A Theory of Mind? Or A Theory of War....

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Interesting read. Her perspective explained to me why person first language is considered offensive by some, not for identity reasons, but for the dehumanisation effect on those varying from the norm. That separating the person from the Autism implies that the Autism is a deficit attached to the person, when really its an inseparable part of the wiring.

The theory of mind for using person first language is to help humanise people with disabilities within the mind of wider society, an every day reminder that the person is still a person, yet the real problem still remains, prejudice coming from a normative but impaired theory of mind.

^
For me, the penny began to drop when I read "Asking whether someone thinks you’re odd gives you some idea of what you might expect when you walk into a conventional social situation........just as it’s very off-putting for a non-autistic person to hear the answer “Yes, I think you’re odd,” so it’s very off-putting for me when my husband ducks the question and keeps asking me why I’ve posed it in the first place." The EQ test has a built-in, undeclared assumption that the autistic perspective is plain wrong (see for example Simon's EQ test questions 28 and 34). Answer it from our perspective, you lose points and you're deemed to have impaired empathy. It took me ages to see that. I've felt that kind of thing all my life, but couldn't put it into words before.

So true. In any field of enquiry, the answers you get depends on the questions you ask, and equally the questions that you don't ask, and who is controlling the process and imposing their analysis of it. Question-type research is heavily laden with unseen assumptions which confine and bias the scope of answers, and the limitations of self-knowledge in both asker and responder are yet another factor.

Baron-Cohen resists these kinds of academic scrutiny of his findings with a vehemence, which to me is always something of a warning sign of hidden agendas or other hidden biasing factors. He has striven hard to make his narrative of autism a dominant discourse, and to and for whose advantage is the over-riding question there.

As someone who gets very (!) preoccupied, at times, I am respectfully wondering what the author was doing, outwardly, when speaking to God, which gets him forced into a psych ward.

I read SBC's work a long time ago. I found it intriguing, like any cognitive science and especially one that tries to describe human variations in personality, behavior, interests, perception, and talents. But there were a few weaknesses that I heard about over the years:

1) Gender essentialism. There are actually a lot of studies that question the idea that the majority of sex differences in interests, talents, personality, and behavior are really biological. And they're not just being PC, they just used different methods, for example, telling people to imagine being the opposite gender before taking a test where gender differences usually show up. Also, gender socialization begins at birth, or perhaps now at 4.5 months' gestation thanks to ultrasound.

2) The EQ and SQ tests seemed to be stereotypes of extrovert and female interests mixed together and male interests, respectively. I scored very low on EQ the first time I took the test (I was more shy/insecure then) and in between the typical male and female scores on the SQ, even though I'm a science buff and all. They mostly asked questions about sports and machines and stuff...not very nerd-friendly! (On the AQ test, I scored low 20s, I think, high-NT/borderline.)

3) Most empathy research I read about later in the context of autism distinguishes cognitive empathy, or the ability to guess what someone is thinking and how they would react to things, from emotive empathy, or the ability to perceive and feel (copy) another person's feelings in real time. Only the former, this more elaborate research says, is impaired in autistic people. That the latter is not impaired makes sense, not only on the basis that autistic people can be very kind and good people, but also that the classic traits of echolalia and echopraxia imply that they're often quite good at perceiving and copying the behavior of others. There's no reason to expect others' emotional states to be an exception to this. Also, autistic people aren't the only ones with empathy impairments: sociopaths lack emotive but not cognitive empathy (hence their ability to "con" people: they know what others think but don't feel and thus don't care what others feel), and narcissists are sometimes claimed to be poor in both (like small neurotypical children). Those who are weak in emotive empathy are scarier than those who are merely weak in cognitive empathy.

