it’s relevant to me or my son, for example.

Results that apply to only some people are still interesting! It isn’t necessary to overhype into a unified theory of autism. But there’s a practical consequence if we only apply a result to a subset of autistics, and that’s the need to figure out which people it applies to.  The autism diagnostic criteria don’t do that work for us.

If we apply a research discovery to the wrong people, then we might harm them by using the wrong approach to helping them.

This particular result, because it’s about being “hyperfunctional,” also continues the disability superpower trope, something that can be harmful by creating feelings such as these. When presenting this kind of “autism as a strength” idea, we have to be sensitive from a human perspective, thinking about autistics who may read about it and think “well, I don’t feel hyperfunctional” or “I don’t seem to have any special skills.” Here’s where always qualifying with the word “some,” some autistic people, can be a small but helpful gesture.

But most importantly — however an article like this one on plays out in practice — it’s inaccurate in a way that deserves correction.

To see this, rewrite it with something we all agree is a dimensional trait, such as intellectual disability, and a single condition that causes that trait, such as Down Syndrome. We might write “What if people with intellectual disability actually have trisomy 21?” and we might talk about how we need to focus on low muscle tone, short stature, and congenital heart disease as central to the treatment of intellectually disabled people.

I think we can all agree that this would be more than oversimplified; it would be incorrect and lead us to flawed treatments. In cases of intellectual disability that are not trisomy 21, we would be badly mistaken to go looking for the characteristics that make up Down Syndrome.

If made this mistake about intellectual disability, they would have to issue a correction. The reason they can mess this up with autism is that autism researchers are also still messing it up, and the mass media follows them. The most cutting-edge researchers are now talking about “the autisms” and so on, but lots of them haven’t caught up.

So whenever some poorly-designed study correlates stuff with autism, and the media reports this as a possible new unified theory of autism, it’s misinformation. Plain and simple. It’s no different from asserting that trisomy 21 is the unified theory of intellectual disability.

There are more known etiologies for intellectual disability than for autism, no doubt. But autism does have some known ones, and there’s no evidence that the remaining idiopathic cases of autism (or intellectual disability) will turn out to be from some unified cause. Most evidence seems to point the other way toward diverse causes.

Discovering trisomy 21 was still a big deal, still very interesting, even though it doesn’t explain all intellectual disability.

When we say “autism is due to intense world,” that’s a much stronger claim than “some autism is due to intense world,” because it requires us to not only prove intense world but also to disprove every one of the other zillion proposed theories of autism. When it comes down to it, quite a few of those theories could be true … for particular autistic people and not for others. To help each person, we need to understand what autism means for them, individually.

Good science and good medicine require us to be precise about our claims and our terminology.


Not explaining autism

There are many attempts to define and explain autism out there. This may be hardest when it’s in a real-world context; “how do I explain autism to a judgmental parent on the playground?” or “how do I explain autism to my autistic child?”

The answer I’m arriving at over time is: I’m not going to explain it.

If I sense that people might wonder about my son in some context, I like saying something like: “he takes a while to warm up to strangers,” or “he needs a break.”  Or saying nothing at all.

I dislike invoking “autism as explanation”: “I’m not a bad parent, he just has autism” / “my son isn’t a bad kid, just autistic.” These statements internalize the ideology that difference isn’t OK unless psychiatry says it is, and they accept that others are “allowed” to judge us. My view is that it’s just fine to behave differently (in a way that’s harmless to others), and this requires no explanation or excuse. If a person behaves differently but meets no DSM criteria, that’s fine too.

Rather than describing some general label like “autism,” why not describe the person? If a child acts differently on the playground, say “he likes to do that sometimes.” That’s a fine explanation.

Unusual behavior is OK because the person is a person, not because the person has been labeled autistic by a clinical professional. We do not need a note from a doctor to be accepted. We do not need to justify ourselves to nosy, judgmental people.

I understand the pressure of judgment, and the fear of being considered a “bad mom” (moms are judged much more harshly than dads). It’s hard to cope with this.

What about explaining autism to your child? I haven’t had to navigate this one yet. But I think I want to say something like, “autism is what some people call people like us.” And then explain “like us” with lots of strengths included. I would focus the explanation on how schools and others need to put people in boxes, and how they are wrong to do so.

