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. This study from UK Biobank finds a genetic correlation between genetic risk for autism and educational attainment (r = 0.34), and between autism and verbal-numerical reasoning (r = 0.19). An analogy: Imagine you have a sound system with a microphone, speakers, and a mixing board. During a conversation on something or other he told my friend that he knew what my friend was going to say, then ended up saying thats not what Id thought youd say afterward. The two may or may not be correlated (Im honestly not sure), but theyre not the same thing. Physically, people with autism might have certain brain structures or modes of neural connection that are associated with high intelligence, but without the surrounding neurological infrastructure necessary to support those structures/functions like the poor Great Dane whose heart is too small and bones are too weak for his frame. 46.8k members in the slatestarcodex community. Someone at the 99.0 percentile for intelligence would probably seem quite mediocre by SSC standards. Yes, I was thinking something very similar: Broadly speaking, its pretty clear that intelligence differeces come from differences in brain structure or organization, macroscopic and/or microscopic. That sounds like the Flynn effect, although the Flynn effect generally isnt considered genetic. And so those are genes that show up as giving you a bump in your IQ in populations genetic studies. My crank theory is that autism, when looked at through the environmental toxins are causing Very Serious Problems lens, starts looking suspiciously like an environmentally induced phenotype, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_assimilation. My son was measured using the full Weschler and most of his scores were 96-99th percentile (thats VERY high). But dont take my word for it, check out the excellent 2016 lit review by Waterhouse et al which concludes: No unitary ASD brain impairment or replicated unitary model of ASD brain impairment exists. I knew a wrestler back in college, really huge and muscular dude. A bit of motivation before asking a question: my boss has a daughter. Overall scores could continue to rise due to the Flynn effect even as intelligence is being selected against on a genetic level, which is what the evidence is suggesting. What is going on? 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. Umm, what? Autism, rationality and intelligence. MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. So I doubt that trans feelings require an opposite-sex brain. 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 draws on the VPR model of intelligence, where g (general intelligence) is divided into three subtraits, v (verbal intelligence), p (perceptual intelligence), and r (mental rotation ability) despite the very specific names each of these represents ability at broad categories of cognitive tasks. 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. More, you have probably already settled into an existence that minimizes their importance to you by the time you have enough information to piece together the importance of predictability. 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. Im not suggesting this accounts for the high/low intelligence as the sample size was small. If I personally were one of these hypothetical genius scientists in possession of technology that could reshape the world, I think that the most optimal strategy for me would be to offer this technology to the U.S. in exchange for a large sum of money say, $50 million. It would explain the association of genes for intelligence with autism (holding foundation strength constant, the taller the tower, the more likely a failure). Dammit, I was nodding along until you threw in sports-watching. no IQb + hgl: very low IQ, non-autistic mental disorders. 54K subscribers in the slatestarcodex community. Shes capable of living without a caretaker, but other than that, the impact on her quality of life seems pretty serious. Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. While their exact numbers are doubtful, I think the overall finding that common familial genes are much more important than rare de novo mutations survives and is important. Slate Star Codex was a blog by Scott Alexander about human cognition, politics, and medicine. This is consistent with the existence of people in the past who seem to be about as bright as humans get. Naive, narcissistic, completely detached from human interaction. These are just three randomly-selected studies; there are too many to be worth listing. So you end up with a system where every gene that increases hyperparameter A makes the individual smarter, except that the individual becomes mentally ill if the hyperparameter exceeds a certain threshold. A couple of property developers Ive worked with. The normies were not spergs running emulations, theyd have the same confused look whenever we sperged-out about something that we had when they talked about sportsball. I view it as absolutely crucial that bright kids get to socialize with kids like them, and also that someone teaches them how to be a functional person. Gender dysphoria. In the graph of relatives, are autists typically on the border or inside of high-IQ regions? Kylounet is drinking a CAMBIER Double Galaxy by Brasserie Cambier at Terroir Alternatif. One of our children is an Asperger (labelled as high functioning autistic in the DSM). They are being positively selected, ie increasing with every generation, presumably because people with the genes are having more children than people without them. Instead of autism causing low IQ, low IQ (in a mental architecture that typically causes high IQ) would cause autism, and then of course when you look at the relatives of a downwards outlier you will find higher IQ. Strongly agree. 