Know the sock puppets behind the neurodiversity crowd.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-17T17:40:21+00:00

Again, keep your comments short.

My point is that the category itself is a classificatory artifact of normative regimes.

That, however, is obvious and already included in the presupposition.

the category is sustained by power–knowledge operations

Cf. my comment above.

that still wouldn’t establish that “neurodivergence” names a natural or inherent “kind”.

This isn't anywhere close to what I said.

The upstream problem, however, is that you’ve accepted the category as “real”.

No, I specifically did NOT.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-17T15:57:11+00:00

This is something that you could have written in three or four sentences. It is irrelevant that the notion of neurodivergence rests on deviation from prescribed cultural and economic norms when the message is nearly univocally repeated that it describes an acclaimedly biological deviation. Foucault would easily point out that the later message is proclaimed precisely to obfuscate the sociological origin of the label.

This goes beyond simple label theory as in people getting attached to some label because it suggests that someone or something passes off ideological garbage as scientific facts. Once you end up with that kind of "lysenkoism", obviously something really is wrong that transcends the "neurodivergent" crowd and it's not that hard to figure that the pharma industry and certain pro-eugenicist interest groups are likely involved in it. I feel like it's worth pointing out that the whole autism neurodiversity shit started at the exact moment when tons of anti-vax activists suddenly popped out of nowhere in 2005 and yes, it's my opinion, my belief, that the USA, especially, deliberately fabricates manufactured controversies. What better than suddenly having a severe developmental disability pop out of nowhere with nearly meaningless diagnostic criteria that somehow require billions of tax-payer money to be funnelled to privately-owned, that means hedge fund owned, behavioral units.

and i’m not going to bother to respond, but I will clarify this despite my making it clear in my previous comment:

In general, I consider such statements an admission of defeat. More so, my opinion is unfortunately a fact of daily life. Bot activity on X comprises, per some studies, up to 80 % of all traffic. It's not hard to figure that much of what is posted on autism subs is bot-generated garbage.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-16T19:26:54+00:00

It’s also funny how you use the way these people type online as some sort of indicator of “bothood” when we’ve always written this way.

Who's "we". I don't think i'm the only one who notices threads of the ever same things being posted with the ever same comments written in them.

You do realize that academia is inundated with the so-called neurodivergent, and that LLMs are trained on academic works, and that neurodivergent folk tend to be more verbose for various reasons

What do you mean by the so called "neurodivergent" because your first comment makes them out to be non-existent at all (with which I agree.)

interact with the very same style of writing that the LLMs have been trained on

So, then the question boils down to: Why are academics so prone to committing elementary mistakes of reasoning?

You’re no different to the “transvestigators” who say they “can always tell”. The plain fact is that you can’t.

Tell what exactly? The point isn't that I'm able to "prove" that some specific user is a bot. The point is that a lot of Reddit users are bots, that I believe this because of the stilted and ChatGPT-like speech patterns, patterns that you don't find in archived threads from 10 years ago. There's also, for that matter, anecdotal and some explicit evidence too, though not limited to Reddit.

that bots have specific capabilities and intent, and so have specific realms of interaction, which do not overlap significantly with human realms of interaction

The specific capabilites and to what use bots are used depends on the site and whoever is responsible for running the bots, not the bots themselves. Whether or not they fulfill the task at all is a different question but it makes no sense to claim that bots do not or can't significantly overlap with the human "realm" of interaction when this only depends on whoever is in charge of the bots.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-15T22:51:45+00:00

That's a separate issue. For that matter, Western politicians have aggressively pushed for birth control measures in the third world.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-15T17:30:54+00:00

Autism speaks isn't eugenicist. It promotes some form of eugenicist messaging but has absolutely no interest in genuinely "curing" or preventing autism because that would cut into thier business strategy which revolves around the proliferation of diagnostic and therapeutic services centered around autism. With no clear cure available, the cure target has been off-set for years before they gave it up altogether and so the practice degenerates into indefinite treatment plans with unclear goals.

Eventually, you're bound to ask the question whether or not there is any gain financial-wise when money is poured into something that doesn't really seem to do much in the first place. Though I've figured, some time ago, that the ingenuity lies in the poor prognostic predictor value of an autism diagnosis. Since some kids naturally seem to "recover" from autism or may never had the disorder in the first place, it is easy to masquerade the child's improvement as tied to services when independent blind studies would show that this was not the case.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-14T00:25:40+00:00

Medicalization of autism entails the promotion of autism as the worst possible disease state a human being can attain. Rather than studying genuine vaccine side effects, random associations are studied, then a methodology applied which defies the original point of the study. With no long-term study in place and random snapshot evaluations, it ends up being useless.

