Would You Have Allowed Bill Gates To Be Born?
Genius May Be Abnormality
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The reason I ask these questions is that there is a good chance we will soon have a genetic test for detecting the risk of autism in an embryo or fetus. The development of such a screening tool raises the possibility that parents might one day have the option of preventing the birth of a child with even a mild case of the disorder.
The thought is very upsetting to many in the autism community, including Aspies For Freedom, an advocacy group for people with Asperger's that is pushing to make June 18 "Autistic Pride Day." In their view, those with autism are no more suffering from a disease than are people who are short or have lighter or darker shades of skin. They want autism treated as merely a difference not a disease. And they are aghast at the thought that anyone would abort a child because they might have any degree of autism.
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I am becoming increasingly concerned that intellectually gifted children are being denied opportunities because they are being labeled either Asperger's or high functioning autism. Within the last year I have talked to several parents, and I was disturbed by what they said. One mother called me and was very upset that her six-year-old son had Asperger's. She then went on to tell me that his IQ was 150. I replied that before people knew about Asperger's Syndrome, their child would have received a very positive label of intellectually gifted.
In another case the parents of an Asperger teenager called and told me that they were so concerned about their son's poor social skills that they would not allow him to take computer programming. I told her that depriving him of a challenging career in computers would make his life miserable. He will get social interaction by shared interests with other computer people. In a third case, a super smart child was not allowed in the talented and gifted program in his school because he had an autism label. Educators need to become aware that intellectually satisfying work makes life meaningful.
Society is increasingly interested in labeling everything that makes people different a disease. Mass panic and pharmaceutical companies are likely culprits in this, but the point is that if "disease" is thrown about so recklessly, what happens when people have the ability to cure it, not just with potentially unnecessary drugs, but genetic testing or manipulation?
Are we headed into Orwellian genetics, in which every abnormality, on an ever increasing list, scares parents into "curing" it?
Autism, Aspergers, and likely any number of other traits that are involved in blame games are not diseases, IMO. At least not in every case. They can be beneficial differences. Disease is only a label, and used properly should only refer to a condition that is truly debilitating and does not provide advantages. Move on to any number of personality disorders. Who decides if those are diseases or personality traits?
Is it bad that my only comment is this?:
Do they have to have a _______ Pride Day/Week/Month/Parade/TV Channel FOR EVERYTHING?!
Yes. Because this some to be proud of. High intelligence should be awarded, not treated like a disease. It's getting so its not just things religious fundies deam bad are being targeted as "not normal".
My therapist says I have trust issues with adults, but when I read something like this? I have to wonder if those issues aren't warranted.
~Rico
It's quite interesting. In America _millions_ of kids (something like 3-5% of students in America) been diagnosed with ADHD. The number of kids with profound autism receiving services from the state of California have almost tripled in the last fifteen years. Perhaps it's not so much a change in environmental circumstances that have caused this incredible surge in developmental disorders, as new kind of parental paranoia. I mean, we're talking about a culture where parents buy CDs filled with Bach for fetuses to listen to, where everything is obsessively logged - the first word, first step, and young children are increasingly crammed with music lessons, math lessons, language lessons. It doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to go from that to a kind of obsession about personality "disorders" a kid "might" have, and then insisting on the prescription of drugs to treat said "disorders".
And so the logical conclusion to that would be the perfect genetically pure designer baby with blond hair, blue eyes, the potential to become at least six feet tall, and of course complete freedom from genetic disorders. On my campus the student newspaper is filled with advertisements soliciting egg/sperm donations. Preferably from students with high GPAs. Hair and skin color of choice! Submit your resumes at the following email address! Potential payout in the thousands, perhaps even in tens of thousands! What price a good start?
So I think it's rather sad to contemplate this picture, but the truth is that parents are well within their own rights to select their offspring, even at the expense of a broader kind of social/genetic diversity. What happens to gene pools that stagnate? They tend to die off. Of course we're not going to live long enough to see the potential effects of that, but it does say something about the culture around us. This isn't a slam on American culture, by the way, since most Asian parents are probably ten times as obsessed with their children than the Americans ;p
As for the fundies, I've got two words for them. Ted Haggard.
Autism, Aspergers, and likely any number of other traits that are involved in blame games are not diseases, IMO. At least not in every case. They can be beneficial differences. Disease is only a label, and used properly should only refer to a condition that is truly debilitating and does not provide advantages. Move on to any number of personality disorders. Who decides if those are diseases or personality traits?
A-freaking-men.
This really makes me worry, that people aim to "cure" things like that. Quite frankly, doing that will do more harm than good, for reasons Pundit stated, and also because most autistics/Aspies don't want to be "cured". Its mostly the parents, many of whom are frightened of having to *gasp* have to work on raising their kids (you have no idea how many times I've seen it) and society in general (which treats autism/Aspergers as the national boogeyman who's almost on par with Osama bin Laden) who have their pants in a bunch about how their kids aren't "normal" and try to "make" them normal. Most of the time, these people do not take into account what their child might want, or what their child is able to handle, or both.
