This is not true. Sure, humans can lie or get things wrong. But normal people will also admit when they don't know something. LLMs tend not to admit when they don't know something, and they use an authoritative voice that sounds like they know what they're talking about. To an untrained person, this can easily be misleading.
> But normal people will also admit when they don't know something.
You'd like to think so, right? However, this isn't really a solid thesis. Decent people will admit when they don't know. Is that normal? I've worked with so many people that just do not fit that definition at all, to the point it just seems like that's the normal way to behave. Maybe I'm jaded grossly overweighting it, but it just seems I have been in way too many meets with too many arguments over something because someone refused to back down and admit their ignorance/arrogance wasted valuable time because of refusal to accept input from others.
I suspect that such a move would draw significant scrutiny from regulators, potentially far outweighing any impacts from users switching browsers on their own.
I can ask ChatGPT to write code and assess myself whether it's correct or not. (It's frequently not, but it can still be useful for certain tasks.) I can ask it to explain something about the industry I work in or adjacent fields and have a pretty good sense of whether it's leading me in the right direction. But if I asked it to teach me about, say, Chinese history, I would have very little ability to assess whether it's telling me the truth or sprinkling little falsehoods into things. I would only be able to catch the most blatant mistakes; the rest would require more detailed independent research.
Now imagine you're a kid who's still learning reading comprehension and hasn't yet developed a functional BS detector. You're not going to have much of an ability to separate truth from fiction, but you're likely going to trust this thing that sounds authoritative.
Yes, that's fair, but I think we can do better in our education revolution than just plonking kids down in a classroom with ChatGPT! If we take a fairly constrained subject like high school algebra, we should be able to, for example, study its BS rate by having knowledgeable testers converse with it at length, and thus perhaps produce AIs suitably calibrated and QA'd for classroom usage. But I should go read Sal's book, it sounds promising.
While these are all valid concerns, they also apply to human teachers. Humans spew bullshit all the time.
But that's OK. A teacher's knowledge doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than the student's.
If ChatGPT explains Chinese history in a way that is 80% accurate, to a student whose understanding of Chinese history is 10% accurate, the student will walk away with a better understanding of Chinese history.
This seems very incorrect to me. Human teachers make mistakes, or understand details of something incorrectly sometimes, but it doesn't come up in every lesson. It only happens occasionally, and sometimes a student will correct them/challenge them on it.
ChatGPT makes mistakes literally every time I use it (in a domain that I'm knowledgable in). How is that the same thing? Being given incorrect information is worse than not having the knowledge at all IMO.
I do find that current LLMs are quite bad at design problems and answering very specific questions for which they may lack sufficient training data. I like them for general Q&A though.
A different architecture or an additional component might be needed for them to generalize better for out-of-training-distribution questions.
You don’t even have to go to the extreme end. Ask people with milder presentations, and they’ll be able to tell you about all sorts of confusing interactions and frustrating situations they’ve experienced that wouldn’t have happened if they were neurotypical. Hard to say that doesn’t impact their quality of life.
It's true, miscommunication and misunderstanding, as well as stigmatization can lead to situations where autistic people are hurt or even killed. This happened recently with Ryan Gainer, who was killed by police after he charged at them with a gardening tool during an autistic meltdown.
But as you said, we should ask people with milder presentations, and listen. While they may impact quality of life, I don't see any autistic people here or in my communities calling for a "cure" to deal with such problems.
We made a big deal of Autism Acceptance and Awareness Month, which was April. There is no autism prevention movement, unless you count Autism Speaks, which is considered a hate group within the autistic community.
I agree, I'm always happy to step out my bubble. That's why I'm here on HN -- this is not a safe place for autistic people. That said, it was not obvious to me you are a spokesperson for Autism Speaks.
Pretty sure the person you are responding to is just being an asshole, inadvertently demonstrating your point that this isn't a safe place for autistic people.
I was only responding in kind. And I'm autistic myself, so.
Honestly, the only hostility toward austitic people I see around here is the person invalidating and ignoring the opinions of others within the autistic community.
I’m not invalidating opinions from autistic people tho, I said many times autistic voices should be centered.
When I typed what I had said before about not seeing any different opinions here from autistic people it was not because I was ignoring your opinion but because I had not seen it. Your opinion is valid.
