So more people are against than for. Not exactly a mandate for its use.
Are people who understand quantum mechanics are more likely to believe in Many Worlds? We perform a t-test, checking whether one’s probability of the MWI being true depends on whether or not one can solve the Schrodinger Equation. People who could solve the equation had on average a 54.3% probability of MWI, compared to 51.3% in those who could not. The p-value is 0.26; there is a 26% probability this occurs by chance. Therefore, we fail to establish that people’s probability of MWI varies with understanding of quantum mechanics.
Sounds like you did a two-tailed test. shminux’s hypothesis, which he has stated several times IIRC, is that people who can solve it will not be taken in by Eliezer’s MWI flim-flam, as it were, and would be less likely to accept MWI. So you should’ve been running a one-tailed t-test to reject the hypothesis that the can-solvers are less MWI’d. The p-value would then be something like 0.13 by symmetry.
So ~3x more people prefer polyamory than are actually engaged in it...
I would not describe this as an accurate conclusion. For one thing, I currently have one partner who has other partners, so I think I am unambiguously “currently engaged in polyamory” even though I would have put 1 on the survey.
For another, I think it is reasonable to say that someone who is in a relationship with exactly one other person, but is not monogamous with that person (i.e. is available to enter further relationships) is engaged in polyamory.
Well, I think you can probably break it down as follows, given just the data we have:
0 partners
1 partner, looking
1 partner, not looking
2 partners+
Of those, I would say the second and fourth are unambiguously practicing poly, the third could go either way but you could say is presumptively mono, and the first probably doesn’t count (since they are actively practicing neither mono nor poly.)
If someone wants to run those numbers, I’d be curious how they come out.
I don’t agree that the first doesn’t count. The Relationship Style question was about preferred style, not current active situation. It could be that 2⁄3 of the polyamorous people just can’t get a date (lord knows I’ve been there).
(ETA:) Or, in the case of not looking, don’t want a date right now (somewhere I’ve also been).
It could just be that 2⁄3 of the polyamorous people just can’t get a date (lord knows I’ve been there).
I’m in the “no preference” camp, not the poly specifically, but I’m certainly there. LessWrong does seem to indirectly filter for people who are there, simply because people who aren’t are less likely to take an interest in things that would lead them to LW, IME.
Opinion is divided as to whether poly is an orientation or a lifestyle (something one is vs. something one does).
i.e. saying someone with no partners is practising neither mono nor poly is like saying someone with no partners is not currently engaged in homo-/bi-/hetero-sexuality. (However I would accept a claim that they were engaged in asexuality.)
I wonder if it’s worth even making the distinction between “lifestyle” and “act”. Thus, poly could be an orientation (“I’m not poly because I don’t want multiple partners”), lifestyle (“I’m not poly because I don’t have and I’m not actively seeking multiple partners”), and act (“I’m not poly because I don’t currently have multiple partners”).
I used to always use the “act” definition when discussing sexual orientation (“I don’t have one—I haven’t had sex with anyone lately”) to the confusion of all interlocutors.
Heh, in fact I started but then deleted as a derail some discussion of problems in activist and academic discussions of sexual orientation—what are we to make of someone whose claimed orientation (identification) does not match their current and past behaviour, which might in turn be different again to their stated actual preferences.
I’m not current in my academic reading of sexuality, but when I was, anyone researching from a public health perspective went with behaviour, while psychologists and sociologists were split between identification and preference.
Queer activism seems to have generally gone with identification as primary, although I’m not as current there as I used to be. The trumping argument there was actually precisely your situation, where to accept behaviour as primary meant that no virgins had any orientation, and that does not agree with our intuitions or most peoples’ personal experiences.
There’s also a bi-activism point which says that position means the only “true” bisexuals are people engaged in mixed-gender group sex. (This is intended as reductio ad absurdem but I’ve heard people use it seriously.)
Poly seems to be more complicated still, q.v. distinctions between swinging, “monogamish”, open relationships, polyfidelity and polyamory. I know multiple examples of dyadic couples who regularly have sex with other people but identify as monogamous, and of couples who aren’t currently involved with anyone else, aren’t looking, but are firm in their poly identification.
