site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This Reddit thread that I saw linked over on rDrama made me wonder if any studies have ever been done about the relative intelligence of straight people and gay people.

Just like there is reason to believe that some ethnic groups are more intelligent than others on average, is it possible that some sexual orientations are more intelligent than others on average? I have not tried to crunch the numbers, but it seems to me that gay people are overrepresented compared to their population size among the ranks of prominent intellectuals and artists. Not just recently, but also hundreds of years ago. Them living in high cost of living areas would add evidence to this theory.

Of course there are many possible other explanations, and the thread mentions some of them: gays have more money because they usually have no kids, gays in poor areas stay closeted out of fear of persecution and are drawn to liberal and usually also expensive cities, gays move in to poor areas and make them fashionable and then those areas become rich. Etc.

One other possible explanation that comes to my mind that I did not see in the thread is that maybe because it is easier for gay men to get laid than straight men on average, they don't have to devote as much of their minds as straights to getting laid and are thus free to focus on other things. I'm not sure about that theory, though - after all, just because getting laid is easy for you does not necessarily mean that you will spend less of your mental energy thinking about getting laid. And being a sexual minority could tend to add some level of stress that partly counterbalances the benefits of being able to easily get laid, especially in the olden days.

I suppose it is also possible that intelligent, creative gays are more likely to come out than intellectually mediocre gays, but I have no idea if there is any truth to that.

I do wonder, though, if maybe part of the reason for gay affluence and prominence is an actual intelligence difference of some sort.

Off the top of my head I saw one study ages back that suggested 4 point advantage for gay people. I think this is possibly a selection effect as people who never realised they were gay probably skew lower iq.

Since @FD4280 has already quoted Pushkin, I'll do the usual with Galkosvky (he has a somewhat humorous quote for every occasion):

The event that took place in Plato's Athens was far from innocuous

And in general, the emergence of philosophy is simply and fully against nature. What prompted people to such a useless, fruitless and destructive endeavour? What manner of cause? – Sexual perversion. Ancient Greek society is a homosexual society, homosexual in a deep, committed sense. One need only read the works of Aristophanes. They were written by a convinced pederast, and a pederast living in an appropriately arranged, congruous pederastic world at that. Socrates, too, was a pederast; Plato was a pederast as well. The Greek youth gathered around the learned men and formed philosophical unions of homosexual kind. Herein lies the precondition for the birth of philosophy. A young man, unlike a girl, has intellect, which creates the opportunity of intellectual courtship. After all, what can be more attractive and tempting for a man than a wonderful conversation on lofty topics? The most mediocre, pathetic male's eyes light up should you start talking to him about eternal issues. And Socrates, so absorbed in Eros, but, alas, unshapely, threw all his energies into the creation of the palace of reason; and as a result – what a catch! – the handsome Alcibiades fell in love with him. It was Eros that begat the revolution, otherwise it is utterly incomprehensible why the shell of naive everyday consciousness would have burst.

But the nascent fire of the Logos was so bright, so dazzling, that not only some dirty homosexuality (which even among the Greeks was seen as somewhat sinful), but the whole world, and life itself, began to seem a dirty and dark cave. Socrates refused the love of Alcibiades and then drank hemlock. Aphrodite the Vulgar turned into Aphrodite Urania. Love for woman, the inferior being, into love for the perfect being, man; carnal love – into perfect, Platonic love, into male intellectual friendship – into the brotherhood of philosophers. Then into love for the idea of Love, and love for the world of ideas, identified by Plato with the realm of Hades, the god of the dead and the netherworld.

The fire of philosophy since then was passed among people as something given, cleansed of its original filth. After asexualisation, there even came the time for heterosexualisation of philosophy. Having become a social phenomenon, it was mirrored in the world of women. A woman cannot comprehend the worth of a philosopher, but she can see that in the male intellectual world her chosen one is deeply respected for some reason. And that turns out to be enough. Philosophy has become a much more normal phenomenon, more adapted to real life. After all, this adaptation has been going on for two and a half millennia. And yet, we should not forget the rather rakish history of the birth of self-consciousness.

Also:

You see how complicated it all is, how contradictory. Paradox atop a paradox. A young man goes to a literary club, is fond of weightlifting, wanders around city parks at night in a woman's dress, writes abstruse poetry, and has cut his arms with a razor. Who would have ever expected it! What a complex young man! And yet he's not complex. He's a pederast. A pederast is always busy, his eyes are always restless, a young man is ceaselessly in search. Homosexuals, after all, don't and can't have love. Only partners. Partners are exchanged quickly, sought by the lavatories at night. That's why you have to hustle day and night, "look for a dose".
There is such a profession - spies. They are complicated, contradictory…

(Galkovsky has a wife and three children, lives a very «boring» life, and generally despises people in unconventional relationships).

Socrates refused the love of Alcibiades and then drank hemlock.

Alcibiades died around 5 years before Socrates was sentenced to death. Also Alcibiades was a scoundrel of a human being, (probably) defacing sacred statues, sending Athens to a doomed expedition in Sicily, betraying his city, defecting to its enemy Sparta, then running to the Achaemenids when they got wind of his general shittiness, overthrowing the democratic government of his home city and replacing it with an oligarchy, general philandry all over the place and then finally coming to an ignoble end by being assassinated after he had become too big of a problem to ignore for the real powers that mattered.

I don't know what Socrates ever saw in him, this relationship always seemed very incongruous to me.

A young man goes to a literary club, is fond of weightlifting, wanders around city parks at night in a woman's dress, writes abstruse poetry, and has cut his arms with a razor. Who would have ever expected it! What a complex young man!

Gilbert and Sullivan got there first.

I expect a crucial component is exact what is meant by "homosexuals". The decision to identify (either to yourself or publicly) certainly correlates with many other variables, many of which correlate with IQ (simply becaise few variables in social science are independent).

For example, if going to college makes you more liberal and more likely to identify as homosexual, then that would increase the average IQ of self-identifying homosexuals.

I'm skeptical you're actually interested in these, uh, incidental (?) correlations though? Which makes your question seem kind of poorly defined.

