By the same rationale, you could say that no one is normal, and everyone is simply running a mental emulation. Slate Star Codex For, Then Against, High-Saturated-Fat Diets Posted on March 10, 2020 by Scott Alexander I. If we take the Ronemus and Gardner studies seriously, the answer seems to be yes. If we got 10/10, wed get a gold star, and, if 9/10, a silver star. There simply haven't been any large, decent-quality studies showing that children in ABA show significant improvements over children not in ABA. In Graph A, we see that if a child has autism (but not intellectual disability), their likelihood of having a father with any particular IQ (orange line) is almost the same as the likelihood of a neurotypical child having a father of that IQ (dotted line). The other two options I guess take effort, but Id say its effort that they enjoy putting in, because they enjoy the rewards (friendship, novel socializing, etc.). The mean could easily shift without creating a bunch of geniusesit is probably much easier to raise the IQ of average or above average people, just through some relatively basic improvements and guidance. High IQ, excellent at math, maybe a little socially awkward but not too bad (we live in a reasonably large town, so there are lots of like-minded kids he can socialize with.) Hrm. 46.8k members in the slatestarcodex community. [1] I assume most such genes do something way more complicated and hard to measure, but head circumference makes a nice example trait. I get to see what happens to those kids otherwise, they become adults who ace every math exam, but are unable to buy pants. Giftedness makes people more idiosyncratic. What are the percentages of children who fall in each group? The Gardner study seems to suggest its a very weakly elevated risk, maybe only 1.1x or 1.2x relative risk. Its because we selectively bred dogs to have these traits at a much faster rate than evolution could naturally develop them. Im very open to people arguing the contrary, but I must say, in 8 years of doing abstract mathematics, I never met an Asperger-like person where giftedness did not seem to be part of the equation. What is the point of arbitrary social rituals? If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent. 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. I am able to emulate being normal very well at work, but horrible in casual settings. This is very very crude model that does not take into account how DNA and sexual reproduction works: it is middle of the night and that stuff is not my strong suit; however, I like this description and with my limited understanding, it may even carry some resemblance to reality: I will bet a considerable sum of money that a model where one simply assumes that Q = f(g_1, g_n) = a_1 g_1 + + a_n g_n for unknown constants a_i does not describe how these parameters affect intelligence (get all g_i that are positively correlated with IQ, combine them, and you get a super-enlightened being!). His processing was below average. About impulse control, there are two strategies being selected for here, one featuring low impulse control(the classic idiocracy strategy) and another (the religious socially conservative strategy) featuring high impulse control: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X18300976. 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. Given that many drugs both medical and recreational appear to affect similarly subtle parameters broadly through relatively simple molecules, theres no reason to assume they cant be much more specifically fine-tuned through genetics. But if you want to redefine incredible to mean the top 0.1 percent of the population, then yes, Bugmasters guess would be roughly accurate: Thered be approximately 1,250 people who were both incredibly smart and incredibly charismatic in the Western world, or maybe 1,500-2,000 if you assume a minor positive correlation between being intelligence and being socially adept. The familial genes mentioned above: common genes that increase IQ and that evolution positively selects for. Intelligence seems much more similar to personality than height in terms of complexity and diversity of manifestations. 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.. Genes encode changes to these hyperparameters. Some vaguely similar term like high functioning autism would be used. Many definitions of autism center around forms of poor functioning which are correlated with low intelligence. Score: the genetic load would be due to bad luck in parent mixing (recessive-recessive pairs) and parent age. I think youre exaggerating unilateralism, Hypoborean. Book Review: The Perfect Health Diet 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. One other observation that may interest people. There is also some link to male sex, I do believe that there are higher levels of males with low intelligence autism. The genes that control the development of that definitely dont do so in a linear or easily explainable way. Probably not the most important feature of this research but its a thunderous argument against modern day IQ-obsessed cryptoeugenicists. I dont know why, but my prior is that the mothers age matters more. Too much difference