I guess my TL;DR is that I’m entirely untroubled by an apparent difference between preference and practice, and if the survey had asked similar questions about sexual orientation preference & practice, we would have seen “discrepancies” there too.
3 vs 16 seems like quite a difference, even allowing for the small sample size. Is this consistent with the larger population?
What struck me was not the difference in numbers of FtM and MtF, but the fact that more than ten percent of the survey population identifying as female is MtF.
So more people are against than for. Not exactly a mandate for its use.
Hypothesis: those directly affected by the troll policy (trolls) are more likely to have strong disapproval than those unaffected by the troll policy are to have strong approval.
In my opinion, a strong moderation policy should require a plurality vote in the negative (over approval and abstention) to fail a motion to increase security, rather than a direct comparison to the approval. (withdrawn as it applies to LW, whose trolls are apparently less trolly than other sites I’m used to)
Hypothesis: those directly affected by the troll policy (trolls) are more likely to have strong disapproval than those unaffected by the troll policy are to have strong approval.
Hypothesis rejected when we operationalize ‘trolls’ as ‘low karma’:
R> lwtroll <- lw[!is.na(lw$KarmaScore),]
R> lwtroll <- lwtroll[lwtroll$TrollToll=="Agree with toll" | lwtroll$TrollToll=="Disagree with toll",]
R> # disagree=3, agree=2; so:
R> # if positive correlation, higher karma associates with disagreement
R> # if negative correlation, higher karma associates with agreement
R> # we are testing hypothesis higher karma = lower score/higher agreement
R> cor.test(as.integer(lwtroll$TrollToll), lwtroll$KarmaScore, alternative=”less”)
Pearson’s product-moment correlation
data: as.integer(lwtroll$TrollToll) and lwtroll$KarmaScore
t = 1.362, df = 315, p-value = 0.9129
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is less than 0
95 percent confidence interval:
−1.0000 0.1679
sample estimates:
cor
0.07653
R> # a log-transform of the karma scores doesn’t help:
R> cor.test(as.integer(lwtroll$TrollToll), log1p(lwtroll$KarmaScore), alternative=”less”)
Pearson’s product-moment correlation
data: as.integer(lwtroll$TrollToll) and log1p(lwtroll$KarmaScore)
t = 2.559, df = 315, p-value = 0.9945
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is less than 0
95 percent confidence interval:
−1.0000 0.2322
sample estimates:
cor
0.1427
If this were anywhere but a site dedicated to rationality, I would expect trolls to self-report their karma scores much higher on a survey than they actually are, but that data is pretty staggering. I accept the rejection of the hypothesis, and withdraw my opinion insofar as it applies to this site.
So ~3x more people prefer polyamory than are actually engaged in it...
I wonder, if you split out poly/mono preference and number of partners, whether the number who prefer poly but have <2 partners would be significantly different from the number who prefer mono but have <1 partner.
Now that I’ve wondered this out loud, I feel like I should have just asked a computer.
I was about to reply the same thing. The quoted statement doesn’t sound particularly more surprising than “Most people prefer to be in a relationship, but only a fraction of those are actually engaged in one”.
Would it be more surprising to find people that prefer poly relationships, but only have one partner and aren’t looking for more, than to find people that prefer mono relationships, but have no partners and aren’t looking for any?
Among those with firm mono/poly preferences, there are 15% of the former (24% if we also include people that prefer poly, have no partners, and aren’t looking for more) and 14% of the latter.
Oh, I forgot to answer your actual question. Slightly over 2⁄3 of people that prefer poly have 0 or 1 partners.
Edit: Although I guess this much was evident from the data if we assume that people that prefer mono won’t have 2 or more partners. I guess the group that doesn’t have a firm mono/poly preference (which I ignored entirely) could confuse things a bit.
3 vs 16 seems like quite a difference, even allowing for the small sample size. Is this consistent with the larger population?
