Transgender regret? Research challenges narratives about gender-affirming surgeries
The findings push back against the notion that many transgender people end up wishing they hadn’t gone through with gender-affirming surgeries.
Open Society
How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.
OpenAI, Google and Meta ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and discussed skirting copyright law as they sought online information to train their newest artificial intelligence systems.
How Mississippi’s Jim Crow Laws Still Haunt Black Voters Today
After the U.S. Civil War, white supremacists used felony disenfranchisement to suppress the Black vote. Even now, restoring rights has hit a roadblock.
Understanding power and de-powering
The normalisation of social power gradients and powered-up relationships is the terminal disease that plagues all empires. Since we live in the context of the convulsions of dying empires, it is im…
A shift from a global monoculture to ecosystems of human scale groups reduces the spurious complexity needed to support a monoculture, and it retains and even grows adaptive cultural complexity, i.e. the diversity that emerges when the human ecological footprint is aligned with bioregional ecosystem functions. Spurious complexity wastes energy – is the result of humans working against biological evolution, whereas adaptive complexity saves energy – it is the result of humans engaging in collaborative niche construction as a part of biological ecosystems.
What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything
The 'White Rural Rage' narrative gets the research wrong. I know, because some of it is mine.
Trumpism Is Emptying Churches
The former president’s embrace of White Christian militantism coincides with a precipitous decline in religious affiliation in the US.
When ‘ruthless’ Boeing cut costs, the damage spread
Boeing’s leaders are tepidly admitting the shareholders-first, workers-be-damned strategy was flawed. It’s an admission a generation in coming.
What's it like going to school when you're autistic?
For Autism Acceptance Week 2024, one autistic student tells us about her experience of attending school in Scotland.
Critical Race Theory Is About You, and All of Us | The Jose Vilson
Recently, Christina Cross, a Black woman sociologist at Harvard, found her work at the crosshairs of the same person who brought us the bastardization of ... Read More
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2024 Neurodivergent Psychedelic Conference Video Replay — NDPSYCHEDELIC.COM
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Emerging adulthood in autism: Striving for independence or interdependence? - Carly Moser, Leann Smith DaWalt, Meghan M Burke, Julie Lounds Taylor, 2024
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
EUCAP Position Statement on ABA
We are deeply concerned about the widespread lack of attention to autistic people’s expressed views and lived experience regarding ABA.
Why You Can't Debate a Conspiracy Theorist Back to Reality, Part III
How Individuals Can Occasionally, Gradually, Sometimes Get Through to Conspiracy Theorists
factors like whiteness and Christianity itself, which cultivate majoritarian grievance and encourage a sense of being targeted for “persecution” by outside forces, also make fertile ground for the proliferation of conspiratorial beliefs. In other words, despite having privilege and social position and a “church family,” certain individuals and groups are still highly susceptible to authoritarian attitudes, paranoia, and succumbing to the faux-comfort offered by conspiracy theories.
These theories often contain elements of projection. Take for example QAnon, with its fixation on a supposed cabal of Democratic leaders, Hollywood elites, and LGBTQ people who traffic children for nefarious purposes. In actual fact, child sex abuse is common in authoritarian religious communities, in which powerful abusers can find cover and access to victims, and can often count on their communities to cover their offenses up. Right-wing Christians, including the significant percentage of them who adhere to QAnon beliefs, do not want to face this reality, so they look for (and conveniently find) external monsters to fixate on.
For many conspiracy theorists, the false beliefs they’ve adopted are not just covering up their insecurities, but are also either themselves closely related to the believers’ identities, or are protecting something that is. When identity is at stake—one’s identity as a “good person,” for example, or, in a way that is often not directly spoken but that conspiracy theories give cover to, one’s whiteness and the privilege it comes with—that’s some very heavy emotional baggage to lift.
Most conspiracy theorists, unless they somehow find their own way out of the thicket they’ve gotten lost in, will be reached, if at all, through patient personal engagement that feels largely unthreatening.
Monotropism
Download PDF for print. One of the best explanations of the autistic experience came from Murray, Lesser, and Lawson: Monotropism. In this model, attention resources in autism is always highly conc…
Why School Absences Have ‘Exploded’ Almost Everywhere
The pandemic changed families’ lives and the culture of education: “Our relationship with school became optional.”
Dr. Rosanbalm, the Duke psychologist, said both absenteeism and behavioral outbursts are examples of the human stress response, now playing out en masse in schools: fight (verbal or physical aggression) or flight (absenteeism).
We Need to Talk About Trader Joe’s
Behind the bubbly cashiers in Hawaiian shirts, craveable snacks, and bargain-basement prices are questionable business practices that have many food brands crying foul at the company’s blatant and aggressive copycat culture.
“With food, just like with fashion, whenever something is cheap, somewhere along the line, someone is being taken advantage of,” says Gao.
