The day Autism become "curable" is a day I dread.

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See, that's where I start to veer off from the mainstream, I think. I have a hard time accepting that Autism is a single unified disorder. From everything I've read, lived and seen/heard it's a fairly large number of individual traits/abilities. And each one falls on the atypical end of a spectrum or bell curve. The end that neurotypical, socially-typical people have deemed "deficient". Although those traits all get lumped together in to the stereotype of someone on the spectrum, they vary greatly among people who've been diagnosed. But here's the catch, or difference: if you remove all of those comorbid conditions, there's nothing atypical left. As they once said about Oakland, "There's no there, there".

Psychology is never about the patient, it's always about the society. The psychiatrist isn't trying to help you, it's trying to make you a productive member of society. So yes, if you are outside the bell (top or bottom) then you have a mental disorder that must be fixed to fit right in the curve of what society wants. Last I heard hand flapping, lack of eye contact, or any other autistic issues never hurt anyone: society just doesn't like looking at it because it's different therefore it must be fixed or discarded.

Or in your language: you've got a nice 8 byte double-- that's a lot of data. Unfortunately, the api you're working with is old and crude-- it only accepts a simple unsigned int. Like a psychologist you're going to convert that double to an int so the api you're interfacing with accepts it.

I wouldn't worry about "them" finding a cure, which I too do not want. They still haven't found a cure for cancer, diabetes, HIV, or even the common cold. What I am worried about are all the quack doctors giving their snake oil cures to gullible and desperate people, mainly the parents of autistic children.

This is a polarising issue. It is easy to be too simplistic.

My take on is is ASD doesn't exist in the sense that it is a model of nature. A model which is there to map traits.

Some people on the spectrum have debilitating issues. So when people talk of cure, perhaps they need to focus on thing that a problem in that individuals life, not the whole.

I also think perhaps we sometime wear ASD on our sleeve. ASD is only part of a person not the whole identity.

I'd like to agree with you on this, but I can't. People exploit other people's biggest "weakness", they don't celebrate a person's greatest "strength". Until that concept changes society views us as no more than the worst of our diagnosis-- it becomes our identity not by choice, but because it's forced upon us.

How is that "dirt", exactly? It's already a common practice for expectant mothers to abort embryos with life-altering congenital conditions.

Yes, it'd be great if everyone could accept us for who we are, but the fact is raising a child on the spectrum comes with its own set of challenges, and not all parents are going to be up to the task.

Raising a ten year old on the spectrum, and being on the spectrum myself, I see what I put my parents through.

Don't have a kid in the first place if you are not prepared for that commitment, adopt or something if you really need a kid. Just don't murder the child.

Nobody's talking about murdering a child, we're talking about abortion.

Would you have liked to be aborted?

If X had been aborted X would never have an opinion on the matter. You raised a bogus question

When I see so many people getting up in arms about needing to protect themselves and autistics around the world from a perceived genocide, it really feels like they simply aren't understanding the human condition on this one.

Really it's the condition of all of life. Watch the animal kingdom and see how procreation and survival works as well as the tendencies of other animals of any species toward any sort of novelty within their pack. Consider what apes do even to alphas who've been crippled in a tribal war of some type. This urge to correct the genome and flush out or kill off the weak is something that echoes all the way down through nature. It's about as likely to be stopped as one is likely to stop people from having sex. About all you can do is make an effort, if you're going to take any sort of political action, to make sure it's done in as humane a manner as possible.

The other harsh reality - no one alive, or who has ever existed, is a special snowflake in the eyes of nature or the world around them. Sorry folks - you've been had if you believe that in any absolute sense. It's equally interesting when people get destroyed by happenstance or societal changes of one type or another and lots of people who get really riled up about this don't bat an eye because that person wasn't one of their particular social tribe.

If we're going to bring nature in then you're right let's get to some cold hard truth: a species that is too homogenized will eventually go extinct through disease. It's happened in our lifetime (happening right now with Tazmanian Devil's facial tumor disease).

People have no concept of balance, and that's the problem. It's the same with this constant "drive to the top", if we look at the fossil record aside from mass extinctions (which are rare and account for minimal overall extinctions) the most common form of extinction of apex predators isn't getting out competed, it's apparently eating out their own food supply and thus destroying their environment. It becomes pretty clear when you see the majority of keystone species go extinct about 100k years before the apex predator does, a half million years pass and suddenly there's a new set of keystone species and a new apex predator and the process repeats. Contrary to popular opinion, the possibility of extinction doesn't lessen when you go up the ladder, it actually increases-- unicellular organism have lasted over 3 billion years with relatively minor change, yet we've had literally 1000's of apex predators go extinct in a fraction of that time. We're following the same primal instincts that caused those other apex predators to go extinct and somehow we think we're "special snowflakes" that won't suffer the same result.

I've said this a lot, but I'll say it one more time: if you can't control your own nature, then nature will control it for you-- and nature is a very, very harsh disciplinarian.

edit: spelling.

I'm actually not so concerned about aborting fetuses with autism that never lived in the first place, I'm more concerned about all the autistics already living on Earth.

This being said, I do dread the days of 70% of unemployment and lost individuality coming in my lifetime.

It might sound a little breezy but I think I can paraphrase what annoys me with this thread: as long as there's suffering in the world there will be plenty of people who'll organize their lives by labeling another tribe morlocks of one kind or another.

I agree that we're on our way to stripping ourselves out of environment, have too much of a Smiths have to outdo the Jones or hang their heads in shame sort of ethic (this is of course competition in our social darwinist structure - one of our more pervasive litmus tests on who has the right to procreate and who doesn't) and nature is set to drive the whole human race off of a cliff based on the impulses we have. Other top-tier predators don't get in quite as much trouble as we do because they don't have the technology we have that deeply effects everything around us based on secondary and tertiary consequences.

Yeah, I concur-- we developed our technology well before we developed the moral institutions and social maturity to harness it properly. Humans domesticate lesser species but refuse to domesticate themselves. People here call me a misanthrope, but it's actually far from the truth. I see this species racing towards a cliff, just like a herd of buffalo, and it frustrates the hell out of me that people tend to be willfully ignorant towards it. I've been thinking a lot lately that we may just be a bridge species for the next intelligent creature to learn a lesson from-- hope it's not the case, but fear it is.