As I understand it, there isn’t good data. Stereotypically, there are more MtF than FtM. But according to Wikipedia, a Swedish study found a ratio of 1.4:1 in favor of MtF for those requesting sexual reassignment surgery, and 1:1 for those going through with it. Of course, this is the sort of Internet community where I’d expect some folks to identify as trans without wanting to go through surgery at all.
After I posted my comment, I realized that 3 vs 16 might just reflect the overall gender ratio of LW: if there’s no connection between that stuff and finding LW interesting (a claim which may or may not be surprising depending on your background theories and beliefs), then 3 vs 16 might be a smaller version of the larger gender sample of 120 vs 1057. The respective decimals are 0.1875 and 0.1135, which is not dramatic-looking. The statistics for whether membership differs between the two pairs:
R> M <- as.table(rbind(c(120, 1057), c(3,16)))
R> dimnames(M) <- list(status=c("c","t"), gender=c("M","F"))
R> M
gender
status M F
c 120 1057
t 3 16
R> chisq.test(M, simulate.p.value = TRUE, B = 20000000)
Pearson's Chi-squared test with simulated p-value (based on 2e+07 replicates)
data: M
X-squared = 0.6342, df = NA, p-value = 0.4346
(So it’s not even close to the usual significance level. As intuitively makes sense: remove or add one person in the right category, and the ratio changes a fair bit.)
Under this theory, it seems (with low statistical confidence of course) that LW-interest is perhaps correlated with biological sex rather than gender identity, or perhaps with assigned-gender-during-childhood. Which is kind of interesting.
Does anybody know if this holds for other other preferences that tend to vary heavily by gender? Are MtoF transsexuals heavily into say programming, or science fiction? (I know of several transsexual game developers/designers, all MtoF).
I don’t know of any such data. I’d imagine that there’s less of a psychological barrier to engaging in traditionally “gendered” interests for most transgendered people (that is, if you think a lot about gender being a social construct, you’re probably going to care less about a cultural distinction between “tv shows for boys” and “tv shows for girls”). Beyond that I can’t really speculate.
Edit: here’s me continuing to speculate anyway. A transgendered person is more likely than a cisgendered person to have significant periods of their life in which they are perceived as having different genders, and therefore is likely to be more fully exposed to cultural expectations for each.
FWIW, I have the opposite intuition. Transgendered people (practically by definition) care about gender a lot, so presumably would care more about those cultural distinctions.
Contrast the gender skeptic: “What do you mean, you were assigned male but are really female? There’s no ‘really’ about it—gender is just a social construct, so do whatever you want.”
It’s more complicated than that. Gender nonconformity in childhood is frequently punished, so a great many trans people have some very powerful incentives to suppress or constrain our interests early in life, or restrict our participation in activities for which an expressed interest earns censure or worse.
Pragmatically, gender is also performed, and there are a lot of subtle little things about it that cisgender people don’t necessarily have innately either, but which are learned and transmitted culturally, many of which are the practical aspects of larger stuff (putting on makeup and making it look good is a skill, and it consists of lots of tiny subskills). Due to the aforementioned process, trans people very frequently don’t get a chance to acquire those skills during the phase when their cis counterparts are learning them, or face more risks for doing so.
Finally, at least in the West: Trans medical and social access were originally predicated on jumping through an awful lot of very heteronormative hoops, and that framework still heavily influences many trans communities, particularly for older folks. This aspect is changing much faster thanks to the internet, but you still only need to go to the right forum or support group to see this dynamic in action. There’s a lot of gender policing, and some subsets of the community who basically insist on an extreme version of this framing as a prerequisite for “authentic” trans identity.
So...when a trans person transitions, very often they are coping with some or all of this, often for the first time, simultaneously, and within a short time frame. We’re also under a great deal of pressure about all of it.
“What do you mean, you were assigned male but are really female? There’s no ‘really’ about it—gender is just a social construct, so do whatever you want.”
Yeah, no idea how good my intuitions are here. I don’t have much experience with the subject, and frankly have a little difficulty vividly imagining what it’s like to have strong feelings about one’s own gender. So let’s go read Jandila’s comments instead of this one.
It’s a common inside joke amongst SF-loving, programmer trans women that there are a lot of SF-loving, programmer trans women, or that trans women are especially and unusually common in those fields. But they usually don’t socialize with large swathes of other trans women who come unsorted by any other criterion save “trans and women”; I think this is an availability bias coupled with a bit of “I’ve found my tribe!” thinking.
As for the radical-feminists-versus-transsexuals thing—there seems to be a fair amount of tension between the gender/sexuality theories of different parts of the queer and feminist movements, which are generally glossed over in favor of cooperation due to common goals. Which, actually, is somewhat heartening.
After I posted my comment, I realized that 3 vs 16 might just reflect the overall gender ratio of LW
Now I feel dumb for not even noticing that. “In a group where most people were born males, why is it the case that most trans people were born males?” doesn’t even seem like a question.
That sounds like hindsight bias. If there were 16 trans men and 3 trans women, you’d be saying ‘”In a group where most people currently identify as men, why is it the case that most trans people currently identify as men?” doesn’t even seem like a question.’
I can attest that this reasoning occurred to me knowing only that there were 1.3% trans women; my prediction was ‘based on my experience with trans people, this probably reflects upbringing-assigned gender, so I expect to see fewer trans men’.
Haha, that’s a great way to look at it. Had skipped over this myself too!
Now it makes me wonder which would be more significant between this and the apparent prominence of M->F over F->M that I just read some stats about (if the stats are true/reliable, 0.7 conf there).
I mentioned them in a different subthread around here. The linked PDF has a few fun numbers, but didn’t notice any obvious dates or timelines. The main website hosting it has a bit more data and references from what little I looked into.
Hmm. Thanks for the link to that wikipedia page. Interesting...
...the definitions given on that wikipedia page seem to imply that I’m strongly queer and/or andro*, at least in terms of my experiences and gender-identity. Had never noticed nor cared (which, apparently, is a component of some variants of andro-somethings). I’m (very visibly) biologically male and “identify” (socially) as male for obvious reasons (AKA don’t care if miscategorized, as long as the stereotyping isn’t too harmful), and I’m attracted mostly to females because of instinct (I guess?) and practical issues (e.g. disdain of anal sex).
Oh well, one more thing to consider when trying to figure out why people get confused by my behaviors. I’ve always (in recent years anyway) thought of myself as “human with penis”.
Same here. (But one of the reasons why I identify as male in spite of being somewhat psychologically androgynous is that I take exception with the notion that if someone doesn’t have sufficiently masculine (feminine) traits, he (she) is not a ‘real’ man (woman). And I’m almost exclusively attracted to females, almost exclusively because of ‘instinct’ (a.k.a. males just don’t give me a boner; is there a better word than “instinct”?) but also because I’d like to have biological children some day.)
Maybe the next survey should include the Bem Sex Role Inventory. (According to this, I’m slightly above median for both masculinity and femininity, and slightly more feminine than masculine.)
Sounds like you did a two-tailed test. shminux’s hypothesis, which he has stated several times IIRC, is that people who can solve it will not be taken in by Eliezer’s MWI flim-flam, as it were, and would be less likely to accept MWI. So you should’ve been running a one-tailed t-test to reject the hypothesis that the can-solvers are less MWI’d. The p-value would then be something like 0.13 by symmetry.
Yes, but I imagined someone like Eliezer might have the hypothesis that the math naturally leads to MWI and rationalists who understood the math would realize that.
3 vs 16 seems like quite a difference, even allowing for the small sample size. Is this consistent with the larger population?
Might be close enough to assume it’s due to the small sample:
Recent statistics from the Netherlands indicate that about 1 in 12,000 natal males undergo
sex-reassignment and about 1 in 34,000 natal females.
Source:Transgender Issues: A Fact Sheet
No idea how reliable those numbers are, nor how they compare with elsewhere in the world. The main website that hosts that PDF should have more complete data that could be cross-referenced, if someone wants to take the time to do that.
Interesting. Going to the source of some of those numbers, it doesn’t look like there was clear specification of what they meant by “sexual orientation”, so that line of the chart is actually entirely meaningless to me. Anyone have a good guess as to how people would have answered?
