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Wellness Wednesday for October 25, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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If I marry an aspie woman, what are the odds that we get profoundly autistic kids? Does anyone have an intuition on this, or any data?

I was curious and did my best* to track that down, but only found tangentially related sources and then engaged in napkin math.

Something like 5x relative risk, and the probability of being on the spectrum being anywhere from 4.8% to 37%(!). Further figuring out the odds of them being low functioning is something I'm not going to try when it's so in the air. At any rate, you should consider factors such as maternal and paternal age too, since environmental conditions contribute quite strongly.

*The one citation I will provide is that this isn't true

At any rate, you should consider factors such as maternal and paternal age too, since environmental conditions contribute quite strongly.

Is it really environmental and not accumulation of mutations and genetic abnormalities?

You're correct, I misphrased that, I don't think general mutations in DNA should fall under the environment.