What about the apparent overrepresentation of homosexuals in prison. Where does that fit into the stereotype. I don't think gays are smarter than average, btu that smarter people tend to cluster in certain urban areas, gays and straits included.

If you're going to make a toplevel post about "are gays smarter", IMO you should at least type the thing into google scholar.

This paper (which I haven't even skimmed) claims homosexuals are on average more intelligent. I could see it being true that smart people are more likely to apply that intelligence to their actions and thus be 'weird' and either actually be homosexual, or to engage in homosexual-ish behavior without having the usual innate cause (if that exists). But, eh, one paper of the usual quality isn't enough to believe anything this fuzzy.

... I wish there was just a 'biobank' dataset I could download and query for the correlation between IQ reported sexual orientation. Publication bias, p hacking, would instantly disappear as concerns. I'd probably vote for a law that nonconsensually released all of my demographic, medical, and other useful data along with everyone else's (it wouldn't be quite as useful if it was opt-in, but it'd still be useful).

I don't accept the premise of their overepresentation as intellectuals historically, but I do think it is likely that in certain industries they might be more overepresented in say theater, or say fashion model designers. And same in the past.

I would argue that it isn't due to intelligence but due to a different nature and nurture. The gays in behavior tend to behave and have different interests than straight men and women in a manner that allows them to specialize in certain art pursuits that straight men would be more uninterested. They combine a male sensibility with a more feminine side, or a willingness to care for certain arts than straight men care less about. So it is about them being inherently more attracted to certain fashions and arts and industries.

This idea of preferences is also the biggest factor for the differences in male and female overepresentation in certain industries. Well, outside of that which relates to physical differences and men being stronger.

As for greater intelligence of the gays, that is a dangerous explanation today in the age of progressive stack and an agenda in favor of overepresentation of LGBT groups. Seems like a way to excuse this.

My unsubstantiated pet theory is related. I've always imagined that if gays are overrepresented among intelligent or creative people, it's because they had greater incentive (and more energy) to use those talents simply because child-rearing, and often times a life in respectable society, were off the table.

Marriage and children require an unimaginable resource investment. Before having kids I used to enjoy reading philosophy and obscure history books. My wife used to draw, paint, and write. We still do that stuff, but probably at about 5% of our previous intensity simply because the vast, vast majority of our time is devoted to childcare, breadwinning, and homemaking. That's not a bad thing, because those things are very rewarding, but it sometimes makes me a bit sad that I have zero time to read challenging books and effortpost on the Motte.

I assume a gay man with no kids, or a gay man having hookups on the down-low to preserve his reputation in polite society, would simply have much more free time and energy and his disposal compared to his married straight peers, thus resulting in a greater proportion of gays among those who contribute to high IQ fields. Of course this is surely not the only factor.

Alternatively, parents strongly discourage their children from trying to become creative types because it's a terrible idea in 95% of cases, and gays are more likely to have sufficiently poor relationships with their parents to completely ignore them.

We can spitball ideas for why artists are more likely to be gay all day long.

We can spitball ideas for why artists are more likely to be gay all day long.

Okay?

At the risk of preempting Ilforte, if he's still around:

В Академии наук

Заседает князь Дундук.

Говорят, не подобает

Дундуку такая честь;

Почему ж он заседает?

Потому что жопа есть.

Roughly, in English:

"In the Academy of Sciences

Sits Prince Dunduk.

People say that it's unfitting -

Not a place he should possess;

Why, then, is the fellow sitting?

It's because he has an ass."

IOW, anecdotal evidence of a broader casting couch.

Higher average IQ or flatter distribution? Gays are almost by definition a deviation from the norm, so we should expect a flatter than normal IQ distribution because anything odd does that.

Didn't Scott's surveys show a correlation between autism and most alternative sexualities?

I wonder what the correlation between selfreported IQ and orientation is in scott's survey.

edit: 2022 seemed suggestive for gays having higher iq but no consistent pattern over all of the past surveys. there's something suggestive now for gays having higher sat verbal but lower sat math than straights but that'd probably disappear with a larger sample

There's so many possible directions to go that without any data to work off, it's hard to know where to even look.

My first question would be are gay people actually overrepresented? What is the base rate comparison?

Secondly, given an affirmative to the first questions, I'd ask whether its actually gay representation or out gay overrepresentation. Especially looking at any data prior to say 2010.

You would assume that being publically homosexual in a society where it's disapproved of would come at a significant cost. So it would follow that those most likely to pay it are those able to pay it.

Lets say you have 100 rich men and 100 middle class men in 1960. In each of those 6 are gay and another 10 are bisexual. In the middle class group 4 of those gay men and 9 of the bisexual men are not openly gay for fear of their livelihood and employment. Of the rich, say only 3 of the gays and 7 of the bisexual are closeted.

It would appear that the gays were overrepresnted in the rich. In actuality, rich people have more options.

The next thing I would think would be, as you suggest, among smart and conscientious people, homosexuals would historically be less occupied with supporting their families and minimizing that risk. So of the pool of gay people capable of being a celebrity intellect and proportional straight men, yeah I would assume enough of the straight men would have already invested the critical resources and time and attention toward family formation. Even a small difference would result in overrepresented gays in high status tournament style recognition.

I doubt it.

The gay population, for obvious reasons, is pretty genetically diverse. So I’d expect any effect to be smaller than what you see between more homogenous groups.

There is another big umbrella that tends urban, has outsize influence in high-visibility media, and is more comfortable with homosexuality. Couldn’t political tribalism explain this apparent effect?

This Reddit thread that I saw linked over on rDrama made me wonder if any studies have ever been done about the relative intelligence of straight people and gay people.

Well, I hadn't seen a catfight over "are the gays or the straights smarter?" before, thanks for nothing. I think the very important difference there is "gay white males from middle-class backgrounds with college educations and professional jobs" are the ones living in high-price areas. The rural gay guys and the BIPOC gays are the ones living in poorer areas/the dense urban lower-class areas, and I think that there's already discussion about the white privilege/class privilege.

