Quote from: RPGPundit;281637Its called common sense.

What is called common sense, exactly? Your assumption that people think like you? That your piss poor understanding of these disorders is prejudiced and offensive?

QuoteIf someone were to claim that the rates of cancer had gone up SIXTEENFOLD in the last two decades, it would be a sign of some kind of apocalyptic crisis.If the rates of psychosis were to have gone up sixteen times the rate they were 20 years ago, that would indicate a civilization on the verge of collapse.  

What does cancer and psychosis have to do with autism? That line of argument is based on straw man logic (and i use the term logic advisedly).

QuoteNow, you can imagine this is the case with autism, but in that case it would be time to go apeshit, move into the woods, stock up on the AK-47s and live off of berries and racoon dung or something while waiting for the End Times to begin.

Do yourself a favour and stop writing this rubbish.

Very good news, Pundit. But I'll let you guys get back to the flamewar.

Your desire to constantly show up in threads in Fritzs-like fashion to blindly bleat out the opposite of whatever you think I said is becoming tiresome, Whistler.

Its not a straw man to argue that if a disease increases sixteenfold in 20 years it would indicate an epidemic of disastrous proportions which would need to have some kind of major catastrophic cause behind it.

RPGPundit

Quote from: jhkim;281639So, just to confirm, your logic is that because this would be a major epidemic, that therefore it doesn't exist?

My logic is that if anyone (outside of the insane anti-vaccine new age hippie freaks) believed that there really was an epidemic explosion of autism cases, our entire society would be going apeshit about it, trying to find its causes, panicking about its significance, etc.  This leads me to the conclusion that even the medical community doesn't buy the idea that there are sixteen times more autistics in the U.S. than there were in 1989.

Of the two possibilities (one: there's a HUGE epidemic spreading out of control in our society that no one has happened to notice; or two: that autism is now being massively overdiagnosed and misdiagnosed) in the absence of hard evidence for the pandemic theory, I will be more inclined to accept the more plausible theory, which is that pop-psychologists, new-age "therapists" and the medical and pharmaceutical communities have jumped on Autism as the latest "fad" disease, the ADHD/Chronic Fatigue/femenine-hysteria/"vapours"/
repressed-memory-syndrome of this decade.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;281660Its not a straw man to argue that if a disease increases sixteenfold in 20 years it would indicate an epidemic of disastrous proportions which would need to have some kind of major catastrophic cause behind it.

Or it's just better detection/diagnosis techniques.

Quote from: RPGPundit;281662My logic is that if anyone (outside of the insane anti-vaccine new age hippie freaks) believed that there really was an epidemic explosion of autism cases, our entire society would be going apeshit about it, trying to find its causes, panicking about its significance, etc.  This leads me to the conclusion that even the medical community doesn't buy the idea that there are sixteen times more autistics in the U.S. than there were in 1989.

Of the two possibilities (one: there's a HUGE epidemic spreading out of control in our society that no one has happened to notice; or two: that autism is now being massively overdiagnosed and misdiagnosed) in the absence of hard evidence for the pandemic theory, I will be more inclined to accept the more plausible theory, which is that pop-psychologists, new-age "therapists" and the medical and pharmaceutical communities have jumped on Autism as the latest "fad" disease, the ADHD/Chronic Fatigue/femenine-hysteria/"vapours"/
repressed-memory-syndrome of this decade.

You failed at logic. You are presenting a false dilemma as there certainly are more than the two possibilities you asert.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/faq_prevalence.htm

Quote from: CavScout;281668You failed at logic. You are presenting a false dilemma as there certainly are more than the two possibilities you asert.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/faq_prevalence.htm

That is interesting. They give an enormous range up to 1 in 500 prevalence.

Quote from: CavScout;281664Or it's just better detection/diagnosis techniques.

If you're suggesting that autism is so subtle that 20 years ago there were 2.3 million people in the U.S. alone who had autism but everyone just dad-gum didn't notice at the time, it would lead one to think that there really isn't any coherent diagnostic definition of autism to speak of. A "developmental" disease where 94% of the population affected by it could pass un-noticed (even back in the dark stone ages of the late 80s, when we'd barely just developed fire, and the wheel, and we all knows doctors still healed by making sacrifices to the spirits of our ancestors), isn't very much of a "disability" then, is it?

