Is WP attracting too many of the wrong people

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Meow101
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13 May 2011, 7:41 am

jcq126 wrote:

The only thing that bothers me is when someone looks up Aspergers and goes "hey, I have trouble being social, I must be autistic!! !!" They don't understand the distress of change, sensory issues (The worst IMO), blank mind when trying to think or say something, not understanding social things. I am not diagnosed but am clear as day when it comes to every symptom besides clumsiness, and I would never claim to be autistic without seeing a professional first (even though IMO, I clearly am).

That doesn't bother me because there still is the broader autism phenotype to consider, plus other things like social anxiety, or even just plain shyness. They may not be autistic, but may have traits that do cause some difficulties. I'm not in the business of judging "who has it worse". I am (now) professionally dx'ed AS, but I do okay academically and professionally, but socially and relationship-wise my life is the pits, always has been, and it has caused clinical depression since grade school. I don't think I"ll ever get off antidepressants. I don't want to have to argue with people who say "you don't have it so bad" because I can hold a job. From that I reason I don't have any business getting pissy with people who may not "have it as bad as I do" socially. We're humans. We're all in this frigging mess together.

P.S. Yeah, I feel empathy. No, I can't show it very well. It's one of the things that makes my husband think I don't care.

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13 May 2011, 7:50 am

Verdandi wrote:

MrLoony wrote:

We're always changing. I am NOT the person I was when I was five. The foundation is still there (which is why the early years are the most important and thus parents are the primary influence), but I've been building upon it over the past 20 years.

Like I said, genetics do play a part, but environment is much more important.

I am not sure current evidence supports this. There's evidence that both play a role and are important, but I have not come across anything that says that environment is paramount.

It also depends on the trait in question. Some are more heritable than others and most of the most significant ones are more genetically weighted. The way your mind processes your sensory input (Like, being overly-sensitive to it.) is largely genetically determined, I'm sure.

For many of those traits where environment makes a large part of it, though, the 'environmental factor' is largely comprised by the prenatal environment, so it's just about as modifiable/predetermined as the genetic factor. So, many traits are beyond any person's control.

Related-concept-but-this-is-a-tangent (I wrote it because the modifiability of personality/cognition and resulting culpability interests me):
Even if we include the next 5 years of development into consideration, the individual wasn't responsible for their home-environment, so most individual traits are effectively outside the individual's control. So to fault someone for their actions resulting from fundamental personality traits seems misplaced, though I understand the importance of 'social feedback'(like penalization and reward) in establishing the complex web of relations between humans in society and to encourage/discourage behavior and increase/decrease the professional/social/relational 'visibility'/'significance' of a given person in society (And, how it is painful to be on the losing side of fate. I really do feel for many of the homeless because many of their situations are due to circumstances outside their control and I'm probably saying that because I'm also pretty afraid of becoming homeless due to the possibility of a future mental illness / defect. I'll take "loser at the bottom of a company's hierarchy / economy" over homelessness, any day.).

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13 May 2011, 10:49 pm

swbluto wrote:

Is this your oponion or do you have a reference? It might benefit other readers here if you attach references to back up the bona fides of your assertions on epigenetic trait inheritance symptomatic of autism.

My unerstanding of current literature is multiple loci control individual traits. The relationship between these traits and the environment is in it's infancy and reliability of current estimates are quite poor,

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14 May 2011, 12:37 am

cyberdad wrote:

swbluto wrote:

Would you happen to have a scientific name for this trait so that it can be google searched? It's pretty much my intuition as I'm pretty sure being over-reactive to physical stimuli is a trait present from birth (In whatever germinal form.) and is hardwired into the architecture of the brain, which heavily implies genetic and prenatal factors.

Quote:

My unerstanding of current literature is multiple loci control individual traits. The relationship between these traits and the environment is in it's infancy and reliability of current estimates are quite poor,

Actually, I'm only aware of the heritability of IQ and that's around .75 within the Caucasian population according to the APA. Memory seems to show a heritability around .5-.6, and those two factors seem to largely define "total intellectual ability". Also, happiness is considered 50% genetic. In all of the previous factors, it seems like prenatal environment makes up a large percentage of the environmental influences. The rest of the personality trait's heritabilities are unknown, but lifelong 'temperamental differences' are clearly detectable by the age of 5 suggesting that earliest determined factors are the most significant, especially in something developmental like autism spectrum disorders.

MrLoony
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14 May 2011, 1:56 am

Can you point to a study that shows a 75% IQ inheritance? From what I've read, it's more environmental (and cultural) than genetic.

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cyberdad
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14 May 2011, 4:49 am

swbluto wrote:

I find it difficult to envisage a correlation so precise between IQ and heritability when there are 200 genes (perhaps more) coding for IQ in humans.

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v8/n1/ ... 1095a.html
IQ is a true polygenic trait due to the additive effect of many genes, each with a small effect. In our studies of over 200 phenotype–genotype correlations with behovioral traits we have found that even when the association is significant, in the majority of cases the percent of the variance attributable to each gene is less than 3% and averages 1.2%

CockneyRebel
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14 May 2011, 6:22 am

I feel that WP might have attracted too many of the wrong people in other areas. Some threads can turn into blood baths.

