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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link