Autism is not a fact out there in the world; it’s a framing and a way of thinking. As always, that doesn’t mean the word “autism” is meaningless, nor does it mean that the traits and behaviors we call “autism” are imaginary. It does mean that given the facts we call autism today, we could group them differently, we could talk about them differently, and we could act on them differently. The meaning, framing, and actions around autism have changed from decade to decade over the last century. Skepticism is warranted, and I would embed that skepticism in what I tell my son.

So, I guess I am explaining autism; but not as a fact. I want to explain it as an ideology, a bureaucratic convenience, an externally-imposed way of thinking that I don’t necessarily care to internalize. I want to keep some anthropological distance from the culture I’m describing.

It isn’t a secret or somehow shameful that the word “autistic” might be applied to my son or to me. I’m fine talking about it (in person though; as you can see I keep it semi-anonymous online). The concern here is that I don’t endorse the meanings and implications baked in to the word “autism” as commonly used. It’s a matter of accuracy, an issue of clarifying what “autism” means to me vs. what it means to others.

Some pedantic accuracy

If forced to “explain autism,” I’d have to adjust the usual words quite a bit. Here’s an example from wikihow:

Autism is a developmental disorder that generally leads to differences in communication and social skills. It is a neurological difference that presents significant difficulties, but also blessings.

How many mistakes are in here?

  1. “disorder” is singular but should be plural
  2. “disorder” should be “condition” to remove value judgment
  3. “leads to” implies that autism is an underlying explanation for differences, when in fact it’s only a description of differences with nothing to say about explanation or cause
  4. “neurological” is a false distinction (non-autistic people are also “neurobiological”)
  5. “significant difficulties” may or may not be true for a particular person; autism diagnosis currently waffles on whether autism is an immutable trait or a functional impairment, especially for preschoolers
  6. “also blessings” may or may not be true for a particular person

So yeah, I don’t like that definition. I could nitpick the rest of the wikihow article too but you get the idea. Most discussion of “autism” internalizes and takes for granted a pile of assumptions that I can’t get on board with.

Let’s look at another article on The Mighty about a parent explaining autism to a child.

I love you so much and am so very proud of you. You are smart and good and funny. Autism just explains why sometimes things feel difficult for you, why you might get so frustrated, and why you have an extra teacher come help you at school.

“But autism not only causes you some frustrations, it also makes you unique. It helps you have an amazing memory. Even when you were very little I could read a book to you and you would have the whole thing memorized after just hearing it once.

Talking to my son about this is a hard problem, and as I said I don’t quite know how to have this conversation yet.

But the part of that article that jumps out at me is the belief that autism explains anything. It’s central to this text: “explains why,” “causes you some frustrations,” “helps you have an amazing memory,” etc. I can’t agree. Autism explains nothing. It’s not an appendage. It is not an outside force operating upon anyone. It is a description or classification of people along a certain dimension; it is a shorthand for a checklist of observed traits and behaviors. There’s no difference, other than brevity, between saying “has autism” and listing the specific differences that make up the definition of autism.

If a parent worries about a child’s differences, and they go to a clinician for diagnosis, they have not learned “the differences are because of autism,” they have learned “the differences are considered autism.” The first statement is a fact about an autistic person; the second statement is a fact about clinical and educational institutions and ideology. As parents, if we know our child well already, then diagnosis tells us nothing about our child — but it tells us volumes about the world our child lives in.

I keep writing about this theme on this blog. A while back I argued that we should redirect anger about overdiagnosis to bureaucracies, away from parents and clinicians. Recently I argued that schools reframe their own one-size-fits-all limitations into medicalized diagnosis of individual children.

Not afraid to use the label

Labels have practical value. (A nice little summary of pros and cons of labels can be found in table 1 of “Ten questions about terminology for children with unexplained language problems”.) I have no problem with using “autism” to get things done within institutions, whether schools or insurance companies. But I’m eager to compartmentalize this use of “autism” and keep my own understanding separate.

Autism as identity

I appreciate that some would take the term back, and convert it from medical diagnosis to Autistic identity. I respect that. I often feel that this doesn’t go far enough. For Autistic to work as an identity, medical authority over the word may need to be abandoned.

