There seems to be a prevalent pop psych view that a bunch of these conditions (Autism, ADHD, Anxiety-Depression, OCD) are sort of clustered together and people who manifest one will often manifest symptoms of others. It gets muddier because a lot of these conditions are understood as spectrums and different people who identify with them may manifest them in vastly different ways. I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
These are just labels we apply to buckets of symptoms. The underlying problems and biological differences that can cause these buckets of symptoms probably will be found, and then we can re-categorize things quite a bit. My bet is we do this within the next couple decades.
What causes difficulty is that actual symptoms of one of these buckets can cause behaviors and coping strategies that look like other ones.
Another issue is that these symptoms are not specific. What one neurodivergent person means by "I have sensory issues" is vastly different from another neurodivergent person, and your psych health provider will dig into those specifics and try and tease out which label fits the best, or whether it's even an example of that symptom. How those symptoms affect you is the entire point.
>I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
And you have that same feeling towards "blind" or "deaf" right? Since a lot of blind people struggle to lead "normal" lives but there are accomplished blind software devs right here on HN
Consider how many people live life with some sort of mild delusion and yet are perfectly functional 99% of the time. The brain is complicated and cannot ever be reduced to single dimensions like that, and it is weirdly good at still functioning when part of it is broken in some way, like with Broca's area or Phineas Gage.
Yes, "syndrome" and "disorder" are vague labels that don't have hard cutoffs or any test you can objectively run. That's the point of those words. When you have a hard test you can run, it becomes a "disease".
I also wonder if we kinda screwed ourselves by expanding pre-existing labels for disorders that appeared similar, instead of using a mixin pattern of describing the spectrum. So you could have a Photosensitivity and Social Inertness "Disorder" instead of people constantly debating whether your combination of symptoms is "bad enough" to be called Autism.
With Autism, as noted elsewhere in this thread, a general social understanding of it is required to help normalize environments that don't exclude autistic people. Having specific labels could, on the one hand, help bring focus towards the specific needs of those people. On the other hand, it's harder to convince people of a 100 different neurodiverse profiles than one...
Honestly it's difficult to expect people to communicate all the things in the bucket that might apply to them. Naming the bucket is easier for a lot of purposes.
I get that. On the other hand, by making the buckets smaller, you're forced to specify the corresponding phenomena a lot more. Which might actually help people understand what applies and what doesn't, better. Understanding something is pretty much a prerequisite to communicating it.
EDIT: I misread your comment earlier, ignore the above paragraph. I definitely get how exhausting it might be to list off everything. I suppose I feel the Autism label is too big at the moment to communicate effectively though. See the following, I think it still applies.
It also helps people on the other end. If someone says they have "Misophonia, Aural sensitivity, and Rejection Sensitivity" I would understand a lot more about their situation than if they simply said they're mildly Autistic.
> The moment our hearts shattered? It belongs to us.
I'm ambivalent about a lot of other cited examples (could be AI, could just be bad ghostwriting) but this particular sentence does have very distinct AI smell.
My issue with that as a reader is that when I purchase a book authored by Suzanne Collins I expect it to have been actually written by Suzanne Collins, not by somebody she contracted to imitate her style.
We are so far past that in mass market fiction. It's folding back in on itself.
Tom Clancy has new books coming out every year and he's been dead for over a decade. They don't hide the "ghostwriter" but they also put Tom Clancy in huge letters at the top even though he had less than nothing to do with it.
It's interesting though isn't it, because if she contracts someone good, the ghostwriter does an excellent job of imitating her style, then really you do get exactly what you wanted? I don't like the idea of it either, fwiw, but it's hard to rationalise.
(But then why stop there, have the estate of the esteemed author go on contracting ghostwriters! Does it only work if you keep the death a secret, or would a licensed P.G. Wodehouse ghostwriter do as well today as if he were a recluse and never proclaimed dead?)
> It's interesting though isn't it, because if she contracts someone good, the ghostwriter does an excellent job of imitating her style, then really you do get exactly what you wanted? I don't like the idea of it either, fwiw, but it's hard to rationalise.
There is nothing hard about rationalizing this. If this was what "I wanted" they would just put the ghostwriters name on cover with "written in style of X" in bold letters.
But, it is not what people wanted and they would buy the book less.
> It's interesting though isn't it, because if she contracts someone good, the ghostwriter does an excellent job of imitating her style, then really you do get exactly what you wanted? I don't like the idea of it either, fwiw, but it's hard to rationalise.
But the ghostwriters are never as good as the original. Imitating style is not the same as imitating excellence. If the ghostwriter were as talented as the original author, they would be publishing their own novels under their own name, not doing anonymous gruntwork for others.
Reminds me, there was a Stephen King interview from a ~decade ago where he observed that when he passes away his son (Joe Hill) could probably keep publishing under his name for at least a few years since he's perfected imitating King's general style.
I think the distinction, for me, is that when I pay for a book I want access to the author's creative thoughts and personality, not just their particular "brand". I realize that a lot of readers don't care, especially in the YA space, but I'd rather read a worse novel from the person who conceived The Hunger Games than a perfect imitation from someone who's merely imitating the brand.
