She is a university qualified computer systems engineer. could equally be applied to people who arent especially intelligent. Their intelligence tends to be more imbalanced than neurotypicals, so IQ tests (which rely on an assumption that most forms of intelligence are correlated) are less applicable. But such an explanation is premature. These things are incredibly synergistic in some people, allowing them to do exceptional things, we notice thisso we start to associate them with one anotherbut the presence of one means absolutely nothing about the presence of any others in general, and you need to scale up all or at least many of them to get any good returnsworse, some factors may not need to go any higher, otherwise theyll just be a hindrance. Agreed. Immune systems that greet pathogens with a really forceful response on a hair trigger. 2. A bit of motivation before asking a question: my boss has a daughter. 5. Or maybe not, because the researchers just act like they are cognitively distinct subtypes anyway, so it might not make much difference in practice. Autistic people have weird developmental trajectories. Why would you doubt it if you dont have the data? And in a sport like wrestling, which is heavily reliant on locks, holds, and pins, having those weak points could easily allow someone to overpower you. Further (indirect) confirmation of the autism-IQ link comes from evolutionary investigations. Fall short of that threshold and you have a pile of severely broken processes. It is where his bread is buttered professionally, but I wish he would think more deeply about it. I think an important possibility to consider is that some or all of the correlation were observing is simply due to bias in the data were using, rather than any actual relationship between high IQ and autism. If you have too many, your legs are bizarrely long twigs that you totter around on like a newborn giraffe, and youve just gone to far so you wont be a great runner. For reasons that dont entirely make sense to me, if instead we look at the likelihood of the father to be a certain intelligence (bottom graph, where dark line surrounded by gray confidence cloud is autistic peoples fathers, and dotted line is neurotypical peoples fathers) it becomes more obvious that more intelligent people are actually a little more likely to have autistic children (though less intelligent people are also more likely. And how come its so inconsistent, and many people have naturally high intelligence but arent autistic at all? As the authors put it: Because the ASD diagnosis is defined by just two symptoms from an individuals complete set of symptoms, an ASD-defined sample is widely over-inclusive, capturing many different lifelong conditions that can arise from a complex combination of multiple genetic and environmental factors (Dawson 2016, para. But you know what really has provided a massive survival advantage over the last few millenia of people clumping up together in cities? In other countries including those in developed areas like Western Europe and North America IQ has been on the rise. Probably not the most important feature of this research but its a thunderous argument against modern day IQ-obsessed cryptoeugenicists. I never liked that. Maintaining or constructing rigorous social boundaries would be the only thing that would protect a human with IQ300 from a human with IQ400 (or a seed AI). Pollution, infection, and trauma might also be in this basket. The tower model looks close to my personal model, which has absolutely no experimental testing besides how the two of us feel about itbut generally I call it the Smore model. Are you sure any of that is a real thing? The damn thing has basically come true! Anecdote is not data, which overwhelmingly show a negative correlation between IQ and fertility. Is there precedent for this tower-versus-foundation model being useful for any other health issue, or was it just made up specifically for autism? with stimulant use (arguably, it also explains a number of non-clinical nerdy traits rather nicely). Theres a range for this parameter, selection in the past has left most of the population too low, but if you push the parameter up too high things will break. Maybe even only a small fraction of potential arrangements are just right to produce ever-increasing levels of some capability in the phenotype. But if you pile on enough of the genes that increase IQ by increasing your head circumference, you will get a kid with such a huge head that his neck wont support it and his heart and lungs cant keep his giant brain in oxygenated blood, and hell die as a baby. This would explain low-functioning autism from de novo mutations or obstetric trauma (the foundation is so weak that it fails no matter how short the tower is). Someone at the 99.0 percentile for intelligence would probably seem quite mediocre by SSC standards. (remember that no intellectual disability just means IQ over 70, and so many of these not-intellectually-disabled people may still have low intelligence I wish the paper had quantified this). But African slaves survived. I mean, doesnt that just mean there are lots of hyper-parameters and you can push one set outside the optimal range without maxing out everything? I am simply saying that when you encounter lots of GS11+ people they are exactly like Comey. For example, girls were much less likely to receive an Aspergers diagnosis than boys, and girls were more likely to be diagnosed at an older agea disparity that points to bias. Some of the genetic diseases of Eastern Eurpoean Jews are correlated with intelligence, IIRC, but I dont think they have mental effects. Optimizing a complicated biological machinery thing to do whatever intelligence is most likely a very difficult thing for that machine to do. The idea is that autistic children have more and finer-grained category boundaries, causing