WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:04.240 I'm getting increasingly concerned that mainstream  journalism and traditional publishing are punking   00:00:04.240 --> 00:00:10.800 me. And not in a cute, funny way like Spaghetti  Trees on April Fool's Day, in a mean way. I have   00:00:10.800 --> 00:00:15.120 recently read several interviews with Woody  Brown, who is a non-verbal autistic man who   00:00:15.120 --> 00:00:19.840 has published the book Upward bound. And I  read those interviews thinking, it is near   00:00:19.840 --> 00:00:25.840 April Fool's Day. How sure am I that this isn't  just some elaborate cruel joke against a disabled   00:00:25.840 --> 00:00:30.640 man perpetrated by these news outlets? I don't  think it's an elaborate and cruel joke perpetrated   00:00:30.640 --> 00:00:35.760 against a disabled man by news outlets because the  news outlets in question were the New York Times,   00:00:35.760 --> 00:00:40.640 the Guardian and the Daily Mail. And I don't  know if you're familiar with British newspapers,   00:00:40.640 --> 00:00:46.960 but the Guardian and the Daily Mail are always  on opposite sides of any ideological debate. So,   00:00:46.960 --> 00:00:50.880 it seems unlikely that they'd both be in on  it. But, it's genuinely unsettling to feel like   00:00:50.880 --> 00:00:54.320 I'm in some kind of weird social experiment  where they're trying to see if we'll believe   00:00:54.320 --> 00:00:58.960 journalists or the evidence of our lying eyes.  Although I did have to work a little bit harder   00:00:58.960 --> 00:01:04.400 to get the evidence for my lying eyes. So Woody  Brown is a 28-year-old man who was diagnosed with   00:01:04.400 --> 00:01:08.560 severe autism as a toddler. To quote from the  New York Times article, "Whenever Woody spoke,   00:01:08.560 --> 00:01:13.600 it sounded like shrieks and gibberish." And  doctors concluded he couldn't process language   00:01:13.600 --> 00:01:18.640 and said it was pointless to explain things to him  or talk to him in complex sentences. I assume that   00:01:18.640 --> 00:01:23.280 the understanding of autism has come somewhat  further in the 20 years since Woody Brown was   00:01:23.280 --> 00:01:29.760 diagnosed because I don't know a large number of  non-verbal autistic people, but many of them are   00:01:29.760 --> 00:01:34.400 perfectly capable of understanding language even  if they don't speak. And it does seem in fact that   00:01:34.400 --> 00:01:40.080 Woody can process language to some degree. To what  degree is the question in play here? because he   00:01:40.080 --> 00:01:47.680 can speak at least a little bit but mostly when he  speaks it's quotes from TV shows which I believe   00:01:47.680 --> 00:01:53.600 is called scripting but I am not autistic and I'm  not particularly familiar with the term so if I'm   00:01:53.600 --> 00:01:57.600 wrong do let me know to go back to the New York  Times article Mary came to realize that her son   00:01:57.600 --> 00:02:01.680 understood more than he appeared to he would  become hysterical if they deviated from their   00:02:01.680 --> 00:02:05.840 daily routine but if she explained why they  had to stop at Target before getting lunch at   00:02:05.840 --> 00:02:09.920 McDonald's he would calmly follow her into the  store which does seem to back up Mary Brown's   00:02:09.920 --> 00:02:14.880 claim that even though Woody can't speak, even  though he's non-verbal, at least at this stage,   00:02:14.880 --> 00:02:19.520 he can understand language. So, here's our  last New York Times quote for a bit. And   00:02:19.520 --> 00:02:25.440 this is where it starts to get interesting. At  5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at   00:02:25.440 --> 00:02:30.720 letters to spell out words using a laminated  card. He began responding to Mary's questions,   00:02:30.720 --> 00:02:34.880 first with single word answers and later with  short sentences. That's how mom figured out   00:02:34.880 --> 00:02:38.880 that I was listening to everything. Woody told me  when we met on a recent morning at his parents'   00:02:38.880 --> 00:02:43.840 home in Monrovia, California, where he lives. To  express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with   00:02:43.840 --> 00:02:48.800 his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated  next to him on the couch, followed his fingertaps   00:02:48.800 --> 00:02:53.920 and repeated the words aloud. Let us put to one  side for now the spelling and reading abilities of   00:02:53.920 --> 00:02:59.520 5-year-olds. Because spoken language is something  that humans are wired for, but reading and writing   00:02:59.520 --> 00:03:04.640 are not. They are skills that you have to learn  and they're they can be quite challenging. Anyway,   00:03:04.640 --> 00:03:08.960 the articles followed the same general pattern.  