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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3397 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why are gays over-represented in the arts and creative fields? Even in tech, I go to an artsy coding meetup and it's hosted in an LGBT space. I go to a discord of people building interesting things and they're 50% furries.

I would presume there's a biological/psychological explanation, if the effect is even real, but it's hard to find good answers. My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior; but then why gay and not bi?

I'll caution that some of this is more alliances than behaviors: a lot of not-very-gay-places will put out the whole flags-and-posters-and-pronouns bit in the interests of outreach. It's not just signalling, but it's also not necessarily a dating club either. You don't want to know how much background drama stuff like this ends up with.

My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior; but then why gay and not bi?

At least for the furries, a lot are bi, or something that you'd probably identify as bisexual even if the furry themselves doesn't. Furscience's stuff gives around 45% bi-or-pan, and I don't think that's too far from realistic. Now, the breakdown for high-recognition artists is probably a little different, but it's also a little harder to find that out quickly (eg, Meesh and ruiadri both identify as straight, which... might surprise readers).

Pulled out of the air: because historically the arts allowed for a degree of flamboyance/non-conventionality and so were attractive to people who didn't fit in with conventional society, like gay people. Add in things like the disreputable characterisation of the arts, and disreputable people would fit in there. Add in the roots in the sacred (like theatre) and representing the gods, and the liminal nature of such matters meaning that men-women or those who straddled boundaries could be both sacred and profane in those contexts.

Then if arts and theatre are perceived as 'safe spaces' to be gay, and gayness is tolerated/celebrated, you'll naturally get more gay people gravitating there than the chess club. (Not that I know about chess clubs, maybe they're hives of scum and villainy). Over time, it gets established for both gay and straight people that the arts are 'for' gays in a particular way that they're not for straights.

Thanks for the link, that is interesting.

Education level. I don't model homosexuality as primarily a mind virus, but being openly gay is certainly a culturally coded occurrence. Education in western academics correlates positively with having been exposed to the idea that gay is a thing and ok. So you'd expect every highly educated group to be a little gayer than gen pop.

My intuition is that creative thinking is correlated with deviant sexuality. Which would include homosexuality.

Even in artsy circles there are still more straights than gays, just going by absolute numbers; but the straights you do find there are more likely to be weird/pervy in some way relative to the population average.

I don't have any hard data to back any of this up, but, it's at least an observation that others have made before:

The gays, good heavens, a full 35 or 40% of major Western authors from the beginning to the present day must have been gay. It would be very safe to assume. William Shakespeare himself would appear to have been bisexual.

a full 35 or 40% of major Western authors from the beginning to the present day must have been gay

Probably exaggerated because for at least half a century now there has been an academic and critical cottage industry devoted to finding gay subtext in everything. And given literary criticism's lack of rigor, people tend to find exactly what they are looking for.

‘Tail populations flock together’

  1. Did you consider that people who do X meetups, more particularly X-Y meetups might not be representative of X? After all that programming meetup was hosted in an LGBT space.. which might just answer your question

  2. Did you consider selection bias? Programming requires a higher IQ, Gays have marginally higher IQ on average. P(Programmer | Gay) > P(Programmer | Hetero) ?

  3. Do you live in California or Washington or Portland... ?

After all that programming meetup was hosted in an LGBT space.. which might just answer your question

This would be plenty of reason for me not to attend an event I otherwise might. Not even out of 'hatred' or whatever. Foremost I'd feel like an intruder in another's place.

Did you consider that people who do X meetups, more particularly X-Y meetups might not be representative of X?

This. Imagine how many meetups you'd go to if there were lots of hot, sexually available girls there. Once gay guys start going in numbers to an event, then any additional gay member is getting the large social benefit or meeting potential sexual partners.

  1. I didn't know it was an LGBT space until I walked in and saw the pride flags and pro-trans slogans. The meetup had been previously held in a neutral space. But this is just one data point. I can imagine that normies enter a discord server of furries and get put off, but then where do they go? I find it hard to find more 'normal' spaces.

