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living in a papereclip maximizing orphan crushing machine that encourages isolationism and is being shaped for extracting every drop of value out if the public good, or potentially growth, to ensure the rich get richer, and that nobody can make accountability come close to our corpo overlords. Lots to make sure we are generally unhealthy, but why is the complaint always that the peasants are trying and not the system around them?
But let’s make sure to individualize the problem and say that having basic access to information or freedom is the problem, since we’ve gated the only options in information devices to be addictive gacha games and slop feeds that you have increasingly less control over. Kind of like stress fed cows.
The stress is all a complete mystery, and has nothing to do with the death of anti-trust or enabling/defending corporate abuses of the public good. Etc.
Only possible solution is to discourage, or reduce the autonomy of the peasants again.
The self diagnosing critique sounds more like complaining that the peasants without access are trying to find words that convey their experience without expert level accuracy, but psychology is one of the most fucked up fields of science out there, and certain old farts just really don’t want to update how we structure and communicate around these topics. Even clinical diagnoses is imperfect, and a we become more informed, your diagnosis or label may change. I’m pretty sure most people would love access to proper and more accurate resources.
Reminder that it wasn’t long ago that being gay was a mental illness because social priors can still overtake less refined scientific truths. Now that all the peasants are connected to information and contemplating their situation, the ones who get smacked into submission rather than being informed about things like sensory issues, you’ll inevitably have groups looking at the middle class reality and trying to address the difference in salience and treatment.
This gets more complicated when you look at subcultures of diagnosed and self identified labels. everything from aspie supremecy tribalism to uta frith wanting to ignore everything other than what she already knows because the formalism is still too vague and reshaping how we communicate the differences of autistic experiences is just too hard. Hand waving away what we now understand about precision weighting and the like, as if we don’t have good new tools for shaping exactly where systems become pathological, at what scale, and how that balanced with the current socialized reality around the context.
So you get a bunch of people who fit the system fuzziness associated with autism who haven’t had any particular system reach “profound autism” levels, or don’t have the comorbid diagnosis to make the pathological experience more intense or likely. This doesn’t mean they aren’t autistic and that it doesn’t affect them, or that they aren’t more likely to end up in certain pathological states.
I’ll note that even ‘neurotypical’ people can still end up in pathological states, but they would be more likely to look different. If we’re going to allow a concession to the aspie supremacists, there may be fuzziness that helps avoid being absorbed into a social delusion, as our species is naturally prone to favoring social beliefs over our own, but that could be more difficult if you have a perspective that doesn’t align as neatly. Basically the “chatgpt psychosis” on a social affirmation level rather that one credulous individual confabulating along with their sycophantic. Kind of like agreeing that being gay is totally a sickness and not just a shape that people can take.
If all of that sounds confusing, that’s why the existing dialogues are so unhinged.
USA is setting fire to a lot of research which also isn’t helping, but maybe we could supply better resources on the real complexity of the issue rather than just telling the peasant kids that they should just be okay getting skipped over because no adult had the available energy or social resources to do anything other than use violence against them to make the autistic traits less notable, and if their entire life is a miserable struggle that ends with self termination, there was just nothing we ever could have done i guess.
But uh, boo to the kids or adults making sense of their reality with noisy and limited resources, they’re totally the center of this problem for some reason. Speaking more broadly than to just this article.
Do agree with the advice that parents should be interacting with the content and trying to make sense of it, as well as following through to citations regardless of whether you get your info from AI, some streamer, or even some social framing built around the still limited science with a lot of opportunistic confabulations built into the current structure around labeling, communicating, or interacting with affected groups.
Adults should also be socially incentivized into actually keeping up with scientific literacy, since science is always actively updating, and all of our incentive gets absorbed by the local energy draws of individualized competitiveness and defensiveness.
The topic requires a high reading comprehension and a lot of time to be properly grounded within the different spaces and contexts to grow any kind of a clear picture, so we have kids making confident diagnosis with very little information, as well as so much critique around those kids that bullying diagnosed autistics or adults with heavily grounded and cited information around their self identification that you end up with a really big muddy gray area of accuracy, legitimacy, and need. like most things, we must apparently treat it like a binary reality and refuse to interact with in any meaningful way that would contradict that absolute binary.