Woody was diagnosed with autism. He couldn't   00:03:08.960 --> 00:03:14.080 speak or communicate and so everyone assumed  that he couldn't understand either, but his   00:03:14.080 --> 00:03:19.040 mother believed in him and they found a way that  he could communicate. And it turns out that he's a   00:03:19.040 --> 00:03:23.840 great communicator and a great writer. Woody has  in fact achieved two degrees, an English degree   00:03:23.840 --> 00:03:29.120 from UCLA and a master's in creative writing  from Columbia University. He has also, as I   00:03:29.120 --> 00:03:33.760 mentioned at the beginning, written a novel called  Upward bound. And all of these were with the help   00:03:33.760 --> 00:03:38.480 of his mother Mary. And this is the part where  things start to get very uncomfortable because   00:03:38.480 --> 00:03:45.200 any form of communication where a facilitator has  to interpret the results of said communication is   00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:51.200 subject to wishful thinking and also to bias. And  specifically in the case of someone typing on a   00:03:51.200 --> 00:03:56.240 board, if a facilitator has to hold the board,  then the facilitator is almost certainly going   00:03:56.240 --> 00:04:02.000 to be subject to what's called the ideomotor  or ideomotor effect. The ideomotor effect is   00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:06.880 unconscious involuntary muscle movements which  are triggered without you knowing about them or   00:04:06.880 --> 00:04:11.600 thinking that you're doing them. The most obvious  example of the ideomoter effect is Ouija boards   00:04:11.600 --> 00:04:18.800 or dowsing rods. the person makes a very tiny  involuntary unconscious muscular contraction and   00:04:18.800 --> 00:04:22.880 because there is a lever because you're holding a  long stick it goes much more significantly in one   00:04:22.880 --> 00:04:26.880 direction or the other but you don't realize that  you have made this tiny unconscious movement and   00:04:26.880 --> 00:04:31.600 so you think that an external force is guiding you  so for this reason neither rapid prompting method   00:04:31.600 --> 00:04:36.880 which is holding up the board and the person  types on it or spelling to communicate which is   00:04:36.880 --> 00:04:41.360 a similar thing they're not recommended by ASHA  which is the American Speech Language Hearing   00:04:41.360 --> 00:04:47.840 Association or by the National Council on Severe  Autism or by various other bodies. Actually,   00:04:47.840 --> 00:04:53.040 they they consider the rapid prompting method and  spelling to communicate new methods of facilitated   00:04:53.040 --> 00:04:57.520 communication, which they don't believe has  any scientific validity. When studies were   00:04:57.520 --> 00:05:01.680 done on facilitated communication in the '90s,  they basically concluded that with facilitated   00:05:01.680 --> 00:05:06.400 communication, you might be able to get  communication, but it's almost certainly not what   00:05:06.400 --> 00:05:10.960 the disabled person might actually be trying to  say. It's important to mention at this point that   00:05:10.960 --> 00:05:16.320 there are lots and lots of forms of augmentative  and assistive communication, AAC, which do have an   00:05:16.320 --> 00:05:20.960 evidence base behind them and which can be used to  help non-verbal people communicate. This is just   00:05:20.960 --> 00:05:24.480 not one of them. This paragraph touches on some of  the potential harms of the method, but we're going   00:05:24.480 --> 00:05:29.280 to come back to that later because just because  something doesn't have an evidence base behind   00:05:29.280 --> 00:05:33.920 it right now doesn't mean it's entirely without  validity. And we're going to we're going to bend   00:05:33.920 --> 00:05:37.920 over backwards to be fair here. So, I found some  clips of Woody and his mother using the method   00:05:37.920 --> 00:05:42.720 which I have just described, and you can watch  them and judge for yourself. This clip is from   00:05:42.720 --> 00:05:48.320 CBS 3 years ago, and you can see the letters that  he's typing right here. Z, A, or S, A, or S, C,   00:05:48.320 --> 00:05:52.720 or V, N. I'm not sure what word that would make.  