Criticisms of ABA Part II

So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly.

We think it's important to understand what she's saying so we understand her criticism and then... carry out the purpose of today's second part, which is to address those criticisms and hopefully arrive at some innovations to make those criticisms null and void in the recent or the near future here of ABA. I jumped right in and failed to fully introduce myself. You guys know me. I'm Mike Rubio with my gracious co-host, Dan Lowry. Mr. Dan, let me let you have the floor for a few minutes here.

How you doing, sir?

What a fantastic mess that was last night. That's all I'll say. Mr. Lowry, do you care to comment?

Two, the criticisms that were, and there were plenty, and again, as I said at the beginning of part one, there are plenty of criticisms to be had and to be heard online or anywhere about ABA, and we kind of pin that against our empirical validity, right?

That's what we come in, we bring to the table as, hey, our stuff works, and then you very eloquently said in our first part, well, just because it works doesn't mean that people are going to take to it or they're going to like it or they're going to do it, most importantly, and it doesn't matter how well we work, if we can't get people to exercise or to to exercise our procedures, if you will, then it doesn't matter, right?

So I've kind of outlined, and I mentioned these in our first part, sort of these three general areas of criticism that Chloe outlines. And again, there's a lot of validity into what she says. So we want to take it seriously, dissect it, and then come up with some new ideas. Understand where it is people can see ABA this way and how it is we're going to change those perspectives in the near future. So I'm going to outline these really quickly for us, Dan, in no particular order.

And again, with a lot of wiggle room amongst these three constructs for us to discuss anything in ABA that you find could be optimized or could be improved now, given our brief but now pretty illustrious history. So first criticism in general is that ABA is not taking into account the individual or the person. Secondly, the science is faulty. I'll take great issue with that one when we get there.

Talking about especially the application of this philosophy of the science, this thing we call ABA intervention, in her case, seemed to be something very traumatic or maybe relatively traumatic and something very standard and rote and not very exciting for her description. And then thirdly, at the heart of ABA is this premise or this move to counter neurodivergence by promoting things like masking.

And then she goes on to talk about an abuse potential within that and not taking into account the individual person and also countering the idea of differences or neurodivergence. So I hope I've covered enough ground there, Mr. Dan. I don't know if you want to add anything to that list or if that seems like a pretty fair synopsis. Oh, hold on here. Give me one second. We got some technical difficulties.

In other words, we all know what certain ABA programs are going to look like, what they're going to smell like, what the flavor of the day is. And in that, there's some... and saying that they're not taking into account the individual person. That is to say, we come in with a standard set of procedures, and in that, we're not individualizing. So there's a lot of ground to be covered there.

What are your initial impressions of the idea that ABA doesn't work into taking into account the individual when one of our basic tenets is social significance?

And also something that I'm trying to work on, and you're really good at, Mike, is figuring out what neurotypical kids do at certain age levels of development. Something that I'm working on and figuring out at what age kids should be following three-step instructions and four-step instructions and things like that I think are very important. So we don't just get into this kind of, okay, I'm going to start with an assessment, and they show deficits in this area.

For this area, we do these goals, and when these goals are met, we do those goals, and when those goals are met, we do those goals. to try to make it more individualized, developmentally appropriate. I think that's where it kind of starts from, for me, taking into consideration that individual. That, and like I mentioned last week, the response generality, those two things. How about you, Mike?

Yes and no. It's not like a car where it's like, hey, we're doing a 12-point inspection, and check, check, check, check, check, check. It's, you know, a child or a human being is a lot more like, well, you know, on these days, on this day, the spark plugs were firing fine, but it seemed like the fuel filter was a little bit clogged. Meaning that if the car's running, we're good. And if the car's running decently well, it's good.

Now, if it's sputtering and it's having tantrum behavior, then we're looking at something different. But oftentimes, we come in with this notion that we're going to have that engine firing at top spec every time. And that we're going to do it by doing this checklist in order. And it's going to happen with NVI first. And then we're going to do this first. And then this next. And the kid's going to sit the whole time.

And that's where I think we completely don't take into account the individual to a person. If you have a young child, you're coming in and they've got gross motor deficits and by just design of nature or natural development, their body is asking them to move around and you're physically prompting them to sit down because you need them to go through these 10 trials. We've got some opposition there.

And it's not from the child because, again, the child's developing just like they want to, expressing the things that they need. And it's sort of our job to put that within a nice little capsule and keep it within a parameter. And a lot of times I think our templates do give us trouble. We go in with the very same template. Targets every single time.

