After reading an excellent article about Craig Newmark by Philip Weiss in New York magazine, I turned to a New York article about controversy over how to deal with autism. (New York, you see, is more humble and thus more interesting than The New Yorker.) Its author, Andrew Solomon, who wrote The Noonday Demon, once wrote about the deaf rights movement. The neurodiversity movement is similar. What I found most revealing about Solomon’s article is the level of animosity he uncovered.
Researching this article, I spent a lot of time being talked at by people on both sides, one more doctrinaire than the next. Not since my early days reporting from the Soviet Union had I found myself so bullied about what I should and shouldn’t be mentioning.
It’s a kind of debate that didn’t happen until recently: on one side are parents who want to help their kids; on the other side are people who want more acceptance for autistic behavior. On the face of it they should be allies but in reality they are enemies. It reminds me of my complaint about how graduate students are trained (or rather not trained): they never learn to praise, to see what’s good about this or that study, so their natural inclination to be negative does a lot of damage.
I read the article too and thought it was a good overview. I’m the mother of an autistic son and fall in with the neurodiversity movement. Not all parents believe that vaccines cause autism (I don’t) or believe that the same things will help their children. I agree most with Phil Schwarz, who commented on the article, that we’re looking at a false dichotomy when we talk about cure/no cure.
Of course, as with autism itself, there is a spectrum of opinion, even if in what appears to be two clear warring factions.
Seth, you wrote “It reminds me of my complaint about how graduate students are trained (or rather not trained): they never learn to praise, to see what’s good about this or that study, so their natural inclination to be negative does a lot of damage.”
We all have our own experiences as graduate students (those of us who are or were) and some of this set later on become mentors. I must say that my experiences differ markedly from yours. My own graduate and postdoctoral mentors (Ralph Miller and Bob Cook, respectively) both taught me how to praise as well as criticize. I have attempted to emulate both sides of critical analysis when mentoring my own postdocs, graduate, and undergraduate students.
Aaron, it’s good to hear about that. About a dozen people have told me they were trained “to think critically” — that is, to find flaws. You’re the first person to say they were trained to find strengths.
I’m now a psychometrics prof at but spent a long, long time as a grad student—in two fields—at University of Illinois. I had different mentors over time. My first (who shall remain nameless) was incredibly critical, far more than is good for anyone. I had to unlearn that because it literally poisoned my thinking as I got way too good at turning the guns on myself. My later mentors were much better about being even handed and modest. Look for what’s good, what you yourself can learn from, and what can be improved. Don’t automatically reach for the 12 gauge and start blasting away. In fact, in the unlikely event that they’re reading I’ll thank, in alphabetical order, Carolyn Anderson, David Budescu, Larry Hubert, Jack Knott, Jim Kuklinski, Gerry Munck and Michael Smithson, various senior faculty members with whom I worked, was supervised by or just got a lot of advice from when a grad student, all of whom taught me how to do it right. The remaining faults are, of course my own.