I believe that empathetic understanding of others greatly increases over time and life experience. This is true of me, nearing the end of my seventh decade. All those years of witnessing the many forms of human distress, arising from so many different circumstances, hearing so many life stories, closely observing the life experiences/narratives of my family, friends, people in all walks of life, the perspectives of different novelists, my own experiences of tragic and traumatic losses, experiencing the grief of others as they undergo significant losses, observing my own experiences of intense pain from the inside out - I learned from these how much, and how greatly people (and animals) can and do suffer, and that expanded my capacity to respond to others with increasing empathy. I was always ultra sensitive to the suffering of animals, even as a child; many on the spectrum seem to share that capacity.

So if my theory has some truth - and we all learn over time, we all tend to do better when we know better - then we have a bit of a problem with the lack-of-empathy theory of autism, because the samples on which the research tends to be based exclude older people. The voices and perspectives of those in the second half of life are almost always either completely missing or so under-represented that they are ignored altogether, not even acknowledged in the research as absent voices and subjects.

In social science we are taught at an early stage that if sampling methodology is flawed, anything we do and find at later stages of an experimental study (especially a questionnaire survey type of study) will be flawed, and the matching of theory with findings will not be valid. Making "facts" fit a theory can be done at every stage of research, though the age bias-by-omission is particularly stark in all kinds of autism research and ignored by nearly all of the researchers in their discussion of the results they obtain. Remember too, that most autism research has used male samples..

Yes, there is also that fourth weakness: most autism research done by NT researchers is on children, a good 3/4 of them (or more) boys, because those are the ones with the diagnosis. Cognitive empathy and emotive empathy can both be improved over time, in people on and off the autistic spectrum. Most stuff I've read about autism by autistic adults puts a lot of emphasis on sensory and perceptive issues, to the point where it sounds like they could be largely responsible for missing social cues that are needed to pass (cognitive) empathy tests designed by non-autistic researchers.

I was thinking today about that cartoon that shows a researcher addressing a line up of different animals beside a tree. He explains that they will all be given equal opportunity to complete the set task, to keep things even and fair. The task is to climb the tree, and from memory the bemused animals include an elephant, a monkey, a fish..

I always think of this when I recall the test Baron-Cohen designed for autistic adults: the reading-meaning-from-looking-into-the-eyes-of-other-people eye-reading test. I can hardly think of a less fitting design for a population in which a significant proportion of people have trouble with making (or are avoidant of) eye contact. It is entirely unsuitable. He claimed it proved our incapacity according to his theory. What it proved was his inherent bias, on a scale that should have caused (but did not) an uproar of protest from the scientific community.

There are other reasons that it is scandalous that Baron-Cohen has been allowed to get away with this scam IMO. Presumably he knows - or should know, if he does not, according himself status as an expert knower of autism - the alexithymic difficulties also affect people on the ASD spectrum: for those who don't know what this is, it's a difficulty linking a name or word with an emotional state. So SBC asks autistic people to do this by staring at the eyes of strangers. Their answers are then taken as the basis for his conclusions! Isn't the absurdity of this obvious?
To SBC, this "proves" that his theory of mind deficit applies to ASD adults as well as children. To me it proves that he is either mendacious or self-deluding.

Have to admit I don't really get all the animosity directed at SBC, what he says makes sense to me, and his methods seem sound as well.

I can only speculate from my own observations (and these remarks are nothing more) but it seems that people tend to delude themselves that autism is not a disability but is instead some kind of "human 2.0", and that people dislike SBC because he says things people maybe don't want to hear, he discuss the downsides of autism and its negative effects, but it's a disability....be real, he is just doing his job as a scientist. You might not like it, but it's the reality.

People tend to not understand that a lot of what he says relates to children mostly as it is a developmental disorder so best diagnosed in children, they also commonly attack him by twisting what he says into a straw man argument "SBC says autistic people have no empathy", "SBC says that women can't be autistic as you need a male brain" and other such things. Or they attack his methods when they are perfectly sound methods, the guy is a Cambridge Professor, I think he knows what he is doing. Don't shoot the messenger, as they say.