OCD obsessions and ASD executive dysfunction do look kind of similar, if you don't know anything about either. Gastroenteritis and bulemia both involve throwing up, so they're the same thing, right?
Maybe I should ask if you actually know what Impostor Syndrome is before indulging your Reading Comprehension failure any more.
It's not a strawman, it's barely even paraphrasing many of the comments on this very post.
Impostor's Syndrome is not a medical disorder indeed. Well spotted. You get a gold star. But from my point of view, it's something I've heard that other people don't have. It's really common amongst Autists and Aspies.
Obsessive-Compulsive disorder is the compulsion to enact non-functional rituals. That is not the same thing as being aware that you don't notice that you're hungry, and getting into the habit of eating a hamburger at 8:00 on Tuesdays because that's hamburger time and if you don't do that then you won't get around to eating at all.
It's almost like you haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about, but you read something on reddit once, and you'e an expert now.
"Some are just assholes", indeed. Congratulations: you're one of the trolls I was talking about.
Compare "at times" with all the time. Like, clinical depression "all the time." Compare "like order and regimen" with being unable to function if anything changes. Compare "put on a brave face and do things they don't want to do" (like go to a job that sucks) with "put on a brave face and go work at a job you love, with people you like, but the effort to deal with people at all exhausts you."
Here's a newsflash for you: you do not know what you're talking about. And you're part of the problem.
I know the trolls are lining up to post "Ass-burgers is fake anyway, I met an Ass-pie once, and he was fine."
So let me say this first: If you've met an Aspie and dismissed the condition because that person "seemed fine", then please consider that what you didn't see was the countless hours of practice and stress and anxiety of being able to pretend to be that way; the habitual exhaustion from the effort of doing so; the depression and abysmal self-esteem from never, never understanding the people around you or being able to tell whether people actually like you or not. The years of teasing and abuse, the subsequent years of retrospectively realising all the other things which were teasing and abuse at the time but we couldn't tell at the time. The incessant Impostor's Syndrome, which only gets worse the higher you rise -- if you can move forward in your career. Who speak nineteen languages, but get scurvy because they forget to eat. No, seriously: people whose executive dysfunction requires the scheduling of bathing and eating, or else a rigid routine, where even slight interruptions can trigger a panic attack. The meltdowns and fear and frustration and despair.
And you don't see the ones who don't "seem fine". Who weren't as fortunate as those of us who got a series of lucky breaks and have been able to work around our disabilities and take advantage of our strengths. The ones who killed themselves in despair or ended up on the streets or were institutionalised or are housebound on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.
The DSMV changes to the Autism Spectrum diagnoses have been widely stated by the people writing them to be for the purpose of excluding people from being diagnosed on the spectrum. Because when people started actually looking at how many people had an ASD, it turns out to be much more than anyone thought.
Obviously it can't be because so many people were swept under the carpet for all those years, so it must be a problem with the definition. Hey, if we change the definition of Cancer to exclude any condition of the skin, that means that all those people with melanomas must be cured, right?
A lot of what you're describing happens to a huge segment of the population at times.
I understand that most people have moments of getting a conversation stuck in their head, of stressing out in a crowd, of getting frustrated at nothing because you're tired.
There is a huge gap between that and being unable to restrain your temper because your morning routine is different. Of having to restrain your urge to flee (I mean straight up pounding heart and racing mind and flinching at all movement and being able to think of nothing other than getting from here to the exit by whatever means possible) from any average shopping center. Of having conversations running through your head that you won't have: will never have, but you can't stop rehearsing what you would say anyway, while finding yourself utterly unable to figure out what to say when someone unexpectedly surprises you with "hello".
I'm high functioning, as Aspies go. And yet a shopping center will reliably send me into a panic. I can't follow one conversation in a quiet room reliably, let alone in a noisy environment. I get completely thrown when I can't have my coffee in the morning in the proper routine, and it puts me off for the rest of the day, or longer. For some people any of this can happen if they're tired or low or having a bad day. For me this is every day. When things are going well, then the trolley moves smoothly enough on the rails. But it doesn't take much to derail completely, where most people are driving something far more all-terrain.