But, you know what, this is such a short clip,   00:05:52.720 --> 00:05:57.040 and there are no words associated, we can't  really say what's going on with it. Let's try   00:05:57.040 --> 00:06:02.240 a different one. Here, we cannot see the keys, but  Woody's mother spells out the word intelligence.   00:06:02.240 --> 00:06:21.440 to presume I N T E L L I G E N C E to presume  intelligence I N in people like me yes first   00:06:21.440 --> 00:06:27.120 the number of taps don't correspond to the number  of letters that she's saying and second he's down   00:06:27.120 --> 00:06:32.560 on the bottom of the board for most of this I and  T are both up at the top His fingers shouldn't be   00:06:32.560 --> 00:06:37.040 down there if he's typing the word intelligence.  But you know what this was 3 years ago, and we   00:06:37.040 --> 00:06:42.400 can't actually see the letters he's typing while  she is telling us what he says. So, let's go to   00:06:42.400 --> 00:06:48.560 this clip from the Ron Charles's Substack, which  has him answering a question in real time while we   00:06:48.560 --> 00:06:52.800 can see the keyboard. Again, the idea is that he  taps out words on this board and his mother reads   00:06:52.800 --> 00:06:57.280 them aloud. And in the comment section of the CBS  video from 3 years ago, there is someone who is   00:06:57.280 --> 00:07:04.080 claiming to be Mary Brown. And she says in that  comment that she writes or types exactly what he   00:07:04.080 --> 00:07:09.600 points to when she is writing for him. So I feel  it's reasonably safe to assume that she should   00:07:09.600 --> 00:07:16.320 then say exactly what he's pointing to, or at  least roughly what he's pointing to, given that   00:07:16.320 --> 00:07:20.000 if you're doing something quickly, there's more  likely to be typos. Because there are more likely   00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:24.720 to be typos, I have given you my best estimates  of the keys pressed. But when it's right in the   00:07:24.720 --> 00:07:29.440 middle of one or two or three, I have given you  all of the possible options. Here are the notes   00:07:29.440 --> 00:07:35.200 that I took of this 1 minute and 17 second clip  from when he starts tapping on the board to when   00:07:35.200 --> 00:07:39.440 the board is taken away. And while the original  clip is framed like this, I am going to zoom in   00:07:39.440 --> 00:07:45.360 on the board and his typing so that we can see  more clearly what he's actually pointing at. The   00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:49.680 short version is that the keys he taps bear almost  no resemblance to what his mother says that he is   00:07:49.680 --> 00:07:53.600 saying. But again, you should judge for yourself.  So, here again are my best estimates just in case   00:07:53.600 --> 00:07:58.240 this gets copyright dinged and I have to take  down the sections where I'm using someone else's   00:07:58.240 --> 00:08:03.520 footage. And here is the question. Ron asks, "How  did you decide to let your characters be funny,   00:08:03.520 --> 00:08:08.000 even ridiculous, without turning them into  objects of pity?" Woody taps the board eight   00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:12.480 times in the following locations, and his mother  says, "May." He taps the board twice in what could   00:08:12.480 --> 00:08:18.080 be the space and I positions. And she says I  say for these. I guess that works. Three taps,   00:08:18.080 --> 00:08:22.800 one of which could be I. And for the rest of the  clip, I'm just going to put the letters tapped on   00:08:22.800 --> 00:08:28.720 the screen and the word at the bottom. 10 taps  for don't. Eight taps for have. Five taps for   00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:41.360 pity. Seven taps for for. 10 taps for disabled.  Disabled. 18 taps for people. people. 11 taps for   00:08:41.360 --> 00:08:54.160 including including. Nine taps for myself.  Myself. Twice for I. 12 taps for respect. 00:08:54.160 --> 00:08:58.880 Respect. Eight taps for them. 00:08:58.880 --> 00:09:10.080 Seven taps for and six taps for they seven  taps for happen. Five taps for two. Five taps   00:09:10.080 --> 00:09:19.760 for be. Nine taps for funny. And at the end,  you can also see that he keeps trying to press   00:09:19.760 --> 00:09:24.320 the board even though she is taking it away.  