And let's not forget how social services go, with the automatic assumption that autism "ends" (so to speak) the moment the kid leaves high school...but that's another hill of beans entirely. ^^;
Ha, I have experience here. See, there are these two kids out here. One is my nephew, the other is an inlaw's kid. Now, they both have "diagnosed" ADHD and ADD and are around the 9-10 year old mark.
The inlaw's kid was slapped on medication and pampered with the "It's not his fault, he has ADHD." And of course allowed to do whatever, and not do schoolwork he thought was "too hard".
My nephew on the other hand was not allowed to use it as on excuse. His mom DID help him with his homework a lot at first but anymore she rarely needs to.
Whats the difference in them today? The inlaw's kid can't read, refuses to do homework, and refuses to mind. My nephew? He'd a handful but when you get serious, he calms down (Like any kid that age). He has straight A's and reads his Harry Potter books for fun.
And of course you have me. I'm "diagnosed" with Social Anxiety Disorder. I was on paxil for 2 years, I was miserable. One day I decided I wasn't going to let it control me. Now, I'm not only interacting with people face to face, I'm out voluteering to spend time with the kids that would have sent me home with a sick headache before.
~Rico
I was diagnosed with at least four different things; I can't remember all of them. Given a large cocktail of pills to take every damn day for it.
The funny thing? I eventually just refused to take the pills. I felt better, healthier, happier, and I did a whole lot better in school because of it.
Hmm.
Also; I'd never even thought to use anything the doctor said as excuses against homework. I skipped a lot of assignment,s but at least I simply admitted not doing them because I was lazy, instead of whining about a nonexistant problem.
This reminds me of the movie "Harrison Bergeron" which is kinda sad because I haven't read Vonnegut's short story upon which the movie is based.
What do you expect when the state thinks it knows more about teaching your child than you do? I expect anything a beurocracy does to have a bunch of screwups.
Intelligence is measured on a curve. The higher (or lower) your intelligence, the fewer people there are that are your peers. Forcing smart kids into normalcy is just as damaging as handing a 7 year old an arc welder and saying "have fun".
Now, people with high intelligence, normally the top five percent of the population, have low "emotional quotients" or EQ's. This is completely normal. Some have wondered if high intelligence causes depression, and there is strong corollary evidence of the relationship.
Now, the role of public schools was once just to teach. However since the 70's American public schools have also been expected to nurture, counsel, and provide primary care for students. This strains the system too much and the well meaning intentions of a teacher can hurt a child WHO IS SMARTER than the teacher.
If you want a child to have a superior educational experience, the two best options are home schooling and private school.
As a side note, aborting a fetus because it has an "undesireable trait" has already happened. What would be really scary is when the testing is cheap enough for everyone to afford it.
Jimro
Emotional Quotient? I've never heard of that.
I agree that this is wrong, for the reasons stated and also because of my distaste for humankind thinking it can best nature. I honestly believe that when we tamper with this sort of thing, we're messing with stuff we know very little about and we can't forsee now the ways it will come back to bite us
Is it any wonder I'm a fan of Dune?
Also, Harrison Bergeron is a good story, I didn't know there was a movie. I may need to check it out.
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Emotional Quotient?
It's a somewhat fluffy concept, but what it really is supposed to represent is people skills.
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What would be really scary is when the testing is cheap enough for everyone to afford it.
I think I would say that that's entirely up to the parents eh ;o What *would* be scary is if legislation were put in place to ban testing and abortion, and desperate parents started going underground to have their tests done/fetuses aborted. These days genetic testing isn't a very complicated/expensive affair anyway... the difficulty is establishing the link between genes and development, if it is even possible to in the first place.
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the automatic assumption that autism "ends" (so to speak) the moment the kid leaves high school..
eh? o.o
And as for the man messing with nature thing, it's quite pointless to bemoan the tendency. It seems to be what we're *about*, as a species. Oh, and how is Dune connected to all of that?
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And as for the man messing with nature thing, it's quite pointless to bemoan the tendency. It seems to be what we're *about*, as a species. Oh, and how is Dune connected to all of that?
That's pretty much the entire point of Dune: meddling with natural forces, even when we THINK we know what we're doing, is a bad idea. Genetic meddling and ecological meddling both backfire at once. The economy is ruined, sixty billion people die, the government collapses and the universe becomes a totalitarian state for 3,500 years.
I believe the last time I took an online test for EQ I achieved somewhere around the 140 mark - similar to what I tend to get for IQ tests. Somehow I trust the EQ result less than the IQ result, probably because I've become adept at seeing patterns in tests and working out which answers are "correct" when given a little time to think. I would not consider myself especially sensitive when it comes to dealing with people, however, or incredibly in touch with my own emotions.
I tend to agree with the prevalent view in this thread - autism and other personality "disorders" should not be seen as diseases, but as differences. Most importantly, people have a great tendency to learn to cope, and so fit into society in some way. This just takes time, is a normal part of growing up, but can be somewhat more exaggerated in some cases (and yes, with some casualties along the way who fail to cope - generally very much the minority, however) Just some encouragement and a refusal to let "difference" act as a universal excuse does the trick.
I would also not be too surprised if there is a correlation between high intelligence and risk of depression, since intelligence has quite often been seen as devoid of emotion (see Vulcans or androids/computers in generic sci-fi). Whether intelligent people are this way naturally, or whether it is due to the expectation that they will be (emotions have been seen as negative to pure thought since Plato, and probably before) or whether it is due to not having the same opportunity to develop emotionally early on due to a tendency towards social exclusion from peers (who talks to the swots unless you need homework done?) - most likely a mix of all these factors - the result is still fairly obvious in popular culture.
I have no knowledge of how EQ is tested but I'm immediately suspicious because a score suggests that somebody is scoring certain emotions or social interactions as "better" than others, and it's attempting to apply a number to non-quantitative data. Similar complaints can be said about IQ, which was founded on very silly notions, but at least it's based on questions (when done correctly) that can be shown to have reasonably well defined right and wrong answers.
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I would also not be too surprised if there is a correlation between high intelligence and risk of depression, since intelligence has quite often been seen as devoid of emotion (see Vulcans or androids/computers in generic sci-fi). Whether intelligent people are this way naturally, or whether it is due to the expectation that they will be (emotions have been seen as negative to pure thought since Plato, and probably before) or whether it is due to not having the same opportunity to develop emotionally early on due to a tendency towards social exclusion from peers (who talks to the swots unless you need homework done?) - most likely a mix of all these factors - the result is still fairly obvious in popular culture.
You know, I recently debated with Vortex on whether emotion is symbiotic or an opposition to reason. I used to believe they were opposed, but I eventually reasoned that emotion is a prerequisite to reason, and that the view of emotion and reason as independent or opposed is a cultural concept.
Despite generic sci-fi, I think it would be far easier to design a computer with emotions than a computer that can do analysis and develop concepts independently. Whether the emotions would be convincingly humanlike is a different story, but just because they aren't human emotions, it would not make them non-emotions.
Vec and Tri, perhaps the question isn't so much the validity (and even possibility!) of a quantitative EQ measure, as whether or not it is possible to say that certain traits contribute to what we would consider social success and if these traits can somehow be engineered/incorporated into children.
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I eventually reasoned that emotion is a prerequisite to reason... I think it would be far easier to design a computer with emotions
This is interesting. A friend of mine recently brought up the question of representing an emotion in a neural network context, as an alternative to traditional training methods ie. back tracing. But we argued ourselves to a halt. Please elaborate on your conclusions.
I wouldn't be so much shocked that there are people that would abort because their kid might not be "normal". I'm always more shocked that so many deranged people are ok with that.
~Rico
Pundit, fair comment about the EQ testing, especially given that IQ tests are not even considered a clear measure of intelligence, merely one form of reasoning which may correlate with intelligence (pattern recognition and memory I believe are the two main things tested). If I remember correctly, EQ is supposed to test for how aware you are of your own and other people's emotions, and their likely effects - however I could be mis-remembering.
As for the role of emotions, there's certainly a move in philosophy to suggest that emotions are very important for our cognitive functioning, especially in terms of determining what information our senses provide us is to be considered "important" or "relevant", and in deciding how to act. However, it is a little unclear as to what constitutes an emotion - whether it is something that causes a physiological change, or a change in mental states. While people have a decent intuitive idea as to what counts as an emotion, actually providing a definition is rather more challenging.
Personally, I agree that emotions and reason are not opposites - they're more likely to be two mostly unrelated capacities/faculties. However, I'd be interested to hear the argument that emotions are a prerequisite of reason, and also how we would be able to recognise, and so show the existence of, the computer "non-humanlike" emotion. I don't wish to imply any skepticism here, this is actually genuine curiosity, since I haven't come across this kind of thought before.
WARNING: gross generalization follows:
IQ and EQ are well represented by a typical high school,
Intelligent people are not necessarily the most socialy graceful or accepted in high school. Geeks and Nerds are partially defined by being a ridiculed outcast of high school social circles.
These nerds and geeks are the future, they will go on to college, get good jobs, and become well adjusted adults. It takes longer for these individuals to learn the social roles and how to manipulate them to not be beaten down by their peers.
In contrast to the geeks and nerds are the popular kids. Their popularity is normally based on their ability to manipulate their image to appeal to their peers.
I am of the school of thought that EQ is dynamic, and as people grow they become more adept at managing emotional matters and social interactions. However, IQ is generally a static relative measurement, with small variations.
Jimro