I'm going to make a very general question, and I'm not trying to be facetious, and I think I've said this before during our podcast, but I'm having trouble these days, especially these days, figuring out where a nonverbal imitation target like touch head ever came from. Lately... As hard as I try, I can't find a single purpose in isolation for what touch head might be good for.

Now, if you put it in a song context, and we're doing head, shoulders, knees, and toes, or you're identifying body parts, now I understand. So it's not that the nonverbal imitation part of touching head is useless.

It's that the way we've been applying it maybe is completely out of context, and we've sort of disempowered it, because touch head as a way to... provide a distractor for error correction, that's a lab procedure to make sure that we didn't somehow provide the right answer and that our next answer is statistically significant. From a social perspective, that's highly insignificant. In fact, it's odd.

It's odd to be doing something and then come up with a completely non-related target just to reset your statistics. Socially speaking, that's odd. So I think that the colloquium makes a lot of sense in saying When we practice that lab-oriented ABA just the way it was written, straight from 1971, with the bell-bottoms and the, you know, full-out, flared-out collars with the 1970s fashion in full form, yeah, we're outdated. We're about 50 years outdated if we're doing it that way.

You know, and if you're doing it based on the 1987 review that Lovaas did to talk about what he did, you're still... about 30 years outdated. Look back at your pictures from elementary school. Do you look current in that clothes? I'm not saying the clothes was bad. The clothes was perfect for that time and that age and that era. But you certainly updated your wardrobe and whenever you try to put something on from that era, it shouldn't fit.

And if it does, you're going to really want to question, has it come back into style? Did it make the cut? And if it didn't, put it away. I think I've used this example on several times and I know that I do personally, but When I have people come up to us and ask us about things like the use of escape extinction for eating programs, not feeding programs, there's a big difference. We won't get into that now. But that's horrific. That's tragic.

That's unethical to be employing an escape extinction program just because you want the kid to eat French fries in addition to chicken nuggets. No, that's incorrect. That is not right. Now, if that kid's about to get a G-tube, okay. Now we're talking about a much more imposing procedure that fits the need. And that's where I do think that, Chloe, it makes a lot of sense. We have to be careful about the way we apply those lab-oriented procedures.

We have to realize that we're now in the living room, or somebody just actually modified that phrase for us, the living room or the learning environment, which makes it a little more general. We're used to the living room in terms of in-home services. But that's the whole point, is once you take it out of the laboratory, you don't have the experimental control anymore.

And if you think that you're gonna create the lab control in somebody's living room or in a classroom, please show me how to do that. What you're gonna do is lean on the empirical validity of those procedures that has been It's been done. It's been done for us. And you're going to apply those procedures in a way that takes into account the extra error in your environment.

So if all of a sudden, you know, 99% validity becomes 70% with margin of error at home, you're still doing pretty well, aren't you? You're doing a lot better than the kid tantruming without any sort of remediation. So that's where I do think that Chloe makes a good point. And we are... hard-pressed, and we should be motivated to make those changes. Move away from the recipes. Use the recipes as a way to understand what the dish is supposed to look like. And then, you know, flare it up, man.

Change the ingredients. Add some garnish. Make sure that it fits the kitchen you're serving it in, that it fits the table you're about to sit at, because otherwise people aren't going to eat it. And if they don't eat it, then they can't benefit from your food. So I do think that there's a lot to be said there in terms of how we serve things up. and the ingredients that we sort of sometimes force ourselves to use almost in limitation.

It's another thing to you say, do homework and the kid goes to turn around and all of a sudden we're blocking that kid from leaving their chair or they don't want to sing a circle time tongue and then we're blocking that. Again, we're talking about contextualization and things like that. There's two totally different things and I've seen one too many kids being blocked trying to run away in situations that were not dangerous.

So I think that's kind of a blanket implementation of escape, which scientifically isn't wrong, but humanistically and ethically starts to get into a real gray area of if I was like, hey, Mike, you got to stay at work till six today. And you're like, no, I want to leave. And I blocked you. Wait, what? Like that's that's not nobody would do that to an adult. So, you know, we would think about other ways to communicate that message. So that's the first thing that kind of came about.

as we talk about humanizing ABA a little more and trying to get away from the Lovaas method. Well, sorry, let me not say that. I'm not trying to get away. Get away from 1980s Lovaas, 1970s Lovaas.

which I think is a really important distinction in that, you know, you get a car that comes in, every water pump is going to be the same. Not every kid is going to be the same. The principles of behavior are the same, but the principles of behavior are just reinforcement and punishment, and that's it. Everything else is a derivative of that. So how that's implemented for every kid is going to look a little bit different.

