Matter Is Binary

 

For those of you who are literal minded, this is a metaphor.

Autism May Be Related To Human Level Intelligence

Autism may be related to the human specific evolution of higher intelligence: 

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection. These shifts may have slowed brain development in children while boosting language and cognition. The findings suggest autism is part of the trade-off that made humans so cognitively advanced.

Brain Injury Is Behind Many Of Society's Worst Problems

[N]early two-thirds of those experiencing chronic homelessness in metro Denver suffer from some kind of brain injury[.]

From here.

The very bottom of American society, from the people who are "problem" inmates in jails and prisons, to the chronically homeless, is pervasively full of people with brain injuries. And, mostly, these are conditions that can't be cured.

Previous posts on brain injury and homelessness, brain injury and incarcerated people, causes of crime including brain injury, brain injury in serial killers, brain injuries common in soldiers who have served in combat.

Addiction Is Genetic Predisposition Plus

Most people who try drugs don’t get addicted, even to opioids or methamphetamine, which suggests that ‌factors other than simply being exposed to a drug can contribute to addiction. ‌The majority of people who do get hooked have other psychiatric disorders, traumatic childhoods or both — only ‌7 percent report no history of mental illness. ‌‌Nearly 75 percent of women with heroin addiction‌‌ were sexually abused as children — and most people with any type of addiction have suffered at least one and often many forms of childhood trauma‌‌.

Chandra Sripada, professor of psychiatry and philosophy at the University of Michigan, argues that distorted thinking is more important in addictive behavior than overwhelming desire, leading to what he calls “unreliable” control over use. . . .  During addiction . . . despairing thoughts about oneself and the future — not just thoughts about how good the drug is — predominate. At the same time, thoughts about negative consequences of use are minimized, as are those about alternative ways of coping. Drugs are overvalued as a way to mitigate distress; everything else is undervalued. The result is an unstable balance, which, more often than not, tips toward getting high.

This theory ‌is helpful for explaining who is most likely to get addicted and what is most likely to generate recovery. Risk factors like poverty, a traumatic childhood and mental illness generate excess stress while tending to produce negative thoughts about oneself. In my case, I was depressed and isolated because of what I later learned was undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder — and hated myself for my inability to connect. The result was a mental climate conducive to relying on drugs, even when they no longer ‌provided relief.

Factors linked to recovery — like social support and employment — can offset distorted thoughts and inflated valuation of drug use. Essentially, people make better choices when they recognize and have access to better options‌. If you are locked in a room with an escape route unknown to you hidden under the carpet, you are just as trapped as if that exit didn’t exist. My recovery began when I saw that there was a bearable way out.

This is why punitive approaches so often backfire: Causing more pain to people who view drugs as their only way to cope drives desire to use even more. Punishment doesn’t teach new skills that can allow better decisions.

From the New York Times. 

The story has many other worthwhile insights, for example, on how addition is neither a total absence of free will nor a totally unfettered free choice.

Dog IQ

Everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask, about dog IQ.

Researchers from the University of Helsinki assessed the cognitive abilities of over 1,000 dogs from 13 breeds with ten tests. Border Collies scored at or near the top in social cognition, inhibitory control, and spatial problem-solving ability, while Labrador Retrievers scored near the bottom. While prior research has shown that a dog's breed isn't as predictive of its personality and behavior as many think, the present study suggests that there are noteworthy differences in certain cognitive abilities.

Researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland put over 1,000 dogs from 13 distinct breeds through a battery of cognitive tests in perhaps the largest laboratory study of canine intelligence ever conducted.

Their findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

(Source) 

The paper and its abstract are as follows:

The extraordinary genetic and behavioural diversity of dog breeds provides a unique opportunity for investigating the heritability of cognitive traits, such as problem-solving ability, social cognition, inhibitory control, and memory. Previous studies have mainly investigated cognitive differences between breed groups, and information on individual dog breeds is scarce. As a result, findings are often contradictory and inconsistent. The aim of this study was to provide more clarity on between-breed differences of cognitive traits in dogs. 

We examined the performance of 13 dog breeds (N = 1002 dogs) in a standardized test battery. Significant breed differences were found for understanding of human communicative gestures, following a human’s misleading gesture, spatial problem-solving ability in a V-detour task, inhibitory control in a cylinder test, and persistence and human-directed behaviour during an unsolvable task. Breeds also differed significantly in their behaviour towards an unfamiliar person, activity level, and exploration of a novel environment. No significant differences were identified in tasks measuring memory or logical reasoning. 

Breed differences thus emerged mainly in tasks measuring social cognition, problem-solving, and inhibitory control. Our results suggest that these traits may have come under diversifying artificial selection in different breeds. These results provide a deeper understanding on breed-specific traits in dogs.

Saara Junttila, et al., "Breed differences in social cognition, inhibitory control, and spatial problem-solving ability in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)" 12 Sci Rep 22529 (December 29, 2022) (Open access). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26991-5

Quote Of The Day

I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.

- Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord (one of the first Antifa advocates and a Weimer Republic General) writing in German in 1933, and recounted in translation.

The Genetics Of Autism and ADHD

A new study compared the genetic profiles of people diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and people diagnosed with both disorders. Both conditions are highly heritable. 

The study used large data set with 23,583 subjects (with ADHD and/or one of four subtypes of autism spectrum disorder) and 42,201 controls, apparently mostly from the national health records of Denmark and possibly also from 23andMe data. The study excluded individuals with a moderate to severe mental retardation from both its subjects and its controls.

The study finds seven genes that are associated with both disorders, and five genes that distinguish between the disorders which are also associated with educational attainment, neuroticism and regional brain volume. 

The Paper And Its Abstract

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are highly heritable neurodevelopmental conditions, with considerable overlap in their genetic etiology. We dissected their shared and distinct genetic etiology by cross-disorder analyses of large datasets. 

We identified seven loci shared by the disorders and five loci differentiating them. All five differentiating loci showed opposite allelic directions in the two disorders and significant associations with other traits, including educational attainment, neuroticism and regional brain volume. 

Integration with brain transcriptome data enabled us to identify and prioritize several significantly associated genes. The shared genomic fraction contributing to both disorders was strongly correlated with other psychiatric phenotypes, whereas the differentiating portion was correlated most strongly with cognitive traits. Additional analyses revealed that individuals diagnosed with both ASD and ADHD were double-loaded with genetic predispositions for both disorders and showed distinctive patterns of genetic association with other traits compared with the ASD-only and ADHD-only subgroups. 