It's not just "occasional social awkwardness". There's much more going on that most people don't see. And it takes a lot of work to make it so that you don't see it.
If you'd RTFComment below, it expands on this quickly thrown out line, to say that what I describe above is the normal problem for accounting of Autism Numbers, and does not apply to the CDC study.
Which is to say, you're right, but neither this study nor its reporting is typical of the norm behind "ONOZ Autism Epidemic" hysteria.
"barely noticeable in everyday conversation to an untrained observer"
Whereas a trained observer may be able to spot it as they walk in the door, and it may be obvious to anyone given extended interaction (socially, professionally, family, whatever).
And in everyday conversation, people see the best behaviour, the greatest effort to pass as Like Everyone Else. They don't, as a rule, see the anxiety attacks, the stimming, the meltdowns and shutdowns, the continual gnawing fear that you're doing it all wrong and no-one will tell you, the desperate desire to go hide somewhere quiet and dark and alone, the continual rehearsing of social interactions in your head.
Just because you can't tell an Aspie when you pass one on the street, that doesn't mean they aren't suffering from it.
All too many reports, however, don't discriminate across age clades, and just count up total Autists, if they specify at all. And they detect massive rises in Autism diagnoses since <whenever>, and you can't tell if adult diagnoses are skewing the results or not.
In this case, that they've accounted for the improvements in diagnosis rates is a positive sign... although I wonder how that "50%" number was arrived at:
However Roithmayr [president of the research and advocacy group Autism Speaks] noted that better and broader diagnosis and higher awareness accounted for only a half of the rise in autism rates, and that the most recent numbers show that there is an autism epidemic in the United States that needs to be addressed.
A lot of Autists simply don't trust Autism Speaks. Most of its money goes to advertising and research into eliminating Autism (which Autists interpret as eliminating the possibility of people like us in the future, at the expense of research into treatments for the disabling symptoms of Autism for people who exist now). There is only one Autist on any of its boards (being John Elder Robison on the Research board, where he is outnumbered fourty-nine to one), and they have produced videos where people talk about killing themselves and their Autistic child and that they only didn't because of the "normal" child at home, in front of that Autistic child. (Just because they may not be able to speak normally doesn't mean they can't understand what you're saying.) Autism Speaks tend, as far as we can see, to be advocating for the parents, not the autistic children (which isn't a problem per se, except that they misrepresent themselves as speaking for the Autists themselves, something which is overwhelmingly not true), and advocating for more resources based on a campaign of fear and loathing of the worst case scenario, and misrepresenting it as the typical case. It would be entirely in character for Autism Speaks to underplay the role of improved diagnosis and overplay the "OMFG EPIDEMIC!!1!", as this plays right into their story of Autism being this Thing which will steal your child in the night and you need to give money to Autism Speaks if you want your child back.
That's not to say it's necessarily wrong, but I do not trust that unsupported statement from that source.
It's console based, but it's fairly powerful for that. Once you learn the navigation keys (and there's a help window at the bottom of the screen), then you can walk up and down your family tree with ease. It reads in GEDCOM, allows you to edit those records as GEDCOM (so you have a lot -- perhaps too much -- freedom in record structure and normalisation), and it exports in GEDCOM as well, as well as a scripting language which allows for all sorts of reports and outputs. You can even tell it to keep records in UTF8.
It is a record/database manipulation program: you will need to gather your data yourself, and enter it by hand. While the actual entry process is tedious (which, to be frank, will always be the case, flashy GUI or not), it is a good opportunity to go over the data and discover incongruities and patterns.)
Depends. There's some confusion, now. There's a big IBM system being commissioned below me in Queensberry st, but I've just been told that it's for different things, and that this announcement might be for another, different, new IBM installation.