However I don’t honk you were only responding in kind in your last reply — the poster was simply asking a question and you replied with sarcasm.
My question and concern for you is: are you not worried that such efforts will further stigmatize autistic people as in need of a cure without ever actually offering one?
For me the worst of both worlds is one in which people earnestly work for a “cure” to a problem that can’t be solved through medicine, all while making the societal problem intractable (as everyone is pushing for that miracle cure).
> the poster was simply asking a question and you replied with sarcasm.
They were not simply asking a question - in that case, they could've dropped the second part, which had exactly the same implication as my sarcastic reply.
Anyway...
> are you not worried that such efforts will further stigmatize autistic people as in need of a cure without ever actually offering one?
No, I'm not, because I don't see them as being mutually exclusive. We can do research to understand the causes of ASD and other neurodivergence - and hopefully eventually offer options for those of us who don't like to live with it - and still work toward destigmatizing it and making society less problematic for people like us. We've been doing that for decades at this point.
I would also note that you're only considering outward pressure on autistic individuals - that is, you're focusing on how difficult it is for us to live in society. But that is only one part of what autism is. Even if society were perfectly accepting of us and there were no obstacles at all in it, I'd still be overstimulated by the sound of rain, or have a meltdown because I can't get away from a smell, or... There are various "internal" symptoms that no amount of destigmatization will ever get rid of.
I'll also point out that, maybe the reason you don't encounter many autistic people who want to be "cured", is because people like you - who so strongly oppose such research - make us feel like traitors to our kind, and so we just shut up about it, and feel isolated even from the one community who we shouldn't feel isolated from.
> They were not simply asking a question - in that case, they could've dropped the second part, which had exactly the same implication as my sarcastic reply.
The intended implication was that the typical "parents of" Facebook group does not count as an autistic community. In my experience, the alleged "autistic community" has always turned out to be something of that nature, but I've only found that out after a lengthy back-and-forth. I phrased the question how I did, because I've found that being more direct puts people on the defensive (more likely to lie), and being less direct doesn't get an answer (less likely to give relevant details). You are the first person I've spoken to who has responded affirmatively.
If I had intended to imply that you were acting in bad faith, I would have dropped the first question, consulted the news guidelines, deleted my entire comment, downvoted yours, and then moved on with my life. I did not.
I apologise for how it came across, but this is one of those fake apologies because I really don't know how I could've done better.
> I'll also point out that, maybe the reason you don't encounter many autistic people who want to be "cured", is because people like you - who so strongly oppose such research - make us feel like traitors to our kind, and so we just shut up about it, and feel isolated even from the one community who we shouldn't feel isolated from.
Eugenics is a wonderful idea that of course we should be doing. However, history suggests that humans cannot be trusted with eugenics. Most autistic people, no matter how worldly, no matter how cynical, just don't get how large groups of predominantly-neurotypical humans behave. You know that innate sense of right and wrong you (likely) have? The closest thing (most) neurotypicals have is a sense of honour, and… well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour is not the same thing.
Most people only care about doing the right thing if other people would find out, or if people they personally know and care about would be affected, would they do the wrong thing. For a good while, the prevailing academic thought considered autistic morality as evidence of an autistic deficit in theory-of-mind: autistic people clearly don't understand that they're allowed to do wrong stuff whenever nobody could ever find out! (I've lost the paper I learned this from, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4834434/ describes autists as having "atypical inflexibility in morality" – which is damning enough.)
We cannot trust most people, but academia is at its core about distributing knowledge (or "knowledge") as far and as wide as possible. The people most likely to act on this kind of research most immediately are organisations like Autism Speaks, who prioritise stamping out autists over the welfare of actual people. (Exercise: compare Autism Speaks' genetics research budget to their marketing/"outreach" budget. Compare that to their torture-"therapy" budget for trying to coerce masking behaviours out of three-year-olds. Now compare that to the money they actually spend on helping actual people live their own lives.)
No matter how much we want the outcome, we have to fix society before we try to research things like this. And I have no idea how we can fix society enough that we can do eugenics without… well, without https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics.
The ultimate goal of the eugenicist is to eliminate the people who are not like them. This is how it has always been. No matter how they dress it up in smiles and sunshine and roses, this is the beginning and end of their goals.
