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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2785 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I've occasionally heard people allude to the idea that "dyslexia" isn't really a discrete medical condition, but rather a sort of cope that parents use to prevent their kid feeling bad about being a bit on the slow side, or lacking in verbal comprehension. For example, Freddie deBoer:

Let’s set aside whether dyslexia is one thing or many things and whether or not it’s simply a term that we came up with to say that some people are poor readers, as a matter of compassion.

Is there anything to this? Is dyslexia a real medical condition, or a contested one? Is it generally sensibly diagnosed by qualified professionals, or is there an epidemic of self-diagnosis muddying the water?

It can be both.

Unfortunately the sort of hard data to show correlation is precisely the sort of thing that is most likely to be affected by political suppression.

Anecdotally: I've met people in all four categories of that particular powerset.

Personal anecdote, but:

Dyslexia is absolutely a real thing, distinct from generally being bad at reading/verbal reasoning/whatever.

I have mild dyslexia. I have never had any problems in school because of it (I was very good in school in general) except specifically with spelling -- if I mix up an i-before-e or something like that, I simply cannot see it.

This was true in school, and it's still true now, many years later. I work as a programmer, and before I installed a spellcheck in my coding enviroment, I had repeated issues with pull requests where I would misspell a variable name, use it hundreds of times (including in comments and documentation where there wasn't autofill or anything), and never notice. The code would work just fine, but my PR would inevitably have a comment to the effect of "this looks good, but you misspelled name everywhere".

If it's pointed out to me, I still can't see it until I stare at it for a few minutes, at which point the letters will almost physically rearange themselves in my perception and all of a sudden it's obvious.

Note that my dyslexia was never so bad as to make reading difficult -- I only ever swap one or two letters at once in the middle of words, and that doesn't really effect reading, but the 'letters physically rearange themselves in my perception' is definitely a real thing, and I can imagine a much higher degree of rearangement would make a lot of school really hard.

Given that my son has a severe language acquisition problem, I don't doubt that dyslexia is a medical condition. If you think about it, being able to interpret strings of symbols as meaningful words is a completely unnatural skill. If you don't get enough practice at the right stage of your brain development, when you already have well-developed speech but the rest of the brain is still pliable, it's going to be much harder to develop the skill to the level when you don't have to expend any conscious effort to read.

If you're asking if dyslexia is more like flu than like hypertension, then I have no answer. Does it matter, though?

Dyslexia severity is dimensional, but I'm pretty sure that difficulty differentiating letters with near-congruent/similar geometry (e.g., b, d, p, and q, in this font - you can look up fonts intended for people with dyslexia) is a distinct phenomenon from other learning disorders. is what I wrote, before double-checking the wikipedia page, which I interpret as stating that dyslexia is in the "all neuro-cognitive-developmental badness is correlated" cluster of poorly studied weirdness. But why didn't you read the wikipedia page, before asking?

I did read the Wikipedia page, but I'm also distinctly aware that, for any contentious topic, Wikipedia is ideologically captured and cannot be relied upon to provide a neutral answer. If there were a lot of psychologists, psychiatrists etc. who privately agreed that dyslexia isn't a real illness, and if there was a large community of people diagnosing themselves with it, I'm not sure if I'd trust Wikipedia to say so.

I am an unaware of any large body of psychiatrists considering dyslexia not a real illness. Nobody I know in my professional life has voiced such an opinion either.

My the-type-of-layperson-who's-interested-in-this-sort-of-thing-and-posts-here impression: There are enough examples of people with normal or even exceptionally good visual/spatial reasoning/general cognitive abilities and a specific inability to read (for a famous example, Jackie Stewart never learned to read, but was an international skeet shooting champion/Olympics alternate and one of the all-time great racecar drivers and claims to have developed a very good memory in compensation for his inability to read; less famously, New Zealander architect and engineer John Britten; also, many artists in both visual and non-visual media) that it seems to be proven that a neurological deficit that's fairly specific to reading exists. However, this population and populations with less-specific neurological deficits may not be natural kinds and, depending on the purpose/context, the less-specific deficit(s)/manifestation of the deficit(s) in common may be more salient.

You may get better answers in the SSC subreddit or ACX open thread.

I'm not sure what would be the difference? Some people are, for some reason unique to them, bad at X. Is it a "real medical condition"? It certainly seems to be real, it certainly seems to be a "condition" - as in, describable and identifiable phenomenon, as for whether it's "medical" I'm not sure that's a robust term. Can you take a pill to cure it? Currently probably not, but there are hundreds of problems that have no pill to cure it. Do we know a sufficiently reduced biological or chemical level cause? Probably not again, but again hundreds of problems without known causes reduced to chemistry or cell biology. The distinction sounds like a political question - e.g. "should people with condition X be covered by ADA and subject to reasonable accommodation provisions, or you just can fire them at will if they're bad at X and you need somebody who's good at X" - but those are impossible to answer objectively. So I think "simply a term that we came up with" describes a lot of things that also absolutely real conditions.

Say you have a condition that makes your leg muscles be 20% slower than average, and that makes you suck at running. If we call that "disrunnia", is it a real medical condition or just a cope parents use to make kid not feel bad for coming last in every race?

I guess my question is more along the lines of "is dyslexia distinct in any meaningful way from a lack of skills in verbal reasoning?"

I don't understand how it could not be distinct? Dyslexia affects reading, so why would that be related to verbal reasoning?

Grammar aside the answer is yes. My sister is pretty badly dyslexic, I remember it took a ton of effort from my mom to teach her to read. But she does just fine in all other language things (and always did), it was purely reading (and spelling) which gave her trouble.

Completely. I've known people with dyslexia for decades and they have normal or better than normal skills in verbal reasoning. They just have a specific dysfunction that causes easily problems with reading and writing that are easy to recognize and have a specific pattern to them.

To me it sounds like asking "is migraine distinct in any meaningful way from having a headache?" or "is depression distinct in any meaningful way from feeling really bad all the time?" Like yes, I can find a way in which these descriptions might be different (e.g. you can feel bad without being depressed, etc.) but why it would be useful, that's what I am not getting?

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