I disagree with you that it’s the discussion that’s off, it is the science.

The problem is that autism is not a clearly defined disorder. Its definition and diagnostic criteria can and have changed, and even then, those criteria are poorly specified.

One thing that I have always found troubling is the “clinically significant impairment” requirement of an autism diagnosis. It seems to me that a person’s level of “impairment” is likely to depend on individual differences and possibly environment and circumstances. To me this seems odd: surely the disorder exists regardless of a person’s ability to manage it? If a person grows up in accommodating circumstances, do they not have autism? What if someone grows up in tough circumstances but later finds more accommodating circumstances, is their autism “cured”? Questions are facetious, but the point stands.

It’s also odd that we see autism so highly implicated in comorbidities with other disorders such as epilepsy, which aren’t dependent exclusively on phenotype observations to diagnose. To me, this strongly indicates that what we call autism today (or some sub/superset of it) likely will become definitively diagnosable in future with improved understanding and brain imaging.

For now, it feels like the diagnostic criteria are actually just guidelines for guessing whether someone is autistic, rather than determining it (especially when it comes to determining what constitutes “significant clinical impairment” and its varying degrees).

To be clear: I definitely believe that “autism” exists and is a disorder that impacts people broadly as described, the challenges are around its definition and diagnosis. I have spoken to autistic people before who have found my views to be offensive, and invalidating of them. That’s not my intention, my intention is to pursue accuracy because I believe with better understanding, we will be able to make sure our public spaces/workplaces/etc. are accommodating to everyone, including folks with different needs.

I’m interested, in what cases would it not be true if we assume “average” here to be “median”? I can only think of one: if we consider “understanding” to be discrete rather than continuous.

That’s not true, and is why I focused on lung cancer. Don’t forget that smokers don’t just die of cancer, so even if we take your source, we still don’t have the proper picture.

That’s why I also added the point that about half of smokers die prematurely due to their smoking, because I was not planning to exhaustively list every possible cause of death which could be caused by smoking.

In fact, only about half of smokers die prematurely from their smoking.

I mean, I’m not saying start smoking, but also let’s at least have accurate facts.

They move to a nominally higher level role in a different department, often a cost centre, generally to some role which serves the organisation just by existing (e.g. a legally required role, or something that serves some certification purpose, or so that sales teams can say 'we have a dedicated person in our X office for doing that').

The majority of high severity vulnerabilities are not the kind of thing you need a PhD in Comp Sci to comprehend, they are mostly about finding a way to get a system to end up in a state different than was anticipated when entering a particular code path.

Exhaustively looking at code and identifying ways to do this is something LLMs are quite good at. They don’t get tired, and you can run them non-stop.

They're also (generally) quite good at reading the literal meaning of the code, whereas humans often see the intended meaning first, and can be biased.

If you had a tireless junior engineer who was given the job of “make this application get into a state it’s not supposed to be in”, you’d probably get similar results.

What Mythos is quite good at is both the first bit and coming up with ways it could chain that together with other bits of unexpected state to create something that forms a meaningful vulnerability rather than a dead end.

It’s very simple, just change every third word for something different to what you originally wrote.

It’s very straightforward, just change each and every third word for something different instead of what you actually wrote.

And so on ad infinitum.

Generally when this happens, it's because they copied the Latin glyph and then made some tweaks to the whole Cyrillic alphabet to make it look more even, etc., and the changes to the 'a' may not even be intentional, but the 'a' got caught up in a batch change or something.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/#:~:text=The%20data%20subje...

What it does incentivise is pushing more usage in case there’s a reset-generating additional demand. Probably sounds good in the boardroom that token consumption is up X% this quarter.

Unlikely to last forever, but for now the goal is to beat Anthropic. Up until the Mythos/Fable debacle, I’d have said Anthropic were leading, but if you’ll forgive the pun, I think they flew to close to the sun, and when Sol came out, they’d shot their “Mythos/Fable” shot and it turned out to be… good, but not revolutionary.