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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Intelligence and autism are probably anticorrelated.

They are not, there is a slight positive correlation with autism. This is copy pasted from gemini, but you can fact check this trivially. It applies for many diseases, such as schizophrenia and ADHD.

The IQ Distribution in Autism

The intellectual abilities of autistic individuals vary widely. While the general population falls neatly onto a standard bell curve for IQ, the autistic population has a different distribution:

Co-occurring Intellectual Disability: According to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), roughly 30% to 40% of children diagnosed with autism have a co-occurring intellectual disability (an IQ score below 70)[1][3].

Average to Above-Average Intelligence: The remaining 60% to 70% of autistic individuals have average, above-average, or exceptionally high IQs

The people with ADHD, whose ADHD is caused by the group of genes which are correlated with autism tend to have higher IQ. The people with schizophrenia, whose disease is caused by the group of genes which are correlated with bipolar disorder also have higher IQ.

The cases of ADHD and schizophrenia caused by other genes lead to a lower IQ. Because IQ increasing variant is rarer on average these diseases are anticorrelated with IQ but in reality there are two peaks.

Source for the claim about schizophrenia, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-natural-tradeoff-and-failure The average autist, who isn't visibly dumb probably has higher IQ than average.

Finally, we recently observed in a larger sample of patients, who presented in specialized outpatient clinics for ASD, a bimodal IQ distribution within ASD individuals [38.2% below average intelligence (i.e., IQ < 85), 40% with above average intelligence (IQ > 115) and 21.8% with an average intelligence (IQ between 85 and 115)

from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9058071/

Cutting off the bottom 40% of the distribution and then finding that the remaining 60% is average-to-above-average is a thoroughly underwhelming statistical finding. Autists have pretty specific deficits in understanding people, and if that's not measured in IQ, so much the worse for IQ.

The word "visibly" is doing heavy lifting there. If you cut off those below 85 IQ in a normal population you would be removing 16% of the population while for autists you would be removing 38.2% of the population.

Autists also have 21.8% above 115 IQ while normal population has 16% in that range.

If you apply same filtering criteria to the normal population and autists, the autists would indeed have higher average IQ than normal population.

In normal professional life you are less likely to meet low functioning autists, so you would observe a positive correlation between IQ and autism.

On average IQ is slightly correlated with having better emotional intelligence too but of course that won't apply to autists.

There is a reason why I use "spergery" and "sperg" rather than "autism" to talk about the social dysfunction which is common (but not universal) in high-functioning autism and the people who display it. "Autism" or "ASD" with the modern diagnostic criteria covers a very broad spectrum from "not actually disabling at all" to "about as functional as a pet rock", and moderate-to-severe autism can be disabling in different ways. "Having an ASD diagnosis" is definitely anticorrelated with IQ, because the most severe cases are more likely to be diagnosed.

My personal view is that there are two different aetiologies of autism, which I call "familial autism" and "fucked-head autism" - the second of which is caused by some kind of brain damage and typically comes along with multiple other disabilities and a very low IQ. This would make autism anticorrelated with intelligence because fucked-head autism exists. I don't know what sign the correlation between familial autism and IQ is, although anecdotally it is positive.

There is definitely a positive correlation between visible spergery and visible intelligence. My darkly cynical view on this is that neurotypical people recognise that the socially correct thing for smart people in normal social environments (and especially mainstream schools) is to act dumber than they are so they fit in with the top quarter of the local IQ distribution. So only spergs show a visible high IQ. There is also a selection effect, where 90 IQ moderately autistic people can't manage their own condition and end up removed from the public realm due to e.g. frequent meltdowns.

IIRC Aspergers and the like are uncorrelated. Smart people are generally functional.

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