It is only safe to research eugenics when these people have no power, and there is no expectation of them ever getting power again. (I fear we may never get there, but that sentiment will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, so I continue to act as though things will be better within my lifetime.)
That's why we have the taboo. Hopefully this information helps you talk about your feelings without triggering the taboo. You are right that you should not feel isolated for the way you feel. (I expect that, among the most vocal enforcers of the taboo, are those who feel the same things you do, and for whom pride in their identity forms part of a coping mechanism.) I hope that it is not anybody's intention to exclude you for disliking your own inability to process certain stimuli.
I thought your point was about your opinions being invalidated and ignored, but now I don't think I know what your point is.
You identified a problem. I questioned whether it was real. You, obliquely, affirmed that it was, but did not provide enough information for anyone (not already in the loop) to address it. Therefore, I spent an hour giving you enough information to begin addressing it from your end. What point does that make?
… Yeah, I see how you could take that away from it. Thanks for explaining.
There are treatments for specific issues associated with autism (e.g. ADHD medication, noise-filtering headphones, AAC tools), but autism is a form of human polymorphism. Like allism and situs inversus, it's a developmental condition, so any research programmes with the capacity to "cure" autism are eugenics research programmes. That's a literal description, not a normative one.
Your desire to avoid suffering is independent of this fact. It's a very much understandable desire, and almost universal among humans. If you make the distinction clear, then well-meaning people won't attack you for expressing that desire. (This has nothing to do with eugenics.) Queer and autistic communities are usually quite big about the right to self-modify.
If you face exclusion or opposition even when it's clear you're talking about your desire to have something available for yourself, and not advocating for a particular approach to be taken (within the context of our sociopolitical environment), I would like to be made aware – ideally with details –, because that's the sort of thing I care about putting a stop to.
Fwiw, I am very, very sad that modern humans cannot be trusted with eugenics. I would like it if that option were available to you. You are not wrong for wanting it. But in the world we currently live in, it's not worth it.
Depends. Cool cyborg eyes, better glasses, cataract surgery, retinal detachment surgery, etc. are not eugenics, so they're fine to advocate for. Heritable genetic modification, embryo selection, sterilisation campaigns etc. are eugenics, and advocating for them will do more harm than good.
Visual impairment isn't, afaik, something the eugenics bad guys are focusing on at the moment – though it was in the past – so they're not likely to twist research into the sorts of things that get bowdlerised out of history textbooks. (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5225285/ exists, but there's no organisation seeking legal permission to electrocute non-compliant blind children.*) So even if you keep it vague, advocating for "curing" blindness is unlikely to be seen as, or act as, advocating for eugenics; likewise, research into the developmental origins of (say) congenital cataracts is mostly safe.
Eugenics is when you take measures that improve the overall fitness of the human population. In other words, eugenics is when you decide which kinds of people should and shouldn't exist.
There are people with skin so fair that it burns in even moderate sunlight – even through clothing –, leading to an increased incidence of melanoma. This is associated with the Asp294His polymorphism in the MC1R gene. This would be very easy to "cure"… and I really wish, as a species, we had the capacity to say "hey, option's available to anyone who wants it, but we won't force it on anyone". But if we had that technology today, you know it would be used in some tired plan for ethnic cleansing, where the cruelty is the point and the costs don't matter. Every time we have some scientific (or cultural) advance that can be construed as legitimising such actions, people attempt it.
And maybe we'll grow past that.
---
*: since they've come up in the thread before, I feel obliged to note: Autism Speaks' PR machine is, surprisingly enough, on the right side of this particular child torture issue.
> You don’t even have to go to the extreme end. Ask people with milder presentations, and they’ll be able to tell you about all sorts of confusing interactions and frustrating situations they’ve experienced that wouldn’t have happened if they were neurotypical. Hard to say that doesn’t impact their quality of life.
Sure, I had rough childhood, but looking back, I wouldn't want to be someone else. The way my brain focuses and optimises for certain ideas actually benefits society if the environment is correct.
There's only limited amount of processing power anyone can have. I just have less points for social and more for other areas that others don't have. Yet society expects us to normalize or consider it a disease. I'm now very successful and extremely proud where I have reached in life.