I used to be in CSSE, but I'm seconded to ITS right now. (That should be enough to identify me uniquely to those in the right circles...)
As for CSSE moving... that's been on-again-off-again for years, but last I heard it's definitely on-again. With deadlines and everything.
It is not a blindness of the eyes, it is a blindness of the brain. I cannot visualise faces. None. I cannot describe to you my own wife's face, nor those of my children. I can recognise them, but that is handled in a different part of the brain.
It is just as real, just as organic, as colour blindness.
"Auditory Processing Deficit".
I cannot filter multiple sound sources properly. The Cocktail Party Effect does not exist for me. It is not a deafness of the ears, it is a deafness of the brain.
And it is just as real, just as organic, as tinnitus.
Every man and every woman is a star... but stars are yet of the universe, and each star is in orbit around other stars.
While I am the master who makes the grass green, my head is not so big as to carry rocks inside it.
I am not my body, or my brain. But I am of them. And this is not a mere function of ‘personality’. My brain works differently from yours. You can perceive things which I cannot. It is that simple. You may as well tell me to see in gamma rays as to be able to notice subtle emotions on another's face.
Change is easy -- when you are physically capable of doing so. I can not think like you, but I can learn to look like I do. Which I have done, but it is not a matter of ‘changing’ my personality, but of hiding those things I cannot do.
So you are an Ásatrúar. In what manifestation then, do you see Óðinn? Is He the Blood God, harsh and demanding of sacrifice, or is He the One-eyed, questing for knowledge and wisdom? Because from your exchange here, Huginn and Muninn would blunt their beaks trying to penetrate your skull.
You do not understand Asperger's, or people with it. You think you do, but you are wrong.
I assume, then, that the face blindness is also a choice. Or the Social Anxiety (I know full well that there is nothing to worry about intellectually, but that doesn't stop my body having a panic reaction.) Or the Auditory Processing issues. Or, or, or...
Asperger's is a real condition, with real consequences. Those consequences can sometimes be mitigated, with practice and training, but those are workarounds: we really do not think in the same way that you do, we do not react in the same way that you do, even if we have learned to pass as NT.
It is a constraint on our behaviour, just as being male (I presume) is a constraint on yours. Unless you are a practising Thelemite, in which case you might have the first vaguest foggy glimmer of how hard it is to willingly change an innate trait.
Go ahead, tell a gay man that it's just a matter of willpower, and he can be straight if he really really tries.
And I hope that your obvious ignorance never comes back to bite you. Who am I kidding: you're NT, and have the privilege of being able to demand that I act like you, and feel like you're simply being reasonable. You have the privilege of being normal... so shut the fuck up about what it's like to not be normal, 'k?
How many other kids do you think tried that sort of thing, and got seven kinds of shit beaten out of them? And then got it worse afterwards for daring to stand up?
What happens when you get someone who is willing to risk an elbow to the throat? And/or is simply better than you at head-kicking?
How about you try to think of a way of addressing this problem which doesn't hold the victim responsible for their own victimisation?
Knowing the reason for something is not the same as using it as an excuse. Knowing where one has deficits is not the same as not having a reason to find workarounds, or to work on improvement. Having Asperger's does not make one a robot, without willpower, discipline or a drive to improve.
TL;DR: Fuck you. And fuck you if you think that spending my childhood being bullied has made me a victim.
Slashdot Mirror
I created nothing, I wasn't even pre-empting.
OCD obsessions and ASD executive dysfunction do look kind of similar, if you don't know anything about either. Gastroenteritis and bulemia both involve throwing up, so they're the same thing, right?
Maybe I should ask if you actually know what Impostor Syndrome is before indulging your Reading Comprehension failure any more.
It's not a strawman, it's barely even paraphrasing many of the comments on this very post.
Impostor's Syndrome is not a medical disorder indeed. Well spotted. You get a gold star. But from my point of view, it's something I've heard that other people don't have. It's really common amongst Autists and Aspies.
