But virtually everyone in the field does believe there are many different mechanisms behind autism, some of which have little-to-no overlap either in the mechanisms themselves or necessarily even in the presentation.
Many scientists believe that one day we will likely be able to split off at least some of the undifferentiated mass of ASD into potentially completely unrelated disorders that may share a lot of aspects of presentation.
For example, we may find out that one set of genes combined with cytokine storms in utero cause dysfunction in synaptic pruning, while another set of genes combined with gut dysbiosis may affect brain plasticity in the critical period of early childhood. Those would be two completely unrelated conditions, with overlapping symptoms for some (but not all) who have them.
This is a misconception I see pop up frequently online. In terms of the color spectrum, there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum. And while there are colors outside of what humans can see, we generally use it not to refer to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but only to the subset that makes up light visible to human eyes.
Likewise, when we talk about the "autism spectrum," we're not including every exhibition of traits associated with autism. You can have some traits associated with autism without being "on the spectrum."
Also, perhaps as importantly, "spectrum" isn't a term that generally applies only to color, or even electromagnetism.
> there are plenty of things—even things that have qualities in common with color—that aren't on the color spectrum.
I'm not so sure about this one. Whatever it is, you can point a camera at it and you'll get colors. That places it on the color spectrum, even if its color isn't the most important thing about it.
Sure, you'll get weird readings for transparent things, and you can't do this for "justice" or "pain", but everything that is remotely similar to something that has color, also has color.
I think you're missing what I'm saying.The overall point is that the existence of a spectrum does not in any way imply that everything exists somewhere on that spectrum.
In the example of the color spectrum, I don't mean that things necessarily don't (or do) have color. Take fundamental particles, as an extreme example. They don't themselves have any color at all, though they have 1ualities in common with color. And depending on what you do to them, they can exhibit qualities of color (or not).
But the fact that something has a color doesn't mean that thing itself is on the color spectrum — color is not a necessary quality of that thing, and can change depending on other factors — for energy that could be level of excitement, or for other things it might be the level and color of light in the room. Also, the physical things you point a camera at often do not themselves have color! They show up as being a color in the picture not because of their inherent qualities, but because of what wavelengths of light they do or do not absorb. And you can, by using different types of cameras or adjusting their settings, take in more of some wavelengths, less of others, or none of some, regardless of what things look like IRL (which is based in the wavelengths of light being reflected/not reflected from those things to your eyes, and which wavelengths the cones in your eyes can take in, and then how those are processed by your brain, etc).
I think I'm understanding what you're saying, I just disagree :)
> They show up as being a color in the picture not because of their inherent qualities, but because of what wavelengths of light they do or do not absorb.
The intrinsic/perceived duality that you're setting up here isn't related to what a spectrum is. What's fundamental for spectrums is that they're expansive: whatever the measured quality is, all such things map to somewhere on a single dimension which is the spectrum.
Color has been overused. Let's consider a mass spectrometer. It gives an electric charge to a sample, hurls it through a perpendicular magnetic field, and depending on the masses of the sample (or its components, supposing the ionization process broke it up), inertia causes spatial separation. Not-very-massive over here, and quite-massive over there. This is a spectrum because all masses have a place on it (nevermind that you might not actually be able to build a large enough spectrometer for some masses).
Or to use a mathematical example, if you exclude the interval [0,1] from the real number line, what you get is no longer a continuum, and mappings of things onto it are no longer a spectrum.
It may be a misconception that all political perspectives exist on a left/right axis, but when people talk about the political spectrum they're invoking a simplification under which all people do map to some point or another on that line.
As far as I'm aware it's only the autism spectrum that doesn't work this way.
I would argue that for the average person, therefore, 'spectrum' is an unfortunate choice of analogy, since most people believe that it encompasses every possible color. One should not need specialist knowledge to discuss an issue of this kind in common terms.
I thought that, too, but I'm seeing lots of companies in tech implement this almost by default because it's built-in to tools that are adding a lot of tangible value.
Looking back at the assholes of my youth, they run the gamut. Some seem like lovely adults, and are very successful. Some are just like they were and are very successful. Some others crashed out completely. The more brash, upfront assholes and the clever assholes seem to have done better than the sneering, malicious assholes.
And we were (almost) all assholes sometimes, but there's definitely a class of kids who were assholes most of the time.
Tenant rights didn't end SROs, but they made them much more expensive to operate in cities that make evictions difficult. Most cities were already discouraging them with zoning and building codes, and tenant rights expansions in some of the most expensive cities just doubled down.
Where they still exist in significant quantity, it's usually because of subsidies, carve-outs that exempt them from some code or regulatory requirements, or both. NYC still has the most in the country, and might stop losing the ones they have so quickly thanks to some 2023 carve-outs and subsidies. But as a percentage of the housing stock (which is already too low!) they've declined from ~10% in the 1950s to >1% now. But it's very, very rare anywhere for new SROs to be built, and especially in the cities that could benefit most from them.
Chicago passed an ordinance in 2014 to preserve the SROs they had, with subsidized loans and tax credits to operators, but between 2015 and 2020 they still lost 37% of their remaining SRO buildings (no more recent data seems easily available).
It seems like half this discussion thread is trying to pin the problem on "tenants rights" while the other half is saying "SROs are bad because they house undesirables."
If it were tenants rights, you'd expect SROs to go away in the parts of the country with the strongest tenants rights, subsidies or no. Instead, SROs disappearing seems mostly correlated with gentrification and nimbys.
As an aside I've known several smallish residential landlords (20-50 units) and they are, in general, strongly biased towards higher-income tenants and totally unequipped to manage an SRO or any building with substantial shared space. For them the perfect property is a walkup with no shared indoor spaces to maintain, and the perfect tenant is a yuppie without a lot of price sensitivity.
> That's every landlord. Higher income tenants tend to bring less problems overall.
Even moreso in states with expansive eviction protections. High-income tenants rarely squat. But at least for bigger landlords squatting isn't an existential risk.
For what definition of "visualize?" I have partial aphantasia but am great at understanding the inner workings of complex systems/processes. I used to think of it as visualization until aphantasia discourse, and then I realized it's not really visual at all, though there seem to be dimensional/spatial elements.
If I'm in a quiet place I can walk through the project, and understand where different things fit into place - even for very very complex systems, I can almost simulate algorithms and see where things go wrong without looking at my code. I realized this ability is not normal, and many people even software engineers struggle immensely with fully understanding large complex systems
According to my wife (a 1), yes. Seems wild to me as a ~4. If I concentrate really, really hard on trying to imagine visual detail I can get something to a ~3 at low detail or hold individual small details at a 2 until I stop concentrating on them.
No, this is pretty squarely outside the scope, and only specific amounts received from in-scope parties (i.e. governments) would be subject. And there's a standing issue. Basically the emoluments clause doesn't have real teeth for most purposes, even where it applies.
It should apply there, though the first Trump admin argued a very narrow interpretation that mostly exempts the president in the first term, at the end of which the case was declared moot (leaving us in suspense about what SCOTUS would have said). Great commentary on emoluments and needed reforms in light of this here: https://www.execfunctions.org/p/trump-20-and-the-foreign-emo...
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