We can actually interact with non-absolute confidences, it’s just much harder when rich assholes are spending a lot of money to get people fighting over extreme takes rather than cooperating to actually improve anything for anyone.
You are all appreciated.
This gets more complicated when you look at subcultures of diagnosed and self identified labels. everything from aspie supremecy tribalism to uta frith wanting to ignore everything other than what she already knows
this is the first i’ve heard of aspie supremacy tribalism. do you have examples to share?
been a thing since early internet forums. anywhere groups can gather and do the in-group out-group thing, you always have to be aware of this. will also note it’s also the inverted experience of ‘the double empathy problem’ where the autistic lens can get socially shut out due to lack of social affirmation in the face of non-autistic interpretations being socialized.
here is a good breakdown by someone else
although to expand around it,
as the 5’th species of ape, we really like to do in-group out-group competition, even when you’re just socially confabulating your own excuses to look down on others and dismiss their experience to boost inner group cohesion. the best perspectives are able to make sense of the experiences in groups without completely ignoring the experiences of other groups.
similarly why progressive groups can’t successfully scale their efforts. local group tribalism tends to be toxic as hell, and a lot of money being put into divide and conquer that makes it really hard for progressives to work together.
there’s also a whole essay to be had around what intelligence is, which is why the group confabulations can often result in main-character syndrome that you see in the ‘star children.’ similarly someone less robust in their thinking can be affirmed into some confabulation or psychosis through an LLM. we are highly confabulatory, and highly social.
sooo we’re very socially vulnerable creatures. even the autistic people when they are allowed to collect in groups larger than they usually see, (yay internet!) they can find affirmation that people who do not comprehend their experience could never affirm. like in collective affirmation being able to get past the double empathy barrier. could also spiral into pathological supremacist behaviour cause monkey brain. this interaction also gives us tools like the double empathy problem, which can be applied as a function to much more broad systems interactions than just the neuro-developmental attempt at communication struggling against an overly rigid neurotypical social bubble affirming itself to save energy. in simple terms, inertia of group beliefs can accidentally overwrite important signals from smaller groups/individuals.
which i believe will also be very valuable in framing and shaping pathology on the ‘individual’ level as well. quotations because an individual is still a lot of systems interacting.
that one’s definitely a bit technical, but i recommend any of her work generally in communicating some of the complexity within social systems.
if you’ve read all of this you are appreciated. world is complicated, and holding all of the tools to not be whisked into some simplification or another is very energy expensive, and we are blind to our blindspots. and a lot of opportunists intentionally add noise and misinformation/divisive rhetoric because informed group coordination scares them for some reason.
usually frame most of the sense-making here as clearing up blindspots you didn’t know you had.
if you’ve never tested your literal blindspots, look up the test, you just need two horizontal dots on a paper and to move it until the one not-centered vanishes. i’d say escaping information bubbles is the same kind of experience of finding something you didn’t know was there, because our brains make sense of the world regardless of the things we don’t know we aren’t seeing.
easy to get silo’d into some local-eco-niche or another, and apes going to do ape brain fighting cause we refuse to recognize how bad our ape brains generally are in how we define and grow into ourselves along with those around us. the actual complexity i’m skipping over feels like an ocean, but i feel like people need a new ‘basic education’ around systems and framing specifically, just because most of our experience is defined by these complex dynamics and interactions. although i think a lot of this unsettles some people because we’re very hackable as a species.
when life grows into a shape that defines other life as something other than itself, often something to be exploited. either you get parasites that lay eggs in living creatures as part of a stable system, or cancer that refuses to recognize that the environment it is exploiting is necessary for the continued survival of the cells that became it. there’s a reason that communicating past scales and group identities is actually very important as a big large ecosystem full of different varied local ecosystems, even if it’s an online chat group.
hope this all makes sense!