So the broad "gay couples are way better off than opposite-sex couples (because the gays are so much smarter and nicer and more creative and just better)" approach isn't quite accurate, even if the LGBT+ activists and allies like to use that to beat 'homophobes' over the head ('you're just jealous because you're stupid and poor and not fabulous at all!'):

(1) Gay couples do better than lesbian couples (they blame it on gender wage gap) (2) White gays do better than BIPOC gays

White Privilege and LGBT Well-Being

In most domains of health and social and economic well-being, LGBT people of color (POC) fared worse than White LGBT people. The analyses of economic outcomes show a consistent advantage experienced by White LGBT people. Fewer White than POC LGBT adults reported experiencing food insecurity, unemployment, use of Medicaid for health insurance, and living in a low-income household. For example, 47% of POC LGBT adults were living in a low-income household compared to 36% of White LGBT adults. Further, more women of color who identify as LGBT reported living in a low-income household and experiencing unemployment and food insecurity compared to all other groups.

Yes, for any X, Black X are worse off than White X, but it doesn't follow that X vs. Y makes no difference at all.

Yes, but then that doesn't become "gay person more intelligent than straight person", it's the same old "Asian - white - Hispanic - black" breakdown.

So then you have to look at "okay, if gay men earn more than straight men, what professions are they in?" and even then, the original thread was not "are gay men richer?", it was "why do gay people live in such expensive areas?"

It got me thinking of all the metropolitan cities from Americas, Europe to Southeast Asia, most of the gay friendly neighborhoods are often regarded the most or one of the expensive areas.

And I think the answer pretty much is "the expensive places are the big coastal cities; there's already the idea of a thriving gay (or whatever) culture there, so if you're closeted in a small town and you want to get out, that's where you head", plus gentrification - as described in the comments there, gays move in to places alongside/following the arty types, the area becomes trendy/happening, property values go up and so do rents, those who can afford the prices move in and those who can't move out, the prices continue to go up as the neighbourhood becomes known as the 'gayborhood' or the Latin Quarter or the artistic hot-spot and so forth.

The well-off white gays will live in the very expensive, hoity-toity areas (and probably be involved in the arts and so on, or visibly associated as patrons, fashion designers, and the like). The less well off gay guys will live in the less salubrious areas but still in the expensive city. The well-off white gays are also probably more likely to be visible, particularly in former times; you needed the insulation of wealth and status to be out (even discreetly out) and get away with it. Thomas Fancypants in the upper class circles of NY or SF or LA can be a leading socialite with a reputation for being "eccentric" or extravagant, and while everyone in the know is aware Fancypants is gay, the media will be more discreet about it - a 'lifelong bachelor' or 'longtime companion' is as overt as any reporting on his doings will get. Tommy Bluejeans from the working-class neighbourhood can't afford that kind of visibility.

It's just more visible if any particular district is the gay district and so that gives the impression that "all gays are living in the expensive, trendy areas and hence all gays are well-off" and then the discussion leaps to the conclusion that "well-off" = "more smarter than the straights" when it's a smaller sample size and self-selected for the richer section

I don't really get this chain of logic here. I get that gay villages tend to emerge in cities. But it doesn't follow that this would cause gays to become rich and cool. Somalians carve out their own little enclaves. But they become poor shitholes. When the Italians flocked to New York they didn't start outearning the native WASPs and running art salons, they formed gangs. They didn't become rich or creative. You might be right that this is just another selection effect and all the dumb gays are back at home pretending to be straight. But I think there's something more. That's not a suggestion that gays are some superior race (they're really not, if anything I think they're less accomplished than their IQ would suggest).

But it doesn't follow that this would cause gays to become rich and cool.

But not all gays, that's the thing! The original post makes it sound like "all the cool rich smart gay people" and it's not, as shown; it's the well-off white gay guys (and then presumably the well-off Asian, etc. gay guys follow).

There's plenty of shit holes and dirty, run-down gay areas; think of the legendary Stonewall Inn (the original one, at least); started off as a speakeasy and was owned by the Mafia. Not salubrious or high-class at all; gentrification comes later.

The better-off gays make a neighbourhood fancy and gentrified and it becomes high cost of living, and the poorer ones move out to another run-down area, or never left the blue-collar neigbourhoods in the first place.

It seems to come down to "white people more likely"; now that identification as LGBT+ is more widespread, common, and accepted, a lot more younger people are identifying as some variety of queer, and being younger means being poorer, as does being BIPOC:

While the pandemic impacts U.S. workers across all demographic groups, the Household Pulse data indicate that LGBTQ+ workers are disproportionately affected, compared to non-LGBTQ+ individuals. Approximately 28 percent of LGBTQ+ respondents said they experienced some form of job loss since LGBTQ+ data collection began last July. Comparably, 18 percent of non-LGBTQ+ respondents reported job loss in the same time frame.

The data indicate that age plays an intersecting role in work-loss experience. LGBTQ+ respondents between the ages of 25 and 39 and 40 and 54 had the highest rates of job losses, while older, non-LGBTQ+ respondents had the lowest rates.

These data are further validated by research from the Movement Advancement Project, which shows that LGBTQ+ individuals with additional demographic intersectionalities face greater rates of job loss. Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ households in the United States experienced higher rates of employment or wage loss, at 60 percent and 71 percent, respectively, between July 2020 and August 2020, compared to non-LGBTQ+ households of all races (45 percent).

While the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic played a significant role in increasing unemployment and decreasing incomes among LGBTQ+ workers, these disparities have been building in recent decades in the United States. Research from 2021, for instance, finds that the lesbian wage premium fell from around 10 percent in 2000 to almost zero in 2018. The Center for LGBTQ+ Economic Advancement and Research, or CLEAR, finds that in 2019, 31 percent of Black LGBT households and 24 percent of Latinx LGBT households reported earning less than $25,000 annually, compared to 24 percent of Black non-LGBT households and 15 percent of Latinx non-LGBT households.

Disparities in employment loss between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ workers may also be driven by a large share of LGBTQ+ individuals being employed in industries hardest hit by the pandemic. Analysis by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, for instance, finds that in 2018, the five industries with the greatest share of LGBTQ+ employees were restaurant and food services (15 percent of LGBTQ+ adults), hospitals and healthcare (7.5 percent), K–12 education (7 percent), colleges and universities (7 percent), and retail (4 percent). These five industries have experienced the greatest disruptions in employment since the onset of the pandemic, which comes on top of the already-low wages widely experienced in three of these industries—hospitality, retail, and K–12 education.

All the coffeeshop waitstaff may be making an area cool, but they're not making it rich. That comes later with waves of gentrification and as enclaves become more established, more identified as 'the gay neighbourhood' and therefore more desirable as the place to go and live when you're leaving your small town for that life where you can be out and proud. As these places become older, the population shifts to the better-off; it's the 7 percent of gays in academia who are making places 'richer', not the 15 percent working in bars and restaurants.

Another report from 2022 on the opposite claim that LGBT+ are poorer, not rich and cool:

Compared with the general population, LGBTQI+ people face significant challenges that obstruct pathways to achieving economic security, including discrimination in employment and housing, workforce exclusion, and lack of access to jobs that pay well and offer benefits that meet their needs and those of their families. For LGBTQI+ people with disabilities, LGBTQI+ communities of color, and transgender people, these barriers to reach economic stability are heightened.

...New data from the HPS [Household Pulse Survey] reveal that:

LGBT households are more likely to live in poverty. LGBT individuals were more likely than non-LGBT individuals to report a household income of less than $25,000 in 2020, at 20 percent compared with 14 percent. Put another way, many LGBT individuals live in households that are at or near the poverty line. LGBT respondents of color (26 percent) and transgender respondents (28 percent) are even more likely to earn less than $25,000.

LGBT households are more likely to report losing a source of employment income. On average, from July 2021 to April 2022, LGBT individuals were also more likely than non-LGBT individuals to report that they or someone in their household had lost a source of employment income in the past four weeks, at 21 percent compared with 15 percent. These disparities are heightened among LGBT respondents of color (26 percent) and transgender respondents (29 percent), which was a consistent trend for the past year.

LGBT households experience more difficulty paying household expenses. On average, from July 2021 to April 2022, LGBT individuals were more likely than non-LGBT individuals to report that it has been somewhat or very difficult for their household to pay for usual household expenses in the past week, at 38 percent compared with 29 percent, with rates consistently highest among LGBT respondents of color (46 percent) and transgender respondents (50 percent). Usual household expenses include but are not limited to food, rent or mortgage, car payments, medical expenses, and student loans.

...LGBTQI+ people experience labor market disparities, as they often struggle to find employment; when they do, they often work in low-wage occupations.

...LGBT people are more likely to work at grocery and convenience stores. LGBT respondents were nearly twice as likely as non-LGBT respondents to report working at food or beverage stores, which include grocery stores and convenience stores, at 11 percent compared with 6 percent. LGBT respondents of color (12 percent) and transgender respondents (14 percent) were also more likely to report working at food or beverage stores.

The white, college-educated, PMC gays are the ones living in the high-property value areas of the expensive cities. The less educated, or non-white, gays may be living in the expensive cities, but not in the high-end areas. Working there, maybe, as a grocery store clerk or waitstaff in the café. But not being patrons of the opera or attending the Met Gala as the big bucks donors.

Satoshi Kanazawa argued that more intelligent people are more likely to engage in behaviour that is evolutionarily novel, which included homosexuality.

His old blog was quite fun while it was running, if a bit try-hard with the edginess.

I'm enjoying this blog, thanks for linking to it.

There was a video that went around a few weeks ago (https://youtube.com/watch?v=RAlI0pbMQiM) where people were asked to rank each other's intelligence from most to least. The (presumably) straight cis het white male who worked in a low intelligence field (former military) and lived in Indiana or somesuch was ranked very low by the rest of the group, but when tested ranked 2nd.

My suspicion that LGBTQIA2S+ community members appear to have such high intelligence because they're not being constantly discouraged from achievement like straight cis het white males are.

You are basically seeing the effects of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat?useskin=vector

LGBTQIA2S+ people are told that they are smart and unique and creative and wonderful and destined to do great things in the world, and as a result of that they do.

Everybody else (I'm using straight cis het white fucking males as a bit of a catchall here, since nearly everybody else can fit themselves into LGBTQIA2S+ somewhere except them) is told that they are stupid, uncreative, evil colonizers who can't dance, can't make music, stole everything they ever created, cant't go to the moon, etc. I am a straight cis het white male. Who are the role models I am supposed to be allowed to have?

Most American historical figures are still fair game. The richest men in the world do pretty well, too.

When was the last time a real person asked you about your role models, let alone dragged you over the coals for them?

Stereotype threat probably does not exist. It's publication biased to shit and what is published likely does not replicate.

Alternatively, they intentionally made a video with an "unexpected" result in order to draw interest... Like how practically all these videos work and reality tv too for that matter.

People getting to dunk on smug people is like catnip, video producers know this.

It could be as you say anyway but I wouldn't take that video as an indication of anything, except what the producers wanted and possibly their social circles. It's the opposite of a scientific investigation.

I don’t think I said it was a scientific investigation? The video is simply a visual representation of what I’m talking about and gained enormous popularity a couple of weeks ago.

Being a dink is enough to explain relative affluence, really, it's pretty powerful.

Another explanation for overrepresentation in creative fields is simply that being an outsider makes you conscious of your culture and makes you introspective about how you don't fit it and gives you relatively uncommon stories and a desire to express them which all help push someone into being a creative or give them more material to work with in their art.

Similarly, being excluded from/having difficulty with normal teen social stuff may probabilistically push you towards more studying/focus on career/etc (same as with the many of us mild autistics here), explaining more representation at high career levels generally.

Being a dink is enough to explain relative affluence, really, it's pretty powerful.

