Interesting Links for 19-01-2025

[andrewducker]

1. COVID-19 dramatically raises the risk of developing ME/CFS

(tags:disease ChronicFatigueSyndrome pandemic doom )

2. Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities

(tags:UK regulation community doom )

3. Autism 'Symptoms' are no such thing

(tags:autism psychology )

4. How a culture of avoidance leads to increasing Russian support for Putin

(tags:Russia polls society psychology )

Comments

[gingicat]

Thank you for that third one.

[andrewducker]

My pleasure.

[mountainkiss]

I am intrigued that you have posted item 3.

Last time we talked about this, admittedly via messaging where you and I constantly fall over low bandwidth, I said how much I dislike that sort of stuff and got the impression that you agreed. So I am intrigued to see this here. Have I entirely misunderstood your position, or failed to communicate mine?

To be clear, my interest here is not to dispute your position if you support the article’s thesis. It is to understand your belief.

[andrewducker]

What sort of stuff?

Can you be specific about what aspect of it?

(I'll write up my beliefs on this, but I'm at a noisy children's party right now, so it may be a while)

[mountainkiss]

Oh I’d love to read that.

The phrasing I used in our conversation IIRC is “it’s all the fault of an ableist world”. That’s the tone that I can’t get past and it’s a pain because I so want to get into the content and build a proper model.

To be clear - I understand that this is super freeing for lots of people who have been othered in really abusive ways, and I do not speak against it. It might well be useful for more people than not (though definitely not 100%; see also conversations passim). But I find it so annoying that I can’t make my way through it, and I got the impression you felt the same way. I’m not advocating here, truly, but am keen to understand whether / where I’ve misinterpreted you.

[andrewducker]

Aaaah, yes.

I don't think that it's *all* the fault of an ableist world. Even if the world didn't look down on people who were different and treat them badly, there are plenty of issues that autistic people have that would still remain.

But the ones in this article, which are the main DSM ones, I think there are good reasons for querying how many of them are "A problem intrinsic to the person who has it" and how many are "This minority of people do things differently to that majority of people, and it's generally treated as them Doing It Wrong even if it's not actually any worse for getting things done."

And I felt that the piece was nuanced in how it approached this. It's not saying "The minority should refuse to learn how things are done by the majority" - it says "Is this an appropriate target for interventions? Sure, to a point — in the same way that speakers of minority languages might be encouraged to learn the dominant language where they are." Which seems like a reasonable enough statement to me.

[mountainkiss]

I think we've got different benchmarks. I went back and read it again and saw very little if anything in the way of nuance. For me, this is a polemic piece and on this topic I don't play for that team.

[andrewducker]

I don't usually associate "polemic" with pieces that link off to multiple pieces of research (9 that I could count), and I thought that the steps made seemed pretty logical.

I'm not at all sure what I'm missing there.

[mountainkiss]

I thought about this overnight. I think it’s a another piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

I think that what’s going on here – though I am not certain – is that there are a lot of statements in this article that to you are obviously true and to me are debatable. Therefore I read the tone as making an argument and you read it as reporting facts.

I may be wrong about this. I am trying to leave my job and it is more difficult than I thought, so I’m trying to avoid going through this to pick out sentences. But that’s probably the next step if you think I’m way off base or I’m not making sense.

[andrewducker]

I'm not saying it's not debatable! Pretty much everything is debatable!

But less important than you sorting things out with your job-departure, and there's absolutely no need to deal with it this minute, week, or month!

Good luck with things today, and if I can do anything to help then just say. (Or if you just need to vent)

[mountainkiss]

Okay rewrite my statement to make it less black and white. That to me are more debatable than to you? I mean, if you correct for my language then does the basic thesis hold for you?

[andrewducker]

Very happy to debate them!

[mountainkiss]

I am clearly not making my point at all sorry.

If we stipulate that you are happy to debate anything (which seems more consistently backed up by data than any hypothesis ever) then can you relate to the underlying principle of why an article derived from axiomata to which you relate more naturally than I do will seem more polemic to me than you? Otherwise we will I think prob have to go to sentence level.

[mountainkiss]

(It’s not particularly today. My last day is 17/2. But it’s quite a draining process.)

[nancylebov]

2. Charlie Stross may be shutting down his long-running commenting community. Or maybe not. It's not clear whether the law covers small sites, or exactly what is forbidden.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-cloud-approaching-rapidl.html#comments

[andrewducker]

It is a ridiculous situation.

[hairyears]

When ridicule is ineffective, we should ask the question: "Who gains?"

Clearly, Facebook do.