Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Lili's thought for the day

Autism is NOT a spectrum, it is a diverse group of syndromes that are caused by different things. If there is any spectrum at all in autism it might be the varying degrees of resemblance to the classic behavioural phenotype of autism, from very close resemblance to only a partial resemblance.

3 comments:

Justthisguy said...

Hmm. The spectrum is one-dimensional. Physicists have had to resort to talking about more dimensions than three, to explain how the Universe works.

Even things as stupid as politics are not explainable on a left-right, one-dimensional line. Please google the Nolan Chart, and what's subtly different, Jerry Pournelle's two-dimensional political quiz.

It seems nobody has been bold enough, yet, to introduce the third dimension into political nerdy craziness.

Lili Marlene said...

Googled Nolan Chart - interesting ideas, but I don't where I could start in categorizing my own political views.

The thing that annoys me about the idea of the autism spectrum is that laypeople think they are being terribly sophisticated in applying this concept. Sometimes I wonder if it is better that regular people should know nothing about a subject rather than have a little knowledge.

Justthisguy said...

As someone said once, Ma'am, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.