Denial: How Refusing to Face the Facts About Our Autism Epidemic Hurts Children, Families, and Our Future by Mark Blaxill & Dan Olmsted

Author:Mark Blaxill & Dan Olmsted [Blaxill, Mark & Olmsted, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autism - Antipropaganda, Autism
ISBN: 9781510716957
Google: 62SCDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2017-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Unqualified Observers

“Bullshitting is not exactly lying, and bullshit remains bullshit whether it’s true or false. The difference lies in the bullshitter’s complete disregard for whether what he’s saying corresponds to facts in the physical world: he does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

—Harry Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University, On Bullshit

◆ ◆ ◆

Every journalist who has been at it for a while (in Dan’s case, four decades or so) has a treasure trove of boneheaded errors they can recount. Mistakes happen. The trick for journalists is to learn how easy it is to get things wrong before we look like complete idiots when it really matters.

By that standard, Steve Silberman, John Donvan, and Caren Zucker look foolish in things that really do matter. Beyond errors in their arguments, they make mistakes in their books that suggest they don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Donvan and Zucker make fewer mistakes but some that are quite crucial to the “branding” that is so important to them. Silberman’s argument is more powerful (which is not especially hard because Donvan and Zucker don’t really have one), but his mistakes are more egregious. Some specific mistakes they make invalidate central pieces of their case. Examples? Donvan and Zucker attempt to co-opt their discovery of Donald T. and misrepresent their own claim to journalistic priority in the discovery of “Autism’s First Child.” And as we’ve seen, Silberman makes Leo Kanner his central villain and random mad scientists his heroes, but makes jaw-dropping errors and scatters wild speculation in his quest for the perfect narrative.

Why does all this matter? To be sure, some of these mistakes have more to do with the idiosyncratic positions staked out by these three writers than with the true history and prospect of individuals and families touched by autism. But they do speak to the credibility of their arguments. In Silberman’s case, a false narrative about “Asperger’s lost tribe” is largely based in invalid evidence, so our demonstrating that matters: as the legal dictum goes, “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” (“false in one thing, false in everything”). Too much of what Silberman has written is just plain wrong. As for Donvan and Zucker, their quest to tell the definitive “story of autism” deserves opprobrium because so much of what they write is elliptical, overwrought, and self-serving. And like the eminent philosopher Harry Frankfurt, we need to call bullshit on that.

The Importance of Finding Donald T.

In 2005, we identified Donald T. as Donald Gray Triplett of Forest, Mississippi. The tip-off was a short paper by Leo Kanner from the 1970s.126 He referred to Donald as a bank teller in the small town of Forest, Mississippi—a classic case of too much information in this modern Internet age about a supposedly anonymous medical case study. Looking online for Donald T*

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