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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3396 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.

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.

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

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