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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 19th, 2023

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  • You know, we restrict and ban certain drugs like fentanyl and heroin respectively because their addiction potential is so high and can cause a lot of harm at the population level.

    Sure people have individual responsibility, but it’s also unrealistic to expect most people to resist an entire social and structural environments geared around certain behaviours, like drinking alcohol or smoking back in the day. Not everyone has the same has the same ironclad will and perfect emotionless reasoning as you, especially youth–remember they used to have smoking ads aimed at kids? And now it’s vaping.

    While a lot of things I can easily resist, like narcotics and alcohol, I still get influenced by certain types of ads to try things, get addicted to certain games, and eat way too much junk food. For a lot of things, you can’t know it’s going to be a problem for you until it’s a problem. Plenty of people buy a few loot boxes here and there and don’t develop a gambling addiction. That doesn’t mean gambling addiction isn’t a risk and problem to take seriously and address at the systemic level, not just leave it to the individual.




  • It’s up to you if it helps you to think of it that way. However, if everyone is on the spectrum, then “autism” is less useful as a term for categorizing a group of people with a shared condition that may need help/accommodation in specific ways. How do you provide special services for autistic people when everyone is “on the spectrum”. There’s a solution, but requires a different way of categorizing people.

    “spectrum” is a useful analogy to the EM spectrum, which is a literal spectrum. The autism spectrum is not a literal spectrum, we call it that because it’s a useful way to understand neurodiveristy. However, like any analogy, it eventually falls apart as you go deeper into applying it. It’s not the complete way to understand autism nor is it the only applicable analogy.

    Autism is not fully understood, but it is characterized by several dimensions that each involve variation from the norm due to a complex of causes. This is why the “spectrum” analogy falls apart–it reduced autism to one dimension. Another analogy might be a crystal that grows in multiple directions, with more growth from the centre being divergence from the norm. Some crystals grow a little bit in all directions, some grow only in a couple directions, and every other combination of amount x direction.













  • Sure, I don’t disagree with what you said. Some will say Applied Science is a category of science, others will say it’s distinct from capital “S” Science. I don’t really care either way, the distinction I was making was: Science is a process of developing knowledge that explains the natural/observable universe, including the humans/societies within it, i.e. a way of understanding what is. Engineering is the application of scientific knowledge, principles, and methods of inquiry in the construction and development of technology–it does not seek to explain things about the world.