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14 May 2011, 6:40 am

CockneyRebel wrote:

I feel that WP might have attracted too many of the wrong people in other areas. Some threads can turn into blood baths.

Really? You don't mean this thread in particular, do you? It's controversial, but it doesn't feel like a blood bath to me (and I'm very sensitive and squeamish). Nor have I seen any other blood baths (even though a couple of threads on gender information nearly drove me potty!). But I've only been here a little over two weeks, and perhaps I haven't seen the true horror of WP yet ... it still looks remarkably civilised to me.

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nemorosa
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14 May 2011, 6:42 am

I'm finding this whole thread extraordinary. Almost amusing in a strange way, if it weren't for the snobbery in thinking there are the "right" sort of people and the "wrong" sort of people at WP.

I say chaps, we really need to keep the riff-raff out :roll:

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14 May 2011, 8:48 am

I never had any issue with the self-diagnosers so no, I don't think WP is attracting the 'wrong people'. A self diagnosed person may be anyone from somebody who can't afford a diagnoses to somebody who realized they were autistic, but now have their various issues under control and don't see a need to diagnose anymore. This forum is for all autistic people, is it not?

The only real additions I've seen are more LGBT people since the addition of that forum, and more people with other conditions. We are a discussion forum after all! A little diversity and colour from all kinds of different sources can't hurt us, only make us stronger.

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14 May 2011, 9:04 am

If WP only wants people who have a professional diagnosis on the autism spectrum, then it shouldn't have tick boxes for NT, Not Sure, and Self Diagnosed. It also shouldn't have a subforum for people who are not autistic, but have mental health problems.

Don't lay out a welcome mat, and then complain the 'wrong people' have come into your house.

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14 May 2011, 9:09 am

Since it's a site for everyone with the slightest connection to AS, I would say it's attracting just the right people. That doesn't mean you have to agree with them all.

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14 May 2011, 9:35 am

cyberdad wrote:

swbluto wrote:

You don't have to the understand the individual contributing genes and the complex interactions between those genes and their expressions in order to measure heritability (And thank god because if that we're true, we wouldn't be able to measure it for at least another couple of decades.).

Anyways, here's wikipedia's entry:

Quote:

Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.[21][22][23] It may seem reasonable to expect that genetic influences on traits like IQ should become less important as one gains experiences with age. However, that the opposite occurs is well documented. Heritability measures in infancy are as low as 0.2, around 0.4 in middle childhood, and as high as 0.8 in adulthood.[7][24] One proposed explanation is that people with different genes tend to seek out different environments that reinforce the effects of those genes.[6]
A 1994 review in Behavior Genetics based on identical/fraternal twin studies found that heritability is as high as 0.80 in general cognitive ability but it also varies based on the trait, with .60 for verbal tests, .50 for spatial and speed-of-processing tests, and only .40 for memory tests.[5]
In 2006, The New York Times Magazine listed about three quarters as a figure held by the majority of studies,[8] while a 2004 meta-analysis of reports in Current Directions in Psychological Science gave an overall estimate of around .85 for 18-year-olds and older.[7]

That mostly seems to suggest a heritability of .75-.85 in adulthood which is pretty significant. Also, contrary to my previous claim, it seems that the heritability for memory is only .4 according to this entry but that should probably get more verification.

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14 May 2011, 11:06 am

Quote:

.60 for verbal tests

This is rather important when talking about autism and verbal IQ. The difference between someone with 160 written/120 verbal and 160 written/80 verbal could easily be environmental.

Here's a question: How are they measuring heritability? I ask because IQ scores are a bell curve, which means that most people would fall into such an area where environment can be a major factor.

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15 May 2011, 2:00 am

swbluto wrote:

Yes Maths heritability is classified by some researchers under personality traits and falls within the heritability estimates for personality traits between 0.30-0,50.

Acording to wiki the variation in IQ heritability is too spread out to make precise estimates...it's what I posted before...
The 2006 edition of Assessing adolescent and adult intelligence by Alan S. Kaufman and Elizabeth O. Lichtenberger reports correlations of 0.86 for identical twins raised together compared to 0.76 for those raised apart and 0.47 for siblings.[11] These number are not necessarily static. When comparing pre-1963 to late 1970s data, researches DeFries and Plomin found that the IQ correlation between parent and child living together fell significantly, from 0.50 to 0.35. The opposite occurred for fraternal twins.

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15 May 2011, 2:10 am

MyWorld wrote:

It seems that there are a lot of self-diagnosed people who claim that they don't fit in anywhere. I wonder is some of those people are just emo and dislike people around them for whatever reason which is why they have trouble making friends. Lots of people without ASD have had trouble making friends in their lifetime. Nothing in life is easy for everyone.

Autism isn't defined as "disliking people" at all.
There are a plethora of characteristics outside social ones,
and even social ones don't include that.
And if anyone disliked people, why would they try to make friends in the first place?

If they feel personally that they meet the diagnostic criteria, and find WP an appealing place to be regardless of official diagnosis,
I fail to see how it hurts anyone.

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