zlacker

BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism. You have to squint your eyes a bit, for example both of these neurotypes involve social difficulties, like the subjective feeling of being alien in the world (known as Anderssein in German psychiatry). However if you peel off the social layer then the remaining autistic features become anti-correlated with the remaining schizotypal features on the scale of the population. There are also some decent theories that suggest this should be the case - for example in the predictive coding theory it is believed that autistic brains over-weigh sensory inputs over their model of the world, whereas schizotypal brains over-weigh their model of the world over the sensory inputs. Or the Big Five traits, openness to experience is usually low in autism and high in schizophrenia.

>>H8cril+(OP)
I think I understand what you mean.

You're saying that relative to the 'typical individual', autistic brains weigh sensory inputs more heavily than their internal model. And that in schizotypal brains, relative to the 'typical individual', the internal model is weighed more heavily than the sensory input, right?

I don't know much about this area, so I can't comment on the correctness. However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.

I don't say this to try to undermine the challenges by people with autism or schizotypy. However, I think it's also fair to say that if we consider what the 'typical' person really is and how the 'typical' person really acts, they frequently do a lot of illogical and --- simply-put --- 'crazy' things.

>>H8cril+(OP)
If the mind is a kind of "prediction machine", wouldn't that make ALL psychiactric disorders a specific variation of faulty prediction mode though?

>>H8cril+(OP)
That is fascinating, I have seen the schizophrenia model of having "trapped priors" before.

I figured that this is probably something Scott Alexander has written about, and lo and behold: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-a...

>>Unlist+p4
Isn't "what the typical individual experiences" pretty much the definition of "normal"?

Whether "normal" is also "correct" is a completely separate question. There are plenty of fields where the behavior of the typical person is also widely perceived to be incorrect, like personal finance or exercise routines.

>>H8cril+(OP)
> BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism.

And I disagree with that. There is a wide overlap of symptoms in all mood disorders. People with ASD show many traits of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. This paper might change your mind:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8931527/

>>coldte+n5
Yes, but not always faulty. My (diagnosed) OCD and Anxiety have saved me from many bad situation. I see the many many many possibilities that something can go wrong and I have very low risk tolerance.

>>Unlist+p4
>However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.

No biggie, there's a real normative undertone to the world in general too.

Norm itself means "what the majority does" or the socially (i.e. majority) accepted yardstick ("norma" in latin was a literal yardstick-like tool).

It's not about the typical person _always_ doing things in a better way, or the autistic person always doing things differently. It's about the distribution of typical vs atypical behavior. So, it's not very useful to characterize such atypical behavior better or worse based on absolute moral or technical judgement. Morality changes over time, cultures, and even social groups, to a bigger or smaller degree.

If, however, we use "degree of comformity with majority behaviors/expectations" as the measurement, autistics do perform worse on that.

>>Noaidi+y6
Yeah, at face value the two diagnoses are positively correlated. This is simply true. And traits of these two only become negatively correlated if you remove the shared social difficulties, which includes a lot of the negative symptoms. Unfortunately everything is positively correlated in psychiatry. If you want to explore this deeper I recommend the "p factor" (general psychopathology factor), which is a serious, multi-year attempt at identifying something like the "first eigenvector of psychiatry", a loading common to all psychopathology, including substance use, affective disorders, psychotic disorders, conduct/personality disorders, ... The idea is that if you only know that someone has whatever goes into this vector then you know that person is quite likely to develop some disorder, but you don't know which one.

I would only add that ASDs do not have "real" negative symptoms of schizophrenia, but what they do have can look a bit similar. The research on anti-correlation was using questionnaires and binned the social questions taking that into account.

>>H8cril+(OP)
Yeah, the "mirror image" idea makes a lot of sense to me. Both groups feel out of sync socially, but for opposite reasons: autistic cognition leans too hard on raw sensory input, schizotypal cognition leans too hard on internal interpretations

>>Unlist+p4
The center of the normal ditribution is “normal” or “normative.” That’s where the term comes from.

It’s like saying we shouldn’t call immigrants “aliens” because that conjures images of space. Where do you think the term comes from?

>>H8cril+(OP)
Wouldn't the implication of them being "opposite" be that in some sense they are mutually exclusive? I don't really see evidence of that. Your example of sensory input vs world model weight is a bit flawed, because both of those are extremely multifaceted. One can have extreme weight in sensory input in one sense but not others, as well as extreme weight on world model for certain aspects of life.