them to over-differentiate similar phonemes that most speakers use interchangeably. children who previously had normal or even remarkable verbal abilities for their age suddenly losing words. There is also some link to male sex, I do believe that there are higher levels of males with low intelligence autism. What if autism does two things: it has a tendency to break enough normal processes to make someone rather nonfunctional, and it also has tendencies to increase perceptual ability and intelligence. Even when adults with autism live outside the family, their families especially their mothers have extensive contact and involvement in their care. Highly intelligent people are likely to have different interests, read and talk about different things, than average peopledoes that make them not normal? people that are 30% autistic have average IQ X. And that finds that only 15% have intellectual disabilities. However, history doesnt always predict the future. Sights and sounds are processed in the brain area that first receives it without sending it further to attach meaning. Dunno, but you dont need to know the exact structure of the genotype to phenotype map to check whether the assumption is empirically correct. Also also, Crespi is one of those scientists who constantly has much more interesting theories than anyone else (eg), and this makes me suspicious. (For example, a too-big head would kill mother and baby until modern times; now it just means mom gets a C-section.). Why conflate diagnosed with autism with has autism? ), in the general population, you will see a very strong correlation between the IQ score someone gets on the two different kind of IQ test, but among autistics, the correlation is much weaker. In Iceland., https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/10/1612113114.full. A reasonable guess there is that the smartest engineer on the pyramid project was not much dumber than the smartest engineer working on the Apollo projectthey came up with brilliant one-off solutions to their problems, which didnt stick around because there wasnt much use for them in day-to-day building problems. I am known as a word smith (and its an important part of my career, but Im not in journalism). He taught himself the alphabet before he was 1 year old. This always seemed nonsensical to me, because muscle is muscle; if two people are equally large, it shouldnt matter whether they were born that way or got that way through exercise. Im not especially neurologically atypical, but enough that Im not confident I might not pass down some potentially deleterious genes. Its not about purely not working out, although I would say natural strength is a part of it (almost every wrestler can increase his in-match power through lifting still), its about the muscles being coordinated and firing at the right angles and right times to actually accomplish something. When people came to our defense, it was generally with an idea I didnt like too much: that maybe there were different types of intelligence and if we sucked at [x] we must surely be good at [y]like life was an RPG character generator or something. Im not sure what you mean by normal. Score: You underestimate the potential of a good emulation, I think. My first thought when hearing that autism intelligence data is that people are much more likely to end up with the autistic label if theyre disabled. The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others. Not just running an emulation of normal to deal with other people? Yes. Engineer/scientist social mixers with barbers/hairdressers and fashion merchandisers One possible explanation is simply that autistic children born to poor parents/less intelligent parents/disadvantaged minorities are simply more likely to die in infancy/early childhood and thus never be diagnosed as being autistic to begin with. . no IQb + hgl: very low IQ, non-autistic mental disorders. https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/race-class-contribute-disparities-autism-diagnoses/. Go up a level and you can mash a bunch of sequential notes on a piano with one left out of the middle and they can tell you the highest note, lowest note, and the one you left out. It also becomes meaningless to say that no highly intelligent people are normal, since by definition, highly intelligent people will think in different ways than people with average intelligence. I am a highly educated (PhD) male parent of a son with autism (aged 17 so in high school), who is in a Special Education class, so I fit the phenotype described here. Would you mind clarifying what you mean by narcissist? I mean, if you go with The Last Psychiatrists standards we are basically all narcissists and to some extent the claim Comey is a narcissist loses meaning. There could be something similar going on with autism. 54K subscribers in the slatestarcodex community. I married an autistic woman. Like many DSM diagnoses it is a junkheap of often unrelated symptoms wrapped up in a single label for essentially politically reasons. 6. My bosses at my last job (normal modulo their ethnic origin). These three buckets and a few other less important factors combine to determine autism risk for any individual. 3. So the technically autistic community could well be more intelligent on average than the general population, with the people who are actually labeled autistic being a particularly low-functioning subset of that population. I am convinced there are a lot more genius now, but : Hood got his M.D. This is why, as a freshman at 125 lbs, I could beat seniors at 160, 171, 189, and 215 lbs on our team, despite all of them crushing me at the bench press. Kraus et al. But its frankly unclear who it is talking about. I favour the Maxander description of the genetic defect in autism, too much brain development can be bad. So by comparison, I could imagine that theres a bunch of gene variants that increase limb length, and that if you have a certain number of these you get some nice Usain Bolt proportions that help you win races. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that our data suggests that the contribution of common variants may be more prominent in high-functioning ASD cases such as Aspergers syndrome. One of our children is an Asperger (labelled as high functioning autistic in the DSM). I have a possible explanation for the observed distribution of intelligence in autistic people. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working. Greg Cochran has a paper that discusses this and other IQ/genetic disease in Jews links here. In Projections, and elsewhere, Deisseroth suggests that a major component of autism is as a bias or preference to information predictability, which anecdotally jives with what many people . EDIT: First, these two children were the only children where my wife was working while she was pregnant. They all share the same hunger for mathematics, and if you get to know those who seem normal on the surface, you find out that they have some interesting hobbies as well. If e.g. Slate Star Codex Tag Archives: iq Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know Posted on November 13, 2019 by Scott Alexander [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions] I. We dont have an understanding of how autism exists in the general populace so our data is skewed towards the worst because of where that data comes from. Maybe this is a tower collapse event. Some vaguely similar term like high functioning autism would be used. Has paternal/maternal age been eliminated as cofounding factor from parents IQ/autism correlation? But >39 repeats means risk of the disease. If you get a high intelligence person who is smart enough to create a game-changing technology for example, militarized AI or super-forecasting technology then they dont need to get along with low-intelligence people: instead, low-intelligence people need to get along with them. Someone at the 90th percentile of weight back then weighed about 185 lbs; today, he would weigh 320 lbs. Take any part away, and you lose some intellectual ability. If females have a higher average baseline social competence, it would stand to reason that even the impaired girls would remain above the diagnosis threshold in greater numbers. Keep in mind, my sample size is small. i do wish you wouldnt use the phrase autism risk. The Western world (taken to mean Europe and the Anglosphere) comprises roughly 1/6th of the global population, which means there should be about 125,000 Westerners who are both incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic. completely unfalsifiable, and 2.) Maybe one bias from my statement is Im young, and many of my smart friends are also young. These 3 have a near 100% incidence rate among civil service employees that Ive had to interact with. b. I dont think you can model the autism-IQ correlation using a simple additive genetic model. Autism-risk genes may just be plumping up the middle tiers, those who are noticeably intelligent but not staggering one-in-a-million test cases. Maybe specific areas for different such quirks of processing have some optimal Goldilocks zones for their values, which if all fit might give you some sort of the upper bounds of human intelligence-maybe there are multiple such optimal/viable configurations, however hitting all the targets simultaneously must be relatively rare, and some of the targets might be smallish, others might be essentially fixed without some de novo mutation for likely good evolutionary reasons. I was thinking of Sickle Cell Anemia, where if you get the gene from one parent you are immune to malaria, while if you get from both, your blood cant carry enough oxygen. If the foundation isnt strong enough for the tower, the system fails, you develop autism, and you get a collection of symptoms possibly including low intelligence. Youre starting with the premise intelligence is incompatible with normality and then reflexively dismissing all evidence to the contrary with theyre not really normal, theyre just pretending. Which is 1.) German Shepherds, Huskies). One just needs to consider a model where a brain is a complicated object whose organization and function depends on changes in the genetic blueprint in non-monotonic ways, and it is likely that all combinations (attainable via sexual reproduction) of genes that are beneficial alone or in some particular arrangements are not even more beneficial together; some of the potential arrangements are bound to be non-optimal or even catastrophic. Precision of it? And many types of successful arrangements/balances existbrilliant minds can look very different, and a trait or dynamic good in one person can take another person down if the overall arrangement is out of whackactually, the same trait can lead to wildly different outcomes in the same person. Some of this effect is because autism is caused both by normal genes and by de novo mutations and environmental insults, and the de novo mutations and environmental insults definitely decrease intelligence. Causation not detected through a randomized controlled trial. I think somewhere in the 90s percentile of IQ is plausibly normal by SSC standards. 2. Why on Earth people take a decomposition of intelligence quotient such as the v-p-r, while itself fairly reasonable sounding but also very broad, and take seriously attempts to shoehorn that as the biological mechanism behind a very handwavy metaphor-like explanation such as tower and foundation?It is blatantly obvious that v-p-r is a very crude model that should not make sense. I dont think there was much correlation at all with years of formal education, and the paths their lives and careers took are almost unimaginable now. Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid. They get offended more if you question them than normal lawyers do, they have the 4chan-y social awkwardness that those communities jokingly call autism, etc. Ive met a couple AMAB people identifying as genderqueer, but at least an order of magnitude more AFAB ones. There is another problem: Giftedness also increases empathy, which in the wrong environment can be a bad thing. Do I say 1.2x that of someone under 30? Or do I say, Not enough data to answer, plausibly extremely high? There are 5 hyperparameters, the optimal value for all is 9, and 10+ in any causes autism, and each hyperparameter is driven by many genes and different people have different mixes of genes. Yeah, your reaction is what I was scrolling down here to say, but you beat me to it. But for me the key point is that high-intelligence fathers show a trend (albeit not significant in this study) to be more likely than average to have children with autism and intellectual disability. If Ronemus isnt missing some obscure de novo mutations, then people who get autism solely by accumulation of common (usually IQ-promoting) variants still end up less intelligent than average. If missing, intelligence develops a lot less/later/incompletely? For one, its multiple different kinds of mental tasks whose scores are then combined to get an IQ score. We dont have all those variants identified yet, but from the fraction we do know and the rate of change, they estimate that genetic potential for IQ is dropping about 0.30 point per decade 3 points per century, about a point a generation. Maybe this is old news to most people, so I wont belabor that point any more, but what about the link between high IQ and a different immune function? If your definition of weirdness includes beliefs and interests, then almost by definition anyone whose underlying cognition is unusually effective or ineffective will be weird. Thus, I cant think of anyone whos very intelligent and not weird ceases to be meaningful. If we take the Ronemus and Gardner studies seriously, the answer seems to be yes. >The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. (*), Its not hard to measure my IQ, except that it generally falls at the top of the scale where the tests dont make effective distinctions. (And maybe theres some kind of subtype of autism > size of correlation thing happening, too. Most of these seem to be related to social ability. I would recommend having girls through IVF if that is legally allowed in your jurisdiction? Observing matters in my local school, I think that child psychiatry is best understood as a means of managing problems that arise in childrens socialization to the school environment, and clusters of diagnoses align with a big three of socialization difficulties: weird dont fit in kids are diagnosed as autistic, restless cant sit still or stop acting up kids are diagnosed as ADD, violent/fighting/tantrum kids are diagnosed with oppositional disorders. Or it means that subgroup is relatively small and thus has not been studied yet. Theres some evidence for this between 2002 and 2017, we saw a decrease in the diagnosis gap between rich and poor white people, but the gap between rich and poor Hispanics and rich and poor Blacks remained constant. But by intelligence mean the ability of a complex system (a brain) to operate effectively; so being smart is much more similar to being able to run really fast or having a good immune system.. One study found that 69% of autistic people had an IQ below 85 (the average IQ of a high school dropout). Social rituals are incredibly important though, humans are social animals. This is more or less a requirement if the system is to be robust and quickly adaptable to environmental variation. I think youd need to ask them about their internal experiences, but Id guess a lot of the people you find unusually functional arent putting a lot of effort into fitting in. We both spent a lifetime getting scolded because we were obviously too smart for the dumb stuff we kept doing (grades and the like). Heck, maybe there are two different underlying conditions here that have similar enough symptoms that we categorize them together (per Scotts observation in his The Body Keeps the Score review that we tend to categorize psychiatric disorders heavily by effect, because the cause is so murky). They come from random plants or shiny rocks or stuff Alexander Shulgin invented to get high. [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions]. I find it absolutely bizarre that the intelligence of kids who dont fit in is often ignored. The only reason social rituals are important is because other people say that theyre important, and historically it was important for high-intelligence people to be able to get along with low intelligence people or they would be outcast from the tribe and die. My personal bet would be that different sorts of mutations associated with autism could be slotted into abstract prior-mapping-affecting categories manifesting through tiny quirks of cellular chemistry, and some degree of interplay between them and those that affect general nervous tissue metabolism and anatomy might also be the case. However, I wouldnt be surprised if a statistically high proportion of people here are autistic or have autistic family members. This probably calls for some elaboration. I was a bit of an outlier in my family, and didnt really find a peer group I fitted in with until university. * Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it. Most genuinely intelligent people are also fairly charismatic. my kid who is on the spectrum is 12 and ok functioning (doing well in middle school) i cant imagine what would get us into the therapist office to do an IQ test. why is the medical establishment making confident claims regarding the connection between his condition and high-functioning autism? (3) Genes that promote autism and IQ are being selected for DESPITE other genes that promote IQ being selected AGAINST, so we would expect to see the representation of autism in (the dwindling fraction of) high-IQ families explode in the coming decades. I didnt understand why you left out the actual finding, which seems to be an important fact to note. corticalchauvinism. I am one of those people who has to run emulators to appear socially normal. Why? But quickly selected out of the gene pool doesnt help the individual person who got one of them, who tends to end up severely disabled. I have read before that age of parents increases risk of autism. There is yet more. FWIW, anecdata in the autistic communit suggests that autistic people are more likely than average to be genderqueer in some fashion, but theres no anecdata correlating this with chromosomal sex i.e. What is going on? It sounds very plausible that the effect of gene variant a and the effect gene variant b alone tweak the machinery in a way that increases its capabilities, but when applied together, they could have a catastrophic collision. Most of my coworkers (except for the youngest ones) are married, and many have children. Theres one other possible source of systematic bias in the data: living and available parents, especially fathers. Indeed, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans all have higher levels of overall learning disabilities than whites do. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere. Or if (as really happens) it turns out that smart, ambitious people usually have their kids a decade later than dumb, unambitious people and usually the smart, ambitious people only have enough time in their fertility window for one kid while the dumb ones have time for three. Most successful businessmen. The reason is that interacting with those students always feels the same, it doesnt matter how weird they seem at first. This is interesting to me, since I am on a career path to become a high end career civil servant, GS-12 at 25 years old for those that know what that means, and I am anything but normal. 9 6 5 4 3 marries 9 2 5 4 3, children high chance of 10+ on first and autistic, children that are not autistic are just barely on the bright side of normal. Its possible they just have a very good emulation that never slips even in casual situations, but at some point that basically merges with normal. Why do you think they arent sperging out about sportsball? She was born with the cord around her neck, and we had respiratory specialists on hand to assist. Some people can correctly identify the pitch of a single note played on the piano. Plus the military is always interested in easy ways to enforce security and they arent too bothered by political correctness, so any automated defense units that I might hypothetically build could also be a profitable side-business for me. The familial genes mentioned above: common genes that increase IQ and that evolution positively selects for. Now there is a very strong effect towards their fathers being less intelligent than usual. It stands to reason that f can be very intractable, and resolving that function is the difficult question where there is science to be done. The military is where the fun toys are all at! Poor people have a higher infant mortality rate than rich people do. But they offer a way of grouping types of problem kids that has caught on. The ICD-11, which was adopted this year and will be implemented globally by 2022, instead calls it autism spectrum disorder without disorder of intellectual development and with mild or no impairment of functional language. Proponents of the change hope to reduce stereotypes. Im not suggesting this accounts for the high/low intelligence as the sample size was small. how could they recruit in such a way as to get a representative sample? Etc. But there is a critical point in the system, the feedback point, after which more isnt just too much of a good thing the behavior of the system changes qualitatively and the whole thing breaks down. (I.e. Given the numerous different genetic correlates to autism, if one wants to preserve the diagnostic validity of autism by finding a single etiology, one might hypothesize that all of these genes affect a narrow set of brain circuitry in a similar way, but as discussed in the Waterhouse paper people have tried to do this and (per her lit review) failed to do so. The additive proportion for height is likely higher. These different enrichment profiles observed provide evidence for a heterogeneous and qualitatively different genetic architecture between sub-types of ASD, which should inform future studies aiming at identifying etiologies and disease mechanisms in ASD. These mutations are often very bad, and are quickly selected out of the gene pool (because the people who have them dont reproduce). Meanwhile, placing people on the spectrum equalizes access to resources, including insurance coverage. But every so often, somebody tries to do . Epistemic status: wild speculation backed up only by anecdotal evidence and theory. I think its possible that some relatively simple model will be found to explain this relationship, but I also think its possible that the mechanics of intelligence are simply complex enough that the explanation is something inaccessible with our current level of understanding. That sounds like the Flynn effect, although the Flynn effect generally isnt considered genetic. Now that Aspergers syndrome has been removed from the DSM, in favour of something understood by lay people as autism, Ive become autistic, along with a fair number of other geeks, nerds, etc. This can coexist with a loss in the number of people with the highest potential intelligenceif were building sewers and safe water supplies at the same time were convincing our smartest 5% of people to take a vow of celibacy, well get that pattern.