Yeah, I don't think the power of DINK couples was properly understood when we set up democratic/capitalistic societies. Unfortunately having kids is just one of those things that really harms your ability to impact the world as an economic agent. Who knew?

And yet, we must have children for obvious reasons. The way the world sits now, people who have children are getting massively taken advantage of by the childless. It really is a shame.

Unfortunately having kids is just one of those things that really harms your ability to impact the world as an economic agent. Who knew?

And yet, we must have children for obvious reasons. The way the world sits now, people who have children are getting massively taken advantage of by the childless. It really is a shame.

Why? You trade off some of your own personal accomplishments and resources(of a sort) for those of your kids. Sure perhaps I on my own would have had more time to do X, more ability to devote to making money if I were childless, but me plus my 3 kids almost certainly will have more X time and more economic potential overall simply because there are 4 of us. That is the trap you are falling into here I think. People who have kids are not being taken advantage of by the childless. Over any time frame but the immediate our influence, economic potential and everything else is much greater than if we had not had kids.

There is no shame to be rectified, no-one is being taken advantage of, just different choices with different trade offs, over different time scales.

In a society where redistribution from old to young is privatized (except for the welfare class) but redistribution from young to old is handled by the State, the childless are free-riding because they are supported in their old age by children they didn't raise.

the childless are free-riding because they are supported in their old age by children they didn't raise.

But in this scenario they will have each (per capita) have been more economically productive and then presumably have been taxed more through their working lives in return, so even if they are then being subsidized more at the end of their lives they would have contributed more throughout (both to general tax take but also to social security) so without knowing the magnitude of this difference, we still can't determine how this stacks up.

Wouldn't this only work if you are in a profession that contributes significantly to the capital stock? If you're a hairdresser or professional athlete, you can be as extra productive as you want, nothing you do during your work life aside from having children will make goods and services any more abundant (societally) at the time when you need them in your old age.

Unclear from the OP, he just thought they would be more economically productive. It seems likely some professions would contribute more than others, but that is true with or without kids. Even a hairdresser without kids could presumably work more hours, and save money they would otherwise have spent on schooling or college and feeding/clothing their kids and the like.

Not just recently, but also hundreds of years ago.

Note that things quickly get murky in the past. People were not free to express their sexuality in those restrictive societies. Pederasty was extremely widespread in many parts of the world – most Persian love poetry is dedicated to boys – for the same reason it is common in Afghanistan. The overlap between Afghan boy lovers and would-be homosexuals is probably not that large.

I suspect there's some kind of "survivorship bias" effect, wherein less intelligent gay men will make stupid decisions early on which select them out of the sample, making the remaining pool smarter by default. This is true of people in general, but given what a small proportion of the population gay men are and how risky their lifestyles tend to be compared to the general population, even a small number of deaths in the community can radically shift the average intelligence.

Imagine a rural town with a population of 10,000 adults, made up of 4,900 straight men, 4,900 straight women, 100 gay men and 100 lesbians (no bisexuals). Every cohort has an average IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15 points.

Every year, 2% of straight men do something stupid which gets them killed (driving drunk, playing with a gun, OD'ing, getting into a stupid fistfight outside a bar), and these deaths are concentrated in the bottom half of the IQ distribution. Every year, a higher percentage (say, 10%) of gay men do something stupid which gets them killed, likewise concentrated in the bottom half of the IQ distribution. Why is the percentage of deaths among gay men higher? Because in addition to all of the stupid things which kill straight men, there are additional risky activities likely to lead to death which gay men disproportionately practise (but straight men generally don't). These include contracting one or more STDs from unprotected sex with a promiscuous partner, prostituting themselves carelessly and getting murdered by a john, or indeed (depending on how homophobic our hypothetical rural town is) lacking the situational awareness not to be flamboyantly gay in an environment where doing so might get you beaten up (when a more intelligent gay man might have the cop-on to dial down the camp in a bar where Bud Light is pointedly not on tap, or while walking past the local mosque).

At the end of the year, from a starting population of 4,900 straight men, there are 4,802 left. If we take the values in the bottom half of the distribution and remove 98 values at random, that brings the average intelligence up, but because the sample size is so large it's a very minor shift: from a starting position of 100.24 to an end position of 100.62. In the gay male population, subtracting 10 random values in the bottom half of the distribution brings our average IQ up a whole 2 points (100.22 to 102.26). This is more than five times the survivorship effect as in the straight male community (which is exactly what we'd expect if gay men's lifestyles are five times as risky as the average straight man's).

Meanwhile, the straight women are charging they phone and eating hot chip, and the lesbians are doing crochet, writing angsty poetry and giving their girlfriends the silent treatment. There's a very minor selection effect as a small proportion of stupid women might get killed by driving drunk or carelessly prostituting themselves - but even the stupidest woman is far more risk-averse than the stupidest straight man, and the survivorship effect is far less pronounced (maybe the average shifts up by 0.19 points or less every year).

Do this cumulatively over several years and you can imagine how stratified the relative intelligences might end up. A gay man smart/lucky enough to survive into his thirties would want to be fastidiously perfectionist (dare I say, anal) about using condoms: he's probably seen far more than his fair share of his peers cut down in their prime than a straight man of the same age.

If this was happening it would show up in the stats as drastically lower life expectancies for gay men.

Courtesy of @naraburns: https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/30/6/1499/651821:

In our paper, we demonstrated that in a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 21 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality continued, we estimated that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years would not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre were experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by men in Canada in the year 1871. In contrast, if we were to repeat this analysis today the life expectancy of gay and bisexual men would be greatly improved. Deaths from HIV infection have declined dramatically in this population since 1996.

If gay men now seem disproportionately intelligent, it could be an artifact of a couple of generations of the least intelligent gay men being purged by HIV. As deaths from HIV (and, to a lesser extent, male prostitutes being murdered) fall further, we might expect the disparity to normalise.

Is that not something they actually have? Given the generally poor state of LGBT health I’d be shocked if it wasn’t.

Probably not, at least since AIDS was controlled.

Just like there is reason to believe that some ethnic groups are more intelligent than others on average, is it possible that some sexual orientations are more intelligent than others on average?