AFAICT It seems to be answered in terms of the sex of their partners post-transition, i.e. a hetero MTF would prefer sexually-male partners.
The fact that the 59% stat for history of rape is symmetrical for MTF and FTM really bugs me, though. It seems to imply weird causal arrows pointing in completely opposite directions depending on whether you were originally male or female, based on my prior knowledge.
Which seems very scary, because it could also imply that MTFs are a dozen decibels more likely to be targets of rape than average females. Now I wonder if that has been taken into account when looking at the mental health stats.
Yeah, somewhere in there are some pretty disturbing violent crime stats. A notable proportion of violent crime in one country was towards trans people.
Sounds like you did a two-tailed test. shminux’s hypothesis, which he has stated several times IIRC, is that people who can solve it will not be taken in by Eliezer’s MWI flim-flam, as it were, and would be less likely to accept MWI. So you should’ve been running a one-tailed t-test to reject the hypothesis that the can-solvers are less MWI’d. The p-value would then be something like 0.13 by symmetry.
No, the data showed people who could solve the Schrodinger Equation being more likely to accept MWI, contrary to shminux’s hypothesis, so the p-value would be 0.13 in a one-tailed test for the opposite of shminux’s hypothesis. I guess that means the p-value for a one-tailed test for shminux’s hypothesis would be 0.87.
Why did you close it early? That seems entirely unnecessary.
I put a link and exhortation prominently in the #lesswrong topic from the day the survey opened to the day it closed.
3 vs 16 seems like quite a difference, even allowing for the small sample size. Is this consistent with the larger population?
So ~3x more people prefer polyamory than are actually engaged in it...
Impressive.
Woot! And I’m not even trying or linking LW especially often.
(I am also pleased by the nicotine and modafinil results, although you dropped a number in ‘Never: 76.5%’)
So more people are against than for. Not exactly a mandate for its use.
Sounds like you did a two-tailed test. shminux’s hypothesis, which he has stated several times IIRC, is that people who can solve it will not be taken in by Eliezer’s MWI flim-flam, as it were, and would be less likely to accept MWI. So you should’ve been running a one-tailed t-test to reject the hypothesis that the can-solvers are less MWI’d. The p-value would then be something like 0.13 by symmetry.
I would not describe this as an accurate conclusion. For one thing, I currently have one partner who has other partners, so I think I am unambiguously “currently engaged in polyamory” even though I would have put 1 on the survey.
For another, I think it is reasonable to say that someone who is in a relationship with exactly one other person, but is not monogamous with that person (i.e. is available to enter further relationships) is engaged in polyamory.
Do you think your situation explains 2/3s of those who prefer polyamory?
Well, I think you can probably break it down as follows, given just the data we have:
0 partners
1 partner, looking
1 partner, not looking
2 partners+
Of those, I would say the second and fourth are unambiguously practicing poly, the third could go either way but you could say is presumptively mono, and the first probably doesn’t count (since they are actively practicing neither mono nor poly.)
If someone wants to run those numbers, I’d be curious how they come out.
The second could be people looking for replacements for their current partner, no? I wouldn’t call that unambiguous.
I don’t agree that the first doesn’t count. The Relationship Style question was about preferred style, not current active situation. It could be that 2⁄3 of the polyamorous people just can’t get a date (lord knows I’ve been there). (ETA:) Or, in the case of not looking, don’t want a date right now (somewhere I’ve also been).
I’m in the “no preference” camp, not the poly specifically, but I’m certainly there. LessWrong does seem to indirectly filter for people who are there, simply because people who aren’t are less likely to take an interest in things that would lead them to LW, IME.
TL;DR—I think it’s not that simple.
Opinion is divided as to whether poly is an orientation or a lifestyle (something one is vs. something one does).
i.e. saying someone with no partners is practising neither mono nor poly is like saying someone with no partners is not currently engaged in homo-/bi-/hetero-sexuality. (However I would accept a claim that they were engaged in asexuality.)
This is a good point.
