= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
taw 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)
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.