How we would design a rigorous study that measures total cost of ownership when teams integrate AI assistance, including later maintenance and defect rates, rather than just initial output speed?
Your experience illustrates something that often gets lost in the autism-vs-not-autism debate: many people don’t fall into clean diagnostic categories. You’re describing a profile that mixes autism traits, trauma adaptations, ADHD features, and developmental history, and instead of neatly labeling you, the system failed you outright with a bipolar misdiagnosis. That alone shows how fragile clinical certainty really is.
I think the most important part of what you wrote is that you changed over time. Whether that improvement came from meditation, therapy, maturity, trauma processing, or simply growing into yourself, it challenges the idea that autism is a static essence. Development, coping skills, neurology, and environment interact in ways the current diagnostic boundaries don’t fully capture.
Where I push back slightly is on the conclusion that self-diagnosis can automatically fill the gaps. For some people it’s deeply accurate and validating, for others it may explain one part of their experience but obscure another. As you said, many people carry a “grab-bag” of traits, and a single label can illuminate or compress that complexity depending on how it’s used.
You’re right that the field has a painful history and uneven present. Misdiagnosis is real. Forced treatment is real. Diagnostic tools are blunt instruments for a very diverse human reality. Supporting research while staying critical of the system makes sense, not because autism isn’t real, but because the categories we have are still evolving. Your story is a perfect example of why humility in diagnosis matters, whether it’s done by a psychiatrist or by oneself.
The core issue is that the BBC report inflates what the study actually shows. The paper is a small, single-centre RCT of one specific surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy). Its primary outcome is a modest reduction in propofol and fentanyl dose under a very specific anaesthetic protocol. It does not demonstrate broadly faster recovery or an across-the-board clinical benefit. The authors themselves are cautious and explicitly list limitations.
The article strips out that narrow context and generalises. Phrases like “music eases surgery and speeds recovery” and “strongest evidence yet” extrapolate from a sample of 56 people undergoing one procedure to “surgery” in general. The paper doesn’t measure global recovery outcomes, discharge times, or longer-term effects. Satisfaction and pain scores are even reported as comparable between groups (P=0.361 and P=0.07).
There’s also mechanistic speculation in the article (implicit memory, psychological responses, “humanising the operating room”) that isn’t in the study’s data. The paper reports dose differences and perioperative physiological measures—not neuropsychological mechanisms.
> Its primary outcome is a modest reduction in propofol and fentanyl dose under a very specific anaesthetic protocol.
Ooh, that sounds like p-hacking. How many other protocols, and other potential outcomes in general, did they look at before picking the one to publish? If it's on the order of 20, then we can expect they'd encounter such a result by pure chance.
Indeed. In Australia, a government was once dismissed after failing to pass supply bills in the Senate (Supply bills allocate money to the government). The Governor-General resolved the deadlock by dissolving Parliament and calling an election. The event is known as “The Dismissal”. It remains one of the key examples of the Governor-General’s reserve powers in action.
This was an example of foreign interference (from where exactly is likely to remain unknown[0]); not an apolitical governor general stabilising the political system.
Isn't this "as intended" in the westminster-style system? The govt is formed by MPs from the majority party (or alliance). By definition they MUST be able to pass ALL money bills, which only require a simple majority. Any failure to pass a money bill is equivalent to the govt no longer holding a majority support in parliament. And that means either the king/president/govgen invites someone else from the current parliament who they have good reason to believe DOES (potentially) have support of majority of the parliament, or dissolve the parliament and call fresh elections if there is no such majority.
I am not quite sure why an action with such a clear established precedent be considered foreign interference? or was it the case that there WAS a suitable candidate with a possible majority but they were NOT invited by the govgen to try and win a trust vote in parliament?
It was very much an edge case, with one of Whitlam's senators on leave and recent changes to territory rules giving additional senators to the opposition party (as I recall ...) the ability to block supply appeared suddenly out of the blue.
Whitlam did move to call an election (rather than be sacked) which likely would have removed the blocked supply threat as he was at the time an extremely popular PM in Australia (loved by the common masses, despised by many elites) .. and when attending the Queens Repreresentative (the Governor General) to advise about calling an election .. he was removed by the G-G.
Strictly speaking the "as intended" outcome should have been to resolve a looming (not yet happened) supply crisis by allowing the people of Australia to vote, instead the government of the day (Whitlam's) was removed on a technical reading against the spirit of intended resolution.
There's a peer comment here that linked to a 2020 article on the finally released royal correspondance that's worth a read. The US influence angle has merit also, they had weight in the game for sure, how much and whether it tipped the balance is debatable.
Literally reams of contraversay here, the G-G acted autonomously and likely to save his own neck as Whitlam intended to replace the G-G, additionally many outside powers (the UK and the US) were whispering in the ears of those with levers to pull seeking to dump Whitlam; he was returning real power to the people, providing socialised health and education to the masses, asking questions about the role of secret American bases on AU soil, etc.
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