[runarberg]

That is certainly one of them. However if that was the case, the name would have simply shifted from Asperger’s to High Functioning Autism, which is not the case (neither in the diagnostic tools nor among neuro-diversity advocates).

The problematic beliefs I was referring to was the notion of high IQ. IQ is a very controversial term in psychology, and has a very problematic history. Even though it was initially conceived exactly for the purpose detecting individuals which may have learning disabilities, it has since grown into something which was integral to the eugenics movement. Today we know that IQ has some racial and class biases which we should probably avoid when creating taxonomies which are then used to describe people with disabilities.

[CobaltFire]

I agree but would be a little more precise:

Our current testing to measure IQ has racial and class biases.

I don’t think IQ itself (as a concept) is the issue; it’s our quantification of it that is flawed.

[runarberg]

I think the problem (apart from the biases) is actually the focus on the high IQ part. Finding disabilities by looking at significant deviations from expected values on a test is precisely what the IQ test was initially designed to do (before the eugenics movement got their hands on the construct).

The focus on high IQ is problematic for a number of reasons, including racial and class biases. There are also theoretical implications surrounding intelligence, there is no evidence that there is such a thing called general intelligence let alone that this g-factor can be measured and presented as a single number (why not a matrix or a tensor?).

Having a diagnostic based on such a murky concept as intelligence is indeed very problematic. It is much better to just leave the question of intelligence unanswered when we are diagnosing people with autism. And instead focus on the disabilities each person has. If an autistic person takes an IQ test and measures with a significant deviation (< 70) we can safely say that this person has a learning disability and should be accommodated accordingly. If another autistic person takes the same test and measures normally (~ 100) then that doesn’t add anything to the diagnosis.

All that said, I was curious about it a few months back, and decided to look up how popular IQ tests are among psychologists, and I found out that they are very much falling out of fashion in favor of more focused tools. If a psychologist uses an IQ test, they are much more likely to use the individual subtests and never actually measure the whole IQ of the individual. I didn’t search for how popular they are among psychiatrists though, so IQ might still be a popular tool when making diagnostics, but I would be very surprised if things were any different there, especially now that intelligence is no longer used to differentiate Asperger’s from Autism.

EDIT: I’ve been doing some reading, and I found an excellent secondary source on why some researches and autism advocates want to abolish the term high functioning and in particular to advocate against using IQ to separate autism into sub-categories.

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/large-study-supports-disca... [PDF]