And I think looking at that philosophy versus the science, looking at every kid as a little bit different and a unique thing, as a one-off, you know, every kid is a one-off water pump, not a manufactured one where everyone looks the same, but everyone's a custom, right? So they might have the same, you know, similar features, but things are going to be a little bit different.

So it's important that we take that into consideration and look at it as we're going to have a scientific backing, but there's still a level of philosophy or a level of deviation from a pure scientific backing that's going to be necessary in our field.

But it becomes a real negative when our fervor actually creates tension. It creates a conditioned motivating operation, if you will, to move away, to escape from that situation. So it's something that we really need to take into account in terms of how we do our data, in terms of what we expect. As case managers, sometimes, you know, coming down on our RBTs and looking at our data kind of generally and going, well, you didn't hit this program, this program, this program.

Well, there was probably good reason for that. And while right now... We may not see it as good reason in terms of the child's behavior, but see it maybe as a deficit on the performance of the RBT for not hitting all those spots. I'm going to have to disagree. Now, yes, I'm sure certain RBTs are slacking. But a lot of times, if you talk to them, they're telling you, man, I just couldn't run that. I'm not sure how to get them to be motivated to do that.

Again, we go back to a younger kid who's got gross motor development issues and they're wanting to move around, and now you've got fine motor targets where they're supposed to sit and write. Man, talk about... you know, incompatible behaviors. How are you going to make that happen? So I think that there's a lot to be said about how rotely we're often implementing certain templates, transferring our technology from very early on, because we do carry this empirical validation.

And somewhere in there, we run a very high risk of not individualizing, of decontextualizing targets, of using exemplars as targets where we're You know, certain behaviors or goals might be around vocal behavior, and then we end up making targets out of individual things like red, the color red. Well, that's an exemplar of the behavior of identifying colors.

And I think if we start looking at that in a greater general context, you know, we might be able to individualize things more for more individual kids. Right now, we do have our clients who come at a risk of easily being identified as not being able to In fact, that's part of our process. So it's really easy for us to say, well, no, the kid couldn't learn, as opposed to us always saying, we haven't found a way to teach that yet.

15 things wrong with your car, but if he fixes seven of them, it'll be running and you'll be completely happy with it. The question to you is, is it worth the extra X amount of money that you're going to have to pay to get those other things which may or may not be important to you fixed on the car? And obviously, we're not talking about cars or monetary currency with our families, but there's a lot of currency that our families are investing, both monetary, but more so time, energy, and effort.

And for us to just come on and say, well, you need to get your car running perfectly so it can be ready to go to the track and run a race. And you've got to spend an infinite amount of money because it's got to be perfect. can be a little excessive for parents. Sometimes they don't have the time, energy, effort for that level of expectation. And if we can just get them to a level where they can interact with their kid, their kid can be a functioning member of society.

Obviously, we're going to shoot for the stars and we're going to do as much as we can, but sometimes the parents don't have as much emotional currency, physical currency time, especially over Zoom. I can't tell you how many parents I've had that have reached out and said they thought Zoom was good, but they're just tired after Zoom sessions and it's just they need a break.

So I think that that level of currency and expectation and expense, not just monetary expense, is really important for us to consider because it's really easy for us to say you need to work on every single one of these targets as a parent because we can hit it for two hours and go home and sleep at night because it's not our kid. But for the parents that can't necessarily do that, then maybe we need to be a little bit more priority and efficient.

little bit more understanding when they're like, hey, you know what? I don't want to work on this extinction procedure right now. I don't want to work on the sleep training or whatever because it's just not worth my mental sanity.

And oftentimes, and I know that I've been guilty of this, hopefully it's been a while since I have, you come to this impasse and it's like, well, if you want the change, you have to do it. No, they're not going to do it. They're not going to do it. So you better change what you're asking them to do or we're going to be stuck anyway.

And I'm not saying that to be critical. I'm saying that there's probably a lot of individualization that can be done within that perspective in saying things like, if you've met one kid with autism, you've met one kid with autism. Where maybe in general, and if you've met one person, you've met one person. There might be a lot of similarities between you and me, but we're our own individual personalities. So maybe that's where Chloe does...

