Hey, sorry for the very delayed response. Had a paper due, which is something that has come up in this thread before so I won't say more... anyway, I hope it's not too late to add this.
Read the quote above with even just one, blurry eye and you’ll see that this mess is far more inaccurate than any simplifications I’ve done for the purposes of this discussion.
Okay, I'm going to stick my response to all your comments about the quality of the video and/or the danger a video like this poses here (so, uh, if anyone isn't interested in this part of the discussion, please skip down!):
I have no objection to you saying the video is inaccurate. I don't think I claimed it was accurate... to me, the video had a different function. Part of that is the context I was coming from, but part of it may just be how I approach blogs or vlogs in general: not for scientific accuracy, but for interesting ideas to play with. I suppose if I thoroughly disagreed with everything he said, I would be more dismissive, but for me, there was enough in there that wasn't confused nonsense that I could draw out the ideas he wanted to call into question. It 'reads' to me like an high-schooler attempting PhD-level work--not someone totally off-base but someone who doesn't have the background to support the ideas they want to argue.
Of course, I would place higher standards on myself. It might even be the case that the video would have been more influential (it's not as if this is a particularly popular video, after all) if it were either more scientifically grounded or more based in the authenticity of personal experience. However, I'm not sure if I want to hold everyone to the standard of rigor I might demand of myself or of science. In fact, I'd go so far as to say doing so would be
more dangerous than uninformed bloggers, a totalitarian externalization of my perfectionism.
I generally try to take a step back before I externalize that tendency and look at things 'sociologically'. When I do so, I see him as only one voice among many that support a general trend toward viewing autism as something that shouldn't be pathologized, which is a trend I support. There are better voices in that trend, to be sure, but what trends do is grow and gain influence. Socially speaking, the bigger your group is and the more
symbolic and social capital it has, the more people pay attention to you, whether or not your arguments hold water. Some of those people who must pay attention will, eventually, be scientists. If it were the case that science had definitively proven him wrong and he was purely spreading lies around, I might be more critical, but I don't think that's what he's trying to get at (see below for what I think that is).
In summary, the problems of interpretive judgement loom just as large in the physical sciences as they do in the social...judgement being subject to preconceptions, personal bias, conflicts of interest, matters of culture [scientific and otherwise], and many other factors that taint the research process. And it is ultimately by judgement that it is decided if the results of any experiment support a hypothesis or not.
Here I totally agree. I love that there are scientists like Anne Fausto-Sterling (somehow
Sexing the Body is available online, what? I can finally finish reading! Left my copy in the US) who actually are versed in social theory
and (in her case) biology who can do the necessary work of exposing those problems.
What I meant was that although researchers in the physical sciences always need to deal with "preconceptions, personal bias, conflicts of interest, matters of culture" and so on, the phenomena they investigate do
not. They do not study bias or culture itself. But when I said this, I was really thinking of the distinction between 'creatura' and 'pleroma', which I got from Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist-turned-psychologist who stole them from Jung to avoid the division between mind and matter, and used them for information theory and cybernetics. The distinction goes like
this:
In summary then, we will use Jung's term Pleroma as a name for that unliving world described by physics which in itself contains and makes no distinctions, though we must, of course, make distinctions in our description of it.
In contrast, we will use Creatura for that world of explanation in which the very phenomena to be described are among themselves governed and determined by difference, distinction, and information.
So when I said that social sciences have to deal with problems of meaning and interpretation that physical sciences do not, I really meant that creatura have meaning and interpretation inherent to them in a way that pleroma do not. And that includes all organisms and their evolution. However, the actual social sciences do have an additional layer of meaning and interpretation to deal with in their object of study: culture. I think that it's all these layers of meaning that create methodological problems for the social sciences, as the more they try to get 'hard, quantitative data', the more they ignore context.
Indeed, I’ve seen good firsthand evidence that the pressure of the charges you describe often motivates today’s social scientists to be more faithful to Scientific Method than their counterparts, who level accusations relatively free of similar scrutiny except among their own. The real tragedy of this antagonism is that the aforementioned pressure is what’s largely behind the “hunger” of social scientists, “to be more quantitative and reductionist.”
I couldn't agree more with your last sentence, and that is what upsets me. Perhaps here I should admit that first degree was in anthropology and linguistics, which of course use ethnography (which has its own problems, but in the opposite direction
...maybe interdisciplinarity is the way to go). I tend to think that rather than making scientists more faithful to the scientific method, the pressure from the physical sciences or others to be a 'real science' has made them blind to what would truly be more scientific in their own subject, imitating methods that are not necessarily best applied to the questions they pursue (this obviously depends somewhat on the sub-discipline). But I'd agree that psychologists and other social scientists are in general more aware of this problem than physical scientists.
There’s no denying the challenges of classifying these disorders. It’s why lines of investigation and diagnostic manuals evolve over time, if sometimes clumsily. It’s why new disorders are established, existing ones are reassessed and updated, and why old ones are sometimes discarded. ... Abnormality is decided in the sciences by numbers, first and foremost.
