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gothgirl420666 comments on 2014 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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I would be really interested in hearing from one of the fourteen schizophrenic rationalists. Given that one of the most prominent symptoms of schizophrenia is delusional thinking, a.k.a. irrationality... I wonder how this plays out in someone who has read the Sequences. Do these people have less severe symptoms as a result? When your brain decides to turn against you, is there a way to win?
I also find it fascinating that bisexuality is vastly overrepresented here (14.4% in LW vs. 1-2% in US), while homosexuality is not. My natural immediate interpretation of this is that bisexuality is a choice. I think Eliezer said once that he would rather be bisexual than straight, because it would allow for more opportunities to have fun. This seems like an attitude many LW members might share, given that polyamory a.k.a. pursuing a weird dating strategy because it's more fun is very popular in this community. (I personally also share Eliezer's attitude, but unfortunately I'm pretty sure I'm straight.) So to me it seems logical that the large number of bisexuals may come from a large number of people-who-want-to-be-bisexual actually becoming so. This seems more likely to me than some aspect or correlate of bisexuality (and not homosexuality) causing people to find LW.
Alternatively, and now that I think about it probably more realistically, perhaps the vast majority of people in America who are attracted to two genders decide to keep their same-sex attraction to themselves, concluding (arguably rationally) that the added sexual opportunities aren't worth the stigmatization. However, LW members are more likely to be unashamed of being weird, and also more likely to socialize e.g. with a bunch of nerds in the Bay Area, meaning that the risk of stigmatization is much lower.
Or perhaps the true answer is some sort of combination of the two I just postulated.
Is there a source on this?
I don't. Compare it with the OkCupid data analysis. Bisexuality could be more of a signal. Admittedly at least in the (quite large) OkCupid data.
Oh, wow, that's incredibly strange/interesting, I had never seen that before. Thanks for sharing.
The fact that young bi men are almost always closeted gay men, while old bi men are almost always closeted straight men, is particularly baffling.
Nah, selection bias. You don't go on OK Cupid as a bi man to find men - that's Grindr or other similar sites. Much easier and quicker and more straightforward. But if you're a bi man looking for women, OK Cupid is a good place to go.
The first part does not actually follow from the data with any rigor - "Go online to meet people of the same sex, find opposite-sex partners in real life" is a perfectly reasonable strategy, simply because online dating avoids the whole "I'm straight" shot down in flames thing, which must get really old really quickly.
The older guys listing bisexuality and only messaging women, tough? Ehhr.. what?
Best guesses at an explanation for that one: 1) A lot of older men had some homosexual experimentation in their past, decided that they therefore count as bi, but are now only interested in heterosexual relationships. 2) A lot of older men choose to signal what they believe to be the desirable characteristic of "sexual adventurousness" to their actual target sexual partner, which is younger women.
Plus, there may be many bisexual men specifically looking for a partner they can breed with. Based roughly on barely remembered male fertility age statistics, I'd guess men would be most interested in fathering children in the 25-45 age rage, and there does seem to be a bit of a hump in the data in that range.
Hypothesis: a large fraction of young men in those results are coming to terms with their sexuality, while a large fraction of old men are trying to signal sexual adventurousness?
Yeah, that's what I thought too. I'm just surprised that bisexuality would be something so many men imagine (perhaps correctly?) women are attracted to.
I don't find the first part baffling; there's a trope that many gay men go through bisexuality on their way to accepting their homosexuality. (I had a brief period where I identified as bi because I wasn't fully ready to identify as gay.)
Same. It's easier to tell people that you have a left hand than it is to tell people you're left-handed, so to speak.
I'd be interested to see the orientation numbers broken down by sex/gender. My personal experience is that geek/nerd women seem to be bisexual at surprisingly high rates. I'm wondering if having typically-male personal pursuits (e.g. LW) is correlated with typically-male sexual interests (i.e. liking women).
I'm in that boat. Feels like I'm missing out on half the potential fun. :-(
Using the "Sex" (not gender) and "Sexuality" columns, omitting blanks, asexuals, and others:
So the male/female ratio by sexuality is:
The sexuality percentage by sex is:
So while female bisexuality is almost as common as female heterosexuality here, the total bisexual ratio resembles the male bisexual ratio closely, as you would expect from the male/female ratio being so high overall (8 men per woman in this restricted sample).
I initially misparsed this as "the female bisexuality rate is as expected." I see that isn't what you meant, but had to re-read two or three times. Just FYI.
I feel like a 42.2% bisexuality rate among LW women is surprising enough to say something, but I'm not sure what.
It is interesting. IME in real life and in OkCupid, female self-identification as bisexual correlates quite strongly with the geek/liberal/poly/kinky meme complex (edit: mirroring your experiences, didn't read carefully enough). Out of my top matches in OkCupid, over 80% of women interested in men seem to self-report as bisexual.
However, also IME, bisexual identification usually doesn't imply being biromantic! Many of those women have had, or would like to have, sexual experiences with other women, but still may prefer men in romantic relationships almost exclusively.
FWIW, I support adding a question about romantic orientation in the next survey.
Great line from OkCupid:
Anecdotally, this matches my experience (both on OKC and the "bisexual but hereroromantic" thing with three of my four most recent sexual partners).
Grammar modified to be clearer, thanks for pointing that out.
All I've come up with is a half-formed joke about how human females really are intrinsically attractive after all.
While an appealing hypothesis, if that were the case I would expect roughly the same percentage for the general public. The wiki of a million lies suggests the actual rate for the general public is in the low single digits.
As clever as this phrase is, it is tragically ambiguous. I'm guessing 65% chance Wikipedia, 30% RationalWiki, 3% our local wiki, 2% other. How did I do?
None of the other wikis you list are big enough to have more than maybe 75,000 lies.
Are you counting talk pages? I'd expect those to have a higher density of lies than the main namespace.
Sure, but I'd expect that smaller wikis have exponentially less talk, because there's fewer people to do the talking.
I meant Wikipedia. I've actually never heard the phrase applied to any other wiki. It's certainly not original to me.
Thanks!
Men who aren't bisexual are missing considerably less than half the potential fun, since the proportion of men who are gay or bisexual is fairly low.
Yeah, but gay men are also more promiscuous.
Is your comparison "than straight men" or "than straight women" here?