A) Increased awareness of the issue for both parents and medical staff. I think that one is clearly true.
B) Rational response to educational incentives around relaxed testing for those diagnosed with syndromes. Extra testing time is big. During the Varsity Blues scandal it came out that you could buy paperwork for accommodations for around $5000. Or parents might see a legitimate issue and testing and in-school accommodations convince them that it’s worth getting their child diagnosed.
A) Collapse of traditional paths to marriage. If you’re less likely to meet mates by meeting them at church or other community events with a more wide spread selection of people, are you more likely to meet someone else on the spectrum?
B) Increased career rewards for those with autistic tendencies, so less need to find a non-autistic spouse.
While you make very good points, I think as society we are quite quick at discounting unknown unknowns in this case. Science and diagnostic methods have advanced a lot, but it is not at all improbable that there is some kind of man-made factor that also caused an increase in incidence of autism (or any other modern chronic disease, such as ADHD like I am). Being an unknown unknown, we literally cannot know until x decades later we find out, "ah yes, we used this chemical everywhere that had a measurable developmental effect on newborn. Whoopsie". Yet everyone keeps saying that's nonsense, let alone insulting and insensitive to even suggest that's the case.
I am not saying there is proof for the contrary, mind you, just science and laymen should avoid the hubris of thinking we haven't made a mistake along the way. It would not be the first time. Radium in toothpaste, cigarettes for sore throat, cocaine in health tonics, DDT, teflon, and the other hundred teratogen chemicals we have given pregnant women over the decades.
>Problem is that unknown unknows are not actionable.
How about carefully testing something new, especially something that one ingests? As far as I know no such testing is done, if it's done, it's done with the goal of gaming the safety standards that may be expected of the product. You cannot fix an ignorant, corrupt society.
How extensive safety testing of a hammer should be?
Should there be double blind clinical trials for it’s health impact when caried daily on a tool belt?
For most people, answer will differ depending on what the hammer is made of (iron vs uranium vs radium).
My point here would be that a) we must choose appropriate set of tests as they cost in money/time/opportunities, b) the choice of tests must be influenced by what we know and/or suspect.
If unknown is unknown, then we don’t know that we need a test for it.
1) Increased diagnosis due to
A) Increased awareness of the issue for both parents and medical staff. I think that one is clearly true.
B) Rational response to educational incentives around relaxed testing for those diagnosed with syndromes. Extra testing time is big. During the Varsity Blues scandal it came out that you could buy paperwork for accommodations for around $5000. Or parents might see a legitimate issue and testing and in-school accommodations convince them that it’s worth getting their child diagnosed.
C) Merging of Aspergers into autism.
2) Increased assortative mating for those with autism or those with autism risk. Some evidence here https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.28.358895v1
As to why it might be increasing?
A) Collapse of traditional paths to marriage. If you’re less likely to meet mates by meeting them at church or other community events with a more wide spread selection of people, are you more likely to meet someone else on the spectrum?
B) Increased career rewards for those with autistic tendencies, so less need to find a non-autistic spouse.