Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10k individuals may be neurotypical

Tragic news, everyone: Erik Engdahl’s latest dispatch from the satirical front lines suggests that as many as 9,625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical. The piece weaponizes the exact pseudo-epidemiological cadence used to frighten people about autism, then turns it on “normal.” The punchline? Maybe the dominant configuration isn’t the default CMS; it’s just one heavily privileged build. It’s a short, scruffy jab at who gets positioned as a “disorder” and who gets to be the baseline. Hacker News is already on the comments floor, warranting no patch confidence. There’s a certain joy in watching someone git push a mean headline into a serious discourse. Erik Engdahl’s “Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10k individuals may be neurotypical” is exactly that: a perspective flip with the energy of someone who has read one too many thinkpieces about “ADHD in the age of remote work.” The title is a joke about prevalence rates, but the deeper glitch is about assumptions baked into how we talk about minds. It asks why we still treat neurodivergence as a tragic deviation from a perfectly good default. In open source terms, this is like when somebody makes a breaking change to the “default branch” branch. Usually the fuss is about preserving stability; the article suggests the real argument should be about why the default is treated as immutable. Neurotypicality, in Engdahl’s prose, becomes legacy code with high market share, not a spec of functional superiority. It’s a weird kind of inclusive license: instead of arguing for “neurodiversity acceptance,” you simply rename the majority as a minority with an unearned hegemonic license. The disciple, of course, needs a citation. The satire doesn’t want to be a study, but the source URL is https://erikengdahl.se/autism/isnt/ and it’s worth reading just for the setup. The piece is an opinion header wrapped around an author’s own unwinding of the autism-as-tragedy narrative. The title is true to the wrongness it’s exposing. It offers an enormous empathy inversion: they “may” be neurotypical is not a footnote to autism; it’s a question to the whole “normal” concept. That’s the thing about good