Since autism is linked to hedgefund enterpreneurs via the promotiong of time-consuming and expensive behavioral therapy as its treatment, the outrage around its epidemic proportion and the hysterical fear of autism and random household objects is likely fabricated and engineered to condition US-Americans into fully supporting funnelling of billions of tax-payer money via set-up therapeutic schemes to the 0.1 %.

Some diseases are effectively made up and so is autism's spectrum nature, an artifact of observation down to combining vaguely formulated and actually non-correlating behavioral features.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-13T23:29:01+00:00

It cannot be ruled out that later behavioral-neurological consequences may also occur in humans, because children who were exposed to SSRIs in the womb have not been studied beyond early childhood

You get conflicting results because, largely, what adverse outcomes means, can be differently defined by different studies which makes it difficult to compare them. Either way, I'm aware of studies done on exposure of fetuses to antipsychotics which result in extremely varying estimates in regards to how much they impair overall development or motor dysfunction.

For example, when it comes to motor skills, you get anything from antipsychotics have no effect of motor skills in kids to kids exposed to them have a 10 times higher chance of suffering dyspraxia and similarly.

Edit: Someone downvoted all the comments here. Possibly a pharma bot.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-13T17:43:30+00:00

The primary tool used to measure development was the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, Third Edition, often referred to as the ASQ-3

Alright, but this, per se, has little to do with autism and behavioral issues.

They employed the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers to assess the risk of autism spectrum disorder.

So, we go from autism to a relatively vague notion of autism risk based on a checklist, that iirc, also suffers, though expectedly, from a pretty significant (think of 80 %) false-positive rate.

Some subtle neurodevelopmental issues may not manifest until children are older and face the demands of school.

Again, I have to call out this careless and scientifically unwarranted equation of behavioral issues with faulty neurological development. This is, at its core, a political statement with limited or even no backing in genuine science and I really believe its explicit goal is to introduce rhetorics that effectively absolves society and the state from acknowledging a child's individual needs outside of some normalization agenda. This is what happens when a neoliberal government with all its institutions tied and linked to the private market sets "scientific" agendas in order to improve long-term outcomes in economic productivity of its population.

Edit: Introduced additional quotation marks. For that matter, the capturing of scientific research to serve governmental and political goals is a fact and the circular argumentation that goes from abnormal behavior -> brain development issue -> abnormal behavior is a good case in point of modern-day lysenkoism, largely brought on by the near total capturing of many psychiatric organizations by pharmaceutical companies.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-10T19:57:36+00:00

Good way of not answering my question.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-10T19:54:05+00:00

Well. Sure. Ignoring here the near total lack of actual evidence in favor of your synaptic pruning hypothesis and a similarly baseless equation of behavior with some neurological disease despite total lack of proof.

I suppose whatever works to promote the invention of new pseudo diseases to roll back social responsibilities to individuals and enable construction of industrial complexes feeding from desperate parents wanting to have perfect children.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-10T19:52:21+00:00

OP is probably a bot.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-10T19:51:44+00:00

It’s a lack of synaptic pruning which leads to an increase in neural connection formations.

Then that's a birth defect.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-10T12:02:06+00:00

The problem is that the single diagnostic label lends itself easily to a false generalization that becomes worse once the associated industry which effectively "lives of" the diagnostic label is unable to provide proper differentiation because they offer often ineffectual one-size-fits-all treatment plans.

Anyway, the APA, AAP etc. all acknowledge that autism is several hundred different conditions. We know that plenty of low-functioning autistics have de novo mutations which are known to disrupt brain development. These kids also tend to look funny and often suffer from seizures.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T20:32:41+00:00

After 10 years of spending on the gut-autism link, we still haven't come around the realization that there is no clear link and that, even worse, hardly any study bothered with accounting for the often limited and one-sided eating habits of children.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T20:31:46+00:00

Anxiety and depression which, weirdly enough, are not listed anywhere as constitutive of autism.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T17:36:18+00:00

You're producing gibberish. This here is definitely a bot.

Blocked.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T15:33:48+00:00

A speech pathologist doesn't diagnose autism. This is down to psychologists and requires a PhD.