First, I'm not sure what you mean by 'decided by numbers'. The only abnormality I'm aware of that's defined statistically is IQ--two standard deviations above or below makes you abnormal. I think most would find that definition completely arbitrary, not to mention impossible to apply due to lack of any reliable quantitative measure, for other traits. I believe most abnormalities are decided by "impaired functioning," but correct me if I am wrong. Autism is one of them. You need to have clinically significant impairments in work, social life, or school to be considered autistic. Or depressed. Or any number of other things. Autism is different, however, in that you
also need to have symptoms present in the early developmental stage, a tie to biology.
Second, distinguishing specific disorders (after you've decided what constitutes abnormality in general) relates to what I said about this problem belonging to the border of philosophy and science. I thought of what it is: the problem of
natural kinds. Someone should tell the guy in the video that what he really wants to do is argue that psychological disorders are not natural kinds, as that is what it means to say that disorders are "created" rather than discovered. It's an interesting topic, bet I could come up with an answer...
I excised the relevant comment, but be assured I find nothing condescending in anything you’ve put here. I’m quite enjoying this, though I’m a bit frustrated that we can’t just discuss it in person over a good bottle of wine. I think we’d get on very well.
I'm flattered. Although currently I'm a bit of a mess, so I'd probably be intimidated to death, drink too much wine, and become a huge grouch because it messes with my medication.
(ETA: my poor attempt at a joke...)
That was your understanding, but that isn’t what he said:
Thanks for transcribing all that. Saved me from watching the stupid thing again! Anyway, my interpretation is based on the last part: "I have encountered enough people diagnosed with autism that I can now say
I know it when I see it, for the most part. But what am I seeing and identifying? It is nearly impossible to say." When he says 'thin air', he doesn't mean it doesn't exist. He means that you can't pin it down--that the symptoms that are currently used to diagnose ASD are actually symptoms of comorbids, but there is 'something' beyond those symptoms causing them that we can't quite grasp yet.
I'm still reading
The Autistic Brain, and today I came across this. I think Temple Grandin has a lot clearer statement (no surprise there) of the problem with the current symptoms:
Researchers might not trust self-reports, but to my mind these quotations [referring to self-descriptions of sensory sensitivities] are an invaluable resource, not just for the information they contain but for the larger lesson: If you want to know what the symptoms of autism mean, you have to go beyond the behavior of the autistic person and into his or her brain.
But wait. Isn't the diagnosis of autism based on behaviors? Isn't our whole approach to autism a result of what the experience looks like from the outside (the acting self) rather than what the experience feels like from the inside (the thinking self)?
Yes. Which is why I believe the time has come to rethink the autistic brain.
(This is after several pages describing how symptoms, especially of nonverbal autistics, have been misunderstood and miscategorized by observers, e.g. behavior that is the result of sensory overload being interpreted as "underresponsive")
I said obsessive-compulsive behaviour is natural to Asperger’s. Symptomalogical overlap. There is a point of demarcation after which the severity of traits indicates a full-blown disorder, but unfortunately, that judgment is ultimately left to individual practitioners in the field.
I still think it's not just a matter of degree of severity....like the same way OCD must be ego-dystonic (felt to be intrusive and externally imposed) and OCPD must be ego-syntonic (felt to be right and part of one's self), there is a difference in kind between obsessive autistic behaviors versus true OCD. What do you think the point of demarcation is?
Our disorders are part of our identities, the same as our sex, gender idenentity, race, etc.
How can autistics honestly embrace our difference if we won’t accept that we are measurably different? That’s all “disorder” is. Difference from the norm. This lad is assigning a value judgement to the term that isn’t inherent to it. I’ve seen this issue argued here before. Why it fails resonate escapes me.
Here I disagree. First, most people with mental illnesses or physical disabilities don't see them as part of their identity in the same way autism is a part of someone's identity. This is a big reason why autistics reject the PC "person first" terminology used for physical disability and instead use terms like autist, aspie, and neurodivergent. And although I've been depressed and anxious, and now apparently have OCD, I wouldn't say any of these are part of my identity in the same way. They're a part of my experience, and my inclination toward them--perhaps a critical mind, etc.--is part of my identity, but being an aspie or a woman or bisexual or other aspects of my personality are more core to my sense of self and less something I endure. That said, I admit this is a hard distinction to make, at least in my own case, as I have had lifelong mental health issues and can't ever remember
not having them. I guess I'd say the struggle is a part of me.
Second, the DSM or ICD is not simply a catalog of 'differences', or they wouldn't have taken homosexuality out. It's a catalog of psychological conditions in need of treatment. It's a
medical manual. If an abnormality goes in it, the value judgment assigned to it is 'illness'.
The science isn’t wrong, it’s incomplete. Most all scientists acknowledge this.
Science is fallible. Therefore, sometimes it is wrong. This is part of the nature of science and why we aim to have falsifiable theories--so that they can be proven wrong.