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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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I've met plenty of extremely intelligent women in the tech industry. They exist, but I think their efforts are spent on things other than the sort of mental masturbation that mottizens like to participate in.

One thing that I have noticed, and should really give you pause, is the frequency with which these high-g women with similar spouses have autistic children. It's not necessarily an awesome idea to breed two shape rotators in an attempt at creating an uber-rotator.

I think the frequency of autism diagnoses in tech couples has more to do with income than tech - as in, highly motivated wealthy parents watching for every single child learning milestone are much more likely and able to take their kid to a shrink if/when they perceive a lag in achievement. Since shrinks are motivated to find something wrong, most of them will find something wrong, and since autism covers a spectrum from "throws feces at the wall all day and is nonverbal" to "sometimes feels slightly awkward with new people" it's a nice safe diagnosis to feed the type A parents. Same with ADD.

I think a lot of normal variation in personality has been pathologized.

I didn't really mean "extra smart, quirky" autistic. Pretty much everyone here checks enough boxes that if we fought to get it, we could get that ordained title. I'm talking about serious problems functioning in society autistic. Better get a bunch of friends while your parents can negotiate your life for you autistic. This is a lot different than "I read a lot of words on the internet and feel awkward in public" autistic.

One thing that I have noticed, and should really give you pause, is the frequency with which these high-g women with similar spouses have autistic children. It's not necessarily an awesome idea to breed two shape rotators in an attempt at creating an uber-rotator.

My mom was the teacher at a fairly unique private school that was essentially designed to cater to autistics, school-refusers and target a band of about 10th-20th percentile intelligence (since the ones largely below that were seen as being very difficult to create positive outcomes from). Very anecdotal, especially since the fees were quite high, but the amount of brilliant, professionally-successful (Actuaries, Surgeons, Engineers etc) parents at that school who'd seemingly benefited from being low-medium on the spectrum who'd then produce a child who was unable to function on their own, was very high.

I do think it's partly confounded by the rate with which professionally successful individuals tended to wait till later in life to actually have kids, but it was definitely a trend in the parental population.

To what extent is the elevated rate of autism among the offspring of such pairings due to the parents skewing older? Of course age at parenthood is highly correlated with rotatorhood, I would imagine, but I’ve never seen anyone try to tease out the magnitudes of each effect individually

As a counterpoint, my girlfriend is smart and loves the kind of mental masturbation mottizens like to engage in. We watched the napoleon movie the other day and ended up talking about the French for several hours.

The reason she’s not here is she doesn’t like to argue, especially if people might be hostile. But open-ended discussions are something she loves, probably as much as I do. I do wonder if that preference explains a lot of the difference in mental masturbation you see.

Eugenics programs will continue until we get another Von Neumann goddammit!