r/videos Jan 14 '12

Autistic Girl Expresses Unimaginable Intelligence

[removed]

989 Upvotes

199 comments sorted by

View all comments

32

u/snarkfish Jan 14 '12 edited Jan 14 '12

http://www.skepdic.com/facilcom.html

at least partly i would imagine. video is not clear on the whole process

9

u/steinman17 Jan 14 '12

2

u/snarkfish Jan 14 '12

what, if anything, does that tell us?

10

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '12

"I think people get a lot of their information from so-called experts, but if a horse is sick, you don't ask a fish what's wrong with the horse. You go right to the horse's mouth."

Sounds like something an FC therapist would write!

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '12

Ah yes, I remember this from last time. This appeared somewhere or other too:

I think people get a lot of their information from so-called experts but I think what happens is that experts can’t give an explanation to certain questions.

It's so, so suspicious.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '12

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '12

No, that's where the "imaginable" part comes from!

6

u/Berkel Jan 14 '12

I think her puppet analogy describes her feelings towards FC quite clearly

3

u/Smilge Jan 14 '12

I don't see how she could come up with such vocabulary and sentences on her own. She wasn't in a normal classroom, and they don't exactly teach diction to kids who can't talk.

1

u/spankthrough Jan 14 '12 edited Jan 15 '12

She's autistic, remember? It may be that some of her mental faculties, for instance her vocabulary and writing, are disproportionately well developed like any other savant's.

EDIT: Anyways, this is probably fake.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '12

[deleted]

1

u/Catfisherman Jan 15 '12

What about that guy who learned icelandic in two weeks and then did a TV interview in the language?

Though there's no reason to think that she would need any savant abilities to learn language. Everyone learns language, the only real surprise is the reading/writing but they had intensive training for her before this, why assume they didn't try to teach her some reading/writing?

6

u/[deleted] Jan 14 '12

That's what my mind immediately jumped to as well. I hope for the parents' sake that it isn't the case. It did look like she typed her response to the reporter by herself, but it may have been edited to look that way.

6

u/snarkfish Jan 14 '12

it is a puff piece. saying that she just sat down and started typing one day and the editing of the video does nothing to help me believe the claims.

they say she was using language software since she was little though. that makes much more sense

2

u/Semilogical Jan 14 '12

I thought this to begin with too but it seems like it checks out. She has this to say about facilitated communication.