I stumbled upon this accidentally. I was going to add to my prediction that schizophrenia might be related to autism, but now that I've found this I need to publish my draft.

Edit: Here was the prediction I wrote. Copied unmodified, ensuring transparency.

March 28, 6:15pm Prediction: Some cases of schizophrenia are being misdiagnosed as autism. I recently took a Coursera.org course on schizophrenia. The negative symptoms look similar to some autism symptoms.

Before I look it up, there are a few other predictions I should make. Do I think schizophrenia and autism will be linked? If there’s cross-diagnosis, will this link be artificial or real? Last time I looked, people with aspergers had (more or less) normal sleep EEGs. In contrast, schizophrenia is associated with disrupted sleep spindles. I already know that schizophrenia and bipolar are genetically linked, but I don’t know what the bipolar sleep EEG looks like. That is to say, I don’t know if the lack of sleep abnormality in autism is evidence against a link to schizophrenia. All in all, I predict that there will be a real link (for example, genetic), but I have a low confidence in this prediction. The reason is that I expect there is little EEG sleep changes in bipolar, implying that there is a supra-mechanism causing all these effects; somewhat like metabolic syndrome, the same cause may manifest in different ways.

This is exactly what I expected. In fact, I would have been extremely surprised if this weren't the case. I just google "schizophrenia bipolar genes" expecting this result.

I had the thought a few minutes ago, and google it right away. This means that I wasn't able to write it down as a prediction. Nonetheless, I think this points in favor of my prediction abilities. My confidence was inordinately high (i.e. on the order of 90%) even before collecting any evidence. Compare that to other high confidence beliefs (e.g. CFS is caused partly by blood volume), for which I have confidence on the order of 95%, but I have good evidence for that belief. Thus, this instance provides data that my confidence meter is reliable. I'll continue to make an effort to write down predictions ahead of time (to eliminate publication bias).

There are several reasons I suspected this would be the case. Firstly, personal subjective experience; that's what gave me the first inkling. Secondly, the connection of mania with long periods of sleeplessness. If the sleep deprivation causes the mania, then bipolar may be a sleep disorder. This is backed up by the sleep deprivation therapy for depression. Additionally, the connection of depression to sleep disturbance implies that sleep may also be causal in low mood. Furthermore, given that schizophrenia is associated with disrupted sleep spindles, it follows that the two sleep disorders, namely schizophrenia and bipolar, may be closely related genetically (via sleep regulating genes). Moreover, I knew that schizophrenia and bipolar were two of the most heritable psychological conditions; given that both are highly genetic and both involve sleep, it follows that they would likely be closely linked. Finally, I know mania can be associated with delusions, so there are several symptom crossovers. All in all, it is highly surprising that I have not seen this discussed before. Neither documentaries on schizophrenia nor documentaries on manic depression/bipolar have mentioned a link. Nor have studies I've read (admittedly few on this particular topic) mentioned anything of the sort. I shall have to look through the literature to see if this idea has been around for long.

This supports my low confidence prediction.

Clarke, E. J. R., Klas, A., & Dyos, E. (2020, May 15). Using RWASDO Subfactors to Predict Reactions to COVID-19 Restrictions in Australia. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/b56qj