fight for truth: fight simon baron-cohen

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Although there are some with autism who feel like socializing, many do not like to. I actually love sitting in front of the computer. It's relaxing and fun and I would sit here forever if I could. Why is it when people don't like to socialize it's not accepted and thought of as a bad thing? It's not. Respect people's right to socialize or not and view asociality not as a negative stereotype or myth but a legitimate lifestyle choice that can have benefits.

I'm sorry, I can't take Simon Baron-Cohen seriously since his cousin Satcha is the same guy who plays Bruno, Borat and Ali G. And yes, Bruno did compare autism to chlamydia.

Non-autistic introverts also do not like socializing. Introverts get energy from inside themselves (ideas and concepts in their own minds), verus extroverts that get energy from outside of themselves (interacting with other people). They are also made to feel uncomfortable because by and large the world tends to be controlled by extroverts. And introverts represent a sizable proportion of the population. Their voices though are less likely to be heard probably because they just don't care to be heard or are less likely to reach positions of power/authority because they don't care for it.

Last edited by Kon on 28 Dec 2010, 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Exactly. A scientist who wants to discuss a theory about 'male brains' has NO excuse for being completely ignorant of research showing that such a thing is difficult if not impossible to define. Gender research is a broad field. One example of an experiment: take 2 lecture theatres full of mathematics students; give one class a five minute confidence building exercise before their exam. The results of the exam: the females in the confidence building class have significantly higher results than those in the other class. The males results do not change. Moreover, in some countries young women now outperform men in all subjects. Clearly such a radical change in 30 or 40 years cannot be biological in origin.

I think the Intense World theory of hyper-functionality=debilitation is a lot closer to what I feel every day. Sometimes I actually find it easier to concentrate when I've consumed some substance that causes my mentation and sensory intake to slow. A lot of times I get incredibly frustrated because my cognition is so much faster than my body can keep up with.

For example, I can read (comprehension) much faster than I can physically move my eyes.

Bad logic. If the style of teaching has changed it is possible that female neurology is more responsive to the new methods.

What has changed that has resulted in better female performance? Without examining that, you can't say anything about causality.

Yes, this is how I feel all the time. Of course no two word label could ever capture the essence of autism, but IW is better than the other options being thrown around.

As I said, I am referring to a LARGE body of academic research. Please inform yourself about it before jumping to conclusions.

I did not jump to a conclusion. You posted something that was logically faulty. It is up to YOU to provide corroboration when you make a statement that is such a broad generalization.

Shall I spell it out for you?

You said:



There is no reason to challenge this as anything but fact, so lets proceed to your claim:



The word "cannot" is an absolute. Logically, you are saying for it is not possible for biology to be a cause. I simply pointed out a scenario where it COULD be a cause therefore your absolute is proven false. Again, your logic is faulty.

If you wish to be accurate, then change your statement to something like "research has shown female biology to be very unlikely".

If you wish to be reactionary, continue using absolutes and words like "clearly" and "radical".

If women are allegedly biologically inferior at certain tasks than men, how exactly do you tailor teaching methods (which have not changed signficantly over this time) to favor women over men in subjects that men allegedly have a biological advantage in?

The research is out there, you can find it. But here's one that Kea referenced to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat

Yes, it's wiki, but the article has citations at the bottom.

Who said anything about biologically inferior? ALL I SAID was the statement was logically faulty.

I'm sorry. My Aspie is showing ...

This is the historical claim as to why so few women were entering the fields of math and science. I'm sorry I failed to separate the long-term arguments about this from your own statement. The statement is logically sound in context with existing research, however.

The stereotype threat information is still applicable, I think.

S.B.C. made a statistical claim. Have you any evidence to indicate flaws in his statistical methods.

ruveyn

I have read some of Simon Baron-Cohen's papers, and I am unable to find any serious flaw in them. The one I like the most is the one where he took undergrads from physical science, biological science, social science and the humanities and he then measured their SQ and EQ levels. He found that there is both a male / female difference and a difference between physical science students and the humanites. The people with ASDs on a 2D plot of SQ and EQ were clustered in a place where so called "super male" minds would be expected to be.

While some people might not like the "extreme male" term as they think it is sexist, I do not think it is being used in a nasty or discriminatory way by SBC. It is being used as a purely descriptive term in the same wayas a lump of chalk is white while a lump of coal is black. I think that SBC has stopped using the extreme male brain term and has moved onto the idea of SQ and EQ, but at the end of the day you have to admit that the average man has a higher SQ and a lower EQ score than the average woman. But bear in mind that the ESD for both SQ and EQ is very large. Many women have higher SQ score than many men (the same applies to EQ scores as well)

If people find SBC to be a bad researcher, then I suggest you go after other worse researchers. In terms of bad and nasty researchers I think that the AS community have much larger and nastier ones to deal with. Some "researchers" are very shabby, one claims that men with AS exert a carcinogenic effect on wifes and GFs. The researcher in question refuses to discuss the methods by which they came to this very contraversal and distasteful set of conclusions.

The problem is that the researcher bypassed the peer review process in accademic publishing by making their claims in books.