I can’t explain autism

For me, autism is an anthropological or sociological problem: why did the world create the idea “autism” and apply it to people like my son and I? I’m trying to understand that.

In most heated discussions about autism, I feel on the sidelines; as if both sides are accepting some facts that I find mysterious. Autistic people aren’t the puzzle pieces. The mystery lies with the social phenomenon of “autism,” and all the ways we talk about it.

Autism isn’t mine to explain. It’s someone else’s formulation — and often, it’s a formulation I don’t think I can explain and justify.

Schools are disordered, and they blame our kids










School: far less flexible than real life







Our family




Schools and autism

Why are schools hostile to autistic kids in particular?

  • little or no curriculum around social and motor skills;
  • bullying seems to happen pretty often;
  • loud or crowded environments;
  • policies often forbid outside experts or therapists;

Schools and strengths





Side note: the problem cannot be dismissed as “overdiagnosis”


It doesn’t have to be this way







Autism, Feminism, and Shy Nerdy Men









Parenting First, Autism Parenting Second

It’s common in the autism community to say (in effect) “because of autism, you have to do parenting this way.” This medicalizes the parent-child relationship; it converts the parent into a therapist, and risks looking at the child as “autism” rather than as a person.

I believe that most parenting decisions hinge on individual traits of family members, on context, and on one’s values. One’s exact approach may have to adapt to autistic traits; but other factors matter much more than anything we can assume from the autism label.

The breadth of parenting approaches

Parents are very different from one another. Here are some examples:

Parenting approach tends to be deeply entangled in cultural and religious background. A family’s daily life, and family members’ senses of self, arise in part from decisions about parenting.

It’s very common to see heated discussions of parenting approach on the internet (nothing to do with autism – I mean general parenting discussion).

People are very quick to judge others.

I expect most families have a reality that’s quite a bit more nuanced than these philosophical debates.

All of the parenting approaches in my list above, and many others, can be adapted to an autistic child. The values embedded in these approaches can still be expressed.

Many general parenting debates mirror debates in the autism community. For example, Alfie Kohn argues that typical families and schools today overuse extrinsic motivation.

The importance of context

In our rush to judge, we often forget the importance of context.

Parenting is a long gradual adjustment to developmental level; as a child ages, we expect more of them. Parents must continually adapt their expectations and approaches. If we see a parent we don’t know interacting with a child we don’t know, we might guess at developmental level based on the child’s age, but we could be quite wrong; as anyone acquainted with autism will realize.

Parenting has everything to do with context. If you see a parent buy their child candy, was that the only candy this month, or does their child live on candy? Most likely somewhere in between. But you don’t know.  If you see a parent react to misbehavior in a certain way, what preceded the misbehavior? What rules does the child know, what have they been asked to do? You don’t know.

What does a certain child consider to be a reward or a punishment? You don’t even know that, if you’re watching a parent-child pair. My son was staying up yesterday night doing a math workbook when he was supposed to be sleeping. Other parents might assign math workbook time as a punishment. Who knows.

Children respond to different styles

Many have made the observation that different kids seem to need something different from parents. One child might find rules chafing, and revolt against them vigorously in a way that makes everyone miserable. Another child might find it anxiety-inducing to lack clear guidance, and be much happier with a schedule and instructions to “do this, then do that.”

As parents we may often need to suppress our own vision of the kind of parent we’d like to be, and replace it with a vision of the kind of parent we’ve discovered that our child needs.

The parenting style that worked so well for one parent with their child, may be entirely inappropriate and even disastrous for another parent with another child.

Perhaps it’s a mistake to be too ideological about parenting, when ideology can blind us to the particulars of the children we have.

Families have different needs

Many (probably most) parents choose a few lines in the sand, where some rule of the household has to be followed or the family just won’t function. For some it might be keeping messes cleaned up, for others it might be that everyone gets enough sleep, for others it might be a period of quiet time after school, for others it might be eating dinner together, for another it might be going to church or using respectful language.

These traditions vary a lot across families, and they depend on individual values and temperaments. Like making a marriage work, to make a whole family work involves compromise, finding the place where all the people involved can coexist. There’s no “right way” to navigate these issues; it depends on who’s involved.