These results provide insights into the biological foundation of the development of one or both conditions and of the factors driving psychopathology discriminatively toward either ADHD or ASD.

Manuel Mattheisen, et al., "Identification of shared and differentiating genetic architecture for autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and case subgroups" Nat Genet (September 26, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-022-01171-3 (closed access).

The Data Set

The data set was apparently a national health care record system for Denmark in which there were 2,304 cases with both ADHD ad an autism spectrum disorder, 11,964 ADHD cases without an autism spectrum disorder, and 9,315 cases with an autism spectrum disorder without ADHD, although some of the data may also have been from the 23andme consumer genetic profiling company (a data set that would include me, my family, and a number of my extended family members). Also:

Controls were randomly selected from the full control cohort to roughly match a 1:4 ratio in cases and controls. . . . we excluded individuals with a moderate to severe mental retardation (ICD10: F71-F79) from both the case and control cohort.

Autism spectrum disorder cases were further categoried into four subtypes: childhood autism (cha, ICD10 F84.0); atypical autism (ata, ICD10 F84.1); Asperger’s syndrome (asp, ICD10 F84.5); and pervasive disorders, unspecified and others (pdm, ICD10 F84.8+9). 

It appears that ADHD cases were not subtyped, which is something of a shame. There is good reasons to think that the genetic basis of ADHD predominantly inattentive type (i.e. without hyperactivity), has a different genetic basis than ADHD combined type (and ADHD predominately hyperactive which probably overlaps heavily with the combined type). This level of information ought to have been available although empirically efforts to further subtype ADHD probably wouldn't have been available in the data. See, e.g, prior posts at this blog from September 8, 2012, April 3, 2012, and October 18, 2017 (Genetics of ADHD hyperactivity/impulsivity and inattention dimensions are quite different),

A Key Figure From The Paper

A figure from the closed access paper:

Fig. 2: Comparison of PRS profiles across ADHD and ASD subtypes for 15 traits and/or phenotypes that have shown significant genetic correlations with ADHD and ASD in the past.

Peer Review

The relatively new practice of disclosing comments from the peer review of the paper, provides some interesting insights although it is rather technical and difficult to evaluate without an open access manuscript to reference it to for the most part. Some notable comment state:

A serious limitation of this study is that the design relies on the common psychiatric nosology that in particular for ASD and ADHD has been problematic, surely in the past when only one of both diagnosis was allowed. Given the high comorbidity between ADHD and ASD, and among other psychiatric disorders in general, plus the fact that recent research shows that ‘genes do not respect diagnostic classifications’ (see CDG publications) I would rather see a focus on the shared genetic findings for ADHD and ASD, in aiming to find general genetic/biological vulnerabilities for trans diagnostic neurodevelopmental problems, instead of relying on a classification system that has surely proven its value in clinical practice but does not seem to guide biological underpinnings of those disorders.

and

Concerning the used sample, I would appreciate getting some more details on the assessment of comorbid ASD and ADHD in the respective cohort. While some of the individuals might have been diagnosed under DSM-IV, which did not allow a comorbid diagnosis of ADHD, I wonder if and how this was accounted for in the datasets. In light of the cited Meta-study 25-32% of ASD individuals do fulfill the criteria for ADHD. In this study, the comorbid cohort accounts for 10% of the sample (assuming they were from both the ASD and the ADHD cohorts).

The responses gave rise to a table regarding the shared risk genes:

Queer Self-Identification And Age

New polling shows a significant growth in the share of adults, especially, young adults who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT). 

Most of the growth in the rate of LGBT identification appears to be due to younger people identifying that way, rather than from older people changing their LGBT identification.

From LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate. 

The most plausible interpretation of the data (not just from the survey, but from other sources), in my view, is that there is definitely a biological predisposition (not necessarily genetic, but probably present at birth) to be lesbian, to be gay, to be transgender, and possibly also to be bisexual, although the mechanism may not be physical gender neutral (there are cases of people whose physical gender is ambiguous, but this is rare) with the mechanism causing a physical female to be lesbian, bisexual or transgender differing from the mechanism causing a physical male to be gay, bisexual or transgender. There may be a "spectrum" of gender identity and gender attraction, but I suspect that it is a very bimodal one.

Notably, some of the most striking early transgender identification cases in the literature involve children who were physically gender ambiguous at birth who were surgically modified in infancy, for example, to appear female despite an ambiguous but male leaning physical gender ambiguity at birth, who psychologically were fully male from a very young age onward.

But the factors that cause someone who has a biological predisposition to be LGBT (or someone who is biologically predisposed to be straight and cis-gender) to identify in the manner that they do is strongly culturally driven, in part, due to have these constructs of defined culturally, and this is what is causing the generation differences observed.

For example, with respect to transgender identification, the 0.2-0.3% identification rate for people older than Millennials, probably almost entirely reflects a biological predisposition, and to some extent is probably an undercount of people biologically predisposed to be transgender because the vast majority of people in the older generations were not aware of the possibility that someone could be transgender, rather than gay or lesbian.

Indeed, the line between being gay and lesbian and being transgender is not entirely black and white. Among people who identify as gay, some live their lives in a very conventional cis-gendered way, while others welcome effeminate touches and tendencies in their lives and may also cross-dress at times. Likewise, among people who identify as lesbian, some tend towards a "butch" identity, while others have a strongly cis-gendered "femme" identity. An effeminate gay man, or a butch lesbian, to some extent blurs the line between being cis-gender gay or lesbian, and being "straight" transgender.

The jump in the total share of people identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender from 0.8% among Traditionalists to 2.1% in Generation X, probably largely reflects a decline in repression and denial of these biological predispositions. 

Some of the rise in this percentage from Generation X to Millennials (4.0%) and Generation Z (5.3%) may reflect the same thing, but my intuition is that the gay, lesbian and bisexual percentage growth between Generation X and the subsequent generations mostly reflects a tendency for people who are not fully stereotypically straight cis-gender, even if that is their predominant biological predisposition, to identify as gay, lesbian or transgender. So, for example, a physical male who loves pink, enjoys reading romance novels, prefers to fine arts to sports, and isn't freaked out by touching another man, might identify as gay or transgender despite not having such a strong biological predisposition towards either identity.

