Simon Baron-Cohen - how neurotypical is he really?

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17 Mar 2015, 9:31 pm

AspieUtah wrote:
Could Temple Grandin serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone for Simon Baron-Cohen and others like him? Because her profession is animal science (though she has a bachelor's degree in psychology) she wouldn't have the professional constraints of bias or conflicts of interest (something even U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker had to defend against after his controversial opinion in 2010 about the matter of California's Proposition 8 prohibition of same-sex marriage).

Despite that fact, she presents herself, and the complex ideas and studies of others to the public as convincingly as anyone and is accepted by her audiences as accurate and truthful. But, here's the catch: So does Baron-Cohen. In my opinion, they share much of the same black-and-white response to scientific objectivity. She does because she speaks as someone with ASDs. He does because he is a clinician and researcher whose obsession, both professional and personal, is ASDs.

I suspect that you are correct in your presumption of his spectrum status.


That's a very interesting observation about the similarity! Once you pointed it out, lightbulb moment here....



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17 Mar 2015, 11:22 pm

Six months ago, SBC was interviewed by a magazine "The New Idealist" and the interview was part of a special issue on autism. Here's a verbatim excerpt from that interview:

"The New Idealist: In one of your talks you reference a quote from Hans Asperger “for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential”. So as a scientist yourself, where do you sit on your own AQ scale?

Simon Baron-Cohen: Ah (laugh), though I haven’t taken the test, because I developed it, I sort of know how it works. I’m not naïve to it all. So, I don’t know if it would be very valid for me to take it. But, you know, as a scient— I mean, scientists, as a group, tend to score higher than people who are outside science on the AQ. We’ve used the AQ in our university, for example, and compared the students in humanities to the students in science, and the scientists score just slightly, but significantly, higher than humanities students. It’s all about, you know, that the AQ isn’t diagnostic; it simply counts how many autistic traits people have, and we all have some, and it’s, it’s a bell curve, you know. It’s, it’s a section of the population, and it may only be that if you score very high that you might need a diagnosis."

I find this doubly interesting because of comments that SBC has made elsewhere, about his centre withholding diagnosis from people who have successful lives (presumably even if they score high on his test). Given that he expresses concerns about validity, if he took the test - (he has a point there, I concede it) - how "valid" is it to withhold diagnosis on the basis of success in life? And how ethical is it to structure diagnosis so that autism is solely represented by unsuccessful lives because you weed out the successes?

It does seem quite curious to me how he thinks about these issues, as well as his perhaps somewhat evasive reply to the interviewer's question. If I developed a test that I intended to publicise widely, and make dogmatic claims about (as he has done), I would road test it myself - mindful of my potential bias; but I would still road-test it out of curiosity, if nothing else.