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Autistic genius novelist woos the literary world with novel composed using "Facilitated Communication"

Vixen said:
What do you understand by the word, 'independent'? So now even the doctors are in on it?

I used to marvel at how angry and activist disablist groups were but now I am beginning to understand. The disabled are not asking for ableist approval, permission or sympathy. They are demanding their rights. Who cares if you don't believe Woody? He's not going to be performing tricks like a pony for you, any more than you will for him.

I suggest you write to Columbia and UCLA universities and demand an explanation! Show them the angry YouTuber clip as your evidence of a sneaky sneaky fraud by this bloody freak and his psychotic mum!

<sfx sharp intake of breath> "Shouldn't be allowed! Bloody bastards!"
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Strawmannery.
 
Vixen said:
Look up the history of disability legislation and how 'reasonable adjustment' (or, in the US, 'reasonable accommodation') came into being. Based on case law. The proviso that FC and it's variations should not be admissible as a reasonable adjustment was because it was unethical towards the presumed helpless and vulnerable disabled subject. That is why it is relevant. Institutions, local authorities and corporations use this law for guidelines. They stick to its provisions. FC was deemed unethical towards a certain group. Woody is clearly not one of them, having graduated high school, UCLA and Columbia.
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As usual, you seem to have gone off on a tangent (it's all that leaning). Stick to the scenario. RPM has no validity. If you disagree with the assessment by ASHA, explain why. It's unethical because it is not doing what it claims to do.

The whole issue is whether Woody actually did the work; it's begging the question to claim his degrees as evidence that he did.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
"Who cares if you don't believe Woody?"

Once again you bark up the wrong tree. You get this wrong so often, you can hardly be doing it by mistake. This is not about believing Woody. This is æAll messages "from Woody" come from his mother. ääd yes she does appear to be just making them up.

She may tell herself she is helping Woody because people will like and admire him for "his" book. But if he genuinely has anything to say to the world, he will never say it while his mother blocks the way.
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Where do you get the idea 'All messages "from Woody" come from his mother.'? Oh, it was a newspaper headline! Did you know headlines are dreamt up by sub-editors as clickbait? They may have little relevance to the issue, especially when surrounded by quotation marks?

Just so you know, Woody's tutor/mentor at Columbia was Rivka Galchen. So not just his mother.
 
Vixen said:
Where do you get the idea 'All messages "from Woody" come from his mother.'? Oh, it was a newspaper headline! Did you know headlines are dreamt up by sub-editors as clickbait? They may have little relevance to the issue, especially when surrounded by quotation marks?

Just so you know, Woody's tutor/mentor at Columbia was Rivka Galchen. So not just his mother.
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And you'll be able to tell us how Rivka Galchen communicated with Woody?
 
Vixen said:
Where do you get the idea 'All messages "from Woody" come from his mother.'? Oh, it was a newspaper headline! Did you know headlines are dreamt up by sub-editors as clickbait? They may have little relevance to the issue, especially when surrounded by quotation marks?
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Because she is using a system that is already discredited. Plus of course that we can see what he points to and what she claims he pointed to for ourselves and they don't match.

She uses her son as a meat-puppet.

Vixen said:
Just so you know, Woody's tutor/mentor at Columbia was Rivka Galchen. So not just his mother.
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Please show the evidence that he communicated with Riva Galchen without his mother facilitating that communication.
 
www.publishersweekly.com

Spring 2026 Writers to Watch: Woody Brown

The nonspeaking author's debut novel, 'Upward Bound' (Hogarth, Mar.), is set in a cash-strapped adult daycare center for autistic and disabled adults.
www.publishersweekly.com www.publishersweekly.com
At Columbia, where his professors included Rivka Galchen, Mary attended every class and helped him compose his manuscripts using the letter board. Galchen, who worked with him throughout his enrollment, says that it is natural for people to wonder about the line between transcribing and cuing. “His mother is present in the sense that she’s with him all the time, but I didn’t have any more doubt than I would about someone else in the class having their boyfriend write their work,” she says.
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There's a lot of wiggle room in that last quote!
 
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Vixen said:
What do you understand by the word, 'independent'? So now even the doctors are in on it?
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NO! Only the mother. If she can fool academics and journalists, she can certainly fool a doctor who might not have experience with the pseudoscientific practice of Facilitated Communication.
 
Vixen said:
Where do you get the idea 'All messages "from Woody" come from his mother.'?
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Decades of research into Facilitated Communication, which have concluded that it is exploitative and harmful to the disabled victims.

Remember, this isn't the only example that has been critically examined.
 
Safe-Keeper said:
There's another possibility that I think CTers on here often suffer from: They're afraid of being proven wrong. They invest emotional value in some theory or idea, and then they don't dare look at contrary evidence because realizing they were wrong would be too hurtful, so instead they double down on their beliefs, going so far as to reassure themselves that the people who disagree with them must just be narrow-minded and uninformed (granted that's a trap all of us can definitely fall into).
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The other possibility is that you cannot reason with an entrenched dogmatist. I discovered this in my youth arguing with Jehovah's Witnesses and Stalinists. Very nice people. But any argument put forward that counters their dogma is brushed off by their referring back to the very dogma one has just countered by reason. In this case, the dogma is a para from wiki declaring all FC is bad!

So, I gradually began to realise it was pointless arguing with the guy outside ULU selling his NEXT STEP or the nice couple from Jehovah's Witnesses. In the end, I just walked on by the Stalinist and his ever changing revisionism, and when a Jehovah's Witness calls, once I inform them I am a scientist, you've never seen anyone scuttle away so quickly with a scandalised expression. A scientist! Far far worse than Dracula himself!

TL;DR Please treat each case on its individual merits and leave the dogma to one side.
 
Vixen said:
The other possibility is that you cannot reason with an entrenched dogmatist. I discovered this in my youth arguing with Jehovah's Witnesses and Stalinists. Very nice people. But any argument put forward that counters their dogma is brushed off by their referring back to the very dogma one has just countered by reason. In this case, the dogma is a para from wiki declaring all FC is bad!

So, I gradually began to realise it was pointless arguing with the guy outside ULU selling his NEXT STEP or the nice couple from Jehovah's Witnesses. In the end, I just walked on by the Stalinist and his ever changing revisionism, and when a Jehovah's Witness calls, once I inform them I am a scientist, you've never seen anyone scuttle away so quickly with a scandalised expression. A scientist! Far far worse than Dracula himself!

TL;DR Please treat each case on its individual merits and leave the dogma to one side.
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Irrelevant rubbish. Address the points made.
 
P.J. Denyer said:
I'm reminded of the number of qualified, serious and entirely well meaning researchers who were fooled by similarly simple tricks during the heyday of psychical research.
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Yep. Humans are very easy to fool especially if we want something to be true and who wouldn't want a locked-in kid to be able to communicate (apart from Woody's mother)? Scientists were often bamboozled because they didn't expect people to cheat, and they were woefully unschooled in how people have been fooling other people for centuries. Thankfully these facilitated communication claims are very easy to disprove which is why we have known for decades that they simply do not allow the claimed person to communicate. It's sad and I know so many parents would be prepared to do almost anything to be able establish communication with their children and sadly charlatans like Soma Mukhopadhyay have taken advantage of that.
 
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A quick note to remind Vixen that when we say the problem is Woody's disability, we are referring to his inability to communicate; we are not referring to his intelligence.

We don't think he is too stupid to do these things. We just don't have any evidence that he is doing these things, and we do have a little evidence and a hell of a lot of inference that his mother is doing these things.
 
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