Obsessive-Compulsive disorder is the compulsion to enact non-functional rituals. That is not the same thing as being aware that you don't notice that you're hungry, and getting into the habit of eating a hamburger at 8:00 on Tuesdays because that's hamburger time and if you don't do that then you won't get around to eating at all.
It's almost like you haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about, but you read something on reddit once, and you'e an expert now.
"Some are just assholes", indeed. Congratulations: you're one of the trolls I was talking about.
Compare "at times" with all the time. Like, clinical depression "all the time."
Compare "like order and regimen" with being unable to function if anything changes.
Compare "put on a brave face and do things they don't want to do" (like go to a job that sucks) with "put on a brave face and go work at a job you love, with people you like, but the effort to deal with people at all exhausts you."
Here's a newsflash for you: you do not know what you're talking about. And you're part of the problem.
I know the trolls are lining up to post "Ass-burgers is fake anyway, I met an Ass-pie once, and he was fine."
So let me say this first: If you've met an Aspie and dismissed the condition because that person "seemed fine", then please consider that what you didn't see was the countless hours of practice and stress and anxiety of being able to pretend to be that way; the habitual exhaustion from the effort of doing so; the depression and abysmal self-esteem from never, never understanding the people around you or being able to tell whether people actually like you or not. The years of teasing and abuse, the subsequent years of retrospectively realising all the other things which were teasing and abuse at the time but we couldn't tell at the time. The incessant Impostor's Syndrome, which only gets worse the higher you rise -- if you can move forward in your career. Who speak nineteen languages, but get scurvy because they forget to eat. No, seriously: people whose executive dysfunction requires the scheduling of bathing and eating, or else a rigid routine, where even slight interruptions can trigger a panic attack. The meltdowns and fear and frustration and despair.
And you don't see the ones who don't "seem fine". Who weren't as fortunate as those of us who got a series of lucky breaks and have been able to work around our disabilities and take advantage of our strengths. The ones who killed themselves in despair or ended up on the streets or were institutionalised or are housebound on antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.
The DSMV changes to the Autism Spectrum diagnoses have been widely stated by the people writing them to be for the purpose of excluding people from being diagnosed on the spectrum. Because when people started actually looking at how many people had an ASD, it turns out to be much more than anyone thought.
Obviously it can't be because so many people were swept under the carpet for all those years, so it must be a problem with the definition. Hey, if we change the definition of Cancer to exclude any condition of the skin, that means that all those people with melanomas must be cured, right?
I understand that most people have moments of getting a conversation stuck in their head, of stressing out in a crowd, of getting frustrated at nothing because you're tired.
There is a huge gap between that and being unable to restrain your temper because your morning routine is different. Of having to restrain your urge to flee (I mean straight up pounding heart and racing mind and flinching at all movement and being able to think of nothing other than getting from here to the exit by whatever means possible) from any average shopping center. Of having conversations running through your head that you won't have: will never have, but you can't stop rehearsing what you would say anyway, while finding yourself utterly unable to figure out what to say when someone unexpectedly surprises you with "hello".
I'm high functioning, as Aspies go. And yet a shopping center will reliably send me into a panic. I can't follow one conversation in a quiet room reliably, let alone in a noisy environment. I get completely thrown when I can't have my coffee in the morning in the proper routine, and it puts me off for the rest of the day, or longer. For some people any of this can happen if they're tired or low or having a bad day. For me this is every day. When things are going well, then the trolley moves smoothly enough on the rails. But it doesn't take much to derail completely, where most people are driving something far more all-terrain.
It's not just "occasional social awkwardness". There's much more going on that most people don't see. And it takes a lot of work to make it so that you don't see it.
If you'd RTFComment below, it expands on this quickly thrown out line, to say that what I describe above is the normal problem for accounting of Autism Numbers, and does not apply to the CDC study.
Which is to say, you're right, but neither this study nor its reporting is typical of the norm behind "ONOZ Autism Epidemic" hysteria.
