Results matching “autism”

The following is an essay into a topic I know next to nothing about.

As part of our endless discussion of Dilbert and Charlie Sheen, commenter Fraac linked to a blog by philosopher Edouard Machery, who tells a fascinating story:

How do we think about the intentional nature of actions? And how do people with an impaired mindreading capacity think about it?

Consider the following probes:

The Free-Cup Case

Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that if he bought a Mega-Sized Smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, 'I don't care about a commemorative cup, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie in a commemorative cup. Did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup?

The Extra-Dollar Case

Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that the Mega-Sized Smoothies were now one dollar more than they used to be. Joe replied, 'I don't care if I have to pay one dollar more, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie and paid one dollar more for it. Did Joe intentionally pay one dollar more?

You surely think that paying an extra dollar was intentional, while getting the commemorative cup was not. [Indeed, I do--AG.] So do most people (Machery, 2008).

But Tiziana Zalla and I [Machery] have found that if you had Asperger Syndrome, a mild form of autism, your judgments would be very different: You would judge that paying an extra-dollar was not intentional, just like getting the commemorative cup.

I'm not particularly interested in the Asperger's angle (except for the linguistic oddity that most people call it Asperger's but in the medical world it's called Asperger; compare, for example, the headline of the linked blog to its text), but I am fascinated by the above experiment. Even after reading the description, it seems to me perfectly natural to think of the free cup as unintentional and the extra dollar as intentional. But I also agree with the implicit point that, in a deeper sense, the choice to pay the extra dollar isn't really more intentional than the choice to take the cup. It just feels that way.

To engage in a bit of introspective reasoning (as is traditional in in the "heuristics and biases" field), I'd say the free cup just happened whereas in the second scenario Joe had to decide to pay the dollar.

But that's not really it. The passive/active division correctly demarcates the free cup and extra dollar examples, but Machery presents other examples where both scenarios are passive, or where both scenarios are active, and you can get perceived intentionality or lack of intentionality in either case. (Just as we learned from classical decision theory and the First Law of Robotics, to not decide is itself a decision.)

Machery's explanation (which I don't buy)

Ouch.

Here's the story (which Kaiser forwarded to me). The English medical journal The Lancet (according to its publisher, "the world's leading independent general medical journal") published an article in 1998 in support of the much-derided fringe theory that MMR vaccination causes autism. From the BBC report:

The Lancet said it now accepted claims made by the researchers were "false".

It comes after Dr Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher in the 1998 paper, was ruled last week to have broken research rules by the General Medical Council. . . . Dr Wakefield was in the pay of solicitors who were acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR. . . .

[The Lancet is now] accepting the research was fundamentally flawed because of a lack of ethical approval and the way the children's illnesses were presented.

The statement added: "We fully retract this paper from the published record." Last week, the GMC ruled that Dr Wakefield had shown a "callous disregard" for children and acted "dishonestly" while he carried out his research. It will decide later whether to strike him off the medical register.

The regulator only looked at how he acted during the research, not whether the findings were right or wrong - although they have been widely discredited by medical experts across the world in the years since publication.

They also write:

The publication caused vaccination rates to plummet, resulting in a rise in measles.

An interesting question, no? What's the causal effect of a single published article?

P.S. I love it how they refer to the vaccine as a "three-in-one jab." So English! They would never call it a "jab" in America. So much more evocative than "shot," in my opinion.

Few people have pointed us to some more of the Venn Diagram Challenge diagrams in response to the Venn Diagram Challenge Summary 1:

The Venn Diagram Challenge which started with this entry has spurred exciting discussions at Junk Charts, EagerEyes.org, and at Perceptual edge. So I thought I will do my best to put them together in one piece.

Outcomes people created can be divided into 2 classes, first group dealt with the problem of expressing the "3-way Venn diagram of percentage with different base frequency". Second group went a little deeper to figure out the better way to express what the paper is trying to express in a graphical way. Our ultimate goal is the second one, however, first problem is it's self a interesting challenge and thus I will deal with them separately. ( Second group will be dealt with in the Venn Diagram Challenge Summary 2 which should come shortly after this article. )

Venn diagram converted into a table:

(For background you can look at the previous posts original entry, on Antony Unwin's Mosaic chart, and Stack Lee's bar chart.)

Someone writes "Keep it simple" and sends this in:

See here and here for background.

In response to this query on how to reexpress Venn-diagram data graphically, Antony sends along this picture:

and writes:

Igor sends along this graph on autism diagnosis

and asks whether this information can be presented better graphically. The answer is definitely yes, although I don't have time in the next 15 seconds to figure out exactly how to do it. My intuition is to do some sort of line plot, showing the probability of autism given different factors which can interact, perhaps using a structure of multiple graphs as in Figure 2 of this paper. Even with binary factors, a graph with the factor on the x-axis can work well, especially if you use small multiples to display different conditions.

I'm not sure, though, since I haven't read enough to have figured out what the substantive goal is here.

Any other thoughts?

P.S. I still like this Venn diagram, though: