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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3402 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?

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.

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