Whereas a trained observer may be able to spot it as they walk in the door, and it may be obvious to anyone given extended interaction (socially, professionally, family, whatever).
And in everyday conversation, people see the best behaviour, the greatest effort to pass as Like Everyone Else. They don't, as a rule, see the anxiety attacks, the stimming, the meltdowns and shutdowns, the continual gnawing fear that you're doing it all wrong and no-one will tell you, the desperate desire to go hide somewhere quiet and dark and alone, the continual rehearsing of social interactions in your head.
Just because you can't tell an Aspie when you pass one on the street, that doesn't mean they aren't suffering from it.
Trust me on this.
Which is a fair point, in this study.
All too many reports, however, don't discriminate across age clades, and just count up total Autists, if they specify at all. And they detect massive rises in Autism diagnoses since <whenever>, and you can't tell if adult diagnoses are skewing the results or not.
In this case, that they've accounted for the improvements in diagnosis rates is a positive sign... although I wonder how that "50%" number was arrived at:
A lot of Autists simply don't trust Autism Speaks. Most of its money goes to advertising and research into eliminating Autism (which Autists interpret as eliminating the possibility of people like us in the future, at the expense of research into treatments for the disabling symptoms of Autism for people who exist now). There is only one Autist on any of its boards (being John Elder Robison on the Research board, where he is outnumbered fourty-nine to one), and they have produced videos where people talk about killing themselves and their Autistic child and that they only didn't because of the "normal" child at home, in front of that Autistic child. (Just because they may not be able to speak normally doesn't mean they can't understand what you're saying.) Autism Speaks tend, as far as we can see, to be advocating for the parents, not the autistic children (which isn't a problem per se, except that they misrepresent themselves as speaking for the Autists themselves, something which is overwhelmingly not true), and advocating for more resources based on a campaign of fear and loathing of the worst case scenario, and misrepresenting it as the typical case. It would be entirely in character for Autism Speaks to underplay the role of improved diagnosis and overplay the "OMFG EPIDEMIC!!1!", as this plays right into their story of Autism being this Thing which will steal your child in the night and you need to give money to Autism Speaks if you want your child back.
That's not to say it's necessarily wrong, but I do not trust that unsupported statement from that source.
This is an important point to remember.
As an example: I was diagnosed with Asperger's in 2010 at the age of 37. Do I count in the statistics of 2010, or 1973?
There, I corrected that for you.
Lifelines
It's console based, but it's fairly powerful for that. Once you learn the navigation keys (and there's a help window at the bottom of the screen), then you can walk up and down your family tree with ease. It reads in GEDCOM, allows you to edit those records as GEDCOM (so you have a lot -- perhaps too much -- freedom in record structure and normalisation), and it exports in GEDCOM as well, as well as a scripting language which allows for all sorts of reports and outputs. You can even tell it to keep records in UTF8.
It is a record/database manipulation program: you will need to gather your data yourself, and enter it by hand. While the actual entry process is tedious (which, to be frank, will always be the case, flashy GUI or not), it is a good opportunity to go over the data and discover incongruities and patterns.)
I happen to be on secondment.
From EngIT. :-)
Hand down in my case. I'm NICTA.
That counts. If Unimelb EngIT does your desktop support, trust me; it counts.
Depends. There's some confusion, now. There's a big IBM system being commissioned below me in Queensberry st, but I've just been told that it's for different things, and that this announcement might be for another, different, new IBM installation.
I used to be in CSSE, but I'm seconded to ITS right now. (That should be enough to identify me uniquely to those in the right circles...)
As for CSSE moving... that's been on-again-off-again for years, but last I heard it's definitely on-again. With deadlines and everything.
OK, hands up all you Unimelb peons...
I wouldn't be surprised if the AC and I are within twenty meters of each other.
Who would have thought that sysads might read /.
