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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Appearances
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.
I also got lots of emails from people who are on the spectrum themselves who
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.
But what they were becoming obsessed with was the question as to whether or not vaccines cause autism.
And this, too...
was also causing a tremendous amount of human suffering because, in fact, I remember reading on an anti-vaccine website this woman saying that basically the day that she ruined her life and her daughter's life was the day that she brought her daughter for a measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.
And so people were really suffering from these ideas that were constantly being argued about online
While meanwhile, no one was talking about what families and autistic people, i.e.
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