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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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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.