The elephant in the room is AGP intelligence. This is not exactly a sexual orientation, but may be somewhat related. One paper famously put the median at 122, which is actually completely believable.

Surely most of that (in the paper, I mean) is selection effects? I expect that there's a substantial barrier to entry for completing SRS at a university hospital (the selection criterion for that paper) and that the barriers are higher for AGPs since they don't match the stereotypical / ideologically acceptable profile. (I also suspect a similar effect causes these studies to underestimate AGP in that population. People who want a thing tend to say what gatekeepers want to hear, and those that don't... don't make it past the gatekeepers as much.)

Of course I'm also saying this as someone who suffers from AGP (though much, much less than I did in my teens / early 20s -- mental habits do make a difference) and also ticks many of the usual boxes: high intelligence, nerdy, family history both of mental illness and of joint hypermobility / connective tissue problems. So make of that what you will.

Surely most of that (in the paper, I mean) is selection effects?

You are right. The interesting part is the difference between male-attracted vs. female-attracted TIMs. If you assume the former are about average, the AGPs would be like 1 SD above the mean, which would neatly explain their extreme overrepresentation in g-loaded activities.

Right, what I was also gesturing at above is that there is probably an additional selection effect, in the form of needing to work the system, for female attracted / AGP people, since their motivations are thought to be more "disreputable" (not sure the right word here).

However, on further reflection, 122 is an astounding mean, even for a combination of selection effects and real differences, and makes me wonder if there is something wrong here. That's a mean substantially larger than what you get pulling only from the population of 4-year college graduates. At this point I think I'll reserve any judgment about the explanation of these numbers.

There seems to be a strong correlation with the type of mild autism that puts people in places like here or the tech sector rather than care homes and institutions. May be related to that.

I also wonder if intelligence is in some sense a prerequisite for having the introspection and general awareness to notice that society has a lot of social scripts and roles it tries to corral you into, and some of them are stupid or don't fit you well. My experience is that smart people in general are more likely to do 'weird' stuff, from polyamory to Larping to ignoring fashion to etc.

Certainly when I look at software development discussion online, it seems to me that transwomen are overrepresented relative to their population size.

This could be explained by the idea that transwomen are just more vocal on average than the average person, but I am not sure that would explain all of the phenomenon.

If transwomen do tend to be relatively prominent in software development because of their actual skills, I suppose there are many ways to explain it. Maybe the same thing that causes men to want to be women also for some reason is responsible for high intelligence. Maybe nerdy, intelligent, tech-savvy guys are more likely to want to switch gender roles than guys who are easily successful in stereotypical male roles. There is also the common online joke argument of "both transgenderism and hyperintellectuality tend to be caused by autism" but I know almost nothing about autism so I have no way of evaluating that one.

Even more particular that software development is emulator development. I'd estimate that something like 90%+ of emulator developers are autistic trans, and almost always of the AGP variety. Off the top of my head Near/Byuu (developer of Higan/BSNES), Endrift (mGBA), and whatever the name of the guy who developed melonDS. Emulators require even more of an autistic obsession with accuracy and technical details than normal software dev.

I'm going to write something stupid and I hope no one will take it too seriously, but I cannot resist the temptation to point out certain dark irony in your comment. Taking into account that autists emulate social behavior and AGPs emulate women, it is hardly surprising that the people who are combination of both are simultaneously the masters of emulating software (hehe).

There is also the common online joke argument of "both transgenderism and hyperintellectuality tend to be caused by autism" but I know almost nothing about autism so I have no way of evaluating that one.

I have heard this said before. But this raises the question of why a disorder that's often characterized as "extreme maleness" would cause a man to want to be a woman.

a disorder that's often characterized as "extreme maleness"

Autist here. The people describing autism as "extreme maleness" never seem to account for the higher clumsiness, lower social masculinity, avoidance of horseplay and contact/team sports, and other signifiers of lower masculinity. It also relies on a stereotype of men as being much less emotional and much more logical than women.

When I was trying to figure out my place in the world, I discovered an idea I've been calling Triessentialism: that the best way to categorize the world seems to be the Physical, the Logical, and the Emotional. One of the biggest components was that men tend to be physically intuitive, women tend to be emotionally intuitive, and people with autism tend to be logically intuitive. The male:female skew of autism is 4:1, which is the simplest explanation why STEM careers have been filled with men at around that ratio until recently:

The share of women and underrepresented minorities in the STEM workforce increased between 2011 and 2021. Compared with women, men make up the greater share of the STEM workforce. In 2021, about two-thirds (65%) of those employed in STEM occupations were men and about one-third (35%) were women.

I have since postulated that autism is a neurological lessening of instinct, so people with autism have to figure the world out without a set of ready-made priors which harmonize into a sense of being a whole being. Thus the high instance of AGP, thus the seemingly high intelligence of having to exercise one's logical intuition to get through daily life, thus the autist's joy in the intellectual beauty of symbolic logics, simplified sorting mechanisms, and hobbies with built-in ontologies such as trainspotting and Pokemon games.

The male:female skew of autism is 4:1, which is the simplest explanation why STEM careers have been filled with men at around that ratio until recently:

Is your contention that STEM careers have been filled almost entirely by autists until very recently, or do you also think that “logical intuition” is similarly biased towards men vis a vis women?

Good question! I’d contend that, since non-autistic men tend to be physically intuitive (I hesitate to reference the “shape rotators” meme but it fits here), their logic is more “gear-like” and related to the STEM fields than is that of the people who are intuitive in realms of motives, relationships, desires, priorities, and other carriers of emotive meaning.

One of my personal hypotheses is that these men are so lacking in their ability to understand women/put themselves in their place that they look at what attracts them and assume that women will want the same thing - the mirror image of a careerist woman who wonders why men are more impressed with her hips than her ability to manage a marketing team.

AGP and actually ‘being a woman’ are radically different, it doesn’t really make sense to conflate them. AGP is often an expression of a kind of (hetero)sexual narcissism. I guess that could be a form of ‘extreme maleness’.