She certainly has a good point, and that's where maybe it resonates with me in that respect that that we do run the risk of coming in with this idea of, oh, this is treatment for kids with autism, and then sort of treating a general group of people with autism, we may not individuate every single client as fully as we can. Again, this isn't me being highly critical as much as recognizing a parameter that could affect us in a way if we're not careful.

So the same thing might ring true In terms of some of the other discussion we have, older applications of ABA, we alluded to them in part one in terms of electroconvulsive therapy and gay conversion therapy, things where we need to be careful that the methods aren't criticized for their application by their practitioner. So that said... Let's go on to our second point.

Unless you have any wrap-up points you want to make there on us not individualizing and how we can get better at individualizing. I think we covered a lot of ground.

So I think that's one of the issues that Chloe or people like that are alluding to, which is not really correct. The science isn't faulty. It'll work if you do it. But how it's being implemented, okay, I'm willing to listen there. But in terms of the science being faulty – Don't know if I can get on that boat.

And it's been proven, unfortunately, and to our dismay in this conversation, even by those very practitioners that she would denounce, even by those very people who may have claimed success in atrocious efforts like gay conversion therapy or misapplications of electroconvulsive therapy.

While I disagree with those applications by and large, depending on what the situation was with the ECTs specifically, we do know that the science proves something, that there was an outcome or a hypothesis that was proven true in applying those ABA procedures.

So I think it's highly important for somebody like Chloe, again, notwithstanding her personal experience, which she describes as rather traumatizing, it's important to make a distinction that in that case, the practitioner was a poor practitioner in her experience. In the experience of the people that we hear applying escape extinction to eating programs and eating diversity, that is a practitioner problem. It's a misapplication of a very valid science. It's the idea of using nuclear power to...

You know, destroy a city versus power a city. How are you using the application and the science and what are the outcomes? And do I deny that ABA has been misused? No, that's why we're here. It's why we're talking about this because we know it has been. You and I can look back early on in our careers and cringe a little bit. I won't say that we've misused it, but cringe a little bit about what we used to do and how much better we know now. And that's the whole point of the science.

That's the whole point of philosophic doubt is to move things forward to make sure that what you knew that worked, you know, the iron lung worked really well. Luckily, we've got other methods now that don't require that. So, much like a lobotomy, you know, a lobotomy had its function. That was the crude technology of that day. Lovaas put forward some great technology. But in 2020, if you're applying it in that same way, you're applying a crude technology.

You should have advanced the application of it while preserving the empirically valid principles within what he put out. So, yeah, that's my five cents there.

There's a lot of cheaper and shorter therapies than ABA if the science was faulty and it didn't have enough generality to substantiate insurance companies investing large amounts of money into ABA therapy. So, yeah, I mean, without... I won't beat a dead horse, we can move on, but I think that one's pretty clear that the science isn't faulty.

Just like when you have an infant in the crib, you're trying to get some sleep. It's time to sleep. It's nighttime. And they're crying, crying, and crying. You're sitting there trying to put that under extinction. I think that example by and large got extended way too far. And suddenly, I still see a lot of practitioners, well, just ignore the behavior. Now, I'm not saying that extinction can't be ignoring. It can be. I think in ABA, we've kind of reduced it to that.

And that's all it is sometimes. So one thing that we can talk about quickly, I know you've got some other methods that you use. I like splitting attention into different levels. Are you going to not speak to them? Are you going to not look at them? Are you going to leave the room? How are you going to ignore and ensure that you don't provide even inadvertently any level of reinforcement to that undesired behavior which we're trying to put under extinction?

Now, you could very well, especially with younger kids, you could very well, okay, Johnny, don't jump off the couch. Johnny, get off the couch. Johnny, get off the couch. You could stop saying that and go just pull them off the couch. You could stop saying that and not let them on the couch by blocking them before. That's a really good use of blocking, especially if Johnny's going to fall. Or you could go the other direction and say, okay, Johnny, you want to jump? The couch isn't okay.

Let's go this way. But what we might do is put something like that under extinction, and then there's a whole bunch of other contingencies that can happen and variables that can occur that parents aren't going to work. No, I don't want them being on the couch. No, they're going to get hurt. No, that's just not okay with me. That's okay with dad, but it's not okay with mom, and it's not okay with grandma. That's her new couch.

