Podcast About 'Telepathic' Autistic Children popular

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^People who *claim* they are such things exist, but there is next to no evidence that they actually are, nearly all such people are con artists, and the the whole thing is a bunch of pseudoscience.

Claiming autistic kids have supernatural powers as if they're aliens or magical beings is just ridiculous. They're human like everyone else.

That is for you to find now. I think I’ve said enough.

Translation, you expect me to go down the same rabbit hole of disinformation and come out believing in magic instead of applying critical thinking to the weak and unsubstantiated claims made by the same disinformation peddlers who convinced you.

I don’t expect anything. Truly. You are free to believe whatever you choose. I research this topic because it interests me and it has helped me to better understand my own experiences, which are not clinically documented and would be irrelevant to you.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that this isn't a topic that's ever interested me or that I haven't researched it before.

That comment demonstrates that assumption.

When I was younger I was both interested in and largely open to considering supernatural and paranormal claims. It's still a topic I find interesting, I'm just much more skeptical of many specific claims I once was open to due to the lack of concrete research substantiating them and the much broader research debunking them.

I don't believe in telepathy or clairvoyance in the same way I don't believe in horses who can do math.

People's desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does not exist. It's not something that exists as an open question, it's something that enough research has been done to lean heavily towards an answer existing and that answer being no.

I recognize that people who are emotionally invested in these sorts of beliefs have coping mechanisms for dealing with attempts at debunking those beliefs, but trying to dismiss skepticism as ignorance is a good way to find those coping mechanisms being tested.

I've had to absorb that some of my experiences were grossly misinterpreted by my mind and that the explanation wasn't nearly as ego-satisfying as I'd like to believe, so even the personal experience argument doesn't really carry weight to me. People can experience both hallucinations and delusions. Altered state of experience will always be a more likely explanation for those sorts of claims, although I understand on a personal level how much less satisfying that answer may be and why people are prone to cringe from it.