The surge in bisexual identification from 0.3% among Traditionalists to 1.8% in Generation X to 11.5% in Generation X almost surely also involves a similar phenomena.

Past data had suggested that among people older than my age, that most men identifying as bisexual came to identify after a transitional period of identifying as bisexual as gay, while a bisexual gender identity was stable among women (some of whom were arguably lesbian women at a fundamental level who tolerate sexual activity with men).

Now, the rise in bisexual identification probably largely reflects a decline in the strength of the taboo against intimate same sex physical touching, rather than a change in primarily biological predisposition to be sexually attracted to someone of the same physical gender. 

If you are primarily biologically predisposed towards sexual attraction towards someone of the other physical gender (i.e. you are "straight"), but don't feel a strong taboo against same sex intimate contact, identifying a "bisexual" in a hypothetical sense is a much less difficult thing to square with your daily reality than identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender.

This cultural shift is different than lying (which is also present in survey data, but rare and which there is no reason to think that younger generations are more prone to than older ones). It is really more a case of redefinition of terms from the narrow sense predominant in older generations, to a broader sense predominant among younger people. Thus, the term "bisexual" appears to have been redefined from an older sense of lacking a predominant gender preference in sexual attraction, to a newer sense of lacking a strong aversion of same sex sexuality.

See also a 2013 post at this blog on a similar topic.

Brain Scans Lend Insight Into Six Common Psychiatric Conditions

We are starting to figure out how psychiatric disorders previously classified solely by symptoms are related to each other (and different from each other) at a biological level in the brain. 

"We found that 4 major psychiatric disorders -- major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder -- show a surprisingly high level of similarity in their brain structural abnormalities," said Dr. Opel. The shared brain areas showing structural aberrations were mainly in cortical areas associated with cognitive processing, memory and self-awareness. 

On the flipside, Dr. Opel added, "we were able to identify regional abnormalities with high specificity for certain disorders." Interestingly, these distinct structural differences sometimes appeared in the same area for two disorders, but in opposite directions from the norm. 

In contrast, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder did not share brain structural signatures with any other disorders. That may be because those disorders are considered developmental diseases with a distinct etiology from the other psychiatric conditions, which have more in common. 

The researchers do not yet understand the mechanisms behind the shared structural elements, but a growing body of evidence shows that these psychiatric disorders also share common genetic as well as environmental influences, which might underlie the current findings.

From Science Daily. The paper and its abstract are as follows:

Background 

Neuroimaging studies have consistently reported similar brain structural abnormalities across different psychiatric disorders. Yet, the extent and regional distribution of shared morphometric abnormalities between disorders remains unknown. 

Methods 

Here, we conducted a cross-disorder analysis of brain structural abnormalities in 6 psychiatric disorders based on effect size estimates for cortical thickness and subcortical volume differences between healthy control subjects and psychiatric patients from 11 mega- and meta-analyses from the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics Through Meta Analysis) consortium. Correlational and exploratory factor analyses were used to quantify the relative overlap in brain structural effect sizes between disorders and to identify brain regions with disorder-specific abnormalities. 

Results 

Brain structural abnormalities in major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder were highly correlated ( r = .443 to r = .782), and one shared latent underlying factor explained between 42.3% and 88.7% of the brain structural variance of each disorder. The observed shared morphometric signature of these disorders showed little similarity with brain structural patterns related to physiological aging. In contrast, patterns of brain structural abnormalities independent of all other disorders were observed in both attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder. Brain regions showing high proportions of independent variance were identified for each disorder to locate disorder-specific morphometric abnormalities. 

Conclusions 

Taken together, these results offer novel insights into transdiagnostic as well as disorder-specific brain structural abnormalities across 6 major psychiatric disorders. Limitations comprise the uncertain contribution of risk factors, comorbidities, and medication effects to the observed pattern of results that should be clarified by future research.

Nils Opel, et al., "Cross-Disorder Analysis of Brain Structural Abnormalities in Six Major Psychiatric Disorders: A Secondary Analysis of Mega- and Meta-analytical Findings From the ENIGMA Consortium." Biological Psychiatry, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2020.04.027

Lots Of People Are Spiritual But Not Religious

It is easy to be lulled into thinking that the rise of the "nones", who don't identify with any particular religion, are basically secular. Politically, this seems to be consistent with their decision making. But, few "nones" are outright atheists or agnostics. A recent Facebook post by a friend, who like me has a quite liberal and not particular Christian identified group of friends illustrates this fact. She asks in her post:

Today's question of the day comes from an elderly friend: Do you believe that there are spiritual beings that interact in some ways in human lives?

My answer was as follows:

No. But, I like the way the your friend asked the question. The definition of what most people think of as "god" or the "divine" is something beyond mankind and smart ordinary Earth animals that intervenes with moral purpose in the universe.

I was struck, however, by the other responses. As of this post, there were 20 people who said "yes" (many enthusiastically), 3 who said "no" (in addition to me), and 2 who hedged.

Where Is Religion Headed In The Modern Western/Globalist World?

I think that most humans are pre-disposed to believe in the supernatural and the divine. Probably only a minority of people in the ranges of human neurodiversity, like me, are more Spock-like. A new age of enlightenment, while tempting to imagine, isn't where I think we are headed as a society.

Lots of liberals and people who embrace modernity are hungry of supernatural beliefs that don't support the anti-technology, anti-feminist, and intolerant/hateful stances of conservative Christians, mainstream and fundamentalist Muslims, Hindu nationalists, and white nationalist neo-pagans.

Sooner or later, I suppose, a faith more in tune with post-industrial reality will emerge meeting needs and supporting values more suited to the current reality*, although it is hard to know what it will look like. The really tiny number of people who have embraced Unitarian Universalist churches and similar religious movements suggest that whatever emerges won't look much like that.

Many liberals with these longings have embraced Eastern religious ideas like Buddhism and yoga (which has Hindu ideas in it, but highly filtered and diluted). The faux Jedi religion of Star Wars has attracted sincere followings in the U.K. and is probably closer to what our religious future looks like than the religiously secular enlightened future imagined in Star Trek.

Another angle that seems plausible for the future is for the West to drift in the direction of Japanese, Chinese and Korean folk religion, with beliefs in ghosts, reincarnation, animistic spirits, and veneration of ancestors in a combination of home shines and temples which are destinations rather than centers of reasonably well defined communities of members of a particular church or parish.