Natural disasters,
Research into aggrivating seismic activity and weather control for the purposes of warfare and other disaster capitalism.
resource management,
Securing the world's dwindling supplies of foodstock, petroleum, minerals, and rare-earth metals...one disaster at a time.
life sciences and e-health
Clandestine psychological and physiological experimentation, eugenics, elimination of transients and the mentally ill.
Careful, there, mate. I think you may have put the shiny side of the tinfoil the wrong way round this morning.
You are correct, it's in the University of Melbourne.
In fact, it is about two floors directly underneath me as I type this.
"Face blindness".
It is not a blindness of the eyes, it is a blindness of the brain. I cannot visualise faces. None. I cannot describe to you my own wife's face, nor those of my children. I can recognise them, but that is handled in a different part of the brain.
It is just as real, just as organic, as colour blindness.
"Auditory Processing Deficit".
I cannot filter multiple sound sources properly. The Cocktail Party Effect does not exist for me. It is not a deafness of the ears, it is a deafness of the brain.
And it is just as real, just as organic, as tinnitus.
Every man and every woman is a star... but stars are yet of the universe, and each star is in orbit around other stars.
While I am the master who makes the grass green, my head is not so big as to carry rocks inside it.
I am not my body, or my brain. But I am of them. And this is not a mere function of ‘personality’. My brain works differently from yours. You can perceive things which I cannot. It is that simple. You may as well tell me to see in gamma rays as to be able to notice subtle emotions on another's face.
Change is easy -- when you are physically capable of doing so. I can not think like you, but I can learn to look like I do. Which I have done, but it is not a matter of ‘changing’ my personality, but of hiding those things I cannot do.
So you are an Ásatrúar. In what manifestation then, do you see Óðinn? Is He the Blood God, harsh and demanding of sacrifice, or is He the One-eyed, questing for knowledge and wisdom? Because from your exchange here, Huginn and Muninn would blunt their beaks trying to penetrate your skull.
You do not understand Asperger's, or people with it. You think you do, but you are wrong.
An explanation is not an excuse. A reason is not a license.
Some people are just arseholes. And, shock, most of those are NTs. You're doing a pretty good impersonation right now, yourself.
I assume, then, that the face blindness is also a choice. Or the Social Anxiety (I know full well that there is nothing to worry about intellectually, but that doesn't stop my body having a panic reaction.) Or the Auditory Processing issues. Or, or, or...
Asperger's is a real condition, with real consequences. Those consequences can sometimes be mitigated, with practice and training, but those are workarounds: we really do not think in the same way that you do, we do not react in the same way that you do, even if we have learned to pass as NT.
It is a constraint on our behaviour, just as being male (I presume) is a constraint on yours. Unless you are a practising Thelemite, in which case you might have the first vaguest foggy glimmer of how hard it is to willingly change an innate trait.
Go ahead, tell a gay man that it's just a matter of willpower, and he can be straight if he really really tries.
And I hope that your obvious ignorance never comes back to bite you. Who am I kidding: you're NT, and have the privilege of being able to demand that I act like you, and feel like you're simply being reasonable. You have the privilege of being normal... so shut the fuck up about what it's like to not be normal, 'k?
No, it's not. It's really really not.
Please shut up before your ignorance embarrasses yourself further.
Words of someone who got lucky.
So it worked for you. Huzzah.
How many other kids do you think tried that sort of thing, and got seven kinds of shit beaten out of them? And then got it worse afterwards for daring to stand up?
What happens when you get someone who is willing to risk an elbow to the throat? And/or is simply better than you at head-kicking?
How about you try to think of a way of addressing this problem which doesn't hold the victim responsible for their own victimisation?
PS: and fuck whoever thought this was 'insightful'.
Knowing the reason for something is not the same as using it as an excuse.
Knowing where one has deficits is not the same as not having a reason to find workarounds, or to work on improvement.
Having Asperger's does not make one a robot, without willpower, discipline or a drive to improve.
TL;DR: Fuck you. And fuck you if you think that spending my childhood being bullied has made me a victim.