I'm skeptical of the strength of the autism connection, but I don't find that in particular much of a mystery:

  • Autism (also let's be real, we're talking about what used to be called Asperger's here, not all autism) is only "extreme maleness" along one dimension: a focus on systems/things rather than people. I've never heard of autistic people being more athletic, more competitive, etc. than typical men (though disabuse me if I'm wrong!).
  • One typical characteristic of being male is finding feminine characteristics attractive and valuable. It's not too far a jump -- for a certain kind of mind -- to feel that those things would be valuable in oneself.

Perhaps it’s a higher incidence of sexual deviance coupled with a low awareness or care that putting that deviance on display will have negative social consequences.

Easy theory is that autism makes you largely immune to social scripts and peer pressure, and those are the only things keeping some small percent of the population trapped in their assigned gender roles.

Or, more generally: autistic people who want to be socially competent have to intentionally and intellectually examine and dissect social scripts and norms that everyone else just picks up naturally without thinking about them. Examining those things intentionally and intellectually makes it easier to notice that they're arbitrary and often dumb, and make different choices for yourself.

My intuition is that anomalous mental traits are all at least loosely correlated with each other. This neatly explains the "mentally ill genius" trope, and your observation here that gays are overrepresented among high achievers, with one principle: the brain is a complex stochastic system, and if you start pushing and pulling on the levers for one trait (e.g. intelligence or creativity), it's hard to avoid unpredictable downstream effects on other parts of the system.

I'm unsure of how this plays out for people at the extreme low end of the intelligence curve. I don't think they're more likely to be gay than average, but I'd wager that they're overrepresented in various types of sex crime, which can be considered its own form of deviancy.

Possibly ties into the fact that left handed people are very overrepresented in various things too.

I always attributed that to dumb lefties get killed of by scissors/power tools before they show up in the statistics.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a (non-industrial) chainsaw that isn’t symmetrical.

Lefties do have a high rate of workplace accidents, though.

And apparently much more for auto, too.

I’m never getting forklift certified.

I would expect gay people to be more intelligent on average than straight people in the US, if only because homophobia is mostly only prevalent in low intelligence areas.

Sure, but is that because gays move away from rural mississippi, or because high IQ areas foster gayness?

Right, I think @rae kind of says this too. If you move to New York because (a) it’s more tolerant of gay people than your small Missouri town and (b) because you want to get laid, you’re nevertheless moving somewhere where the average pay is probably double (for the same job) what it is in your hometown, and there are a lot more well-paid jobs available.

This is part of the reason why detailed average income by (European) ethnicity data for the US always throws up huge differences between some white ethnics (scroll down to the ‘detailed’ section) ; it’s not just HBD, it’s also the fact that some groups predominantly moved to rural places, while others moved to cities where there’s more economic opportunity in the modern era. Someone of the same intelligence and conscientiousness in NYC and in West Virginia won’t make the same salary.

The gay men I know spend just as much time and energy as straight men on getting sex, they’re just more successful at the hooking up part. They’ll spend way more effort on their appearance compared to straight men (with corresponding higher rates of body dysmorphia and eating disorders) since male sexuality is primarily visual. Ironically straight men should be more motivated by their sexuality in pursuing financial success, as things like status, money and charisma matter a lot less to sexual success if you’re gay (unless it’s a sugar daddy situation).

I think it’s more to do with the kinds of people that are openly homosexual - having used Grindr in rural or poor areas, the gays there tend to be extremely closeted, often in sham straight relationships. Many won’t even admit to being gay (which is why medical professionals use the term “men who have sex with men”). You need a certain level of introspection and non-conformity to come out (even to yourself!) and I bet that’s correlated with financial success - plus you’ll likely want to move to an urban, more affluent area as that’s where LGBT acceptance is the highest nowadays, and that surely motivates you to have a high paying career due to the cost of living.

You need a certain level of introspection and non-conformity to come out (even to yourself!)

I think this is a big part of it. Introspection, self-awareness and metacognition are all probably heavily correlated with intelligence.

I’ve always believed with zero evidence that there are fatter tails for the distribution of income for gay men, partially for a version of this reason:

One other possible explanation that comes to my mind that I did not see in the thread is that maybe because it is easier for gay men to get laid than straight men on average, they don't have to devote as much of their minds as straights to getting laid and are thus free to focus on other things.

Many of the gay men I know tend to fall into two categories.

The first are obsessed with casual sex and devote their lives to its pursuit. They typically work either menial/low level jobs (bartenders, waiters, baristas, junior line cooks, retail store assistants) or they pick a profession with an easy 9-5 like working for the state, and then devote the rest of their time to Grindr or alternative. They almost always seem to have no money unless they’re hereditarily rich, in which case they don’t work at all and spend all day in pursuit of sex either directly or indirectly (eg by lifting weights). This may be a function of male-ness and availability; if straight men could access an endless number of attractive women for no-strings-attached hookups, many would probably drop out of the rat race for this lifestyle too (and in fact there are hot straight men who drop out and become bartenders or surf instructors for this reason, it’s just harder so it’s more rare).

The second category seems to shirk sex, or at least to pursue it less vigorously than the other group. Often they seem to have long periods of celibacy, or even a lifetime of it. If they pursue hookups they do so occasionally and quietly. All gay men I know in stable marriages are in this category, obviously, and those who aren’t married date ‘for a husband’ rather than for sex. They’re often extremely devoted to their careers and career progression, plan to adopt children or have them with a surrogate, are quite materialistic and want the trappings of an upper-middle class lifestyle. I don’t know, maybe Tim Cook is in this category, although I can’t say I know much about his romantic life.

Again, I don’t think this is ‘because’ of their sexuality per se, rather it’s because straight men are reliant on women (most will marry and have children with women) whose preferences they at least somewhat want to try to meet. Gay men are unmoored from this heterosexual dynamic; they have their own, but it’s almost entirely superficial (unless you’re a wealthy older man looking for a sugar baby), so those gay men one sees pursuing high-level professional careers are almost entirely doing so out of personal ambition, while straight men doing the same have a larger number of possible motives. If you work in corporate law or investment banking or medicine or whatever (and I have noticed this in my own line of work) you might therefore find that your gay male coworkers seem more conscientious or likely to be promoted than straight men, who might just be slackers who knew they wanted a good job to attract a respectable wife and provide for a family, but who had no substantial innate ambition.

It's not so obvious to me that there's no overlap. I've read a few accounts of fairly rich or successful gay men with absolutely bonkers sex lives.

I've heard the theory that due to it generally being more comfortable to be 'out' as a homosexual in more educated/affluent surrounds and in more successful demographics that there's an associated upward skew on homosexual average income, education and the rest.

If 90% of affluent gays feel comfortable coming out, whilst only 20% of lower-class gays feel comfortable, that can explain a ton of overperformance.

This is the truth, both open homosexuality and high income/status occupations correlate strongly with "attended a good college."

Going to a good college, outside of a tiny handful of evangelical schools that aren't total shite, means being exposed heavily to leftist worldviews. Being exposed to leftist worldviews makes it much more likely that if you have the spark of homosexual attraction in you that you will explore it, cultivate it, identify with it.

I expect if we used one of those weirdo-erection-porn-tests to measure arousal at gay stuff, you'd find a lower correlation between income and homosexuality. But using open homosexuality as your standard, you're going to find a higher correlation, because at this point it's basically impossible to find associates at a V50 law firm (for example) who haven't gone to a school where they were told repeatedly that being gay was a-ok.

I'd also theorize that that high income correlates well with not-depending on family/social circle in which you were born/church community etc. A rich guy can live how he pleases, and if his family doesn't like it they can go to hell; a poor man might be frightened to lose his social support network.

gay people

Gay people or gay men?

prominent intellectuals and artists.

Aside from the problem of defining such a group, given the rank bigotry of the class of people who decide who is and is not an "intellectual" and "artist", could be selection effects as well. I suspect if you took academia's word for it, a disproportionate number of "the most prominent artists and intellectuals" would be POC as well. And communists.

That's certainly a valid point about selection effects, but it's easy to find examples of prominent gay intellectuals and artists from long before the Great Awokening: Foucault, Turing, Wittgenstein, Proust...

Wilde, Byron…

I mainly had gay men in mind when I wrote my comment, but I left it open-ended because I am also curious about lesbians, bisexuals of both genders, transgender people, and so on. Also, for that matter, kinks. Are some kinks more highly correlated with intelligence than others? As I write the previous, I am aware that the difference between a sexual orientation and a kink is not well-defined.

It is a bit distasteful, but I guess that I should also mention pedophiles. My intuition is that the average pedophile is less intelligent on average than the average person, but it's possible that it only seems that way because most of the brilliant pedophiles are just really good at keeping their pedophilia secret.

In general, I am just curious about all possible ways in which sexual orientations, kinks, and interests are correlated with intelligence.

I would suspect the same about pedophilia, though this is such a strong taboo topic, that there is probably not enough data to investigate the question reliably. Anecdotally however, there are well documented brilliant pedophiles, for example, you can take a look into interesting story of Nobel recipient, Daniel Gajdusek on wikipedia.

He was one of the pioneers in the field of prion diseases, and he in fact did a lot to explain the transmission mechanism of kuru disease, but his sexual motivation and his scientific life are intertwined in an incredible way.

A lot of artists/authors in the colonial period were famous for running off to Morocco or some such place where pederasty was winked at. Borroughs, etc. Some overlap with gay.

Discovering Arthur C. Clarke was (probably) a pedophile was a big one for me.

Well, that’s my dose of disappointment for the day. :(

Gay people have feminine interests, well at least more feminine than straight men. Ergo they'll be overrepresented in fashion, drama and the like, and thus also more likely to hold higher ranking positions therein.

I, at the very least, don't see any glaring discrepancies in a more general consideration of public intellectuals, if we're trading anecdotes.

Gay men obviously tend to have feminine interests, and if we can assume that a drive for social status is a partially innate male trait, we would expect even a mediocre gay male fashion designer to rise through the ranks faster than a very talented female fashion designer who favours greater work-life balance. But that doesn't really answer the question of whether gay men are more intelligent than straight men.

It doesn't, but if part of the implicit reasoning behind suspecting that might be so is the disproportionate success of gay men in certain fields, that's at least some Bayes Points knocked off, given that a more prosaic explanation like what we have in mind would explain the disparity.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/abs/intelligence-and-homosexuality/

Apparently according to Google's web scraper, has somewhere behind the paywall a claim going:

Rahman et al. (Reference Rahman, Bhanot, Emrith-Small, Ghafoor and Robertsin press) show that there are no statistically significant differences in estimated full-scale IQ among straight men, straight women and gay men.

Which is what I would personally expect.

If someone wants to go to the trouble of finding the actual paper on Sci hub, I'm curious to know more, but I'm at the hospital with more pressing concerns right now.

Edit:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21331499/

Claims:

The present study explored whether there were relationships among gender nonconformity, intelligence, and sexual orientation. A total of 106 heterosexual men, 115 heterosexual women, and 103 gay men completed measures of demographic variables, recalled childhood gender nonconformity (CGN), and the National Adult Reading Test (NART). NART error scores were used to estimate Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Full-Scale IQ (FSIQ) and Verbal IQ (VIQ) scores. Gay men had significantly fewer NART errors than heterosexual men and women (controlling for years of education). In heterosexual men, correlational analysis revealed significant associations between CGN, NART, and FSIQ scores (elevated boyhood femininity correlated with higher IQ scores). In heterosexual women, the direction of the correlations between CGN and all IQ scores was reversed (elevated girlhood femininity correlating with lower IQ scores). There were no significant correlations among these variables in gay men. These data may indicate a "sexuality-specific" effect on general cognitive ability but with limitations. They also support growing evidence that quantitative measures of sex-atypicality are useful in the study of trait sexual orientation.

Which I am too sleep deprived to interpret.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats