= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (425)
For you non-techies who'd like to be titillated, here's a second bleg about some very speculative and fringey ideas I've been pondering:
What do you think the connection between motivation & sex/masturbation is?
Here's my thought: it's something of a mystery to me why homosexuals seem to be so well represented among the eminent geniuses of Europe & America. The suggestion I like best is that they're not intrinsically more creative thanks to 'female genes' or whatever, but that they can't/won't participate in the usual mating rat-race and so in a Freudian manner channel their extra time into their art or science.
But then I did some googling looking for research on this, and though I didn't turn up much (it's a strangely hard area to search), I ran into some interesting pages on the links between motivation & dopamine, and dopamine & sex:
Which suggest to me an entirely different mechanism: it's not that they have more time, it's that they are having much less sex (even if only with their hand), and this depletes dopamine less & leaving motivation strong to do other things they'd like to do. (Cryptonomicon readers might also be familiar with this theory from one memorable section with Randy.)
So: does anyone know any research testing this? As I said, I couldn't find much.
What suggests that homosexuals are getting less sex than heterosexuals in the first place? Naively they are probably having more sex, and more sexual partners than median heterosexual males.
Also, what suggests homosexuals are overrepresented among "eminent geniuses"? Let's use some objective benchmark - how many Nobel Prize winners were homosexuals, and how it compares with society average?
Along with what orthonormal said, I definitely think that up until ~1960, the Nobel Prize committee was very careful, in all categories, not to give the award to a person of "ill repute", which includes, among other things, being gay. So Nobel Prize winnings wouldn't be informative.
However, you could control for this by checking out how many men won the prize before 1960, and would be suspected of being gay (i.e. old and never-married).
Can you think of a better list, or is the entire question non-empirical in practice?
I would go with general metrics of 'influence' like in Murray's Human Accomplishment. It's easier to decide not to give someone a prize because you find them skeevy than it is to ignore their work and accomplishments in practice and to keep them out of the histories and reference works.
Genius being easier to claim in retrospect, I think the real claim is that until recent decades, there were plenty of nearly celibate homosexuals (for lack of public opportunities to seek out others, or from internalized stigmas).
Obvious thing to check is the contribution to science and art from other known celibates; plenty more examples (including Erdös) leap to mind.
Some objective benchmark yes, Nobel Prize winners no. There are too few Nobel Prize winners in the first place, the categories aren't obviously the right ones, and the selection process is far too political.
There are 789 Nobel Prize winners. We can throw away peace and literature obviously, but the rest don't seem to be that politicized, at least I doubt they care about scientist's sexual orientation much.
It's as objective as it gets really, and very widely accepted. If there are any known gay Nobel Prize winners, I'm sure gay organizations would mention them somewhere.
Yahoo answers can think of only one allegedly bisexual one, but for all Wikipedia says it might have been just some casual experimentation, as he was married, so he doesn't count as gay.
If this is accurate, it means gays, at least the out-of-the-closet ones, are vastly underrepresented among Nobel Prize winners, definitely conflicting with the gay genius over-representation theory.
You missed Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a quick Google tells me. And let's not forget those who weren't Nobelists. I don't think anyone here disputes that Turing deserved a Nobel or Fields medal, but it seems likely to me that he didn't get one because he was gay. It would be hard to correct for discrimination & prejudice like Turing suffered.
You can narrow that down to: Sexually frustrated people have more motivation to do other things. This makes evolutionary sense. People who are sex-starved want to raise their status to better their odds.
The conjecture you offer here has been floating about in philosophy and psychology circles for some time. It was a view heavily promoted by Freud, who used the term sublimation to describe the diversion of unfulfilled (sexual) desires into constructive pursuits. A search of this term may yield further findings.
Hm, yes, I was a bit familiar with Freud, but I was hoping for ties to biochemistry; it's one thing to intuit that the mind has n bits of energy & forces sloshing around and if they can't come out in sex they have to come out elsewhere, and entirely another to have a specific, materialist model of what's going on. I haven't found anything for the latter.
There's a passing mention in George Ainslie's book on akrasia, /Breakdown of Will/ which struck me as interesting. At the moment I can't recall just what or where. I'll dip into it again and see if I find it again.