Also, if you watch the clip in its entirety,   00:09:24.320 --> 00:09:28.400 you can see that the board moves around  quite a lot. She's not holding it still,   00:09:28.400 --> 00:09:32.160 which considering that quite a lot of the time  he's also not looking at the board would make it   00:09:32.160 --> 00:09:36.400 very difficult to find one's letter of choice. I  hope that the quality of the clip is good enough   00:09:36.400 --> 00:09:40.720 that you can see the letters that he's pointing  at here. And I don't know if you are seeing what   00:09:40.720 --> 00:09:44.720 I am seeing, but reading the communication  method described in the newspaper articles   00:09:44.720 --> 00:09:51.600 made me a little bit uneasy. And then I went  and watched some clips of it in action and now   00:09:51.600 --> 00:09:57.920 I'm very uneasy to put it mildly. The evidence  of my eyes does not lead me to the conclusion   00:09:57.920 --> 00:10:03.120 that Woody Brown is communicating via a letter  board. It leads me to the conclusion that he is   00:10:03.120 --> 00:10:07.840 randomly tapping the board and that his mother  is extemporizing whether consciously or not.   00:10:07.840 --> 00:10:12.640 I further conclude that if people see this and  think to themselves, "Wow, maybe this could be   00:10:12.640 --> 00:10:17.600 a method that I could use to communicate with  my non-verbal child," they are going to waste   00:10:17.600 --> 00:10:24.080 their time and their money and their energy and  their hope on something which does not seem to   00:10:24.080 --> 00:10:29.920 actually produce results. I am not convinced that  this is Woody Brown's authentic communication,   00:10:29.920 --> 00:10:35.920 and I don't think that's a good thing. There's  not a great deal of scepticism shown in any of the   00:10:35.920 --> 00:10:41.200 three articles. There's a little bit, but the most  is probably shown in the New York Times article,   00:10:41.200 --> 00:10:45.520 and I have some quotes from there. Mary says  she isn't surprised some people question Woody's   00:10:45.520 --> 00:10:50.240 abilities. It took her years to recognize what  he was capable of, but she bristles at critics   00:10:50.240 --> 00:10:55.280 who say the way they communicate is harmful or  manipulative. How on earth am I harming him?   00:10:55.280 --> 00:11:01.360 She said, I had to pause for a long time after I  read that when I was writing this video because I   00:11:01.360 --> 00:11:06.560 wasn't sure that I could make a non-emotional  argument as to the harms involved. Bluntly,   00:11:06.560 --> 00:11:12.480 I did not think I could express my creeping  horror at the situation in a way that would   00:11:12.480 --> 00:11:16.960 actually be helpful. I have therefore decided to  give that part of the argument a swerve. You can   00:11:16.960 --> 00:11:22.000 feel free to make one in the comments if you would  like to. I will merely state that truth is good   00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:27.840 and falsehood is not good even if that falsehood  is unconsciously done. Luckily, I do not have to   00:11:27.840 --> 00:11:32.880 make the argument for the objective harms of  facilitated communication or rapid prompting   00:11:32.880 --> 00:11:38.560 or spelling to communicate because several other  people have done it before me. Before I read you   00:11:38.560 --> 00:11:42.160 the quote though, here we must note again that  spelling to communicate and the rapid prompting   00:11:42.160 --> 00:11:47.840 method are both considered to be basically just  reskinned versions of facilitated communication.   00:11:47.840 --> 00:11:54.240 And having watched the clips of Woody and his  mother engaging in the rapid prompting method,   00:11:54.240 --> 00:11:58.880 I hope you can understand why. Studies dating  back to the 1990s have repeatedly demonstrated   00:11:58.880 --> 00:12:03.600 that the products of facilitated communication  reflect the often non-conscious control of the   00:12:03.600 --> 00:12:08.240 facilitator and do not represent authentic  communication by the disabled person. Since   00:12:08.240 --> 00:12:12.560 the entire point of these methods is to  hear the voice of the disabled person,   00:12:12.560 --> 00:12:16.880 to allow them to communicate their thoughts  and feelings and wants and needs and desires,   00:12:16.880 --> 00:12:22.240 that should be sufficient. But there's more. At  times, false statements generated by facilitated   00:12:22.240 --> 00:12:27.680 communication practitioners have resulted in  devastating outcomes, including false accusations   00:12:27.680 --> 00:12:33.360 of abuse against parents and others. Let us create  for ourselves a hypothetical situation which is   00:12:33.360 --> 00:12:40.080 not this one but does involve a mother and her son  who are using facilitated communication or rapid   00:12:40.080 --> 00:12:44.320 prompting or spelling to communicate or one of  these similar methods. We will stipulate for the   00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:49.280 purposes of this hypothetical that the mother in  the situation truly deeply believes that her son   00:12:49.280 --> 00:12:55.040 is communicating via tapping on the keyboard. In  this hypothetical, if both parents are caring for   00:12:55.040 --> 00:13:02.880 the child and a disagreement arises about some  aspect of his care, do you think they will use   00:13:02.880 --> 00:13:08.240 that method to ask the child what he thinks? Do  you think that the child's wishes will reflect   00:13:08.240 --> 00:13:13.680 those of the mother or those of the father? Or  a third and different option, would the wishes   00:13:13.680 --> 00:13:19.440 expressed really be the child's wishes at all?  What if the facilitator parent develops a dislike   00:13:19.440 --> 00:13:25.920 of one of the child's other carers? What if via  the letterboard the child accuses that carer of   00:13:25.920 --> 00:13:31.280 abuse? I don't necessarily think that Woody Brown  is taking any direct physical harm from his mother   00:13:31.280 --> 00:13:36.960 using this method. But if the point of the method  is to allow him to communicate with the world,   00:13:36.960 --> 00:13:41.920 I do not believe that that's actually what is  happening. If he has thoughts which he could   00:13:41.920 --> 00:13:47.760 or would communicate given an actual method of  augmentative or assistive communication that   00:13:47.760 --> 00:13:53.200 actually works, you are robbing him of that  chance. And given that what seems to happen   00:13:53.200 --> 00:13:59.520 is that he taps on the letterboard pretty much at  random while not really looking at it and you tell   00:13:59.520 --> 00:14:06.240 us what you think that he's saying, it feels more  like you are just talking to your own unconscious   00:14:06.240 --> 00:14:12.320 echo rather than telling us what he thinks. And  I believe that truth is preferable to untruth,   00:14:12.320 --> 00:14:19.040 even if untruth gets you a book deal and coverage  by CBS and the New York Times and the Guardian   00:14:19.040 --> 00:14:24.400 and the Daily Mail. And this is why I feel like  I'm being Punk'd by news outlets because were we   00:14:24.400 --> 00:14:30.240 supposed not to notice that Woody isn't looking  at the keyboard? Were we supposed not to notice   00:14:30.240 --> 00:14:38.400 that he taps the board far more than his mother  spells words and not in the locations where the   00:14:38.400 --> 00:14:42.880 letters are for the words which are supposedly  being spelled? Are we supposed not to notice that   00:14:42.880 --> 00:14:48.000 he would have continued tapping the board even  after the sentence was supposedly finished and   00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:51.760 his mother was taking it away? This is one of  those circumstances where you don't want to be   00:14:51.760 --> 00:14:56.880 right. I would love to be wrong. Being wrong would  be great in this situation because being wrong in   00:14:56.880 --> 00:15:03.040 this situation means that Woody Brown really is a  brilliant novelist who can in fact type unassisted   00:15:03.040 --> 00:15:07.760 on a keyboard by himself with no input from anyone  else. And the fact that he only communicates via   00:15:07.760 --> 00:15:13.360 his mother and a letterboard where the words  spoken bear no resemblance or little to no   00:15:13.360 --> 00:15:20.000 resemblance to the things actually being pointed  at is just because I don't understand how it   00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:24.880 works. But on the balance of probabilities, I do  not think that is the most likely explanation for   00:15:24.880 --> 00:15:30.800 the facts in front of us. I could be wrong, but I  don't think I am. And I'm amazed and confused and   00:15:30.800 --> 00:15:36.240 concerned that none of these journalistic outlets  seem to be as skeptical as I am. And apparently   00:15:36.240 --> 00:15:41.680 neither is traditional publishing, though, all  things considered, I suppose I shouldn't be so   00:15:41.680 --> 00:15:46.960 surprised about the latter. I don't really know  how to end this video. This is not even slightly   00:15:46.960 --> 00:15:52.320 like what we normally do on this channel, but  if you've got this far, thank you for watching.