Elon Musk’s Flawed Cyborg Dream
It turns out that connecting brains with computers is the easy part.
The Dragon Paradox
"Dragons aren't real in the same way that fish aren't real" – JRR Tolkien---The problem started with a book. Actually, I suppose it started with a show, “Dra...
FAQ
I get asked lots of questions about having Tourettes all the time. Some people ask me things that show a lot of thoughtfulness and take me by surprise. Others ask things that are so strange they make me laugh.
I’ve answered many of the questions I get asked a lot about Tourettes below. Some are g
Shifting Sands
I’m sad today. I feel worn out and worn down. I’m frustrated by the physical reality of my body and with how I’m dealing with it. In the last few weeks my energy levels have plummeted for no obvious reason, and they were already pretty low.
Things that I could do relatively independently, I’m now
Alexithymia and interoception: What the Hell is going on!?
Alexithymia is a condition or difference, which roughly translates in ancient Greek as “no words for emotions.” People who experience alexithymia can have difficulty identifying feeling…
Dimensions of Difference
By Dr Dinah Murray From The Neurodiversity Reader (2020). Pre-publication version. This chapter is based on an ecological, embodied, enactive and exploratory account of minds. It offers an al…
Interest is a quality that tends to elude measurement – except when it is deliberately (and perversely) reduced to ‘behaviours’. The third diagnostic criterion has always been about interests; within ABA and its variants, that has been reframed as about behaviours. Behaviourism is a reduction of dimensions which creates an illusion of scientific worth by focussing only on what we can ‘know for sure’. However, the effects of what we don’t exactly know can be as ramified and real – and use up more real energy to integrate – while also sometimes being fun to pursue (Stern 1987).
Another frequent accusation is of ‘mind blindness’ – apparently a ‘dysfunction’ that is especially prominent in autistic pathology. This is fundamentally wrong from two very different angles. It is wrong because nobody actually can ‘read’ or ‘see into’ another person’s mind. Tuning in to another’s interests and substantially sharing prior assumptions can situate people in a comfortable dialogue in which good hunches happen about each other’s hopes and fears. This is not much like reading, it is a lot more like dancing or sailing or improvising music together, and concerns reciprocal noticing, intuition, engagement and attunement (Stern 1985, Bohlis et al, 2017, Milton 2012, Green 2011, Constant et al 2018).
How the U.S. National Park System Is Welcoming Neurodiverse Travelers
Customized itineraries, social stories, and sensory kits help families pull off a seamless visit.
Ex-deputy says he was fired after refusing to affiliate with alleged deputy gang
A former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy has sued the county, alleging he was retaliated against and wrongly fired.
Pluralistic: Too big to care (04 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The Effects of Behavior-Based Models on Neurodevelopment and Learning with Alfie Kohn & Prof. Torres
We would love to hear your thoughts on this webinar, fill out our brief survey using the below link.https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/sv/seyMIkB/njaceBased...
FINAL_JADD_manuscript.pdf
A mom called 911 to get her son mental health help. He died after police responded with force
When a 24-year-old former Marine experienced a manic episode at a southern Indiana rest stop, his mother called 911 for help getting him mental health treatment.
PsyArXiv Preprints | Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI
Conspiracy theories are a paradigmatic example of beliefs that, once adopted, are extremely difficult to dispel. Influential psychological theories propose that conspiracy beliefs are uniquely resistant to counterevidence because they satisfy important needs and motivations. Here, we raise the possibility that previous attempts to correct conspiracy beliefs have been unsuccessful merely because they failed to deliver counterevidence that was sufficiently compelling and tailored to each believer’s specific conspiracy theory (which vary dramatically from believer to believer). To evaluate this possibility, we leverage recent developments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver well-argued, person-specific debunks to a total of N = 2,190 conspiracy theory believers. Participants in our experiments provided detailed, open-ended explanations of a conspiracy theory they believed, and then engaged in a 3 round dialogue with a frontier generative AI model (GPT-4 Turbo) which was instructed to reduce each participant’s belief in their conspiracy theory (or discuss a banal topic in a control condition). Across two experiments, we find robust evidence that the debunking conversation with the AI reduced belief in conspiracy theories by roughly 20%. This effect did not decay over 2 months time, was consistently observed across a wide range of different conspiracy theories, and occurred even for participants whose conspiracy beliefs were deeply entrenched and of great importance to their identities. Furthermore, although the dialogues were focused on a single conspiracy theory, the intervention spilled over to reduce beliefs in unrelated conspiracies, indicating a general decrease in conspiratorial worldview, as well as increasing intentions to challenge others who espouse their chosen conspiracy. These findings highlight that even many people who strongly believe in seemingly fact-resistant conspiratorial beliefs can change their minds in the face of sufficient evidence.