  2. Do gays have higher IQ? This is news to me.

  3. No, I don't live in America or a 'liberal' city. But my town is full of students and young people, and we all live in Amerika.

On 2, just from the fact that openly gay men are more likely to be college educated they’re probably higher IQ than average.

Most bisexuals, especially past the age where most people have long term partners (so what, mid-20s?) will be in a heterosexual relationship. Mentioning one’s bisexuality then is weird, especially if it’s not an affirmative action play. You’re not going to walk into a meeting, discuss your wife and kids casually with a coworker and then say “by the way, I also used to love fucking dudes, just so you know”.

Not bi? In my experience a lot of people in these circles were bi.

Can you explain your belief that a dearth of them are bi?

My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior

I would just call it big 5 high openness. But- your way of phrasing it is valid. Probably better to commit less to a specific model. But it's worth pointing out that the big 5 model does have this category and can pull some weight here.

I don't have strong conviction. More of an assumption on my part. Many may very well be bi, which would fit better with the theory.

Programming is a field that's particularly appealing/rewarding/accepting of autistic people. Autistic people are far more likely to be trans or furries.

Autistic people are far more likely to be trans or furries.

I wonder if they are. Didn't look this way decades ago (of course there were no above-ground furries). Obvious enough but I think we'll come to look with horror at this blasé liberal acceptance of really weird and historically recent sociosexual patterns as innate traits that «just exist», like there exist left-handed people, paranoiacs or, well, gays – and that somehow just coincide with vulnerability to getting tricked and bullied, cartoonish literalism and over-systemizing mindset, and inability to read nontrivial social cues. We may discover something simple and nasty, though I'm not sure what exactly (probably not transmaxxing).

Oh, and I think the theory that explanation for the explosion in high-functioning autism cases themselves as something that «just used to be suppressed» will be also revealed as total bullshit, and moreover a deliberate coverup by people who knew better, in the way AGP stuff is desperately covered up right now.

Curious as to what you think is behind the increase in high-functioning autism cases.

the explosion in high-functioning autism cases themselves as something that «just used to be suppressed» will be also revealed as total bullshit

The explosion in ‘high functioning autism’ cases is because being on the spectrum now grants you easy access to cheap legal meth. “ADHD” and ‘tism have very similar symptoms, many or most psychiatrists diagnose them at the same time. Among children and college, you also get extra time in tests and additional extras in school (in my school kids with ADHD were even allowed to pause the timer on exams for a while if they ‘needed a break’, plus they got 50% extra time), so parents are extra incentivized for diagnosis. Among adults, autism is a get out of jail free card for a bunch of stuff in the workplace, makes management more worried about firing you, is an easy response to being accused of rudeness or other weird behavior etc.

Society strongly incentivized ADHD and autism diagnoses, so they rose.

Society strongly incentivized ADHD and autism diagnoses, so they rose.

I have no doubt that as it relates to ADHD diagnoses this is true, but ADHD diagnoses don’t necessarily have much to do with actual phenotype- sure, the DSM officially wants a note from a child’s teacher stating that the kid has ADHD symptoms interfering with schoolwork, but I don’t think teachers ever deny those notes, in part because all children have ADHD symptoms which don’t make school easier, and doctors also seem to waive that requirement a lot. Society incentivized diagnoses, not symptoms, and the diagnoses are virtually never denied regardless of the presence or absence of symptoms. Something has to account for the increase in symptoms, and that could be parents don’t beat their kids enough to keep them in line, it could be chemicals in the water, it could be assortative mating or what have you, but ‘people are acting crazy to get crazy pills’ isn’t a good hypothesis because people who want legal meth just lie and say they need it, and doctors don’t call them on it, and being more impulsive and less focused and socially less aware are all bad things that people avoid.