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. I think, everywhere. But studies show autistic people generally have lower intelligence than neurotypical controls, often much lower. How exactly are you defining normal? Its not because simply being small or being large or having a flat face are inherently unhealthy traits; there are other species that are much smaller than Yorkies, much larger than Great Danes, and have flatter faces than Pugs, without suffering any problems as a result. In particular, this aligns well with the observation that de novo variants are more frequently observed in ASD cases with intellectual disability compared to cases without comorbid intellectual disability, that IQ correlates positively with family history of psychiatric disorders92 and that severe intellectual disability (encompassing many syndromes that confer high risk to ASD) show far less heritability than is observed for mild intellectual disability93, intelligence in general94 and ASDs. 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. These 3 have a near 100% incidence rate among civil service employees that Ive had to interact with. I was getting my disorders mixed up, yes, but this is the one I was thinking of. So for example, bench is largely worthless if youre not pushing people away from you. (Although, arent gene-behavior connections in general pretty suspect, as per your previous post?) A PhD in particle physics at 15 is incredibly impressive, but a programmer starting out of college at an FAANG who saves a bit will be a millionaire by 30. Interestingly, other/unspecified PDD and atypical autism also have a significantly higher PRS for neuroticism than childhood autism and Aspergers. 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. Even when adults with autism live outside the family, their families especially their mothers have extensive contact and involvement in their care. Below are two lists taken from an autism checklist and a reactive attachment disorder list. 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. 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. I would expect that to be the case based simply on the premises. Being a carrier for cystic fibrosis may be protective against cholera. 5. The optimal value is at 10.0 (for example). I would say half of the up and coming civil leaders have hints of being abnormal. This might sound mean, and Im very sorry if this offends anyone, but just seeing what my family has gone through, I would definitely find having a severely disabled child worse than not having one and would likely be unhappy with a child any more than slightly aspie. I am not, but we both initially bonded over (I dont know a way to put this delicately or more exactly) being objectively very smart people that dont perform intelligence very well, albeit different ways. Having charismatic superpowers isnt normal, and I suspect requires being sufficiently unconcerned with opinion sufficiently thing-oriented so as to cease to be normal. Theres a new paper out on how the frequency of variants that affect educational achievement (which also affect IQ) have been changing over time in Iceland. Do a lot of super smart people play the game? Thats sounds like a significant amount of epistasis in IQ, so I agree its not that weird that a few people end up very different than youd expect from a purely additive genetics + additive environment model. Couldnt this all be the result of several essentailly different things being lumped together under the label autism spectrum? 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. Autism measures may miss more women with autism.. AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. At least part of the story is that there are at least three different causes of autism. 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. Regarding Narcissim, the first website I pulled up had these as the first 3 symptoms: * Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance At the individual level things are generally way more complex than these symptom-based diagnoses and the key is to ask *why* the kid isnt mixing well socially, gets into fights / lashes out, or cant sit still rather than reify it as a brain dysfunction. for which certain genetic inputs might be extremely valuable but there are numerous different ways to arrive at the end point of being good at the game, and numerous different ways that even people genetically gifted in some important capacity can end up being bad at playing the overall game. But then the answer to your question becomes so obvious that its hardly worth asking in the first place; there are countless people who are highly intelligent without suffering from any kind of psychological condition or personality disorder or mental/emotional instability. Given the problems measuring IQ in autistic people (spiky profiles, huge differences between ravens vs. weschler) its also possible that intellectual disabilities are overreported at 15%. But her personal life is a mess. Shes unable to work in a normal public school classroom, but luckily we have a charter school that specializes in children with autism that has worked well for her. Everyone else, enslaved or not, kept dying off working the fields. Why conflate diagnosed with autism with has autism? None are autistic, but both boys were a little socially awkwardbasically a couple years behind their classmates in this area. . (That said, it becomes an incredibly strong correlation if youre taking mentally disabled people into account, as people with IQs below 70 tend to have extremely poor social skills.).