Most people use Echos as voice controlled music players with occasional smart assistant functionality, this shouldn't be too hard to replicate in OSS. You could argue that the extend to which they're not making you buy into the Amazon ecosystem is a major failure of the product line.
> how long it'll take to Neuralink to turn their army of computer connected paraplegics into some Mechanical Turk-esque Grok clean up
It's really hard for me to imagine that making more logistic sense than the current state of affairs - which is hiring armies of poor able-bodied people in developing countries.
The point is the scale of poor people vastly outweighs the scale of Neuralink users.
It's not worth both the setup cost, nor the backlash to convert the relatively small number of Neuralink users into forced labour. Especially since they would still need the poor workforce as well.
Agreeing to data collection and sharing of your brain activity while concerning for it's own reasons, is not the same as forcing them to complete Mechanical Turk like tasks.
At this stage in the war keeping your social spaces free of malicious users seems like a much higher priority than providing the other side's civilians with accurate information. Russians can access all the info in the world with a simple VPN setup, that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia.
This likely keeps normal people from seeing this way better than it keeps away any hackers or bots, as Russian citizens are mostly using DPI circumvention tools. And this was a thing since the first days of the war, it's not something new.
>that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia
Giving up is the easiest thing to do. Last time some people did, it was blamed on stereotypes like their "learned helplessness" and "fatalism".
The reality is, civilians cannot change a country's domestic foreign policy - especially in a country like Russia.
Revolutions don't work without alignment from power centers like the police, military, judiciary, and a subset of legislators.
Hosni Mubarak wasn't overthrown because of protesters in Tahrir Square - he was overthrown because General Sisi decided to ignore shoot-on-sight orders.
There's no reason for Ukraine media to create a literal attack surface when most Russians already have a decent idea of what is happening in Ukraine (and vice versa) - most Russians and Ukrainians have blood relatives on both sides of the border.
Claiming the exposure doesn't work is probably the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. The reality is that awareness is a major factor, that was literally the main way of the power takeover in Russia (see e.g. Suponev, Ernst, Gusinsky, and Listyev). Russian government is really careful about doing things slowly and getting away with everything people let them get away with, and stopping dehumanization and letting people hearing voices is really important. Even if people right now disagree or think of it as propaganda (which it usually is, I hope nobody has any illusions about that), just existence of something in the background is enough to set up something else in the future. The time for the change will inevitably come like it always does, and the question then will become "what Ukrainian media did all this time, and where the hell they were". Turns out they may have not existed at all as well - out of sight, out of mind.
My point is there's nothing "cultural" about it, those suggesting it either have zero idea about it or have never lived through or at least analyzed 80s-90s-2000s in Russia. It's purely the artifact of manufactured consent, and media takeover that was creeping in since Listyev's times and went full speed in 2001 is a primary factor in it. Willingly going into an invisible mode for Russians while having a huge leverage (language+presence), leaving them in their bubble, is a colossal blunder.
Consciously or not, you're spreading Putin's propaganda and justify/validate his actions. "It's world vs Russia, always been and always will be, since Adam and Eve. Nothing can be done. Everybody supports the government, it's cultural. We've always been at war with Eastasia. Spread out, nothing to see here, people are powerless anyway." People like you might have a lot in common with many Russians without realizing it.
Tbf a lot of the thought experiments around human consciousness hit the same exact conundrum - if your body and mind were spontaneously destroyed and then recreated with perfect precision (a'la Star Trek transporters) would you still be you? Unless you permit for the existence of a soul it's really hard to argue that our consciousness exists in anything but the current instant.
I don't know how a materialist could answer anything other than no - you are obliterated. And if, despite sharing every single one of your characteristics, that individual on the other side of the teleporter is not 'you' (since you died), then some aspect of what 'you' are must be the discrete episode of consciousness that you were experiencing up until that point.
Which also leads me to think that there's no real reason to believe that this discrete episode of consciousness would have been continuous since birth. For all we know, we may die little deaths every time we go to sleep, hit our heads or go under anesthesia.
> I don't know how a materialist could answer anything other than no
Well, I'm a materialist and I say yes. Materialism doesn't preclude the existence of information which can be represented by matter. Recreating matter in the same arrangement/configuration as before reproduces the information.
If I copy down an equation, is it now a different equation? Of course not. It consists of different material for sure, but it's the same equation.
Does't this just devolve into the boltzmann brain argument? It's more likely that all of us are just the random fluctuation of a universe having reached heat death.
The same goes for us living in a simulation. If there is only one universe and that universe is capable of simulating our universe, it follows we have a much higher probability of being within the simulation.
> even people that some people decry as bad and terrible people (for example Elon Musk) still can make amazing leaders
None of the leaders in this conversation are good people. Elon's controversies are way past the point of "some people decry" (why even use a phrasing this convoluted unless you just want to signal that you don't agree with it?) and firmly in "lots of great people wouldn't touch it with a pole". Part of leadership is creating a safe work environment and shielding your companies/brands from unnecessary drama, and Elon has done an absolutely abysmal job at it lately.