from wild type synaptic pruning and youve got pathology in addition to the possible, but not certain, optimization. Sights and sounds are processed in the brain area that first receives it without sending it further to attach meaning. The physical kinematics of the human body dictate some ideal limb proportions for the 500-meter dash (say), and thats a target your genetic makeup can miss in either direction. Theres probably not anyone working in math right now who is any smarter than Gauss was. While our latest study shows that autistic people, on average, have a shift towards a masculinised profile of scores on empathy and systemising tests, they are not extreme males in terms of other typical sex differences. It wouldnt surprise me if whats perceived in higher order terms as stereotypically autistic might be a series of misses on such optimal targets, over- or under- shoots, and then you end up in a situation where a child has difficulty working out how to discard pareidolia from their mental model of the world say just because of a specific kind of synapse oversensitive in some particular way, or later they engage in repetitive behavior instead of altering their mental model to accommodate more unpredictable interactions because it appears more efficient to their brain to conserve the model because of the overstated unpredictability of the alternatives, et cetera. Thumbs up to this perspective. This gene developed in Africa, and can be seen as a fundamental reason for the transatlantic slave trade. Having charismatic superpowers isnt normal, and I suspect requires being sufficiently unconcerned with opinion sufficiently thing-oriented so as to cease to be normal. That, combined with intentional software creation can lead to more or less high functioning autists. However, I wouldnt be surprised if a statistically high proportion of people here are autistic or have autistic family members. Even if the definition is good, people who function poorly are more likely to seek out (or be coerced into) psychiatric treatment, and so are more likely to be identified. This can best be understood through a tower-versus-foundation model where higher intelligence that outstrips the ability of some mysterious foundation to support it will result in autism (25% confidence), 6. I didnt understand why you left out the actual finding, which seems to be an important fact to note. Blacks have an infant mortality rate more than twice as high as whites do. Im not an expert on biology or genetics or neuropsychology by any means, but I feel like youre onto something with the tower-and-foundation model. Ah, that would explain the discrepancy. My parents were optometrists. also, i just read through the swedish study cited in the post. How does age of parents figure in? However, once it exceeds a certain threshold, the network starts learning things that dont make any sense, and then when it tries to correct those mistakes it goes too far in the other direction again. There are so many ways to be weird and out of touch with the people around you, related to very different sets of issues and characteristics. All this is a purely hypothetical thought-experiment, of course. Im not sure what you mean by normal. If you get the volume knob too close to the feedback point, the sound will start to behave strangely it will ring weirdly in a way its never done before. AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. I actually find it rather consistent with the idea that our brain chemistry is tuned to work with a given level of hormones/neurotransmitters produced by our gut bacteria as per Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Working Because A Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grandmother Into A Zombie. There are different levels of the concept we call perfect pitch. And if you do have a more challenging child, youll have more energy to deal with it as a younger parent. I.e. But one of his trainers actually had an explanation: A lot of people who casually work out dont exercise all of their muscles equally, so even if they appear to be as strong as him, there could be some muscles that arent as developed as others. Hunter gatherers do eat certain roots and tubers, so it's not . But they can only screen for de novo mutations they know about, and it could be that they just missed some. Our ages when our son (1st child) was born were 27 (me) and 26 (my wife), and for our daughter (3rd child) we were 31 and 30. A 120 year old comes into my office and asks what her risk of death next year is. That should give us more geniuses, but not a shift in the distribution where now we get a Gauss/von Neumann/Newton/Kant/Einstein born in every town. There are almost no exceptions. That sounds like the Flynn effect, although the Flynn effect generally isnt considered genetic. FWIW, Ive only ever heard biological females apply the term genderqueer to themselves. Optimizing a complicated biological machinery thing to do whatever intelligence is most likely a very difficult thing for that machine to do. Highly intelligent people are likely to have different interests, read and talk about different things, than average peopledoes that make them not normal? Several studies have shown a genetic link between autism and intelligence; genes that contribute to autism risk also contribute to high IQ. Its much easier to please one person than an entire society, and unlike our judgmental mouth-breathers in the States, Putin at least seems like a pretty pragmatic and reasonable guy. I am not saying they have the full disorder (and no its not a partisan snipe, except to the extent that being very skeptical of the US bureaucratic class is partisan). (All three were C-section births.) I would argue the same standardization that has raised IQ generally actually de-selects for geniuses in many caseswe spend a lot of time getting people to think and act a certain way and behave efficiently etc. -.-). I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. Also, if anything, it would be self-control thats being selected against by modern reproductive behaviors, not intelligence. My vague mental model is that there are a bunch of different parameters that have to be within a certain range to get good performance from your brain. IQb + low genetic load : extremely high intelligence, slight or undetectable autistic tendencies, strongly tenchnically inclined Well, I think its certainly a reasonable possibility, which in my experience appears to be true, that beyond a certain point, intelligence either directly causes weirdness or is reliant upon it as a foundation. Has anyone here actually met a highly intelligent person who is genuinely normal? According to the most recent findings on the subject, its not many developed countries, its only Scandinavia. I honestly wouldnt be surprised if he was a rationalist himself. The top level of any domains is so hard that most people cant judge anything about it. The best civil servants get an extra allowance of weirdness points to allocate as necessary. The blog was written by Scott Alexander Siskind, [1] a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, [2] under the pen name Scott Alexander. Genes which are helpful until you have too many of them, at which point you are screwed. Other possible explanation(s): Some kind of anxiety about doing things wrong, combined with worrying about whether one is supposed to be able to do a thing yet. Question the first. Ive heard stories of autistic children sometimes regressing in development around 2 years old, e.g. I think, everywhere. Under the DSM-5, autism is characterized by persistent deficits in social communication and interaction across multiple contexts, as well as restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. It would not surprise me if a lot of non-neurotypical children were doing similar things, and that it poses genuine problems for studies like those discussed above. Low-functioning autism has all kinds of genetic linkages to all kinds of different genetic syndromes that cause brain damage, damage that often extends beyond autistic symptoms. If Im not, that suggests one of three things: n=1 description of autism and speculation on etiology. Find company research, competitor information, contact details & financial data for SYNPSH of CROIX, HAUTS DE FRANCE. That seems like a poor methodology; I think it would be better to start with an unbiased sample of the general population and test them for both autism and IQ. 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. no IQb + low genetic load : high intelligence, sociable, not so technically inclined This study of 45,000 Danes finds that genetic risk for autism correlates at about 0.2 with both IQ and educational attainment. Yes. Evidence suggest otherwise. at 25/26 and Ph.D. at 29/30, so might not be of the caliber of your acquaintance, though. So it may not just be something like too much of a good thing but the relationship between the seed parameters (genes) and the result (brain architecture/intelligence) is something thats chaotic rather than simple. > (which are around 80% to 90%; the authors are embarrassed by this, and in a later study suggest they might just have been bad at determining who in their sample did or didnt have autism. It would explain the association of genes for intelligence with autism (holding foundation strength constant, the taller the tower, the more likely a failure). Are there other mental disorders that track with intelligence? There was definitely a sperg-normie dynamic on my last work team, all highly intelligent. However, history doesnt always predict the future. The Waterhouse study I linked above (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x.pdf) argues that even before the autism-aspergers lumping made things worse, ASD samples within single studies (let alone meta-analyses) were not useful for scientific inference because the autism diagnosis lumps together so many wildly disparate developmental and social issues. How much effort do people, particularly young people, put into being normal that is, into fitting in? The dangling paren is disquieting enough to have prompted me to make an account: most of the other statistics mentioned here). * Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it. Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). with stimulant use (arguably, it also explains a number of non-clinical nerdy traits rather nicely). My wife also has a university degree, her father was an engineer and his 3 siblings had careers in operations research, research scientist, school principal. 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. My oldest child, a boy, is very high functioning. * Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration no IQb + mgl: normal I spent a lot of time reading about giftedness (having a IQ > 130) in the last few months, specifically educating gifted kids and teenagers, and I found out quite some things about how giftedness can interact with social ability: It turns out that giftedness can be quite a burden for children and teenagers, as not many of their peers can relate to them and vice versa. E.g. Bottle. The genes that increase risk of autism are disproportionately also genes that increase intelligence, and vice versa (~100% confidence), 2. Its similar with hearing. Because a masculinizing influence on the brain would militate against the development of brain structures telling the autistic person you are actually a girl.. You might want to adjust for inflation. People diagnosed with autism are less intelligent than average (~100% confidence, leaving aside definitional complications), 3. This seems a possible explanation, if high-IQ parents have children significantly later, I like the tower explanation, but not so much the different types of intelligences: maybe autism is a combination of rare IQ-boosting alleles inherited from parents, together with high general genetic load (which, among other detrimental effects, decrease IQ, negating the IQ-boosting alleles). Figuring out the causes of neurotypicality in intelligent people would go a long way, but its hard even to measure how neurotypical a given smart person is. I think (as an interested amateur, not an expert) that the most plausible answer is that human intelligence depends on getting lots of stuff right. I am convinced there are a lot more genius now, but : 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. Brilliant, productive people dont spend time either wishing to be normal, wishing to be different, or obsessing how they are different from normal. Theyre simply too busy getting things done for a triviality that reduces to dumb averages to matter to them. in particle physics at age 15, millionaire at age 30 type of stuff. Let me write toy model, where intelligence Q is a function f of all heritable biological parameters that could possibly affect brain function (let us say, all possible variants of human genes in a DNA sequence of certain base pair length), denoted by g_1, , g_n. I recall it because the lowest functioning children all had loser fathers. That seems too low, based on my interactions with her: shes not so much slow as odd, so it may very well be that the test isnt a good measure. Note that billionaires in America are still vulnerable to (using a topical example) wealth taxes, and abroad billionaires in Russia / China must play the cuddle up to Putin / Xi or die / get put in a camp game. This makes it difficult to analyse high functioning autistics separate from those who would have previously been distinguished as having Aspergers. how could they recruit in such a way as to get a representative sample? IQb + high genetic load: autism with lowish IQ, always diagnosed as autist These mutations are often very bad, and are quickly selected out of the gene pool (because the people who have them dont reproduce). If so, then the top-level geniuses may well have something else going on upstairs to enhance their intelligence, some other difference from the norms, that isnt part of the complex of IQ/autism risk genes. In the 1800s, the average US man weighed about 155 lbs. Knowing how much of the genetic variance in intelligence (say IQ for an easy measure) is additive is probably good enough to figure out how off the purely linear assumption is. Dammit, I was nodding along until you threw in sports-watching. What do SSC readers think? This is a common situation, but not with many genes of small effect. Epistemic status: wild speculation backed up only by anecdotal evidence and theory. I am one of those people who has to run emulators to appear socially normal. [Thanks to Marco DG for proofreading and offering suggestions]. 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. More generally, to relate to those people around you who are also bright. Against autism as "extreme male brain"? : slatestarcodex I was a bit of an outlier in my family, and didnt really find a peer group I fitted in with until university. Quite a few trans women seem to be extremely masculine in their interests. A lot of dog breeds, particularly those that are very small (like Teacup Yorkies), very large (like Great Danes), or otherwise very different from the default canine somatoform (like Pugs), tend to suffer from health problems at a vastly higher rate than mutts or more natural breeds (e.g. After further consideration, Im unaware of any phenomenon which would correspond to a low-function, low-intelligence version. 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. 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. She was born with the cord around her neck, and we had respiratory specialists on hand to assist. It's kind of sick. This is true in a sense, but also alters what we mean by normal. I still sometimes feel bad about whether that ended up slightly ruining some sort of investigation into which methods of teaching spelling were better or something like that. I dont think cystic fibrosis works that way. Agreed. We cant do much about the genetic or random developmental stuff, but we can make sure most of the things that have stunted peoples intelligence over time go away. MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. The optimal value is at 10.0 (for example). I find it absolutely bizarre that the intelligence of kids who dont fit in is often ignored. According to the different mechanism theory, they should have more, but by the collapsing tower theory, they should have fewer. On that and other evidence, its pretty clear the above article isnt talking about autistics like me. i.e. The genes and developmental stuff is one part, an enriching environment in childhood is another, and the physical requirements (adequate nutrition and good health and few toxins present during critical parts of brain development in childhood, continued good health in adulthood). 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. Perhaps whats happening is that the genetic factors passed along are responsible for generally supporting IQ, but high IQ parents are having children later in life for some reason (more years of schooling than average, early stage demanding careers, saving a nest egg before starting a family). Why on Earth one would assume that the effect of genes that contribute to IQ should be linearly additive and increasing to ad infinitum. Hood got his M.D. Because they survived due to wearing helmets, and we were only measuring *surviving* soldiers, helmets appeared to increase the number of head injuries, rather than decrease their severity. Drink your Brawndo! Say you are a bright nerdy tech-aligned person who is attracted to other bright nerdy tech-aligned people; you have a medium preference for eventually having kids but you really dont want an autistic child. He (I presume) seems to be a bad conversationalist, likely through lack of practice. She has absolute pitch, [] an amazingly high proportion of her autistic students have it to some degree. (Note that if autism is really one thing [not a complex syndrome], with high and normal functioning individuals, and high vs normal correlates with IQ, then if you only measure the normal autistics, youd get results like the above, due to sampling bias. She has an article on her website here: https://hennyk.com/autism-and-perfect-pitch/ and a book: https://hennyk.com/book-perfect-pitch-in-the-key-of-autism/. In this study, however, we see strong heterogeneity of genetic overlap with other traits when our ASD samples are broken into distinct subsets. If thats the case, if the Flynn effect ever slows down or goes into reverse wed be in quite a bit of trouble, and Scandanavia could be the canary in the coalmine for that process. And since mental traits like intelligence, social aptitude, and self-control are the ones most likely to be selected for in society, it makes sense that our imbalances would primarily be mental. As an AI researcher, this actually seems pretty intuitive for me. I have always considered him more naturally gifted than me. The result is a total mess. 10 hours ago View Detailed Check-in. Also, if we do get to a bold new future of hyper-intelligent unilaterism, would the hyper-intelligent even want to sign up for it? Two of our three kids had extremely large heads as babies. required to answer an examiners quetsions[sic]. How much do we know about how intelligence develops and what might impact it? No need for (extremely valid) concerns about whether IQ tests accurately measure (normal/low) functioning autistics, e.g. 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. If youre trying to compare the IQs of parents and children, you need to have both the parents and children, and be sure that the parents are in fact the parents of the children in question. Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. Our 2nd, 4th, and 5th children are not autistic, so parent age doesnt seem to have played a role in our case (though we were both relatively young even for our fifth, at 36 and 35.). surveyed ~4000 MENSA members and found that in addition to being at a signficant increase in risk not just in ASDs and mood disorders but also in food allergies, asthma and 2x RR of autoimmune conditions compared to the general population. Get the latest business insights from Dun & Bradstreet. My wife is dyslexic; Im not. Rare de novo mutations, ie the autistic child gets a new mutation that their non-autistic parent doesnt have. With that said, Im not an expert and there is a vast literature rummaging around for genetic correlates to autism, so Im mostly going by the linked paper above. For, Then Against, High-Saturated-Fat Diets Normality is just too vague to be quantifiable. 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. Regarding Narcissim, the first website I pulled up had these as the first 3 symptoms: * Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance