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Notes -
Scott warrants that it's due to a strong correlation between autism and transgenderism, likely due to them attributing their discomfort from bodily signals everyone else accepts as a sign of them being assigned the wrong sex.
And autism is rampant in the programming community, and LW/other rat-adjacent fora too, so it's no surprise to find trans people there. Especially since the latter are unusually accepting and open to experience, so they get plenty of the early adopters.
Scott's claim, I think, brushes against a lot of the right ideas while also being mostly wrong, imo. Like, why would the discomfort be so narrowly focused on gender? I think that smart and self-driven people are naturally more vulnerable to - or more active explorers of - whatever tendencies the material and social circumstances create in humans. And I'm not really sure what to think of 'autism' in very smart people, is it really the same thing as autism in normal-iq people?
I mostly agree with Scott myself. Being a Furry, transgenderism, programming, they're all strongly correlated with autism. It might not be "misinterpreted bodily signals" necessarily, but programming is still a field where it's acceptable to be eccentric as long as you're competent in a way that's not acceptable, in say, investment banking. Similarly, LW folk and the rat community are incredibly open to experience, so I wager that and the autism covers it. Same deal as for taking psychedelics really.
If you want to consider changes in material circumstances, I would also posit that modern technology heavily rewards prowess in shape-rotating that high functioning autists often excel at, to my chagrin as someone who's a 99.999th percentile wordcel and maybe 75th percentile in the former. Hence more tolerance and less pressure to conform, since they're getting wealthy enough to indulge in their individualist tendencies.
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