fight for truth: fight simon baron-cohen

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Oh good grief. I was posting with my iPod and the autocorrection completely sucks. I never typed "racially" but I can't remember what I did type.

I think "racially" is in place of something like "leaning towards", but I don't know what I actually typed. The problem is the iPod corrects words in really weird ways that can't always even be deciphered.

Maybe you meant "radically"? It could possibly fit there...

A friend of mine had "rejected" autocorrected to 'dent" the other day.

My sister had "Katie" autocorrected to "Mike."

Really?! How would you like to be judged by what your cousin is doing?

Sorry, but it sounds very illogical.

Except that the research shows that this is NOT the case, and you are probably aware that human generations are 20 or 30 years apart, leaving little room for genetic mutations over this time period. Let me guess: you are a male. In my experience, your reaction is typical of some young men who I used to meet when I taught statistics at university, many years ago. If you wish to discuss logic with me, you are most welcome to try, but you have been warned ...

Let me guess. You think yourself to be without bias.

Incorrect. Everyone has biases.

And yet you are willing to believe that my gender is relevant to the discussion.

You made it so by reacting in what is most easily described as a typical NT sexist male fashion.

The problem I see is that the AQ, EQ and SQ scales have several different purposes. These scales are used for the diagnosis of people as well as being used for research. SBC has claimed that a strong coorelation exists between autism and the AQ and SQ scales and that an inverse coorelation exists between autism and the EQ scale.

The great problem in science is that it is possible to take at least two routes through science. I am not sure what scientific method that SBC is using, he has formed a extensive set of hypotheses but I am not sure how well he has then tested them. I am a follower of some of the ideas of Karl Popper which makes me a falsificationist, I am not sure if SBC is an inductionist or a falsificationist.

I am sure that he has observed a difference between different populations in terms of his three scales, but how well has he tested the hypothesis ?



Oh this is the idea of pathological science, where a person is tricked into false results by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. One of the problems I see in science is that it is possible (either by mistake or in bad faith) to choose experiments which favour one outcome. These experiments are poor experiments which are not a fair test of a hypothesis. I have not seen any evidence of SBC trying to design his experiments in such a way that he increases the likelyhood of a given outcome. If you want to read about how this type of rigging can be done then I would suggest you read the book "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre.



Good point, I know in the past that ASDs seemed to be a "male" thing, as oftein men and boys with AS/HFA are identified while women and girls are not. The problem I see is that while the SQ test would be better in some ways if he added more questions to test things which are "female" interests (and some more "male" interests) the number of questions required for the test would increase greatly which would make fewer people willing to take the test. I think that a tradeoff needs to be made between the ideal test with infinite questions and the test which typical people will be willing to take. Also if the test is altered then will it be possible to continue to compare the existing data from the older version of test with the data from the newer version ?

Had you a lick of sense, you would realize that, in typical aspie fashion, I was fixating on the logical structure of the specific sentences in question. Structurally, what you said was illogical, even if your larger argument is valid and one that I tend to actually agree with.

So who is showing bias? You assumed a great deal about me when the OBVIOUS interpretation in a forum FILLED with people on the spectrum is that I was being very literal. Oh. Wait. People on the spectrum are never literal. What was I thinking?

I don't want to build a wall of text so I'll just pick out two things of interest. There's a thread with the eye photo test so I took it. I missed several and have many of the same problems with it that you point out. It is incredibly unnatural in all the ways you say. Real life is not in black and white (even if you are color blind), people move, and only in certain very limited situations can you only see somebody's eyes. Also these are actors and models so it's also a test of how well they have simulated a particular emotion.

One of them I think he even screwed up. Myself and another poster recognized one of the eye photos as belonging to Claudia Schiffer in a modeling shot from the late 80's/early 90's that was ubiquitous at that time. He had labeled the emotion "disgust" or something else that didn't match what we both knew was going on in the full shot...Claudia Schiffer stepping out of a plane and looking around at where she had landed. She had the look that models usually have of mild and remote interest. Models aren't supposed to be displaying identifiable emotions the way actors are. They are supposed to have an expression that can be interpreted in a variety of ways so that the buying public can project their own fantasies onto the model and thus be inspired to buy the clothes. But he had labeled it as "disgust" or something else equally silly.

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Since I don't have autism myself and had barely even heard of it before my autistic daughter was born, I had the same assumption that Baron-Cohen has. This assumption is that there is only one body language and all humans use it. No diversity the way there is with verbal language. Just one monolithic language with some body language idioms that vary from culture to culture, like regional accents that don't impede understanding once you hear them a few times. When you are working within that assumption, it will seem like the autistic people who are actually using a wholly different body language are simply devoid of body language and also unable to read it

. What I have since learned is that there are actually two body languages (or maybe more, I wouldn't know) and that what we have here is not a lack of empathy but a plain old-fashioned language barrier. It's as though an English speaker and a Chinese speaker encountered each other but when the English speaker couldn't understand the Chinese speaker or make himself understood, he assumed that the Chinese speaker wasn't speaking at all but rather just making choking noises because he couldn't talk. Language barriers are pretty easy to overcome because we know that they are there. Having no awareness that there is a language barrier because you don't know there are multiple languages leads to the mistake that Baron-Cohen (and non-autistic people generally, including myself) have made.

The biggest problems with his research is that all his measures are strongly correlated, and that they are strongly correlated with whatever core ASC traits he want to test. For instance, the AQ test is correlated 0.83 with Aspie-quiz, and the EQ test is correlated -0.72 with Aspie-quiz. Despite the fact that Aspie-quiz contains no stereotypes about lack of empathy in ASCs, neither many social problems (the problem side of ASCs have been selected out) nor many systemizing skills.

Anybody could take a set of core ASC-traits of their liking, put them in a survey with related traits of their liking, and prove it as a possible cause. However, it quite likely is not a cause, but rather just some traits related to ASCs one way or the other.

I think the main problem in the SBC theories is the AQ - many studies in non-clinical populations don't show great internal significancy within AQ - the alpha cronebach (sp.?) are low (apperently, the several traits measured by AQ are largely unrelated with wich other).

I hava also some doubts about the folk physics vs. folk psychology explanation of special interests (by personal reason - my special interst in childhood was animals and nature - folk physics - but since adolescence is politics - that can be considered folk psychology)

Yes, because ASCs comprise of a whole set of traits that have low correlation to each others. Also, the AQ test also contains some items of his own construction, that are not correlated to overall test scores, and in fact are not related to ASCs at all. These include imagination and related issues that once was hypothesised to be part of ASCs because of ASC theories.



Yes, special interests are not related to specific topics. They are just a tendency to hyperfocus on a narrow issues.

I do think SBC has done a great deal of damage with the "Extreme male brain" theory in the fact that it has harmed identifying diagnostic criteria in girls and created the "professional" myth that it does not happen in women. This has had a big negative impact in diagnosing women on the spectrum earlier in life when the most help can be done, as well as in the adolescent years when it is most likely to be apparent. It has also skewed the population diagnosed significantly. The very fact is the terminology he put forth is extremely damaging to women on the spectrum, as there is a significant underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis because of his theory and terminology. The theory was sexist and did diagnostically set things back for women, and they are only recently starting to address this.