Published on 12, July, 2020
We often get posts on the form asking for advice with autistic children. And I can't help but notice the requests overwhelmingly relate to low functioning autistic children. As someone who is quite high functioning and had a very disrupted and turbulent childhood I can guarantee you it's not because high functioning autistic children don't have just as many issues. Nore is it that high functioning autistic children are particularly rare. We recently had a discussion on this point in another thread and figures I dug up indicated around 40%+ of autistic children being diagnosed these days are of average or above average intelligence.
So the question I'm asking is this. Why don't those parents come looking for help? Is it because the main stream schooling and support systems are so much better at supporting high functioning children? I doubt it. Is it because they tend to think of their child’s behaviour as 'naughty' not 'autistic?' Is it maybe they don't accept or agree with their child’s diagnosis? What do you think it is?
More to the point:
Edit ps: For the simplification of this entire discussion and to avoid a long drawnout arguments over semantics. Instead of high functioning we shall say high IQ meaning an IQ of 85+ and instead of low functioning we will say low IQ meaning an IQ less than 85. As measured on a standard clinically approved IQ test.
There is no such thing as ‘low functioning’, please do not use functioning labels when speaking about fellow members of our autistic community, especially our younger neurokin. It’s dehumanising and inaccurate.
People harmfully and wrongly misconstrue some autistic people as ‘low functioning’ if they have co-occurring needs such as apraxia, learning disability or epilepsy etc. No human deserves to be defined and identified using functioning labels, our worth is not defined by how much we can contribute to society.
Please use the term ‘support needs’ instead and list what specific needs the autistic person you are talking about has.
Please read about the harm that ensues from using functioning labels to describe our autistic community:
https://www.autisticality.co.uk/functioning-labels
Support needs would be inaccurate. I’m taking about intelligence, in practical terms low vs high IQ. If you prefer we can use low IQ autism instead of low functioning.
Intelligence can be measured in many different ways, the Intelligence Quotient is not accurate or representative of all humans, particularly those who are multiply neurodivergent.
there is a statistical mean when it comes to what is quantifyable. And often (but not always) values clustor around the mean. This is definatly true for IQ tests of neurotypicals. (not so true for autistic IQ tests where you get the double hump effect)
Well by definition you can only mesure what you can messure. You have to mesure IQ by difrences that can be messured. You can't messure inteligence (or anything else) using things that can't be messured.
How does IQ work? Is it normally weighted where the average appears at one value and then you look at how you differ from the average. What sort of distribution is it?
It's literally called a normal distribution or bell curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient IQ is calibrated so that the average iq is 100 and the standard deviation is about 15 iq points. roughtly 2/3 of people have IQs between 85 and 115.
Also with the IQ test of autistic children versus ordinary children. That means it only includes the autistic children that get diagnosed, compared to the ones that don't. That might have a difference on the result.
That's fair. But since high iq is likely to make it easyer to mask it's likely those discrepencies, if they exist, are mostly present in the normal to high IQ inderviduals. Maybe there are some highly inteligent undiagnosed autistic people who test as having normal IQ because the test isn't well calibrated for them. But that doesn't really hurt my definition since I'm defining 'high iq autistic person' as someone with and IQ over 85. Which is 5/6th of the population for neurotypicals.
Peter said:ordinary children.
You mean non autistic children, there is no such thing as normal it is a societal construct.
We have lost sight of the forest for the trees. Could it be that parents of high intelligence autistics are more likely to be autistic so are less likely to ask for help? They have spent more time masking and have found ways to deal with their problems that they don't really want to confron their difference in themselves. They have grown up hearing the idea that they must try to fit in and so they might try to enforce that on their children rather then seeking out a different opinion. They are just tired of all this masking they have to do and they probably have more stuff on their plate.
I think you are right. IQ doesn't measure intelligence it measures a bunch of different factors that lead to high intelligence. Which can be useful. Bottom down thinking is extremely useful, it has created the devices we are using to communicate. It has created the modern world. But you also lose sight of the forest for the trees in the bottom up approach. The problem is it is never enough. You are always trying to break down problems into smaller and smaller parts. How much money is spent on modern physics trying to break down the universe into ever smaller components? You need a balance between the two. Bottom-up to fill in the details, but also top-down as a sanity check, to make sure you don't get lost and are on the right path.
Doesn't the fact you can't measure IQ by looking at noticeable differences feel a bit strange to you?
Also with the IQ test of autistic children versus ordinary children. That means it only includes the autistic children that get diagnosed, compared to the ones that don't. That might have a difference on the result. You might not be able to say autistic children have a different IQ then ordinary children, but only the diagnosed autistics. Does that make sense? Is that accounted for? There were a lot of strange words in the link and I found it very confusing. Shouldn't it be simpler. Can't they explain it in simple terms. I understand they are probably using it to communicate with other similar scientists who have knowledge of that but it seems so strange that research is inaccessible to anybody else.
I got a bit over the top in my previous message. Sorry.
I mean what kind of noticeable difference (based on IQ) would you like to measure? If it’s job success then that presupposes you assume that intelligent people always get good jobs which I think we both agree isn’t true?
anyway I do not think they are trying to measure autism via IQ tests in that paper. They are comparing the IQ tests of autistic children versus ordinary children.
Well the first thing I will say is that an IQ of 125 is at least one standard deviation above mean making it quite high. IQ gets less accurate to the further you get away from 100 in either direction. Once you get beyond 2 standard deviations The number becomes pretty meaningless beyond simply being very high or very low. It’s difficult to calibrate and test the reliability of IQ tests at those sorts of high and low IQ levels because there are so few people to test them on. All they really tell you is that someone’s IQ is very high or very low.
secondly I am not from moment suggesting that people with low IQ not be allowed to take exams, and I’ve said previously that IQ can be plastic can improve with education. However if I was planning a package of special educational needs for a student and I knew they had a very low IQ it would influence the way I put that together differently than if they had a very high IQ.
you know I’ve yet to meet or hear about a brilliant programer with an IQ of 60, but I’m open to being surprised.
I’m regards to top down thinking. I think the most practical purposes people use a mix of top down and bottom up thinking, or at least they should. But it works better if the top down thinking is used as a shortcut to help Focus on the bottom up thinking on the most important elements.
as you can say models can be wrong and sometimes very wrong. That’s why they have to be validated against experimental data. One mathematician one said all models are wrong about some models are useful. Newtons theory of gravity was wrong but it will get you to the moon and back. Einstein special theory of relativity is is pretty much all you need for GPS satellites but it won’t explain the orbital precession of mercury. That doesn’t mean bottom-up thinking was the wrong way to think about gravity.
bottom-up models can be chaotic and that doesn’t nullify their usefulness either. Weather forecasting being the obvious example. Or over even longer timeframes climate models which can’t predict the weather on a particular day but will tell you about the climate in a year some time in the future.
The sad truth is economists are just very very bad at maths even when they’re pretending not to be. I once sat in a fourth-year Masters economics lecture on stock market analysis where a student raised his hand and asked what is a ‘sine wave.’ For historical reasons we economists tend to get ahead have often bbeen those who have a good verbal / people skills rather than those who are good at maths.