Steve Silberman
speaker
584 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2018
last heard Jul 2022
Steve Silberman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I no longer think of neurodiversity as like a political stance or even a movement.
I think of it as a living fact, like biodiversity.
and we can pathologize it endlessly and say that all these variations are diseases or syndromes or whatever, which was the approach for most of the 20th century, or we can celebrate that diversity as a gift to our society that requires us to be responsible and to provide people with whatever they need to achieve success
in whatever form their success would be.
Hey, Debbie, I'm really honored to be here.
Thank you for asking me to be on the show.
Sure.
Well,
The inspiration to write it was the fact that in 2001, I wrote an article about autism in high-tech communities like Silicon Valley.
It was an article called The Geek Syndrome that appeared in Wired.
And the article came out right after 9-11.
So I figured that hardly anyone would have time to read it or care about it.
But instead, what happened was
I got an email about the article for 10 years and that's very, very unusual for a magazine article.
Usually they're forgotten overnight and the emails, many of which were from parents actually were about very basic problems in accessing services for their kids on the spectrum.
Uh, I also got lots of emails from people who are on the spectrum themselves,
who were unable to ever find a job, even if they had been told they were prodigies when they were young, because they couldn't make it through a face-to-face interview.
And so these emails were very heart-wrenching and really had to do with very basic failure of society to provide reasonable support and accommodations for people on the spectrum and their families.
And it was causing a tremendous amount of, you know, just the sheer volume of human suffering that I read about practically every week for 10 years after my article came out.
Meanwhile, a funny thing was happening, which was that the entire world was becoming obsessed with autism.
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