Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…That is possible. It is possible. Again, very hard idea to test. And it’s one that I wouldn’t even think that I would ever say, but I’ve said it, and I’ve even presented about it, is asking whether an autism diagnosis is more beneficial than harmful. Very hard question to investigate. When there is an actual purpose-built study that does that — obviously has a lot of flaws, but found that the probable autistics who weren’t diagnosed were better off. And in population-based studies like the one in Korea, the autistics who had not been diagnosed — did not have an existing diagnosis — were much better off. You often find that autistics who are diagnosed at older rather than earlier ages are better off. This is contrary to everything you’ve ever heard, probably, and so on. I don’t think that those things are being taken seriously enough. We definitely are getting data from autistic people who are diagnosed as adults, who seem to be better off than what you find in longitudinal studies of autistics who were diagnosed as children. All very, very hard to interpret, but the question is raised, and the fact that it is out there. I’m not trying to discourage or encourage anything or give advice in the least, but it speaks to my own concerns — maybe they’ve been futile — about standards, basic standards in research and practice, standards of science, ethics in medicine. And these are things I see as human rights issues. They are, to me, a big deal, and we should be very concerned that we are doing things to autistic people that we know produce bad outcomes in anyone. One of my striking takeaways from your work — and just to be clear, I don’t think you’ve ever said or written this in general terms — but just to see the extent to which parents do not necessarily have the actual interests of their children at heart, that parents seem to have a strong bias for children who will be a lot like they are. And they will take a lot of steps to try to make their children more like them, even if that, in some ways, harms the child from the point of view of the child itself. I think a diagnosis is a kind of segregation, and in most other settings, we’re morally very reluctant to segregate. But somehow, when it comes to children, we seem really quite willing to segregate. This is a moral split, so to speak, possibly not always for any good reason. First, I’m going to totally disagree about the parents. Keep in mind, in autism, you have very, very loud people — loud advocates, loud influential advocates. And those are autistics and nonautistics, professional organizations, people selling services, whatever — very loud advocates. They are not necessarily representative.…

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