I was going to claim that trends like increasing parental age might cause an increase in diseases like autism and ADHD due to higher mutational load, but on further research I found that the trend seen in autism is reversed for ADHD, with younger parents being a risk factor instead!

I assume that's because of them likely having lower than average executive function if they're having kids that early, but this was a rather non-obvious discovery that surprised me.

At any rate, I haven't heard anyone claim ADHD or autism rates increasing in India, though the former is nigh unknown for some reason.

ADHD seems dramatically less common outside of North America. This is probably because the clinical definition is ‘sometimes impulsive or bad at paying attention to the point that it affects your life’, and for cultural factors America applies that literally while everyone else considers it to be a descriptor for people who are unable to live a normal life under any circumstances due to poor attention-paying and impulse control, which is a group that usually winds up in prison rather than a psychiatrists office.

I'm sure this is wrong because the same pattern of shifted phenotypic norms holds in Russia and elsewhere where you get diagnosed with schizophrenia instead of autism and don't receive «meth» except illegally. Unless you believe that to be mimesis.

I put more stock in Uriah's theory of frontal lobe cucumber-like overgrowth from excess of nutrients.

I'd like to know more about Uriah's theory

I'm not sure I agree. Increased diagnosis seems to play most of the part when it comes to high functioning autism incidence, as a consequence of awareness building. Perhaps increasing maternal age at conception plays a minor role.

I'm sure that for most of human history, most of the high functioning autistics were just held to be weirdly antisocial, awkward yet useful characters, and the population density and degree of networking wasn't high enough for them to develop a particular label for them or a common culture.

Now, furries seem to be a highly Western/US phenomenon. I haven't heard of furries in India, even in the large programming community (there might be a handful), and I think the whole thing is a social contagion that is particularly appealing to the demographic most prone to social contagion, autists. (Teenage girls are too cool to become furries, usually)

Of course a fursuit would likely kill you from heat stroke here, but that's another matter. Doesn't stop people from identifying as one even if they can't wear the suits!

Scott has written extensively on how autists are more prone to being suggestible, and have predictive processing issues that make them liable to dysmorphias.

I personally find furries to be a highly inexplicable phenomenon, but at least the links to autism seem robust.

Edit: Assortative mating of high IQ professionals who are close to but not quite on the spectrum is also likely a strong contributor. I at least recall it increases the odds.

Perhaps increasing maternal age at conception plays a minor role.

Note that in the case of autism, the correlation with paternal age is actually better-attested than that from maternal age. It's not like nondisjunction (Down's/Klinefelter/etc.) where it's specifically the oocytes stuck in metaphase for decades causing the problem and thus only the mother's age matters. It's probably something to do with mutational load, which actually goes up more with age in men because spermatogonii replicate (and have replication errors) during a man's life while a woman's oocytes do not.

I was aware that both are correlated, but I appreciate the detailed explainer, I wasn't aware of the mechanism!

I wonder how related furryism is to being exposed to Disney's Robin Hood animated film at the right time in their development.

Stupid sexy Chanticleer…

My model is that socialization rolls off of autistic people like water off of a duck by default. So they're usually less socialized by the time they reach adulthood. They instead get socialized once they make socialization a special interest.

It turns out one of the communities where everyone's special interest is socialization, and people get technical about it, is the trans community, for reasons I think should be apparent (they have to learn gender roles after losing neuroplasticity and childhood mirroring habits, plus as autistic people accumulate, the norms become more autistic). So Autistic people are likely to gain their first socialization special interest when coming in contact with it.

I also model high functioning autism as more adaptive than it was in the ancestral environment for a number of reasons, which may help to explain its rise.

  • We have more control of our environment, so it is less crucial to be able to filter external stimuli internally.

  • We punish lack of social awareness less than in the ancestral environment.

  • We are more specialized, focusing our entire beings on a special interest is less maladaptive than it was in the ancestral environment.

