ACX
What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?
Scott Alexander suggests that studying human fetishes could provide insights into AI alignment challenges, particularly regarding generalization and interpretability.
18 min read 2,767 words
A thread through the archive
autism
Essays tagged “autism”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Essays on autism
28 essaysACX
Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?
Scott Alexander investigates the unexpectedly high prevalence of joint hypermobility in transgender individuals, exploring various theories and presenting survey data on the phenomenon.
14 min read 2,112 words
ACX
Blindness, Schizophrenia, and Autism
Scott explores the puzzling relationship between congenital blindness, schizophrenia, and autism, discussing potential explanations and the need for further research.
6 min read 880 words
ACX
Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Tradeoffs And Failures
Scott Alexander examines whether psychiatric conditions result from evolutionary failures or tradeoffs, proposing that most disorders involve a combination of both.
29 min read 4,352 words
ACX
Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics
Scott Alexander examines taxometrics in psychiatry, finding that most mental health conditions are dimensional rather than categorical, and discusses the implications for diagnosis and treatment.
31 min read 4,710 words
SSC
Assortative Mating And Autism
Scott Alexander analyzes survey data to investigate whether assortative mating among highly analytical people increases autism risk in their children, finding no significant evidence for this hypothesis.
8 min read 1,147 words
SSC
Symptom, Condition, Cause
Scott Alexander argues that psychiatric diagnoses, while imperfect, are useful tools despite potentially combining multiple conditions with different causes.
9 min read 1,390 words
SSC
Autism And Intelligence: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Scott Alexander examines the paradoxical relationship between autism and intelligence, discussing genetic and environmental factors, and proposing explanatory models for the observed lower IQ in autistic individuals despite genetic links to higher intelligence.
16 min read 2,442 words
SSC
Diametrical Model Of Autism And Schizophrenia
The post explores the diametrical model of autism and schizophrenia, suggesting they represent opposite ends of a spectrum from mechanistic to mentalistic cognition.
11 min read 1,625 words
SSC
SSC Survey: Scattered Negative Results
Scott Alexander reports on weak correlations and inconclusive results from the latest SSC survey on optical illusions and visual perception.
8 min read 1,180 words
SSC
Preregistration Of Hypotheses For The SSC Survey
Scott Alexander preregisters hypotheses for the 2018 SSC Survey, planning to explore relationships between perception, cognition, personality, and demographics.
11 min read 1,690 words
SSC
Toward A Predictive Theory Of Depression
Scott proposes a speculative theory of depression as pathologically low confidence in neural predictions within the predictive processing framework, explaining how this could account for various depressive symptoms.
13 min read 1,978 words
SSC
How Do We Get Breasts Out Of Bayes Theorem?
Scott Alexander examines the conflict between predictive processing theory and evolutionary psychology claims about innate knowledge, questioning how genes could directly encode complex preferences.
8 min read 1,089 words
SSC
Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty
Scott Alexander reviews 'Surfing Uncertainty' by Andy Clark, exploring the predictive processing model of brain function and its wide-ranging explanatory power.
43 min read 6,598 words
SSC
Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?
Scott Alexander hypothesizes a link between transgender identity, optical illusions, and NMDA receptor function, based on survey data and existing research on schizophrenia and autism.
21 min read 3,120 words
SSC
Conversation Deliberately Skirts The Border Of Incomprehensibility
The post explores how neurotypical social interactions often involve indirect communication, which can be confusing for autistic individuals, and suggests that conversations may be deliberately designed to be unpredictable.
7 min read 1,076 words
SSC
Somewhat Against Psychiatric Conditions As Domestication Failure
Scott Alexander examines a theory linking autism and schizophrenia to human self-domestication, initially dismissing it before reconsidering its merits in light of Williams Syndrome.
16 min read 2,422 words
SSC
It’s Bayes All The Way Up
The post explores how Bayesian processes in the brain might explain perception and various mental disorders, linking neurotransmitters to different aspects of Bayesian reasoning.
25 min read 3,871 words
SSC
Links 6/16: Linkandescence
A links post collecting interesting stories from around the web, including scientific studies, historical oddities, media criticism, and current events, with Scott's commentary and analysis.
18 min read 2,667 words
SSC
2D:4D Ratio And Psychological Traits: Results From The LW/SSC Survey Sample
Scott Alexander analyzes 2D:4D ratio data from LW/SSC surveys, finding unexpected correlations with feminism and masculinity, despite failing to replicate basic gender differences in digit ratios.
10 min read 1,434 words
SSC
Against Against Autism Cures
Scott Alexander critiques the autism rights movement's opposition to curing autism, arguing that severe cases cause immense suffering that justifies continued research into cures.
36 min read 5,500 words
SSC
Effective Altruists: Not As Mentally Ill As You Think
The post analyzes survey data to examine if effective altruism attracts people with mental disorders, finding slightly higher rates of autism but no evidence of unusual self-hate or scrupulosity.
5 min read 711 words
SSC
More Links For October 2014
Scott shares a diverse collection of interesting links and brief commentary on topics including linguistics, science, economics, and social issues.
7 min read 1,077 words
SSC
Why No Science Of Nerds?
Scott Alexander discusses the lack of scientific research on nerds, exploring potential explanations for their distinct traits, including the possible role of testosterone.
11 min read 1,564 words
SSC
Psychotropic Base Rates: The Argument From Antibiotics
Scott explores how antibiotics and antiprotozoal drugs unexpectedly affect mental health, suggesting that random chemicals may frequently influence mental processes.
4 min read 614 words