Post #3342237

2026-06-18 01:24 UTC

Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015): I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors. So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker: But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it. As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And applying those means to him would be bad, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED, appeal to adverse consequences losers.

Replies (2)

@it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 2026-06-18 06:35

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-06-18 21:11

This feels like yet another case of “what no postmodernism does to a mf”. Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but that’s entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors aren’t “abnormal” and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled. But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but it’s easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of “how do I help people be happy and successful” necessitates asking “how do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person.” Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively. But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, can’t really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because he’s a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Don’t listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.

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