  • Our world is more technical. High precision behavior, focusing on mathematics, and so on are more important to success than in the ancestral environment.

  • Autistic norms are becoming better accepted and better known. A more accommodating environment also makes high functioning autism less maladaptive.

I think a lot of people underestimate the rate at which humanity adapts to it's environment, and I believe our world contains pressures that push adaptation towards certain traits associated with high functioning autism.

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women. Even many women who call themselves allies and post about their support for LGBT rights would find it a turnoff to learn a man sleeps with other men. Female bisexuality on the other hand, is so common (at least among my demographic of Zoomer yuppies) that it wouldn't signal much of a loosening of priors at this point. So it's mostly gays who have their own communities now.

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women. Even many women who call themselves allies and post about their support for LGBT rights would find it a turnoff to learn a man sleeps with other men.

I wonder how this would be different if women had perfect transparency into whether a given bisexual man’s solely a top versus if he’s gotten or sometimes gets TOPPED.

Few things give women the ick like submissive men. Bisexual men are a threat to women in that they could “trick” women into having sex with them, men who might sometimes get sexually dominated by other men.

However, I could easily see chicks giving a pass to a Spartan warrior-looking guy who only tops. yes_chad.jpg: “My testosterone levels are so high that other men look like women to me, how did you know?”

I’ve never thought about it in those terms but I think to most women it’s just that their reputation is that bisexual men will always cheat on you with other men and/or leave you for a man when they finally have their mid-life crisis. Most women know someone whose boyfriend or husband left them to come out as gay, even in progressive circles among younger people. That obviously has a psychological impact.

I don’t think it’s directly about physical attraction with regards to top/bottom role. If you look at Yaoi fanfiction largely written by women that involves gay sex, both the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ in these fictional pairings are usually considered as very attractive in their fandoms, it’s not usually that the ‘bottom’ is a stand-in for the woman in heterosexual sex as you might imagine. In Call Me By Your Name, Timothee Chalamet plays a bisexual character (as does Armie Hammer), but it still seems heavily implied that he’s a bottom in his relationship with Hammer’s character in my opinion. That didn’t seem to dent the attraction of so many young women to him.

In general, the kind of bisexual men women are attracted to are more likely to be tops or vers, but this is because bottoms are more likely to be very camp / very effeminate, and thus less attractive to women as male partners. But I don’t think handsome bisexual men have ever had problems attracting women, at least not since general acceptance of homosexuality, even if they’re open about it and even if polling technically says otherwise (I think it’s women picturing a stereotypical camp catty man and thinking he’s not hot, not picturing a hot guy who happens to be bi), and that the main issue is the feeling that he’s going to leave for or cheat with a man.

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women.

... is it? I'm intrigued. Is this intuition from life experience or do you have numbers? And if it's the former, may I know generally where you've lived/worked/read_posts and received these experiences? This will help me formulate my models of the world. But I understand if you'd prefer to remain more private than that.

As a bisexual guy, there's absolutely a stigma. I've even met bisexual women who say they won't date bisexual men.

Hard numbers are harder to come by. Cosmo had a poll a couple years back that suggested 2/3 of women would immediately write off a bi guy, but of course that's Cosmo. From personal AB testing on OLD platforms, I'd say that overstates it significantly. Listing being bi on the profile dropped inbound like rates by ~1/3. That's in a liberal area and conditioning on women who like my vibe, so you shouldn't take it as the ground truth either.

One interesting thing I found from that test is that women from conservative foreign cultures seemed less opposed to it than the general population and mostly just didn't want to hear anything about it. My theory is that they select for other traits and the entire "fucks men" thing doesn't play much of a role in their attraction process so long as you don't throw it in her face.

Another aspect is that, once you've already met and established a connection with someone, most women just take a day or so to digest it if you wait to reveal it. It's less a deep filter and more of a shallow first pass filter.

I know I’ve seen this opinion before, but likewise, I’m not sure where.

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