Another direction the West could head towards is the grass roots "attractor" (in the fractal and chaos mathematics sense) of what has been somewhat derisively described as "moralistic therapeutic deism", a term that was first introduced in the book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005) by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. The term is used to describe what they consider to be the common beliefs among American youth. As Wikipedia explains in the link above:

The author's study found that many young people believe in several moral statutes not exclusive to any of the major world religions. It is not a new religion or theology as such, but identified as a set of commonly held spiritual beliefs. It is this combination of beliefs that they label moralistic therapeutic deism: 

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. 

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. 

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

On the other hand, to really catch fire, it seems that a religion has to demand significant deviation for prevailing norms from its followers, to embrace something that takes a leap of faith to believe in something impossible or absurd, and to contain "mysteries" that only those who study the faith deeply can understand, providing a basis for the development of a corps of "expert" religious leaders, whether or not formally recognized as a class of priests. Path of least resistance belief systems don't achieve these ends. 

The Satanic Temple might be a model for a new religious organization beyond the pure jokes of the philosophical tropes of the Invisible Pink Unicorn and Flying Spaghetti Monster, with a genuine cultural aesthetic and in your face identity, even if it isn't really metaphysical at this point. Infuse a little pantheism and superstition with some pagan and Kaballah and Sufi flavoring rooted, in part, in ancient mysteries suppressed by more orthodox versions of Christianity and Islam, and maybe you get something that does become a religion.

Images of the metaphysical world likewise tend to reflect the leadership structures of their day, and so, perhaps, the next major religions of the post-industrial era will be a less centralized oligarchy with something like a pluralistic by "crony capitalist" sort of organization.

* I think that one can see the deep roots of Islam and pre-Rabbinic Judaism as meeting the needs of a hunter-gatherer society, and of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as meeting the needs of an agricultural and more urban society in which a culture of honor has become dysfunctional, and it is critical to help people to forgive each other as they live cheek by jowl and constantly slight each other.

Alone In The Wild

Kelley Armstrong's latest full length novel, released yesterday, which I finished today, is "Alone in the Wild", her fifth novel set in a hamlet called Rockton full of people who need to hide from someone, deep in the Yukon. 

Our cohabiting heroine and her boyfriend (who have started to tell strangers that that they are husband and wife, and who are two members of a three full time employee sheriff's office in the town), find a dead woman and a live baby abandoned in a snow bank near their campsite on their rare day off and set out to determine the cause of the woman's death, save the baby, and figure out who the baby's parents are, while considering if they need to adopt the one month old child in the depth of forest plunged into a cold and snowy subarctic December in contemporary Canada.

It's the 36th full length novel of hers that I've read (in addition to numerous short stories and novellas, one of which I provided some copy edits for). So, I guess you could say I'm a fan, even though I have one of her stand alone novels on my bookshelf waiting to be read, and two of her fantasy trilogies (one co-authored with another fantasy author) yet to read.

I started with a series of books set in her "Otherworld" universe that has produced thirteen adult paranormal romances, and seven young adult novels, as well as one live action television series based upon her novel "Bitten". Her three Nadia Stafford novels, her five Rockton novels, and four stand alone novels, are all set in contemporary Canada and the United States in worlds that could easily coincide with each other. She has five other adult paranormal romances set in a (probably) different world in the Cainsville series, and two more trilogies each in yet other fantasy worlds. 

Why am I a fan?

* Her novels are page turning fast reads with plots that strike a good middle ground between simplistic and baroque. Most of her novels are basically mysteries, no matter what world they are set in.

* Her novels are all sufficiently different from reality to make them an escape rather than deeper immersion in other aspects of my daily life.

* Her novels are intelligent and about as well fleshed out and rich as they can be without the verging on cumbersome world building overkill of series like Game of Thrones and Tolkien's works. Her worlds don't have serious world building flaws, which a contemporary foundation for most of them helps with.

* Her novels engage in so many of the themes and issues of the zeitgeist without being preaching, dystopian, or utopian. "Alone in the wild" is no exception. This novel alone deals with, for example, new couples having and thinking about having kids, coping with severe traumas in life, dealing with a family member with an autism spectrum disorder, sex work, same sex relationships, human trafficking, psychoactive drugs, issues of consent in cults, the moral dilemmas associated with allowing people to live in anti-technological communities comparable to the Amish or indigenous peoples living traditional lifestyles with the benefits and costs that come with that choice, the question of when child protection intervention is appropriate, the pros and cons of having technology and global communications connections in life, environmentally conscious living, the risks of letter profits lead people to make decisions that are bad for communities and how middle managers can and should respond to those issues, the dilemmas faced by adult women trying to navigate life as modern feminist women, suitable ways to respond to neurodiversity, who someone is now versus who they have been in the past and the questions of what sins are forgivable, post-Christian religiosity, domestic violence, when revenge is justified, the appropriate role of law enforcement in a community, role models for living with a disability, social class, and more.

* She has well developed characters who are developed as the story progresses, and she gets into their heads to portray them in a believable way.

Study: Autism Basically The Inverse of M.S.

NPR has a story that indicates that autism may be basically a function of too much mylenination (the body's natural nerve insulation), while M.S. is too little, according to a new study.

On the bright side, we are much further along in finding medical treatments for M.S., than for autism for which treatment has been basically intractable, and the new understanding of autism may shed light on how to treat it derived from M.S. research.

Musings On "Fruits Basket"

"Fruits Basket" is one of the most charming Japanese manga series ever written, was made into a very well done anime series in 2001 and another in 2019 which is available in an English dubbed version on Hulu. I've read the manga and watched the 2001 series and I'm now watching the 2019 series, which is considerably longer, omitting less from the original magna series.

Our heroine, Tohru Honda is a classic sweet and pure ingénue, and, of course, also an orphan, like a disproportionate share of young protagonists in fiction.

What really distinguishes the series is the very counterintuitive (to American eyes) way that Tohru and those around her deal with the interpersonal issues within the Soma family in which Tohru becomes ensconced, some of which are counterintuitive to anyone, and others of which reflect distinctly Japanese values rooted to some extent in Confucianism, about the appropriate ways for people of unequal status to interact with each other.

