Sunday 22 September 2019

Results of my Twitter poll on "the prime cause of disability"

This twitter poll was my experimental response to critics of Neurodiversity who paint it as a movement of people who want to deny the reality of disability as a medical condition.
My assumption was that though the poll is rough and ready, as most of my twitter followers are pro-Neurodiversity it would be a reasonable measure of how they think about this question

The Poll Question and Final Results




Explaining the subtext


  • By "this is horribly simplistic" I signified that I am aware that this is not a scientifically valid poll.  
  • And by  "purists", I meant social model or medical model fundamentalists. 
Why didn't I say so? Because if I had, respondents would have got tangled up in defensiveness and would have dragged me into increasingly arcane academic theorizing in the totally unsuitable twitter medium. 
I wanted to elicit gut reactions. 
  • I also suspect that many of those who did choose Option 1.  "a medical condition" were Neurodiversity critics. 
Being neurodivergent myself, I have never found even the most rigorously scientifically designed profilers satisfactory. They invariably feel like "Nothing, nothing about my complicated case!". 

That is why I prefer qualitative to quantitative methods. Too often, profilers actually create reality rather than sample it. I always sense a subtext that subliminally informs us of the latest view of normality they measure difference from.

Then again,  I must admit that these tests can flush out some very broad trends. As it happens I just tried out Amanda Kirby's Neurodiversity Profiler app, and though I found the process agonizing given my pedantic nature, it actually gave me results that matched what I already knew about myself. 

So finally let me apologize to everyone that I have tormented into feeling torn between the importance of having a voice, versus having to suppress their much more nuanced and complex thoughts to do it

So I think the results here are valuable, but please make up your own mind.