I think if you believe that autism is a real disease, and I do, you need to have diagnostic criteria that would make it pretty hard to fucking miss the fact that something is wrong with the person affected aside from them just being "odd" or "anti-social".  If the latter two are the only good definition of "autism" then you've turned autism into a joke-disease.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;281677If you're suggesting that autism is so subtle that 20 years ago there were 2.3 million people in the U.S. alone who had autism but everyone just dad-gum didn't notice at the time, it would lead one to think that there really isn't any coherent diagnostic definition of autism to speak of.

I'll go with the CDC on this one. You can't seem to graps the difference between "incidence" and "prevalence".

That you're to fucking stupid to know when to stop will keep the thread interesting at least.

Quote from: CavScout;281679I'll go with the CDC on this one. You can't seem to graps the difference between “incidence” and “prevalence”.

That you're to fucking stupid to know when to stop will keep the thread interesting at least.

You forgot a letter 'o' while calling someone else stupid.

In general, Pundit is right in that it IS a strange statistical jump.


- Ed C.

Its not just me.  Leading experts on autism have gone on record warning about rampant misdiagnosis, pointing out that this can lead to irreparable harm for the children falsely diagnosed as well as being harmful to those children and their families who have to genuinely deal with autism.

And its mostly happening in the same place the ADHD-craze happened 10 years ago: the school. Parents have gone public on occasions with having been pressured to allow their child to be diagnosed as being on the "autistic spectrum" in order to allow the school to get more special-needs funding, in exchange for their kid getting speech therapy or something like that, because they can get funding for autism that they couldn't get if the kid only has a speech impediment.

And of course, its the "autism spectrum" that's the problem. Clearly, there is a real spectrum of low-functioning to high-functioning autistics; but when you have diluted and expanded the spectrum (as pop-psychologists and social workers and school administrators have) to define things as vague as "excessive interest in a single subject", "speech impediments" or "poor motor skills" as meaning a child is in the "spectrum", you've loosened the definition of the term to the point of absurdity.

Now you have some of these same social-engineers suggesting that EVERY SINGLE CHILD in america should be tested for autism before the age of 2 (an age so young, BTW, that its often too young to correctly or adequately diagnose autism!).  Why? For money. Because the more kids they can define as autistic, the more critical they can make the statistics seem, the more parents they can freak out thinking that little bobby is autistic because he skins his knees a lot or little janey is autistic because she really likes ponies or little tommy is autistic because he doesn't want to take baths; and the more freaked out parents and bloated statistics they can provide, the more money they can get the government and others to throw at them.

I mean shit, if I expanded the "blindness spectrum" to include everyone who wears glasses, or the "albino spectrum" to include everyone with light skin colour, or the "paraplegic spectrum" to include everyone with a limp, we'd be facing global pandemics of those as well.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Koltar;281684You forgot a letter 'o' while calling someone else stupid.

In general, Pundit is right in that it IS a strange statistical jump.

Never pegged you for a cocksucker. But here you are slurping away.

Quote from: RPGPundit;281660Your desire to constantly show up in threads in Fritzs-like fashion to blindly bleat out the opposite of whatever you think I said is becoming tiresome, Whistler.

Its not a straw man to argue that if a disease increases sixteenfold in 20 years it would indicate an epidemic of disastrous proportions which would need to have some kind of major catastrophic cause behind it.

RPGPundit

It isn't a case of 'whatever you think i said'; it is what you actually said. Unless you are now going to claim i have misquoted you. That's not how the quote function works.

There is nothing blind about opposing your wilful igorance here; if you don't like it then don't start talking such utter nonsense about something as sensitive as autism. Something you know nothing about at all.

As for the second point: disingenuous rubbish. Autism isn't like the conditions you mentioned and so your argument is made of straw.

Quote from: RPGPundit;281685Its not just me.  Leading experts on autism have gone on record warning about rampant misdiagnosis, pointing out that this can lead to irreparable harm for the children falsely diagnosed as well as being harmful to those children and their families who have to genuinely deal with autism.

Evidence please.

Anything can be misdiagnosed ffs.

QuoteAnd its mostly happening in the same place the ADHD-craze happened 10 years ago: the school.

It's a real condition.

I know 2 adults who were diagnosed with ADHD. Neither has any trouble with inattention or hyperactivity.  Without those the criteria for diagnosis seems to be "impulsive"... which sounds more like a character trait that a disorder or "impairment" (according to Wikipedia).  I'm not saying ADHD isn't real... but I know that people have been labeled with it that honestly shouldn't have been. I think stats on ADHD are highly inflated.

I've also known a few people with children that have autism (the serious sort), and also people who say they have aspergers (some very believably... some, not so much).  I don't think stats on people living with serious autism should be lumped in with people who (may or may not) have mild aspergers.