Even deeper than that, however, is the very sophisticated level of psychological analysis rooted in very deep empathy (rather than explicit social science  theories) employed by Tohru and several of the more mature characters in dealing with these interpersonal conflicts. This is more obvious in  the longer retelling of the story in the 2019 version makes it possible to focus on the meaty interpersonal relationship analysis in the underlying material relative to the 2001 version. It seems even stronger in the 2019 anime, to some extent, relative to the manga itself which is a bit more subtle on some of these points (although perhaps I just wasn't as attuned to them when reading it as one of the early full manga series that I read). Some of this may come with the passage of time too. The 2019 anime, for example, has a somewhat less tone deaf recounting of the travails of a transgender member of the family, although, as it is bound by the original material, not one that fully fits today's sensibilities about how to talk about and deal with transgender individuals respectfully.

The depth of understanding, empathy and sensitivity on display in the series itself has an internal irony to it. Despite the very sophisticated understanding of others that some in the Soma clan hold, the clan as a whole does a horrible job of recognizing the importance of love or the feelings of its members and is full of interpersonal misery. In part, this is a consequence of apparently unenlightened leadership of the mysterious Akito Soma at the top that everyone is powerless to address, a classic problem in any Confucian hierarchy. In part, this is a consequence of an epic, multigenerational curse that it is hubris to think that anyone can actually really overcome.

This in turn is rooted in a moral axiom and ideal rooted very deeply in modern Japanese culture that is absent in Western culture to anything approaching the same degree. This axiom is that everyone, no matter how deplorable their conduct, is capable of being persuaded and won over to acting more appropriately is you can only get to understand them and what is making them act the way that they do much completely.

As an empirical proposition, I have my doubts that this moral ideal accurately describes the world. It bears a lot of similarity to the almost ubiquitous tendency to overestimate the relevance of Nurture, relative to Nature, in understanding people's propensities and abilities. 

The reality is that behavior arises from complex Nature x Nurture interactions, and also depends a lot on immediate social context. But, the reality is also that some uncommon but not terribly rare people, perhaps one to four percent of the overall population, are just irredeemable, for example, due to a congenital condition that deprives them of the ability to have empathy, or due to a traumatic brain injury, or due to a life time of bad experiences that it are impossible to undo at some point.

Still, it is also true that there is something very positive to be said for routinely putting more effort than is common into trying to see things from someone else's perspective in an effort to understand why they are acting the way that the do. There is value in recognizing that behavior often does have roots that are understandable when known, that may not be immediately obvious without further intense investigation. And, it is likewise true that a myopic view of social interactions that looks just at an isolated incident of interaction in isolation (as most Western rules of law do) can obscure more fruitful ways to prevent bad behavior from continuing that approaches roots in imposing brute consequences often long deferred from the misconduct in question as a response to anti-social or inappropriate interactions and behavior. 

The snotty, spoiled and immature, but smart young family member Hiro Soma, routinely abuses his authority and tries to manipulate situations and rules to his favor. He exemplifies and demonstrates the perceived flaws in Eastern legal and political thinking of a narrow Western style system of "rule of law" that can be manipulated in so many ways and ignores the pervasive inequalities found in so many socially and legally important interactions. These are flaws relative to an Eastern legal and political philosophy oriented system focused on putting in place moral and wise people to administer society at every level and clear understandings about the appropriate ways to act interpersonally towards others who are in unequal relationships with each other, in which the focus is on nurturing well socialized people for leadership positions in which their own innate morality rather than formal rules of law are the primary guiding force in their actions. In Western legal and political thinking, the natural response to something that isn't working well is to adopt better laws and policies. In Eastern legal and political thinking, the natural response to something that isn't working well is to put in place more virtuous leaders.

It isn't wrong to observe that the Western narrow incident oriented approach does have flaws. Punishing someone for hitting, even when they do so only after extreme and inappropriate anti-social provocation, doesn't do complete justice or solve the problem entirely. Treating a girl who kills a man that has been keeping her as a sex slave and repeatedly raping her when she gets a chance because legally authorized self-defense in the moment is futile, isn't culpable to the same extent as a pre-meditated killing of a weak stranger. Many bullies start out as victims of other bullies until a vicious cycle builds up that treating each incident in isolation as an act to be punished with stiff consequences can't break. 

Sometimes someone gives someone else the cold shoulder out of misplaced love, trying to protect the person that they love from the woes that the person giving the cold shoulder is afflicted with, rather than hate or actual disdain.

Looking at acts narrowly and imposing consequences in isolation may be better than anarchy and easier for marginally competent people charged with enforcing peace and order to carry out without making serious mistakes. But, this is also crude and misses many opportunities in which more enlightened, empathetic and wise actions by those in authority and those involved without authority could have treated a situation differently and secured a better result. 

It brings to mind the truth that teachers and school administrators (who are better educated and who are specifically trained to deal with the issues of developing children) often do a better job of balancing consequences with empathy and understanding to get good results in dealing with discipline issues of students in school, than "school resource" officers who think crudely like the cops that they are and systemically lead to a school to prison pipeline.

Narrow Thinking As MPD

You can't understand society without rejecting the assumption that people are omniscient. But, thinking of narrow thinking as a sort of multiple personality phenomena is an interesting way to frame it:

I develop an approach, which I term narrow thinking, to break the decision-maker’s ability to perfectly coordinate her multiple decisions. For a narrow thinker, different decisions are based on different, non-nested, information. The narrow thinker then makes each decision with an imperfect understanding of the others. Formally, it is as if the decision-maker is a collection of multiple selves playing an incomplete-information game. The friction effectively attenuates the degree of interaction across decisions and can translate into either over- or under-reaction depending on the environment.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Beyond Stereotypes About Liberal Takes On Genetic Differences

“In the past few years, genetic evidence on human differences has become more obvious. The reaction, in the West, is to declare even more strongly that no differences exist, or even could exist.” 

This is something of a straw man argument. The more common and more refined argument is that the genetic differences that exist are not (or more elastically should not be considered) morally or socially or legally significant differences. 

Obviously, no informed person disputes, for example, that genetics cause visible differences in phenotype like eye color, hair color, skin color, height (interacting with environment) and stuff like epicanthic folds, and also that there a specific micro scale differences like sickle cell gene based malaria resistance. 

But, the notion is that those differences are not differences that are significant enough to discriminate against someone or treat them differently and don’t give rise to group differences that are meaningful in terms of policy or validating stereotypes. This also has a notion buried in it that physical differences are less important than differences in who a person is. 

