Interesting Links for 15-07-2025

[andrewducker]

1. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem

(tags:people comics ai doom communication )

2. How old are you in your head? (Mid 30s for me)

(tags:age psychology )

3. Reddit will start verifying the age (but not the identity) of UK redditors

(tags:uk age reddit regulation internet )

4. "Autism" is at least 4 different syndromes, each with distinct biological and genetic pathways.

(tags:autism genetics )

Comments

[arpad]

1. - yes indeedy :(

2.

[channelpenguin]

I honestly don't know. I know what I consider my peak (41, though also the peak of doing TRULY stupid things...). But then again I don't think of that as my age. I think I think I'm 54 (I AM 54). I've never seen ageing as negative. I'm the same weight and proportions as I was in my late teens (was briefly heavier in mid 20s, and I was a tad heavier in 2021/22 nothing drastic). I'm perfectly fit. My hair went substantially gray before 30, I've always been prone to random aches and pains and been a bit stiff (though fit). I was always longsighted (though it's a LOT more of a pain now, but bifocal sunglasses are my best friend outdoors). I'm mentally probably more capable than in my alcohol or hormone (or lack thereof) fuelled past. But there's nothing I have done in the past that I don't think I'm capable of now, mentally or physically. So yeah. I'm my actual age, in my head.

My mother always says she feels 19. (She's .. uh..77).

[juan_gandhi]

I guess, when you start feeling, riding your bicycle, this magic feeling of your 30s, that's where you might start thinking that it's way in the past. But the feeling is good.

[mountainkiss]

Good nominative determinism in #2

[andrewducker]

I didn't even notice that!

3. Nice try Reddit

[bens_dad]

A decent aim from Reddit.
The discussion suggests that the implementation is struggling in the details, as the head of Dreamwidth foresaw.

Re: 3. Nice try Reddit

[andrewducker]

Yeah, there's usually a dismissal of the side-effects of these things. We shall see how complex it gets.

[symbioid]

60 in my head at this point. I'm almost 49. But I feel older. I didn't used to before the last job that killed me I didn't feel 40, 8 years ago. But now I feel like everything just killed me. :(

It is funny though how nobody seems to "feel old" I assume because we all magically think somehow there is an "adult" age and we get smart and older and wiser, but we feel just as dumb and stupid, no matter how old we get (and no matter how smart we are, unless we're a narcissist). Eh, IDK.

[andrewducker]

I think a lot of it comes from looking at how our parents were, and that we're less tired than people with kids were :-)

[teaotter]

2.

I felt set in my thirties for a long time, but after breaking up with a long-time partner, I suddenly feel my age. I think the break-up (or the therapy) re-set my sense of myself; I feel so much more settled than I have for the last decade or so. I don't really feel *older* so much as in a different era of my life, but I don't identify with the "me" of fifteen years ago any more.

[andrewducker]

Were they younger than you? Or do you think it was just the freedom to rethink who you actually are?

[teaotter]

That's an interesting question! I think it's the freedom to reframe who I am; I did a lot of mental re-arranging in a short time. I do think one of the reasons I "feel" fifty now is that I've long had the idea that women who reach a certain age often bloom around then; when I was a kid, I knew a lot of women who prioritized their kids and families when they were young and later started prioritizing their own growth. I guess I identify with that life stage right now.

[andrewducker]

There's definitely an age you reach where you stop putting up with the nonsense that society tells you.

[liv]

I'm really extremely suspicious of that kind of autism study. People are always trying to divide autism into categories, and fine, it's a syndrome, it's a spectrum, ok, but the history of the labelling approach is pretty bad, and I am not seeing anything to convince me that this time it's different. We had Asperger's (useful to Nazis) versus Kanner Autistic (murder them right away). We had "high functioning" (too articulate to be really autistic) versus "low functioning" (too stupid to count as people). We had "severe" and "mild" autism, we had the recent thing with the nonsensical numerical "levels" of autism. And all of it is just codifying people's prejudices and none of it is actually good for autistic people. The fact they open completely uncritically with parroting the DSM line about persistent deficits in social communication and interaction doesn't improve my impression.

In terms of their actual methods this looks hardly better than phrenology. What they're calling "person-centered" (FFS! words mean things) is basically just vaguely shoving people into totally subjective categories and then trying to put numbers on it. I don't deny that autism has a strong genetic component, and it seems extremely plausible that different genes and their interactions contribute to presentation. But this study just seems to be using sciencey words to justify establishing a genetic underclass. Even their pie-in-the-sky conclusion section suggests that this kind of research could be used to gain insights into the underlying neurobiology of particular autism presentations and offer the potential for more precise clinical diagnosis and guidance which is a barely disguised euphemism for classifying some people as congenital idiots.

When I was associated with Sanger they proposed to do a huge genetic basis of autism study like this and autistic people protested enough to shut it down, because all it was going to do was harm autistic people, not help them. It looks to me like this study happened because the American autistic community isn't as well organized as the UK.

[andrewducker]

That these different groups have different genetic associations and different biological pathways indicates to me that they're seeing something real.

It has seemed unlikely to me for several years that all of the things grouped together as "autism" were actually the same thing, rather than multiple things that looked similar from a distance.

[liv]

The thing is they haven't proposed any biological pathways, it's a purely descriptive paper about differences in gene expression. Roughly sorting the genes they identified into ontologies isn't a "biological pathway". There's nothing there to convince me that what they've done is any different from looking at the genetic profiles of autistic people over 6ft tall and under 6ft tall; you would absolutely expect different gene profiles and different tissue and developmental expression patterns because height has a huge genetic component, but it would be fallacious to conclude that "tall autism" is a different type of autism from "short autism". People with both autism and OCD, or people with both autism and developmental disability, have different genes from people with autism who don't have those co-occuring conditions, but this is completely unsurprising. I don't see solid evidence that these really represent meaningful subtypes of autism.

I have little doubt that they're measuring something that exists out there in the real world. Nature Genetics has a decent level of peer review and I expect their statistical analysis is perfectly sound. But the whole study design is completely begging the question. They have different groups of people with different presentations, and there are (almost certainly real!) genetic differences between those four groups, but this only means anything if you start from the assumption that the groups assigned actually represent different autism types.

[andrewducker]

Hmm. They certainly seem to have mapped them on to biological pathways, although you're right that they've done that purely by looking at the genes behind them. But the biological processes in figure 4 are presumably meaningful?

I guess my thought process is that autism is a term that's diagnosed (a) purely on the effects it has and (b) with significantly different effects for different people. It would be surprising if there weren't multiple different causes that produced a similar spectrum of effects that had some things in common and some different.

I'm not saying that it's impossible that there's one thing underlying all of these cases that is the "autism" bit, and then lots of overlaying things on top of it. But that seems pretty unlikely to me - there are lots of ways for people to be, and lots of them will look similar from a distance, particularly when your criteria for categorisation are as vague as autisms is.

(I'd be surprised if it ends up anywhere near as low as 4. I'm curious whether the genes in these clusters tend to reinforce each other - do you tend to get "Membrane depolarization during action potential" "Barbed-end actin filament capping" and "Neuronal action potential" all at the same time, or does it only tend to tip over into an autism diagnosis if you have all three at once, for instance.)

#2 = how old in the head

[agoodwinsmith]

I fluctuate between 5 and 12.

The current physical yuck I am experiencing isn't really linked to an age, and I was pretty sick at both 5 and 12 - so it really just perpetuates my conviction. No agency at either age - just reacting.