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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3405 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.

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…

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