For example, an illustration of this argument is the aphorism that you shouldn’t fault a turtle for not been fast at winning sprinting competitions. Sometimes this gets generalized to neurodiversity as well. 

This isn’t to say that this belief doesn’t have difficulties. At the individual level, there is strong evidence that traits like individual cognitive traits like IQ, personality and temperament have a significant hereditary component. 

Likewise, many Western liberals will acknowledge that small populations (e.g. communities of South Asians who recently immigrated to the U.S. on work related tech industry and medical profession visa available only to the most elite individuals) do exhibit group level average differences on certain work related IQ and spatial aptitude type abilities until diluted with other populations or the passage of time with a reversion to the mean. 

But, those belief holders presume (as an axiom not an empirically driven fact), while conceding this point, that the measured differences in traits like these that we do care about, in large representative samples of continental scale populations (e.g. Africans or South Asians generally) or large random samples of historically old caste or racial minorities, are almost entirely due to environmental effects as evidenced, for example, by the Flynn effect and by the apparent positive impacts of the reducing of lead poisoning rates in the U.S. This presumption is, at a minimum, difficult to test rigorously, and tends to support policy decisions that are hard to resolve empirically that Western liberals tend to think are good policies which promote a just society and emphasize individual merit over group stereotype based decision making. 

The truer description of the mainstream intellectual viewpoint of Western liberals is a close cousin of the idea that while culture differences absolutely exist (and indeed, should be respected) that all cultures are equal. More sophisticated individuals may qualify this position by saying that all cultures are equal in dignity and in a platonic sense, but that particular cultures may be better adapted to one set of circumstances in a given time and place than another, and that we nonetheless have a moral obligation to respect cultures not optimally adapted to current conditions in the present time and place.

This is a reprint with minor reformatting and editing of my comment to a post at Brown Pundits.

This said:

* The vast majority of people of all political stripes (except fiction authors when writing about royal children whose paternity has been denied) overestimate the relative importance of child rearing (within the normal range) relative to genetics in how a child turns out, and attribute more hereditary effects to child rearing and less to genetics than the best evidence supports.

* Most people underestimate the impact of genetic tendencies in how people turn out, more generally, relative to environmental factors, although liberals do so more than conservatives.

* Few liberals, but many conservatives embrace the notion that different continental or subcontinental or national scale populations or races have inherently different genetic traits and capabilities on things that matter where there is a clear good or bad side to them.

* Many more liberals than moderates or conservatives doubt the meaningfulness of IQ as a psychometric measure.

* Liberals tend to be especially skeptical of biological differences in important cognitive things based on sex relative to heredity more generally, and are strongly inclined to attribute gender differences to nurture to an extent not supported by the best evidence. But, there is diversity of thought within liberalism and within feminism on this matter.

* Almost everyone overestimates the extent to which their decisions are shaped by individual personal idiosyncratic choices they make, rather than cultural and genetic and social context and economic influences. Thus, they think that more of their decisions are purely a product of autonomous free will as opposed to more predictable deterministic influences. Put another way, people are more predictable than the vast majority of them believe themselves to be.

* Smart and well informed people of all political stripes have more nuanced views on these topics than less intelligence and less well informed people. Liberals tend to have more nuanced views on these topics than conservatives and conservatives tend to be oblivious to many of the nuances in hte views on these topics commonly held by liberals. 

Autism Diagnosis Stable By Fourteen Months Of Age

The findings suggest that an ASD diagnosis becomes stable starting at 14 months of age and overall is more stable than other diagnostic categories, including language or developmental delay.

From here (citing this article in JAMA Pediatrics). The abstract from the referenced article is as follows:

Importance Universal early screening for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in primary care is becoming increasingly common and is believed to be a pivotal step toward early treatment. However, the diagnostic stability of ASD in large cohorts from the general population, particularly in those younger than 18 months, is unknown. Changes in the phenotypic expression of ASD across early development compared with toddlers with other delays are also unknown. 

Objectives To examine the diagnostic stability of ASD in a large cohort of toddlers starting at 12 months of age and to compare this stability with that of toddlers with other disorders, such as developmental delay. 

Design, Setting, and Participants In this prospective cohort study performed from January 1, 2006, to December 31, 2018, a total of 2241 toddlers were referred from the general population through a universal screening program in primary care or community referral. Eligible toddlers received their first diagnostic evaluation between 12 and 36 months of age and had at least 1 subsequent evaluation. 

Exposures Diagnosis was denoted after each evaluation visit as ASD, ASD features, language delay, developmental delay, other developmental issue, typical sibling of an ASD proband, or typical development. 

Main Outcomes and Measures Diagnostic stability coefficients were calculated within 2-month age bands, and logistic regression models were used to explore the associations of sex, age, diagnosis at first visit, and interval between first and last diagnosis with stability. Toddlers with a non-ASD diagnosis at their first visit diagnosed with ASD at their last were designated as having late-identified ASD. 

Results Among the 1269 toddlers included in the study (918 [72.3%] male; median age at first evaluation, 17.6 months [interquartile range, 14.0-24.4 months]; median age at final evaluation, 36.2 months [interquartile range, 33.4-40.9 months]), the overall diagnostic stability for ASD was 0.84 (95% CI, 0.80-0.87), which was higher than any other diagnostic group. Only 7 toddlers (1.8%) initially considered to have ASD transitioned into a final diagnosis of typical development. Diagnostic stability of ASD within the youngest age band (12-13 months) was lowest at 0.50 (95% CI, 0.32-0.69) but increased to 0.79 by 14 months and 0.83 by 16 months (age bands of 12 vs 14 and 16 years; odds ratio, 4.25; 95% CI, 1.59-11.74). A total of 105 toddlers (23.8%) were not designated as having ASD at their first visit but were identified at a later visit. 

Conclusions and Relevance The findings suggest that an ASD diagnosis becomes stable starting at 14 months of age and overall is more stable than other diagnostic categories, including language or developmental delay. After a toddler is identified as having ASD, there may be a low chance that he or she will test within typical levels at 3 years of age. This finding opens the opportunity to test the impact of very early-age treatment of ASD.

There is no rigorously evidence validated treatment of autism at any age, although there are approaches which are used to manage the symptoms. Also, it is worth noting that autism is a syndrome of similar symptoms that tend to appear together but almost certainly has multiple distinct causes (mostly de novo genetic mutations) that all affect the same neurological sub-systems of the body in similar ways. 

