Autism

Saw this one before, the message is good but I dislike the use of a box at all here because the analogy is still weird. I like to think of it as an equalizer, traits are at different volumes and gains like the different frequency ranges of sound going through a sound system simultaneously. (Think bar chart for alternate example.) Different traits manifest differently, i.e. perseverance, stimming, sensory sensitivity, monotropism, special interests, etc.

Tangentially on the same topic, I dislike the term "on the spectrum" because this article's reasoning. You are not sitting atop a one dimensional number line. You ARE the spectrum, and your spectrum "settings" differ from that of others, though only to a certain extent (or otherwise Autism would not exist)

Ellen might be Autistic, she might not. I've never met Ellen so I wouldn't really know. As it turns out you can be Autistic while still being a shitty person. It feels very weird to gatekeep being Autistic. She's totally wrong about everyone being Autistic but I do think Autism is more common than many people want to admit.

Great read, thank you for posting. People conflating spectrum and gradient is a really eloquent way to put it, actually.

It was an interesting read, and helped me process a few things about myself. Thanks for posting/sharing :)

I thought we cancelled Ellen.

Thanks, I wish there was a Spanish version so I could share it with my parents.

I always liked the idea of a Venn diagram as a metaphor better. The central circle is you and then the autism traits are the circles overlapping with you (and sometimes each other!). How much your autism affects you is related to how much those circles overlap with you in the middle. Probably not perfect either, but I always liked it better than the oft-misunderstood "spectrum" metaphor.

It might not make sense to be wearing red and say that you're a little bit rainbow, but it does make sense to wear a desaturated red and say that you're a little bit red. To that point, I like to compare it to visual acuity. Everyone's vision lies somewhere on the gradation of 20/20 or better up to complete blindness where absolutely no visual signal reaches your brain. Saying that everyone has a little bit of trouble with social situations is akin to saying that everyone is a little bit blind.

The author’s total misunderstanding of how visual/color spectrums work makes their analogies fall apart.

• the “visual spectrum” as they mention it is a gradient, it’s just a gradient of frequency/wavelength which usually isn’t particularly relevant unless you are doing science
• there are ways people organize, define, and describe colors for aesthetic purposes, often in 2D or 3D “spectrums” or “gradients”. In this context statements like “this color is more red than that color” are very well defined and make sense.

I think I get their core point that there are many facets to autism and annoyance at people who aren’t really “autistic” trying to claim to be to play that “card” in an argument. But IMO trying to pretend words don’t have meaning for the sake of a half-baked analogy is a really weak way to make that argument.

I don't think this article quite gets it, either. The problem with "Autism is a spectrum" isn't the word 'spectrum', but the word 'a'. People understand what a spectrum and if autism were 'a' spectrum, they would be right to say that everyone is on it. However, it's not 'a' spectrum. It's a collection of spectrums. So an individual falling on the 'autistic end' of one of the spectrums doesn't necessarily make them autistic.