Comments on a Longish Passage

This passage is long, but it contains several gems that I think are worth commenting on. I found it one of my favorite blogs; He was quoting a frontiers in Psychology article:

“Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases,” which you can tell is serious because it has a colon to introduce the over-long subtitle.

It’s all interesting, but the relevant part today is that, among pop-psych fallacies, they include “Autism Epidemic,” noting:

there is meager evidence that this purported epidemic reflects a genuine increase in the rates of autism per se as opposed to an increase in autism diagnoses stemming from several biases and artifacts, including heightened societal awareness of the features of autism (“detection bias”), growing incentives for school districts to report autism diagnoses, and a lowering of the diagnostic thresholds for autism across successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Gernsbacher et al., 2005; Lilienfeld and Arkowitz, 2007). Indeed, data indicate when the diagnostic criteria for autism were held constant, the rates of this disorder remained essentially constant between 1990 and 2010 (Baxter et al., 2015).

To which I will add some amateur analysis that would, no doubt … well … I was going to say “drive them crazy” but let’s just say, “probably upset them.”

1. Some correct tricky plurals: diagnoses, biases, data, criteria
2. Pretentiousisms: “as opposed to” instead of “compared with”; and how about using  “more public” instead of “heightened societal”? Maybe the Latin “per se” is a pretentious version of “itself,” but it is, after all, an academic article.
3. Getting rid of “drive them crazy” and replacing it with “probably upset them” is a good example of replacing metaphorical language with straightforward language.
4. Actually saying that he was replacing the phrase fits the good-natured humor of the piece. If he were editing something more serious, he would have just gone with the better phrase.

I don’t read all this academic stuff; I found it about a third of the way down this article.