In my childhood I used to question why people didn't like me, if I had myself from now to guide myself, and create an environment for myself, I'm sure I would have had 100% happy childhood. And I know what and how to do if I ever had someone like myself as a kid, and it's not a disease.
The reason my childhood was terrible was EXACTLY because of expectation that everyone should behave like X, and that was just not me. So everyone tells me I have disease that needs to be fixed. It's disgusting.
I didn't finish high school because of all the issues I had, and spent years in depression, but as I happened to finally land in an environment that appreciated my differing thinking I was able to do exactly what my brain is suited for and make 8x+ average income in my area. I had passion as a kid, interest in weird things, but school and the social environment killed every little bit of it.
> I had passion as a kid, interest in weird things, but school and the social environment killed every little bit of it.
As a parent of an autistic kid: How would you cultivate that? Our son is autistic, he is 8 years old. He started to hate school. All he cares for is Minecraft and Magic: The Gathering. It's a bit sad to see that he seemingly drowns his curiosity by immersing himself mentally only in these two topics. I wonder if there's a way to guide him to develop interest in other topics. Any recommendations?
Best I can say is lean into it. Make everything those themes or adjacent to them in some way. You’re lucky because Minecraft is a gateway to computing in general. Find out what he specifically likes about it and then figure out how to use Minecraft to build a bridge toward real world skill that still include everything he likes about Minecraft.
Forcing him to do things he doesn’t want to will be next to impossible. RSD is real and irrational. You can trick him into wanting to do things though.
And by trick I don’t mean deceive but just to make him thinks he wants it. Give him a choice and let him choose, but make both options good. Don’t force him to do things your way or the correct way as you see it.
Autistic people like to build and use our own systems, so that’s probably what he likes out of Minecraft, a world he can shape to his liking. He rejects the real world because it forces him to be something he doesn’t want to be.
Thanks, coincidentally, I listened to a podcast episode about RSD (assuming you mean Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria) this morning and yeah, it is absolutely real. He's extremely sensitive to criticism, which often results in a vicious cycle. Will try to work with Minecraft to give him more topics. So far, he didn't like the whole Redstone logic stuff, but maybe it'll come in a bit. His mathematical abilities are actually quite good (and so are his language capabilities).
Those experiences wouldn't have happened if the autistic people were medicated to neurotypical or neurotypical people were more accepting of autistic people. And many autistic people would reject being medicated to neurotypical despite those experiences.
There’s this thing people online tend to do where they’ll take a well-defined word or phrase like autism spectrum disorder and just decide that it actually should mean something else and get mad when everyone else uses the word in the “wrong” way. It consistently derails conversations, and it almost never brings anyone around to a place of greater understanding.
I'm not arguing over the semantics. I am rejecting the entire concept in its overly broad state. Imagine somebody said 'Oh don't worry about your weird coworker. He's just acts that way because he's a Sagittarius.' Obviously you'd look at them pretty cockeyed. I'm not arguing about what a Sagittarius is, but rejecting the idea of it having a well enough defined meaning to ultimately mean anything. Of course millennia of people of all classes, including the founder of analytic psychology (who was quite enamored with astrology) would have strongly disagreed with me.
According to the CDC we're now up to about 3% of kids being "identified" as autistic. [1] In 2010 it was about half as many (per capita). And then in 2004 it was about half as many again. At this rate one can reasonably speak of a majority in the future. Which is quite silly. One of the main differences between a science and a pseudo-science is falsifiability. If an oncologist diagnoses you have a malignant tumor - this is falsifiable. It is either true, or false. You don't need a consensus or an opinion.
But in psychology, there is scarcely such a thing as falsifiability, especially in the overly broad diagnostics. This applies not only to diagnostic/analytical psychology, but even to contemporary research in psychology. Psychology is the butt of the replication crisis with even leading psychological journals seeing replication rates in the twenties. There's something very wrong with this field, and it can be largely explained by considering the fact that it may simply be a pseudo-science.
What you are seeing is the effect of acceptance and awareness, not overly broad diagnostic criteria. It's not reasonable to extrapolate from these rates to half the population.
We are talking about human brains and psyche here, not much is known, and it's hard to conduct falsifiable experiments. If this upsets you, don't concern yourself with such endeavors, who asked you? Not every truth is found through the scientific method. Others are telling you that their diagnosis gave them peace and understand, a foundation on which to build an identity. Why are you here trying to take that away from people? What is your reasoning for making these arguments?
> My ability to type this message and read is not a constant. There are times when I am non verbal. There are times when I cannot read because the letters are all jumbled in my head. When I'm able to read and write and speak, society values me. When I'm not, society devalues me. You want to take autism out of the equation so that I can be valuable to society.
> What I'm saying is that society needs to be reoriented so that autistic people are valued whether or not they can read or write or speak.
People like to say stuff like this on social media, but I can never quite figure out what they actually mean. Society emerges from interactions between people. If someone can’t communicate, how exactly are they supposed to participate fully in society? All people deserve love and support and dignity regardless of their ability to contribute economically, but I’m curious what this “reorientation” would actually mean in practice.
> If someone can’t communicate, how exactly are they supposed to participate fully in society?
It's not that autistic people cannot communicate, it's that we communicate differently.
For example, I cannot talk on the phone. I just can't. I could explain all the reasons why, but I feel very dismissed here so I'm not going to be vulnerable anymore, but suffice it to say it's something I cannot do, and a lot of autistic people cannot do.
This means people like us can't have jobs which require a lot of phone communication. Accommodations that would allow autistic people to communicate in their preferred way would lead to greater employment of autistic people, but such accommodations are rarely offered for various reasons.
It's other things too. For some people it's lights. For others it's a uniform. For others its noises. For instance, I can hardly go into grocery stores because they play loud music, there's a lot of noises from beeping registers, and the lights are bright and garish. All retailers are like this, and that's where many entry level jobs are. If I can hardly shop there without wearing sunglasses and headphones, then I could never work there because workers are not allowed to wear noise canceling headphones.
Then there are people who require service dogs. You'd think that would be a solved issue, but my friend was just denied entry to a place because of her legit service dog, not even an emotional support dog. They said she couldn't have one because she didn't look blind. Then what, she has to explain to some putz about her autism, expecting he'll understand? No, she backed off and went home and now she won't go out again. It took her that much just to go outside and she was turned away by some busybody, so it's back to being a recluse for a bit.
And that's another thing, is the world could be a lot more accepting of how ND people identify, that would go a long way too. My friend I just mentioned says that her experience as a transgender person is inextricable from her autism. I'm not sure what she means 100%, but also I do, autistic people have a complicated relationship with gender and sexual identity, and a lot of people are very very against those feelings. Autistic people who are transgender (there are many) have a hard time existing in public life because they are shamed, ridiculed, vilified, beaten, and even murdered for who they are. Do you think it's easy for someone who faces those dangers to be employed? There are many transgender homeless people who suffer as a result.
I could go on and on, but all of these things I've listed are ways in which autistic people are marginalized in society, and they don't necessitate "curing" autism to fix, or even really reorienting society as a whole. It's not because they cannot communicate, it's because they cannot participate fully in public life. The solution is to just let them participate in public life. To make things better for everyone involved, we can just be accepting of people's differences and not force them all to be one way, and support them when those differences mean they need help to survive. We can afford to do that as a society I think, why not, isn't that the point of the whole exercise?
For me personally, I can get to quite high levels of "socialness" depending on mood and practice. I can get to muster up the courage to do calls, interact more socially, flirt with someone etc. It does take an extreme amount of energy though.
Where I think it differs for me, is in that if I don't do this type of "social training" constantly, it completely goes away again. If I didn't call my doctor/the post office/relatives in a few months, the ability to just do it normally is gone again and I start from 0. Everytime.
My psychiatrist helps me get to that point again but over time has realized that "exposure therapy" doesn't really work because every few months we have to start from 0 again.
Now having all of that said, for most people these types of interactions and things in life are just... normal. They don't require even a second thought. And that, I would imagine, removes a lot of friction from their lives because these interactions are needed to be a self standing, emancipated, contributing member of society.