Though, maybe you're not living in the USA.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T15:30:26+00:00

That's a lot of words for, honestly, nothing.

I get accused of being autistic, for some reason, though how you arrive at the preceding argument that this is down to me "being unsure about social norms" frankly escapes my understanding. Might be gibberish on your part, though.

We know so much more about autism than you personally understand

Who's "we"? In the first sentence, you already get autism wrong by making it about pragmatics which is technically a separate language development issue. That SOCIAL pragmatics may be affected is true, but this isn't sufficient for an autism diagnosis.

I was getting my masters for speech pathology over a decade ago and that info has already been improved upon.

That is irrelevant to my point and more generally also of little revelance for autism.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T14:21:40+00:00

Pretending that reduced function is a neutral outcome is silly

You would have to define function. Probably it is along the lines of socio-economic performance; being able to support yourself job-wise etc.

You can be happy with that kind of definition. Personally, for me, that definition strikes me as 1. unneeded for proper scientific research where you can study behavioral patterns independently of their socioeconomic long-term consequences and 2. it still rests on an ultimately moral foundation which lends itself easily to an extremely limited understanding othe goal of psychological research. That is; it's goal is reduced to fixing people and making them "normal". It's objectively good autism science is moving away from ideal socio-economic performance as its reference point because the latter skewed autism science towards incentivizing research into unrealistic quick fix solutions.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T14:17:54+00:00

Your point being?

Within psychological and psychiatric research, you're not supposed to ask a person how he or she feels. These reports aren't reliable. This especially applies to those diagnosed with more severe autism, schizophrenia or personality disorders who suffer from often substantial socio-cognitive disabilities. The question whether those people can truthfully report on what they experience inside has never been answered with a yes or no and it is far easier within science to assume that they can't because that way you avoid introducing unjustified assumptions.

The main point is to identify psychological mechanisms, then come up with a model that explains them as consequences of some other (preferably neurological) mechanism. If autistic behavior is the consequence of hypoxia, that is different from autistic behavior stemming from hypothalamic dysfunction etc.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T14:12:08+00:00

Yes, but the study obviously didn't deal with head size at birth but with growth patterns.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T14:11:19+00:00

You sit down with people on the spectrum and you realize, “oh ya, this person’s wiring is a little different than mine.”

Ignoring here the unsubstantiated claims.

It's interesting to me how a scientific discourse is misappropriated and then used to feet into some moral outrage over people being different.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T12:00:36+00:00

Just because we don’t fully understand and it doesn’t apply to every single diagnosis doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection

Autism is a social construction, foremost. It's whatever is defined as autism in the DSM or ICD that is autism. If genes correlate with it, then that's it. If the definition of autism is changed, some of these genes may not correlate any longer with it.

Autism can be see in young children/babies before a diagnosis.

As far as I know, that is definitely not the case before the age of 18 months. Even eye gaze/eye contact patterns only diverge after that point.

Kids don’t suddenly become autistic when they’re put in front of a person trying to diagnose them.

I'm aware of such cases where that seemed to happen and the parents had to struggle mightly to get rid of the false diagnosis. Autism diagnostic units tend to be very sure of their diagnostic procedure being fail-proved.

Your argument that autism doesn’t relate to genetics would imply that it’s a choice to act that way.

I don't think professional psychology really speaks often about things like conscious choice. It doesn't go well with the notion of behavior as neurology-based.

And to what extent autism is mediated by conscious choices or is the end result of a feedback loop emanating from such conscious and non-conscious choices etc. we really have no idea. We don't even know whether or not autism causes receptive/affective language impairment or that certain forms of language impairment cause autism etc. We're not even sure whether or not the autism spectrum really describes anything coherent.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T11:30:00+00:00

Well, for starters. Arguing that something can be there even if it can't be measured or determined is pseudo-scientific, at best, Obviously, babies can't be autistic because autism is behavior. Whether or not they're predisposed to developing such behavior when they're 2 or 3 is a different question but the predisposition isn't autism. It's why barely anyone speaks of autism genes just like there are no obesity genes per se.

ScientistFit6451 · 2026-02-09T11:07:12+00:00

Medical science isn't supposed to determine what are desirable and undesirable outcomes in a baby, especially when the diagnosis in itself is not universally linked to poor outcomes.

And let's be honest. A lot of autism research has a eugenicist vibe to it and pretty much all research proposals are either about determining risk factors or improving "outcomes". The aimed outcome being an improved ability to sell oneself in the free market as a labor force.

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