So, a cure to one cause of autism wouldn't necessarily be a cure to most cases of autism. 

The Genetics Of Mental Health

A major new genome wide association study published in the journal Science has significant new findings related to mental health. The core finding of the study is as follows:

The final results indicated widespread genetic overlap across different types of psychiatric disorders, particularly between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and schizophrenia. The data also indicated strong overlap between anorexia nervosa and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as between OCD and Tourette syndrome. 

In contrast, neurological disorders such as Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis appeared more distinct from one another and from the psychiatric disorders -- except for migraine, which was genetically correlated to ADHD, major depressive disorder, and Tourette syndrome.

From here.

A full set of abstracts from the article appear below the fold.

Psychopathy And Gender

The brain anatomy associated with psychopathy is different in boys than it is in girls.

[I]n typically-developing boys, the volume of the anterior insula -- a brain region implicated in recognizing emotions in others and empathy -- is larger in those with higher levels of callous-unemotional traits. This variation in brain structure was only seen in boys, but not in girls with the same personality traits.

From here.

Are There Really 15,500 Transgender Individuals In Current Military Service?

A Denver Post story in reaction to President Trump's ban on transgender individuals serving in the military states that:

Transgender people are banned from the military, yet an estimated 15,500 are serving.

This is probably greatly exaggerated and is probably at least an order of magnitude too high. The Denver Post's source, however, is disclosed and can be examined. The basic problem is that neither of its core data sources, Gates (2011) for the overall prevalence of transgender individuals in the general population, and the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS) from 2008 (whose respondents are all gender non-conforming and are part of a large convenience sample with no demographic information on respondents' ages), are particularly precise sources of data. The NTDS Survey isn't really designed to provide information that fits the needs of the Williams Institute, although isn't a horrible place to look for a rough estimate.

The Denver Post's estimate is based upon this report from the Williams Institute, which clarifies that this is out of activity duty, reserves and national guard. This is broken out as:

7,300 Active Duty (assigned male)
1,300 Active Duty (assigned female)
5,300 Guard/Reserves (assigned male)
1,400 Guard/Reserves (assigned female).

As I noted in a previous post on the topic (relying on data cited here):

The DSM-IV (1994) quotes prevalence of roughly 1 in 30,000 assigned males and 1 in 100,000 assigned females seek sex reassignment surgery in the USA. The most reliable population based estimate of the incidence occurrence is from the Amsterdam Gender Dysphoria Clinic. The data, spanning more than four decades in which the clinic has treated roughly 95% of Dutch transsexuals, gives figures of 1:10,000 assigned males and 1:30,000 assigned females. 

In September 2007 however, Olyslager and Conway presented a paper at the WPATH 20th International Symposium demonstrating that the data from this and similar studies actually implies much higher prevalence rates, with minimum lower bounds of 1:4,500 assigned males and 1:8,000 assigned females across a number of countries worldwide. They also present other evidence suggesting the actual prevalence might be as high as 1:500 births overall.

My source has been updated since my last post to add this point:

The most recent (2016) systematic review of prevalence, leading to a meta-analysis of 27 studies, found estimates per 100,000 population of 9.2 (95% CI = 4.9–13.6) for surgical or hormonal gender affirmation therapy and 6.8 (95% CI = 4.6–9.1) for transgender-related diagnoses. Of studies assessing self-reported transgender identity, prevalence was 871 (95% CI = 519–1,224); however, this result was influenced by a single outlier study. After removal of that study, the figure dropped to 355 (95% CI = 144–566). Significant heterogeneity was observed in most analyses.

This is 1 per 114 people with the outlier study, and one per 288 people without the outlier study, and with the self-reported surveys producing much higher estimates than estimates based upon therapy or third-party diagnostic related estimates.

The Williams Institute relies on "Gates (2011) estimates that approximately 700,000 adults in the US are transgender.", and on the NTDS survey result that "this group is 60% male assigned at birth and 40% female assigned at birth". The adult U.S. population in 2011 was 237,801,767. So, Gates is estimating that 1 in 340 adult Americans is transgender, which is probably significantly too high. Likewise, the assigned male to assigned female ratio of 60-40 in NTDS is probably low relative to other more reliable estimation efforts. 

The Williams Institute footnotes this conclusion from Gates (2011) as follows:

Estimates of the size of the transgender population from national population-based surveys do not exist. This estimate is based on two state-level population-based surveys in which questions regarding transgender status implied a gender transition or at least discordance between sex at birth and current gender presentation.

There are currently 1,219,510 personnel classified as male in active duty U.S. military service and 210,485 personnel classified as female in active duty U.S. military service.

If the Williams Institute figures are correct then 1 in 167 people assigned as male in the U.S. active duty military is transgender and 1 in 162 people assigned as female in the U.S. active duty military is transgender. This is about 3 times the rate at which individuals are transgender in the highest credible estimate for the general population. It is a rate 27 times higher for assigned males and 49 times higher for assigned females than a more conservative minimum lower bound for prevalence of transgender individuals in the general population.

The Williams Institute estimate is also notable for showing no assigned gender disparity, when all of the conservative estimates show that assigned males are two to three times as likely to be transgender as assigned females.

Now, admittedly, the military is not a random sample of the general population. For example, the number of high school graduates enroll in higher education is about ten times as great as the number of people who will ultimately enlist in the military for any given cohort of high school graduates (admittedly the numbers do not fully overlap). This is about 4-5 to one for men and about 30-1 for women.

Since the military is one of the most traditionally masculine pursuits, it makes sense that transgender individuals assigned as female who are not able to medically transition would enlist at higher rates than similarly situated transgender individuals assigned as male, so the lack of the prevalence distinction in the Williams Institute report between assigned males and assigned males that is found in the general population isn't necessarily something that discredits its data.

But, given that the military is also well known to be an institution that has been hostile to LGBT individuals and that the active duty service affords the least opportunity to conceal one's gender identity, it is surprising to see a prevalence of transgender presence in the active duty military that is three times the highest credible estimate of prevalence in the general population. Naively, one would expect a lower prevalence than in the general population with a rate of 1 per 1,000 or so, which would imply that there were about 1,220 assigned males and 210 assigned females in the U.S. military who were transgender, for a total of about 1,430 or less than 10% of the numbers estimated by the Williams Institute.