There's so many different variables that we don't take into account when we could just say, well, there's, okay, we think this is attention maintained. So how are we going to, by and large, completely reduce your attention as much as possible So that when you do provide attention, it's actually for the behaviors that are in replacement or more desired. But again, one of the misapplications that we've taken This idea that extinction means ignoring.

And what it means is removing reinforcement, right? Ignoring might do that. Ignoring might not. In fact, ignoring might make it worse if, you know, you ignore Johnny jumping off the couch three times, but on that fourth time, he jumps and he busts the table and he busts his head, and now you're lending all sorts of attention. So you kind of fail yourself and you shot yourself in the foot. That's probably the best example I've got, you know, with regard to where...

The science is not faulty, but maybe our misapplication of it has created situations that reduce its social validity.

What does the parent do? Well, the parent eventually has to give in. So a kid will win, and again, outside of a lab. In a lab, you can control everything. You can have the things that you want there, the things that are going to hurt them gone. You can ignore it. You have these things set up, especially in the EAB lab where you've got non-human animals and things like that. So blanket extinction works in those areas because you can eliminate all reinforcement and withhold that contingency.

In real life, if a kid wants attention and they want it bad enough, they're going to get attention up to sipping themselves where ethically we're going to have to give in to some level of attention or escape. We want a kid to do homework. They can just not do their homework, and they can get that level of escape. So that kind of blanket extinction is very – That's where that philosophy of the science comes in.

Yes, scientifically extinction will work, but how are we going to make it philosophically appropriate or parsimonious or pragmatic in an actual situation so we don't literally have a dad chasing a kid around a house as he's knocking off all of his wedding gifts and things like that with the intention to not give him attention.

You and I have talked about this. So a young kid is crying. You're not saying anything, you're not acting, but you're rubbing their back. Man, old school ABA, what? You're lending attention to that behavior? Actually, I am. I'm trying to make it go away so the kid has a capacity to interact with me, to communicate with me. Because at a high autonomic arousal, they're not going to be able to do that, just like you and I can't. Right now, it's a really fine line.

I'm not criticizing the idea that we... Obviously, when something's under extinction, you shouldn't be reinforcing it, right? But so what's under extinction there? Is it this child's distress or is it the child's crying? Well, for the child to stop crying, we have to quell the distress, which means rubbing their head, rubbing their back. We're not trying to not have... How can I say this? We're not trying to have them cry, per se. We're trying to not have them not be in distress.

And once they're not in distress, then the crying, the behavior we're worried about, the exemplar of it, will mitigate. It will stop. But if we don't stop and think about those two things, we'll be in opposition, you know, in our descriptions and in our procedures. And then suddenly a parent's wondering, wait a minute, so if my child is crying, I can't sue them at all? I just have to ignore them?

Well, that's really different if you say... yes to that or say no no no you can soothe just make sure they don't get the Cheerios if that's what they wanted and that's why they're tantruming so you can soothe them all you want in fact that's the best thing to be doing is going honey I'm sorry I know you want Cheerios it's not time for them right now so you can cry all you want I'm going to soothe you I'm going to keep you comfortable I'm going to keep you safe but you're not getting those damn

Cheerios and not for this behavior you're getting these Cheerios when you calm down and we have a chance to do some corrective procedures and you do some things that are acceptable or within range before I deliver even one Cheerio to you.

And the parents were like, well, we just want him to do it. And the kid has no pecs or signs or vocal communication outside of that. So if you're going to put someone on extinction... when they have no form of appropriate replacement behavior, it's kind of like going to another country and you can't communicate and everybody's just ignoring you because you can't communicate. At that point, it's a no-win for either party. So that's a really, really important thing.

If anyone is going to look at putting a behavior on extinction, is they have to have a socially appropriate or a more appropriate replacement behavior in the repertoire. Otherwise, extinction isn't going to work. They're going to get to a higher rate behavior. The parents are going to reinforce it. And now ABA didn't work because now the behavior's That's

We're very linear, ABC contingency, one contingency at a time. We do the extinction, and then we worry about the replacement behaviors when, in fact, it's all kind of happening at the same time, and we need to get better at juggling all the pins and keeping them in the air at the same time. We're very good at it. I think we can stand to get better. Nice closing point there for the science is faulty. Chloe, with all due respect. We vehemently disagree with you there.

