(In lieu of a longer post I’ve been planning to write, with the gist “the systemizing/empathizing research is elaborately terrible, and from a cursory glance the people-vs.-things literature looks a lot more rigorous, so it’s funny that the former is so much more popular”)

Act One

Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues: “As can be seen, the results cluster in the SQ-EQ space and do not randomly fill the chart. This suggests that it may not be possible to score anywhere in SQ-EQ space, and that there may be constraints operating, such that SQ and EQ are not independent.”

Me: “uh that just looks like a big blob to me, where are the clusters”

Act Two

Me: “Oh huh that’s interesting.  The male and female control groups overlap a lop, so they don’t form clusters per se – looks like the distribution for controls is unimodal? – but now that you mention it, the autistic group is very distinct.  I didn’t see it as a “cluster” in the first plot because you had more control than autistic subjects, so it just looked like variance.  But if you wanted to train a binary classifier to distinguish autistic from control subjects, it’d work pretty well, you’d get a decision boundary covering like most of the far bottom of the graph but excluding a bit on the left – ”

Act Three

Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues: “Since there is no unique way to break up the results of our data analysis into identifiable groups along the D dimension, we propose a classification based upon the cumulant plot of Figure 2a. This generates 5 brain types […]”

Me: “Wait, five clusters?  I can’t see any support for having that many, but at least you have enough boundaries that you can get the green dots well separated from the others, so whatever, go ahead – ”

Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues:

Me: “what the fuck”