carlos55 wrote:
Now in order to have the potential for "treatments" science needs the optimal outcome objective of cure even if cure is unlikely.
No, it doesn't. It needs the goal of maximum relief of suffering. This would radically alter autism-related research priorities to focus on our actual problems rather than on a long-range goal of fitting us all into a Procrustean bed.
If the goal were maximum relief of suffering, there would be, for example, much more emphasis on finding ways to help the most severely disabled autistic people learn to communicate in whatever way is possible for them. Many of these people experience severe distress, causing them to injure themselves, without being able to communicate what's hurting them or what they need.
carlos55 wrote:
To use an example to fly to mars which is potentially possible in the not too distant future, you need to aim for the stars even if the stars are impossible for now.
No you don't. Indeed, too much of a fixation on aiming for "the stars" might even interfere with the practicalities of getting to Mars, by skewing research priorities away from the latter.
carlos55 wrote:
My objection to ND is it tries to use identity politics to as a way of making it eventually difficult for science to create treatments for autism by making it "offensive" to the "group" for science to invent things that change the group. In the same way as a gay cure would be offensive to LGBT.
You've got the causality backwards: The "identity politics" arises
because a lot of us feel that the goal of "curing autism" is an attack on our very being, and that, moreover,
a fixation on that longterm goal has resulted in the neglect of our actual needs.Consider my own case: For most of my life I didn't even know I had something called "ASD," much less embrace an "autistic identity." All I knew was that I'm a very unusual person in a lot of ways, with lots of weird quirks, and that I needed to arrange my life so as to minimize pressures to conform. Even back then, let's suppose I been offered a choice between the following two alternatives:
1) A pill that would make me normal enough to behave in all the many ways I would need to behave, and enable me to put up with all the things I would need to put up with, in order to rise up the corporate ladder.
2) A pill that would help me with my executive functioning difficulties and nothing else, plus a ticket to a social environment, including job environment, where all manner of personal idiosyncrasies were accepted and accommodated.
Even back then, I would, unquestionably, have chosen alternative #2.
_________________
- Autistic in NYC - Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.
- Autistic peer-led groups (via text-based chat, currently) led or facilitated by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group.
15 Aug 2019, 10:20 am