Thank you for sharing that. I’m not going to address every example in your comment, and I agree that there are many ways society could be more accommodating. But I also think that not every difference can be accommodated in every situation, even if disability advocates don’t always want to admit it. Some jobs require you to talk on the phone, just like some jobs require you to lift heavy boxes. Not everyone can do that, and that’s ok. I can tell you with absolute certainty that I could not do my job as an engineering executive if I could not talk on the phone or video calls, since so much of my job is about making emotional connections with other people, understanding subtle cues and subtext, and influencing people. I have colleagues who I know are on the spectrum, and I greatly respect them and do try to accommodate them where possible. But some things require a level of social skills they simply don’t have.
Beyond that, I have to be honest: reading about your struggles with communication, lights, noise, etc. it’s frankly hard me to fathom why anyone would not want medication that can alleviate those symptoms. I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s, and my whole life suddenly made more sense. Stimulant medication dramatically improved my executive function, attention, concentration, impulsivity, etc. but I am still in every way myself while medicated. I am just more in control of myself. I realize there is no medication like that for autism yet, but if there was, I simply can’t imagine someone not wanting it when my life was improved so dramatically by treating my much-less-severe condition.
> not every difference can be accommodated in every situation, even if disability advocates don’t always want to admit it
That's why labor law generally has the concept of "reasonable accommodations" and core parts of the job. I don't think anyone is seriously saying that every disabled person can do any job.
It's honestly even more subtle than this. I absolutely agree with you about talking on the phone. I avoid doing things when I know it will mean I have to call ahead - and I would much rather go down there in person and get looked at weird for making an appointment in person.
Yet I've worked 4 different call center jobs and had absolutely no issue talking to people on the phone there. (Probably largely because the "small-talk" in such a scenario is absolutely rote and mundane...)
Fast-forward to my current job (IT) and I hate answering the phone (or joining a meeting) again.
No developmental anomaly can start after birth. It must preexist but is not detected. Proof: heavy cases of autism are diagnosed at birth, so the beginning lies sometime in uterus. The same holds for the lighter cases too.
What the fuck? Of course developmental anomalies can start after birth. Yeah, many initially develop in the womb, but like, the time in the womb is a trivial percentage of a child's development.
Nonsense. Developmental disorders can be caused by any number of factors in early childhood, like stress, neglect, infection, injury, and exposure to substances in the environment like lead. A multifactorial disorder like autism may have many different causes, and we don’t know enough to say for certain that they all originate before birth. I’d wager they do not.
Same with people who complain about paying a living wage or basic benefits. I once had an Uber driver who, apropos of nothing, started telling me that he was driving for Uber because he had to shut his old business down after Obamacare went into effect because he couldn’t afford to provide health insurance for his employees. I just sort of nodded along because I didn’t really have a choice, but I couldn’t help but think, “Sounds like the problem was just that you weren’t a very good businessman.”
Additional government regulations will always require additional resources by a business to be compliant. By over regulating, the government is killing small businesses. The only organizations that can afford the resources to manage government bureaucracy are large companies. So I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss that Uber drivers statement.
Not mentioned in this comment are that those large companies are the ones who lobby for such regulation, so they can kill small businesses and gain their customers
Providing health insurance for full-time employees in the United States is just part of the cost of doing business. It's not cheap, but it's absolutely something you can budget for. IIRC this guy had over 50 employees working more than 30 hours a week (I think in a landscaping business) which is why he had to start providing healthcare. If he couldn't afford to pay for health insurance for his full-time employees, then frankly, that means his business was only ever viable as long as he was able to exploit his workers with substandard pay and benefits.
That one I'd be more sympathetic to. The fraction of GDP that America's health care sector rakes off is far out of line with other first-world economies. (And, by most metrics, their health systems deliver same-or-better results.) In effect: Any company which wants to employ actual Americans (one who'll have to get heath coverage) is forced to send huge-and-growing protection payments to America's health care system mafia.
Be that as it may, it's not like the ACA invented employer-sponsored health insurance. Health insurance is just part of the cost of doing business in the United States and has been standard for full-time employees (and many part-time ones) for decades. In this particular case, I believe he wasn't providing health insurance for anyone but was now required to because his company was over a certain size. (Something along those lines, it's been a long time.)
Sure, but PE certification is only relevant to a small subset of engineers in the US, even outside of software engineering. Outside of a few specific fields, most people in the US will not think "PE" when they hear engineer, unlike professions like medicine or law where licensing is effectively universal.
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