The methodology suggests that the estimate is overstated because the survey is not a random sample and is probably biased towards people who LGBT gender identities. According to the Williams Institute:

The primary data source for the estimates of transgender military service is the NationalTransgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), which was conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality. This 70-item survey was distributed in cooperation with over 900 organizations across the United States and also was announced through listservs and online communities. It was made available both online and on paper in English and Spanish. The survey was fielded over six months beginning in fall 2008 and resulted in 6,546 valid responses, which is the largest sample of transgender people in the US to date. . . . 

As a purposive sample of transgender adults in the US, estimates derived directly from the NTDS could be biased if the true demographic characteristics of the transgender population differ from the characteristics of transgender respondents to the survey. For example, relative to the US population, NTDS respondents are younger and report higher levels of education. Both factors would be associated with lower levels of lifetime military service. Given the lack of demographic data on the transgender population derived from population-based sources, it is not possible to determine if the age and educational attainment levels of NTDS respondents are different from the general US population because younger and more educated transgender individuals were more likely than others to have completed the survey (known as selection bias) or if transgender individuals are, in fact, younger and more likely to have higher levels of education compared to the general population.  

More than 93% of NTDS respondents provided information using an online web-based survey. 

The primary risk is that survey respondents to a 70 question online survey announced on listservs and online communities in the fall of 2008 overstates has a higher proportion of LGBT respondents than the general public. Indeed, this is almost certainly the case.

The report goes on to state that:

In the US, approximately 5.8% of all adults who have ever served in the armed forces are currently on active duty and 4.4% are now serving in the Guard or Reserve. An estimated 86.8% are veterans who served on active duty in the past and 3.0% are retired from Guard or Reserve service.  

The number of transgender adults in each category is estimated by applying these same proportions to the estimated number of transgender individuals who report any service in the armed forces. 

Transgender military service 

Analyses of the unadjusted NTDS data show that 29.6% of respondents assigned male at birth reported that they have served in the armed forces along with 6.0% of those assigned female at birth. In total, 20% of NTDS respondents reported some type of military service. Assuming NTDS reported rates of military service are true of the transgender population in the US, Figure 2 shows adjusted estimates of military service for the transgender population (separated by sex assigned at birth) and for adult men and women in the US. When figures are adjusted such that the age and educational patterns of the US adult male and female population are applied to the NTDS sample, an estimated 21.4% of transgender individuals have served in the military. The adjusted estimates suggest that 32.0% of those assigned male at birth and 5.5% of those assigned female at birth have served.

By comparison, in the general population "1.4 percent of all female Americans have ever served in the armed services, compared to 13.4 percent of all male Americans." (The Williams Institute study claims that 19.7% of adult men and 1.7% of adult women have served, with a combined 10.4% of all adults, and does not make an age adjusted comparison of military service rates to its sample's demographics despite the fact that military service rates for people under age 45 who are disproportionately represented in their data source are less than half as likely to have served in the military.) It is also surprising giving the educational level of the respondents which significantly exceeds that of the general population since people with college educations are less likely to have served in the military than members of the general public.

Thus, if the Williams Institute data is accurate, transgender individuals assigned as male at birth are about 2.2 times as likely to serve in the military as members of the general population and transgender individuals assigned as female at birth are about 4 times as likely to serve in the military as members of the general population.

Keep in mind that for most of the period from 1940 to 1973, there was a draft in place for men, so many people served in the military involuntarily. For example, about 2.2 million of the men who served in the Vietnam War were drafted, 1.5 million of the men who served in the Korean War were drafted, and 10 million of the men who served in World War II were drafted. There were also significant numbers of interwar conscripts. These numbers compare to 22 million people alive today who are military veterans, although, of course, some people who were conscripted for military service from 1940 to 1973 are no longer living.

Conscription makes it relatively less likely that there would be a huge difference between the likelihood that transgender individuals assigned as male who served in the military than non-transgender individuals during the period from 1940 to 1973.

Also, the NTDS sample is younger than the gender public, yet the percentage of young people who have served in the U.S. military is significantly lower than the percentage of all people who have served in the U.S. military.

Using data from the Census and the Veteran's Administration it is clear that rate of military service for men under the age of 45 is well under 10%. So, the NTDS survey suggests that transgender individuals assigned as male have an age adjusted military service rate about three times as great as members of the general public.

In its defense, the Williams Institute does offer some corroboration of its counterintuitive conclusion that transgender individuals are much more likely to enlist in the military than the general population. It states:

There is other evidence that transgender individuals represent a larger portion of those in the military than their proportion among adults in the US population. In a survey of transgender people assigned male at birth, Shipherd et al. found that 30 percent had served in the military, which is similar to military service among transgender people assigned male at birth in the NTDS. A recent study by Blosnich et al. reviewed all health records of veterans receiving health care through the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) from 2000 through 2011 and found a prevalence of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) five times that of the US general population. Though individuals with GID diagnoses may or may not identify as transgender, the substantially higher prevalence of GID among veterans in the VHA system provides further evidence that transgender people are overrepresented in the US military. 

But, even if the enlistment rate is much higher for transgender individuals than for non-transgender individuals, the estimated prevalence of transgender individuals in the general population from Gates (2011) is almost surely an overestimate.

While this is not impossible, it is very unlikely that there are really 15,500 transgender individuals serving in the active duty military today. It is far more likely that respondents are either atypical of the gender population with regard to military service, perhaps due to the way that survey respondents were recruited, or that they are simply not accurate in their reporting of their military service (as over reporting of all kinds of events is a common problem in survey based studies).

Thus, to get to a 15,500 active duty transgender soldiers in the U.S. military, you need to assume somewhat more than the highest credible estimate of the prevalence of transgender people in the general population and a military enlistment rate for transgender individuals that is three times that of the general population for individuals of a comparable age, as the NTDS sample suggested.

Neither of these assumptions is likely to be true, and while this makes the decision to bar transgender individuals from military service look like it harms more people than it actually does, it also dramatically exaggerates the likely cost of accommodating transgender individuals in military service. 

The estimate also fails to distinguish between individuals who are transgender but "in the closet" and those who are "out". The number of "out" transgender soldiers in the U.S. military appears to be much lower (e.g. there appears to be only one "out" transgender soldier in all of Fort Carson in Colorado). Realistically, there are probably several dozen to a couple hundred "out" transgender individuals serving in the U.S. military. Obviously, military policies on whether transgender individuals are allowed to serve in the military influences this (and they were only allowed to do so late in the Obama Administration).