And I hope that you take an opportunity to respond to us or maybe come on our show and enlighten us a little bit more. We certainly enjoyed your TED Talk. Lastly. She makes a statement that at the heart of ABA is an effort to counter neurodivergence. When what I said earlier is, I think we're looking for social significance. What is the difference in those two things? Because in finding social significance, there is a certain level of conformity you're going to have to subscribe to.

I can't just say, hey, Dan, I want to get myself some food at the store, and instead of using currency, I'm going to trade my shoes. Great, great. I shouldn't get punished for that. I shouldn't get arrested for that, but I'm probably not going to get any food. So where is the difference between the idea of countering neurodivergence and promoting social significance? I know that's a big expanse. What you got for us?

If he's getting picked on by a lot of other kids or a teacher's not able to attend to the other kids because they're spending too much time on him, he's being disruptive, he has to be in a more restrictive educational environment, then at that point, maybe it is excessive neurodivergence. If the parents deem that to be a behavior of concern, it's something that should be addressed. So I think it comes down to if it impedes an individual's ability to live independently.

I would say live happily, and I do think happiness is very important. That's just much more difficult to quantify.

That's disruptive. He's actually one of the better students in the class, so he should be excited for solving these derivatives and these integrals. And you find you catch wind of the fact that some of his peers are making fun of him. So you employ some positive practice and some restorative practice, and you try to make those kids stop making fun of him. But as human nature would have it, they're not just making fun of his actions.

They're a little envious at the fact that he... he kind of whoops their ass in calculus. So they keep making fun of him, right? Now at that point in time, there's only so much you can do to change the other student's behavior and only so much you can do to take that individual student and say, if you can't mask this, to use that phrase, I can't do much more to keep you from getting picked on. You're gonna have to, I can't control those kids.

You, however, can do something to try and control your own behavior. That's a tough question. I know that I just came up with that one. I didn't rehearse this one. But from what we're talking about, what do you do? Yeah, you can't control the students. You

So within that, there is a a natural countering of divergence. Not neurodivergence per se, but we're saying that the neurodivergence might be at the root of this diversity in behavior. So this is a tough call. This is something that I think ABA needs to continue exploring because we do have this strong template base. And at the same time, this premise to do... When I say template base, it's pragmatism.

It's not wanting to have to reinvent the wheel every time, knowing that there are similarities between people, even... amongst the uniquenesses. So, you know, not trying to be disparaging about that replication of templates, but within that, I think that's where Chloe, somebody like Chloe is saying, you're really killing divergence there.

You guys come in with the same programs, wanting us to do the same things, defining the correct behaviors as this limited set of behaviors, and while she's not wrong, you know, yeah, well then part of that is gonna be limiting divergence. That means that only a certain set of behaviors can be seen as socially significant, and the rest of them are gonna be seen as aberrant or unacceptable. And as ABA professionals, are we gonna work to correct those? Yeah, we are.

So I'm a little baffled in this one. I'm a little, I guess, undecided in the sense that I know at the heart of my work is not to stifle anybody's uniqueness, At the same time, social significance tells me I've got a certain set of answers to choose from. And anything outside of that may not fit the bill. And

And then you see a typical three-year-old that does not follow instructions at 80% of opportunities or this kid should attend because I told them to attend and that's what the goal is written for. Yeah, maybe a long-term goal, but a typical three-year-old isn't attending for 30 minutes. So I think that's another thing that could be certainly improved on as well.

We have to take into account or get better at NABA as to how we take into account the individual person and continue to always listen to that criticism because we start with such a stringent set of standards to launch from and to define this idea of deficit or delay or need, if you will.

So we do have to launch from a standard, but within that, yeah, let's continue to define standards the individual person within their own environment despite these standards that we have to measure them with at the beginning. Secondly, the idea that the science is faulty. Second general assertion that we took away from, we have to respectfully and vehemently disagree with Chloe Everett. The science is in fact valid. It's empirically validated.

It's been replicated and validated over and over and over again. But There is a point to the misapplication of the science or the philosophy of the science. And certain practitioners not evolving their science, not employing philosophic doubt to continue to make progress in their techniques and their strategies. So anything you want to add there, Dan? I think we vehemently disagree with Chloe there. All right. And then thirdly, at the heart of ABA is this effort to counter neurodivergence.

And you and I say... No, we're not countering neurodivergence, but we're trying to define a set of socially significant standards and parameters, if you will, that allow anybody, no matter what diagnostic term or definition has been set to you, allows anybody access because you have a repertoire of behaviors that can almost guarantee that. I don't know if there's anything you want to add there in closing.