Keeping the focus on family

It’s harmful for any of us to tell parents how to parent, based purely on “autism,” with no knowledge of their specific family or specific child or specific cultural background.

Many autism therapy programs include a valuable parent training component, and parents do need and appreciate hearing experiences of autism, from autistic people, from other parents, and from autistic parents. I’ve found parent coaching incredibly helpful; and many parents say their “autism parenting” coaching helped them quite a bit with their non-autistic kids too.

But in these contexts, we have to draw careful lines. There’s a line between helpful advice and “back-seat parenting.” There’s a line between providing information and dictating our own values to other people.

I’ve seen both therapists and autism community members step over these lines. I’ve also seen parents violate their own lines, searching for and using someone else’s autism-related advice when they should be making a decision based on their values.

Most importantly, there’s a human, everyday parent-child relationship. There’s a family, and happy families find quirky and distinctive ways to make the family work for all the family members, even if it looks a little strange from the outside.


Autism as a “neurobiological” condition











Forgiving ourselves without psychiatric approval





Let’s find a better way of thinking about relationships







A related conversation: sexual orientation





Parenting and education are not criminal justice




Applying moral judgment to some skills but not others


Acceptance with allowance for growth



This stuff is hard.

An unhelpful question: “Is this caused by autism?”



Practical considerations:


Moral considerations:












Autism and prediction

Via this post by John Elder Robison I just read a new paper “Autism as a disorder of prediction” (the full text is available but took me a while to find; click on the red Adobe Acrobat icon).

Statistical vs. Logical Prediction

The paper talks about a particular kind of prediction, which they call “Markov chain” (you predict Y after X, if Y is statistically common after X). Markov chains are often used in computer programs to generate nonsense text that matches a “genre.” A Markov gibberish-generator analyzes how words tend to group together in a bunch of sample text, then generates text with those same statistical probabilities. The result is humorous nonsense that sounds like a parody of the genre used to “train” the gibberish-generator.

In the fields of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, these statistical properties of text are thought of as largely-unconscious ways to convey meaning, often social meaning. For example, the way we talk (word choice, pronunciation, gestures, sentence length, etc.) is often enough to let other people place us socially: race, class, gender, even occupation. This social meaning may have nothing to do with the actual “denotational content” (dictionary definition) of what we’re saying; it’s a sort of overlay. And it’s based on statistical probability (stereotype, in essence) rather than logic. The same mechanisms that define a literary genre such as the “romance novel” also define genres of everyday speech and genres of identity.

A famous on-purpose example of Markov genre parody was Alan Sokal’s hoax in the journal Social Text. A famous not-on-purpose example is anything written by Thomas Friedman. These are texts that appear coherent and match a genre, but their logical content (i.e. what the words mean in a dictionary sense) makes no sense.

I’ve also known several people in real life who were like this, very charismatic, sounded very convincing in their social role, successful even, but the words meant very little beyond “I am talking like a CEO” or “I am talking like a minister.” These people were all-genre, no-content. Finally there’s an interesting condition called Williams Syndrome which leads to intellectual disability paired with the ability to convincingly inhabit social roles.

The point here is that the ability to make statistical language chains does appear  to be decoupled in some sense from the ability to think logically.

With that background, let’s get back to the paper.

Problem: Attempted unified account of autism

Let’s note that the paper is on a fool’s errand trying to unify and explain all autism, and these authors should take Lynn Waterhouse’s advice on that front .  The paper would still be interesting if it led to an account of some conditions underlying autism, and that should be our default interpretation of it.

Problem: Assumption that if it correlates with autism, it must be bad

And let’s note that the paper takes whatever thing correlates with autism and assumes it must be a bad thing, which is simply unscientific as usual. Statistical Markov-style prediction creates many of the known cognitive biases, not to mention racism, sexism, and a lot of nonsensical speaking and writing. Unquestionably, this kind of thinking is also necessary for humans to get things done — it isn’t effective to think everything out explicitly all the time — but there’s a reason we have the ability to both “pattern match” and also think things through step-by-step.

Possible meaning and future direction: intellect and instinct again

In the past I listed 20+ word pairs used in everyday language and various academic fields to refer to the distinction between “intellect” and “instinct.” Here’s the post listing those and talking about how I feel it relates to autism.