>>coldte+M6
Norm is descriptive. Normative is prescriptive.

Knowing the difference is important to understanding and empathizing with the person you replied to.

>>coldte+n5
Given we're long evolved, and also tribal based animals, and that culture is an evolutionary pressure feedback mechanism, and prediction is fundamentally useful to our reality, different "thinking styles" (ways to predict/understand outcomes) are useful, aannnd, tribally we used people for their usefulness, I often wonder if "faulty" is the correct lens. That is to say, If prediction variation was useful to tribes, having both 'trust the model' and 'trust the senses' type people, I suppose framing these as disorders rather than trade offs is probably the wrong lens entirely. Society/culture/reality is so narrow and predictable these days, faulty in what context, you know? If you breed 20 generations of "best night watchers", in the jungle at night looking down, quiet, still, dark... you'd probably be selecting for specific traits, and creating new traits, retinal rod density and sensitivity, faster dark adaptation/contrast etc, attention/vigilance traits, pattern detection, anxiety adjacent traits in hypervigilance, prob something about circadian rhythm tolerance etc etc. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40886135_Not_By_Gen...)

>>neom+tE
it becomes a disorder when the person faces "too many" difficulties due to their difference (instead of enjoying the advantages)

and of course there are extreme cases, like the many non-verbal people (who likely wouldn't be able to live alone, their communication is limited to poking at pictures on a board), and the truly end of the spectrum where nothing sort of institutionalization can provide the environment and care necessary for survival

but of course having our society somehow become so narrow allows for the economic efficiency to even have the surplus that then we give to people with these disorders (in the form or care, attention, medical research, and so on)

>>pas+nH
Yes, having society "somehow" became ordered for a certain "norm" on a spectrum certain does create a disordered reality for the others...

>>H8cril+(OP)
I don't think there's much underlying relationship. True they will both impact social relationships. But it's more like how being blind or being deaf will impact social relationships. The mechanics might be the same but the cause is very different.

IMHO schizophrenia is a breakdown in the barrier between imagination and processing of reality.

Autism and the like is an inability to process social cues like a blind person might have a damaged visual cortex.

>>H8cril+(OP)
What's your interpretation of this study?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6982569/

>>kelsey+ix
Normative is just the adjective form of "related to norm" - can still be perfectly descriptive in use. The difference you allude do is more about the practical enforcement of a norm (or lack thereof), than the kind of the part of speech use to refer to it.

I 100% understand and empathize, doesn't mean I agree.

>>H8cril+(OP)
Something fascinating that has been noticed by many people is that LLMs with a low temperature setting produce output similar to autism and high temperature is schizo in style. You even see the AIs get stuck in repetitive loops at very low temperature settings.

>>coldte+k01
> Normative is just the adjective form of "related to norm"

You might want to recheck the definition of normative. Yours is a non-standard usage and you will be misunderstood if you continue to use it that way.

Norm is is, Normative is ought.

> Normative: pertaining to giving directives or rules

> Synonyms: prescriptive

>>kelsey+ix
A "norm" can refer be either descriptive (average) or prescriptive (standard), but "normative" specifically is an adjective which refers to things establishing or relating prescriptive norms (this subtle distinction is often not made in short dictionary definitions but is readily observable in use.)

>>treis+WL
Autism is not the inability to process social cues. It seems more likely to be the difficulty to either filter or generalize sensory input.

>>kelsey+j51
No. Both definitions are correct. Don't tell people to recheck without first doing so yourself.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/normative

>>treis+WL
Autism is more broad-spectrum than just related to social processing. It's most visible in social processing because that's the cognitive area that humans have highly specialized in as a species, where expectations of performance are very high, and thus where deficiencies processing complex information in real-time are most visible. If we were birds, we'd probably think autism had something to do with flying. Instead, we are talking tribal apes, so when someone has the cognitive differences that lead to autism, we notice most strongly that they are having trouble being a normal talking tribal ape.

But the effects of autism are visible outside of social interaction too, with repetitive behaviors, intense focused interests, trouble with adapting to change, rigidity in lifestyle, etc.

>>jeltz+Eg1
The default mode network is so active that there is little bandwidth remaining for processing sensory input.