“Obvious” makes it sound like this is inevitable and acceptable, and I do not think it is. We do not judge it to be in other areas, either.
If I design a university building today, I can’t just go “obviously, all humans can walk and see and hear”. No, I make it wheelchair accessible, accessible for blind people, and accessible for deaf people, even though they are outliers. Because they are outliers we want in academia.
If I design a school curriculum today, I can’t just go “obviously, all humans learn the same way”, and teach all my students the same way. Well, I can, and as a result, a large number of students who could have done brilliantly will fail, feel awful, and not be able to contribute to society afterwards. Each of them will individually be an outlier.
There is a famous and interesting example on designing cockpits for pilots in the first planes. Someone made a model of the average, normal pilot, in order to make a cockpit that would fit average people. For each trait, they made sure 9 out of 10 pilots would fall into the range the cockpit was made for. There were only 10 traits or so—eye height, leg length, arm length, body width, horizontal visual range, etc.. - The resulting cockpit suited practically noone. Nearly everyone was uncomfortable in some way, because nearly everyone was an outlier in some way, and nearly everyone flew shittily for that reason. Ultimately, cockpit design was sent back to the drawing board—and we ended up with the individually adjustable seats and turnable equipment that nowadays, all of us are familiar with from modern cars. One size fits all fits practically noone.
We are seeing the same thing with machine learning algorithms. If we feed them data that fits the average, the outliers will be misclassified horribly, with severe consequences, and it is surprising how many outliers you end up encountering and how much damage that does.
A lack of representation does tangible harm. We have seen this in racism, we have seen this in sexism. Tell people implicitly that all scientists, or at least, all scientists that matter, are white men, and this will have consequences on who ends up in science, who speaks up. This is awful for the women and people of colour in question. But it also sucks for science.
And especially when it comes to neurodivergence… the fact that these things can often be masked, that they are not immediately visible, and that they can lead to difficulties with activities considered trivial, or genuine pain from things considered harmless… it is so easy to conclude from that that you are broken, asocial, that something is wrong with you. Everyone else can deal with loud crowds. Everyone else can focus. Everyone else understood this. Clearly, you aren’t trying, or you are sick. I literally had my dad argue, in writing, that the difficulties arising from me being highly gifted clearly showed that being highly gifted was a disease state requiring state intervention. I got handed to psychologists, not to be helped and understood, but to be made to conform. The fact that society says neurodivergence either does not exist, or does not matter, or is shameful, reinforces that you need to hide it, rather than asking for understanding and accommodations that would be empowering. A lot of the things one is told all humans do or need are things framed as moral imperatives, and not feeling them or needing them can feel like being a bad person, a person who cannot act ethically, a person who is inconsiderate, when this is not actually true.
“Obvious” makes it sound like this is inevitable and acceptable, and I do not think it is. We do not judge it to be in other areas, either.
If I design a university building today, I can’t just go “obviously, all humans can walk and see and hear”. No, I make it wheelchair accessible, accessible for blind people, and accessible for deaf people, even though they are outliers. Because they are outliers we want in academia.
If I design a school curriculum today, I can’t just go “obviously, all humans learn the same way”, and teach all my students the same way. Well, I can, and as a result, a large number of students who could have done brilliantly will fail, feel awful, and not be able to contribute to society afterwards. Each of them will individually be an outlier.
There is a famous and interesting example on designing cockpits for pilots in the first planes. Someone made a model of the average, normal pilot, in order to make a cockpit that would fit average people. For each trait, they made sure 9 out of 10 pilots would fall into the range the cockpit was made for. There were only 10 traits or so—eye height, leg length, arm length, body width, horizontal visual range, etc.. - The resulting cockpit suited practically noone. Nearly everyone was uncomfortable in some way, because nearly everyone was an outlier in some way, and nearly everyone flew shittily for that reason. Ultimately, cockpit design was sent back to the drawing board—and we ended up with the individually adjustable seats and turnable equipment that nowadays, all of us are familiar with from modern cars. One size fits all fits practically noone.
We are seeing the same thing with machine learning algorithms. If we feed them data that fits the average, the outliers will be misclassified horribly, with severe consequences, and it is surprising how many outliers you end up encountering and how much damage that does.
A lack of representation does tangible harm. We have seen this in racism, we have seen this in sexism. Tell people implicitly that all scientists, or at least, all scientists that matter, are white men, and this will have consequences on who ends up in science, who speaks up. This is awful for the women and people of colour in question. But it also sucks for science.
And especially when it comes to neurodivergence… the fact that these things can often be masked, that they are not immediately visible, and that they can lead to difficulties with activities considered trivial, or genuine pain from things considered harmless… it is so easy to conclude from that that you are broken, asocial, that something is wrong with you. Everyone else can deal with loud crowds. Everyone else can focus. Everyone else understood this. Clearly, you aren’t trying, or you are sick. I literally had my dad argue, in writing, that the difficulties arising from me being highly gifted clearly showed that being highly gifted was a disease state requiring state intervention. I got handed to psychologists, not to be helped and understood, but to be made to conform. The fact that society says neurodivergence either does not exist, or does not matter, or is shameful, reinforces that you need to hide it, rather than asking for understanding and accommodations that would be empowering. A lot of the things one is told all humans do or need are things framed as moral imperatives, and not feeling them or needing them can feel like being a bad person, a person who cannot act ethically, a person who is inconsiderate, when this is not actually true.