I am an accademic who is sometimes called on to review papers, I suspect that most reviewers do what I do. I do not mind if the paper goes against some hypothesis which I love. I only want to know if the paper is well written and contains evidence to support its conclusions.

It's not his statistics that are problematic, it's his methods of measuring them and his surety that performance on certain tests really reflects specific qualities called empathizing and systematizing. And of course that empathizing and systematizing are actual qualities that have... I don't know the word. He thinks they are real and not just force-fitted ideas. And then he thinks you can measure them a certain way. You can't just have statistics, you have to be sure what you're measuring are genuine and distinct qualities and that the way you measure them is itself a good way to measure them (if they even exist).

He is very caught up in a certain kind of abstraction so extreme that he takes these words he comes up with and thinks of them as concrete or nearly so the way something like muscle strength or nerve conductance is relatively concrete. Then he goes around measuring people in ways that make the world seem to meet his abstractions.

Just one among many critiques of his measuring techniques I've heard: His idea of systematizing doesn't include many traditionally "female" interests or activities and does include many traditionally "male" interests and activities.

Another thing I've noticed is that his measurements (as well as others measurements he supports in his writing) of "empathy" and "theory of mind" are similarly tailored to areas autistic people are bad at.

Restricting the reading of body language to photographs of actors (so likely to measure familiarity with stage conventions rather than genuine candid expressions) who are not autistic (it's possible that autistic people find autistic people easier to read just like nonautistic people find nonautistic people easier to read) restricted to the eyes (a body part many autistic people find stressful to look at) in black and white (an unnatural color) and still photos (also an unnatural situation that some evidence shows is harder for autistic people to read than moving people) with questions using language (difficult for many autistic people on its own, but difficult for most autistic people to combine language and nonverbal cues at the same time, additionally knowing something is not the same as knowing the word for it).

Thats a lot of different ways in just one of his tests that could potentially make it harder for autistic people, some of which are known to make things harder for us, yet many people don't question it at all.

Then there's the Sally Anne test. Already it contains some of the most complex language structures in the English language. Autistic people have trouble with language. If you give a picture based false belief test, autistic people do at least as well as nonautistic people if not slightly better at times. What happens when an autistic person manages to pass the Sally Anne verbal test? Do they get told they have theory of mind? No, they're given a more complex test using harder language and abstraction and multitasking, and given harder and harder tests until they trip up and then they lack theory of mind again.

Then there's the empathizing test. Lots of it is based on how nonautistic people respond to you, and being able to understand nonautistic people (since most people are nonautistic). So then there's the "nonautistic people think autistic people lack empathy therefore autistic people lack empathy" circularity. And then there's the "autistic people can't read nonautistic people very well so autistic people lack empathy" thing.

Let's look at that last thing with some information about the world:

Nonautistic people can barely read autistic people at all.

Autistic people can usually read nonautistic people to some degree, certainly better than the reverse, because we live in a world full of them and we pick up some of it to survive. Additionally some autistic people seem to read nonautistic people anywhere from fairly well to very well.

Nonautistic people can usually read nonautistic people well. Not perfectly but well.

Many autistic people can read other autistic people (or people of their subtype) at least as well as nonautistic people read other nonautistic people.

So, when we can't (or seem to not be able to but actually can in some cases) read them it's a defect in our empathy. When they can't read us it's not considered a defect in their empathy (we are just seen as innately mysterious, or lacking in expression -- one time an autistic woman read my emotions and motivations perfectly and a nonautistic woman exclaimed you can't possibly be reading her emotions, she doesn't have any body language!! !"... says a lot about bias, doesn't it?)

Or as I put it, I can't read you so I'm defective, you can't read me so I'm defective. It doesn't make sense.

Additionally all of these tests require verbal skills. It's just assumed that those of us without the verbal skills will just be more extreme forms of those who can take the tests. But that's not necessarily so. When I'm not actively using language I revert to the way I've always been -- language might as well exist, same as with many autistic people whose pattern matching skills didn't lead them to simulating language as well as I do. When I can't use or understand language, my ability to read nonverbal cues skyrockets. It's like many of us can have one or the other, and some shift like me (while possibly racially a side the way I favor non-language) while others do language without so many people reading skills, people reading skills without much language, and everywhere in between. Mind you I don't read the same nonverbal cues in the same way as nonautistic people, so I would also possibly fail a test tailored toward their specific skills. But it's been shown autistic people with the same severe receptive language delay I had, often look at people's bodies more than people with better language comprehension who usually focus on mouths or nothing at all.

When I say full of holes a mile wide I mean it. These issues have rarely been properly addressed. (And when they are they often get different results.) Statistics on tests this potentially messed up don't mean a lot. I could come up with a test tailored to my conclusions as well (whether consciously or otherwise) and come up with my own statistics and that wouldn't make me right any more than his statistics make him right.

(And while I'm not a traditional researcher, I am involved in some research and have tried to help researchers design around some of these problems. They seemed to take me quite seriously.)

That's a lot of issues. I'd only noticed, like, two or three of those on my own. Impressive.

Also, I didn't quite understand this part:

I'm guessing you meant "language might as well not exist" (is this correct?) but I can't make sense of "while possibly racially a side the way I favor non-language." Can you or someone else clarify?