To me this prediction paper is getting at the same dichotomy again, this time calling “instinct” “Markov prediction.”

Generations of academics from all kinds of fields have wrestled with this distinction. The theoretical framework is weak; what does this distinction really mean? What does it mean biologically? What does it mean in everyday experience? At the same time, there’s a lot of data and previous work that could be learned from. Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have a lot to offer here, among other fields. There’s no need to start from scratch.

Rather than unifying autism, can we unify some of the past work on this intellect vs. instinct dimension of human experience? Can we figure out if this is a real thing or just a folk theory? Can we decide on ways to measure this dimension?

I think there’s interesting work to be done, somewhere in the vicinity of this paper.

Alternative explanations for prediction failure

Before concluding that failure to Markov-predict is due to deficits in prediction ability (due to our unscientific bias against autism), here are two examples of alternative explanations we could also consider.

  1. Attention and interest.  That is, interest in instinctive prediction vs. a preference for other kinds of cognitive activity. For example, I typically feel pretty good (even superior) at pattern matching in areas of intellectual interest. John Elder Robison brings up the example of autistic kids playing a video game they’re really into.
  2. Interference from a “thinking slow” filter. Introspectively, I feel that step-by-step intellectual thinking builds on a “pattern matching” substrate; each “step” is a pattern match, and you learn to apply a sequence of pattern matches to get to a conclusion. The difference between this and a Markov chain is that you aren’t allowed to use “false” pattern matches (stereotypical associations or genre features), you can only use those that make sense on the literal/factual/denotational/logical level. This is an extra level of filtering which may hinder automatic, instinctive pattern matching. Framed this way, the “problem” is that someone is doing more on top of and beyond Markov prediction, rather than that their Markov-predictor is broken.

I don’t know if these are right; the point is, we’d consider them if we didn’t jump straight to “if it’s autism, it’s broken.”

Avoiding fuzzy thinking

This paper is a great example of how our biases (toward autism as a unified condition, and toward autism as an unqualified deficit) can cloud our insights.

If we open our minds to the possibility that we can understand some autism, and to the possibility that some traits may be both strengths and deficits, depending on context, we can explore a lot of ideas that we might otherwise miss.

To find the truth researchers must make things more complicated.









Some personal thoughts on “passing” and learning social skills



















We need to help people navigate the complexity and nuance.

False dichotomies in autism parenting














Kudos and criticisms for the NY Times article

Here are some things I’d change about this article.


Here are some things I liked:







Regarding “optimal outcome”




Finding a better path




Book: “Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity”







She proposes that we diagnose symptoms, rather than a disorder:




Why does it matter?




This post


Indented quotations are from the book unless otherwise specified.

Three Arguments


Argument 1, variation requires explanation:


Argument 2, research must consider the full phenotype:


Argument 3, unified theories of autism are harmful:


Does autism exist?





Many routes to social impairment and RRBs

Dr. Waterhouse writes:




Many outcomes from single genetic risk factors




Broad autism phenotype



Implications for genetic counseling






A research agenda around heterogeneity

Dr. Waterhouse writes:




Autism and gender

Rethinking Autism devotes some space to autism’s greater prevalence among males.





Some personal reactions




Enough defensive disclaimers… you get it.

The practical impact of autism’s reification





  • that autism can be separated from a person





Advocacy benefits of a unitary autism









What should professionals tell those in their care?








Defining social impairment, RRBs, SPD




Are autistic traits contextual functional difficulties or lifelong differences?











Will we find evidence for “not like my child”?







Savant and special skills, and autistic strengths

















Language neutrality



Four small concrete changes which could add balance to the book:

  • use of more neutral terms where appropriate




Research starting from case studies


  • Temple Grandin’s “thinking in pictures”
  • The “sensory overload” experience described by many
  • The commonalities in accounts of hyperlexia


Developmental perspective, feedback loops, and neuroplasticity


She does say that:



I am hungry for more research here.








On education

At one point Dr. Waterhouse laments that













Reification of conditions besides autism








  • only some fraction of the knowledge applied to my son
  • the researchers mostly hadn’t figured out who their findings applied to



Unscientific words in scientific papers



This is bad science.













