BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism. You have to squint your eyes a bit, for example both of these neurotypes involve social difficulties, like the subjective feeling of being alien in the world (known as Anderssein in German psychiatry). However if you peel off the social layer then the remaining autistic features become anti-correlated with the remaining schizotypal features on the scale of the population. There are also some decent theories that suggest this should be the case - for example in the predictive coding theory it is believed that autistic brains over-weigh sensory inputs over their model of the world, whereas schizotypal brains over-weigh their model of the world over the sensory inputs. Or the Big Five traits, openness to experience is usually low in autism and high in schizophrenia.

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notnullorvoid 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Wouldn't the implication of them being "opposite" be that in some sense they are mutually exclusive? I don't really see evidence of that. Your example of sensory input vs world model weight is a bit flawed, because both of those are extremely multifaceted. One can have extreme weight in sensory input in one sense but not others, as well as extreme weight on world model for certain aspects of life.

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coldtea 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the mind is a kind of "prediction machine", wouldn't that make ALL psychiactric disorders a specific variation of faulty prediction mode though?

	▲	Noaidi 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but not always faulty. My (diagnosed) OCD and Anxiety have saved me from many bad situation. I see the many many many possibilities that something can go wrong and I have very low risk tolerance.

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TimByte an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, the "mirror image" idea makes a lot of sense to me. Both groups feel out of sync socially, but for opposite reasons: autistic cognition leans too hard on raw sensory input, schizotypal cognition leans too hard on internal interpretations

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Unlisted6446 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think I understand what you mean.

You're saying that relative to the 'typical individual', autistic brains weigh sensory inputs more heavily than their internal model. And that in schizotypal brains, relative to the 'typical individual', the internal model is weighed more heavily than the sensory input, right?

I don't know much about this area, so I can't comment on the correctness. However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.

I don't say this to try to undermine the challenges by people with autism or schizotypy. However, I think it's also fair to say that if we consider what the 'typical' person really is and how the 'typical' person really acts, they frequently do a lot of illogical and --- simply-put --- 'crazy' things.

	▲	heyjamesknight 40 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The center of the normal ditribution is “normal” or “normative.” That’s where the term comes from. It’s like saying we shouldn’t call immigrants “aliens” because that conjures images of space. Where do you think the term comes from?
	▲	coldtea 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		>However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition. No biggie, there's a real normative undertone to the world in general too. Norm itself means "what the majority does" or the socially (i.e. majority) accepted yardstick ("norma" in latin was a literal yardstick-like tool). It's not about the typical person _always_ doing things in a better way, or the autistic person always doing things differently. It's about the distribution of typical vs atypical behavior. So, it's not very useful to characterize such atypical behavior better or worse based on absolute moral or technical judgement. Morality changes over time, cultures, and even social groups, to a bigger or smaller degree. If, however, we use "degree of comformity with majority behaviors/expectations" as the measurement, autistics do perform worse on that.
	▲	WJW 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Isn't "what the typical individual experiences" pretty much the definition of "normal"? Whether "normal" is also "correct" is a completely separate question. There are plenty of fields where the behavior of the typical person is also widely perceived to be incorrect, like personal finance or exercise routines.

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Noaidi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism.

And I disagree with that. There is a wide overlap of symptoms in all mood disorders. People with ASD show many traits of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. This paper might change your mind:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8931527/

	▲	H8crilA 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, at face value the two diagnoses are positively correlated. This is simply true. And traits of these two only become negatively correlated if you remove the shared social difficulties, which includes a lot of the negative symptoms. Unfortunately everything is positively correlated in psychiatry. If you want to explore this deeper I recommend the "p factor" (general psychopathology factor), which is a serious, multi-year attempt at identifying something like the "first eigenvector of psychiatry", a loading common to all psychopathology, including substance use, affective disorders, psychotic disorders, conduct/personality disorders, ... The idea is that if you only know that someone has whatever goes into this vector then you know that person is quite likely to develop some disorder, but you don't know which one. I would only add that ASDs do not have "real" negative symptoms of schizophrenia, but what they do have can look a bit similar. The research on anti-correlation was using questionnaires and binned the social questions taking that into account.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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SecondHandTofu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is fascinating, I have seen the schizophrenia model of having "trapped priors" before.

I figured that this is probably something Scott Alexander has written about, and lo and behold: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-a...