I wonder if it’s worth even making the distinction between “lifestyle” and “act”. Thus, poly could be an orientation (“I’m not poly because I don’t want multiple partners”), lifestyle (“I’m not poly because I don’t have and I’m not actively seeking multiple partners”), and act (“I’m not poly because I don’t currently have multiple partners”).
I used to always use the “act” definition when discussing sexual orientation (“I don’t have one—I haven’t had sex with anyone lately”) to the confusion of all interlocutors.
Heh, in fact I started but then deleted as a derail some discussion of problems in activist and academic discussions of sexual orientation—what are we to make of someone whose claimed orientation (identification) does not match their current and past behaviour, which might in turn be different again to their stated actual preferences.
I’m not current in my academic reading of sexuality, but when I was, anyone researching from a public health perspective went with behaviour, while psychologists and sociologists were split between identification and preference.
Queer activism seems to have generally gone with identification as primary, although I’m not as current there as I used to be. The trumping argument there was actually precisely your situation, where to accept behaviour as primary meant that no virgins had any orientation, and that does not agree with our intuitions or most peoples’ personal experiences.
There’s also a bi-activism point which says that position means the only “true” bisexuals are people engaged in mixed-gender group sex. (This is intended as reductio ad absurdem but I’ve heard people use it seriously.)
Poly seems to be more complicated still, q.v. distinctions between swinging, “monogamish”, open relationships, polyfidelity and polyamory. I know multiple examples of dyadic couples who regularly have sex with other people but identify as monogamous, and of couples who aren’t currently involved with anyone else, aren’t looking, but are firm in their poly identification.
I guess my TL;DR is that I’m entirely untroubled by an apparent difference between preference and practice, and if the survey had asked similar questions about sexual orientation preference & practice, we would have seen “discrepancies” there too.
What struck me was not the difference in numbers of FtM and MtF, but the fact that more than ten percent of the survey population identifying as female is MtF.
Hypothesis: those directly affected by the troll policy (trolls) are more likely to have strong disapproval than those unaffected by the troll policy are to have strong approval.
In my opinion, a strong moderation policy should require a plurality vote in the negative (over approval and abstention) to fail a motion to increase security, rather than a direct comparison to the approval. (withdrawn as it applies to LW, whose trolls are apparently less trolly than other sites I’m used to)
Hypothesis rejected when we operationalize ‘trolls’ as ‘low karma’:
Plots of the scores, regular and log-transformed:
If this were anywhere but a site dedicated to rationality, I would expect trolls to self-report their karma scores much higher on a survey than they actually are, but that data is pretty staggering. I accept the rejection of the hypothesis, and withdraw my opinion insofar as it applies to this site.
I wonder, if you split out poly/mono preference and number of partners, whether the number who prefer poly but have <2 partners would be significantly different from the number who prefer mono but have <1 partner.
Now that I’ve wondered this out loud, I feel like I should have just asked a computer.
I was about to reply the same thing. The quoted statement doesn’t sound particularly more surprising than “Most people prefer to be in a relationship, but only a fraction of those are actually engaged in one”.
Would it be more surprising to find people that prefer poly relationships, but only have one partner and aren’t looking for more, than to find people that prefer mono relationships, but have no partners and aren’t looking for any?
Among those with firm mono/poly preferences, there are 15% of the former (24% if we also include people that prefer poly, have no partners, and aren’t looking for more) and 14% of the latter.
Also, roughly 2⁄7 of people that prefer poly are single, while roughly 3⁄7 of people that prefer mono are.
Thanks, computer!
Oh, I forgot to answer your actual question. Slightly over 2⁄3 of people that prefer poly have 0 or 1 partners.
Edit: Although I guess this much was evident from the data if we assume that people that prefer mono won’t have 2 or more partners. I guess the group that doesn’t have a firm mono/poly preference (which I ignored entirely) could confuse things a bit.
So, people that prefer mono are more likely to have their preferred number of partners, but people who prefer poly have more partners.
Not by that much, but yes, I suppose a tad more.
Thanks for clearing this up.
As I understand it, there isn’t good data. Stereotypically, there are more MtF than FtM. But according to Wikipedia, a Swedish study found a ratio of 1.4:1 in favor of MtF for those requesting sexual reassignment surgery, and 1:1 for those going through with it. Of course, this is the sort of Internet community where I’d expect some folks to identify as trans without wanting to go through surgery at all.
After I posted my comment, I realized that 3 vs 16 might just reflect the overall gender ratio of LW: if there’s no connection between that stuff and finding LW interesting (a claim which may or may not be surprising depending on your background theories and beliefs), then 3 vs 16 might be a smaller version of the larger gender sample of 120 vs 1057. The respective decimals are 0.1875 and 0.1135, which is not dramatic-looking. The statistics for whether membership differs between the two pairs:
(So it’s not even close to the usual significance level. As intuitively makes sense: remove or add one person in the right category, and the ratio changes a fair bit.)
Under this theory, it seems (with low statistical confidence of course) that LW-interest is perhaps correlated with biological sex rather than gender identity, or perhaps with assigned-gender-during-childhood. Which is kind of interesting.
Does anybody know if this holds for other other preferences that tend to vary heavily by gender? Are MtoF transsexuals heavily into say programming, or science fiction? (I know of several transsexual game developers/designers, all MtoF).
I don’t know of any such data. I’d imagine that there’s less of a psychological barrier to engaging in traditionally “gendered” interests for most transgendered people (that is, if you think a lot about gender being a social construct, you’re probably going to care less about a cultural distinction between “tv shows for boys” and “tv shows for girls”). Beyond that I can’t really speculate.
Edit: here’s me continuing to speculate anyway. A transgendered person is more likely than a cisgendered person to have significant periods of their life in which they are perceived as having different genders, and therefore is likely to be more fully exposed to cultural expectations for each.
FWIW, I have the opposite intuition. Transgendered people (practically by definition) care about gender a lot, so presumably would care more about those cultural distinctions.
Contrast the gender skeptic: “What do you mean, you were assigned male but are really female? There’s no ‘really’ about it—gender is just a social construct, so do whatever you want.”
It’s more complicated than that. Gender nonconformity in childhood is frequently punished, so a great many trans people have some very powerful incentives to suppress or constrain our interests early in life, or restrict our participation in activities for which an expressed interest earns censure or worse.
Pragmatically, gender is also performed, and there are a lot of subtle little things about it that cisgender people don’t necessarily have innately either, but which are learned and transmitted culturally, many of which are the practical aspects of larger stuff (putting on makeup and making it look good is a skill, and it consists of lots of tiny subskills). Due to the aforementioned process, trans people very frequently don’t get a chance to acquire those skills during the phase when their cis counterparts are learning them, or face more risks for doing so.
Finally, at least in the West: Trans medical and social access were originally predicated on jumping through an awful lot of very heteronormative hoops, and that framework still heavily influences many trans communities, particularly for older folks. This aspect is changing much faster thanks to the internet, but you still only need to go to the right forum or support group to see this dynamic in action. There’s a lot of gender policing, and some subsets of the community who basically insist on an extreme version of this framing as a prerequisite for “authentic” trans identity.
So...when a trans person transitions, very often they are coping with some or all of this, often for the first time, simultaneously, and within a short time frame. We’re also under a great deal of pressure about all of it.
Relevant: http://xkcd.com/592/
Yeah, no idea how good my intuitions are here. I don’t have much experience with the subject, and frankly have a little difficulty vividly imagining what it’s like to have strong feelings about one’s own gender. So let’s go read Jandila’s comments instead of this one.
It’s a common inside joke amongst SF-loving, programmer trans women that there are a lot of SF-loving, programmer trans women, or that trans women are especially and unusually common in those fields. But they usually don’t socialize with large swathes of other trans women who come unsorted by any other criterion save “trans and women”; I think this is an availability bias coupled with a bit of “I’ve found my tribe!” thinking.
Yep, I’d guess that matters a great deal. (IIRC certain radical feminists dislike male-to-female transsexuals for that reason.)
That’s the explanation I’d lean towards myself.
As for the radical-feminists-versus-transsexuals thing—there seems to be a fair amount of tension between the gender/sexuality theories of different parts of the queer and feminist movements, which are generally glossed over in favor of cooperation due to common goals. Which, actually, is somewhat heartening.
Now I feel dumb for not even noticing that. “In a group where most people were born males, why is it the case that most trans people were born males?” doesn’t even seem like a question.
That sounds like hindsight bias. If there were 16 trans men and 3 trans women, you’d be saying ‘”In a group where most people currently identify as men, why is it the case that most trans people currently identify as men?” doesn’t even seem like a question.’
I can attest that this reasoning occurred to me knowing only that there were 1.3% trans women; my prediction was ‘based on my experience with trans people, this probably reflects upbringing-assigned gender, so I expect to see fewer trans men’.
Haha, that’s a great way to look at it. Had skipped over this myself too!
Now it makes me wonder which would be more significant between this and the apparent prominence of M->F over F->M that I just read some stats about (if the stats are true/reliable, 0.7 conf there).
link?
Oh, heh, sorry.
I mentioned them in a different subthread around here. The linked PDF has a few fun numbers, but didn’t notice any obvious dates or timelines. The main website hosting it has a bit more data and references from what little I looked into.
Hmm. Thanks for the link to that wikipedia page. Interesting...
...the definitions given on that wikipedia page seem to imply that I’m strongly queer and/or andro*, at least in terms of my experiences and gender-identity. Had never noticed nor cared (which, apparently, is a component of some variants of andro-somethings). I’m (very visibly) biologically male and “identify” (socially) as male for obvious reasons (AKA don’t care if miscategorized, as long as the stereotyping isn’t too harmful), and I’m attracted mostly to females because of instinct (I guess?) and practical issues (e.g. disdain of anal sex).
Oh well, one more thing to consider when trying to figure out why people get confused by my behaviors. I’ve always (in recent years anyway) thought of myself as “human with penis”.
If you can’t think of practical ways for two people with penises to have sex that don’t involve anal, you might just need better porn.
Haha, true.
Then again, I’m guessing looking at actual male-male porn would decrease the odds of that happening—which I’ve never done yet.
Same here. (But one of the reasons why I identify as male in spite of being somewhat psychologically androgynous is that I take exception with the notion that if someone doesn’t have sufficiently masculine (feminine) traits, he (she) is not a ‘real’ man (woman). And I’m almost exclusively attracted to females, almost exclusively because of ‘instinct’ (a.k.a. males just don’t give me a boner; is there a better word than “instinct”?) but also because I’d like to have biological children some day.)
Maybe the next survey should include the Bem Sex Role Inventory. (According to this, I’m slightly above median for both masculinity and femininity, and slightly more feminine than masculine.)
Yes, but I imagined someone like Eliezer might have the hypothesis that the math naturally leads to MWI and rationalists who understood the math would realize that.
Might be close enough to assume it’s due to the small sample:
No idea how reliable those numbers are, nor how they compare with elsewhere in the world. The main website that hosts that PDF should have more complete data that could be cross-referenced, if someone wants to take the time to do that.
Interesting. Going to the source of some of those numbers, it doesn’t look like there was clear specification of what they meant by “sexual orientation”, so that line of the chart is actually entirely meaningless to me. Anyone have a good guess as to how people would have answered?
AFAICT It seems to be answered in terms of the sex of their partners post-transition, i.e. a hetero MTF would prefer sexually-male partners.
The fact that the 59% stat for history of rape is symmetrical for MTF and FTM really bugs me, though. It seems to imply weird causal arrows pointing in completely opposite directions depending on whether you were originally male or female, based on my prior knowledge.
Which seems very scary, because it could also imply that MTFs are a dozen decibels more likely to be targets of rape than average females. Now I wonder if that has been taken into account when looking at the mental health stats.
Yeah, somewhere in there are some pretty disturbing violent crime stats. A notable proportion of violent crime in one country was towards trans people.
Overview for the United States
Like “FTM: 35% Heterosexual, 33% Bisexual, 18% Gay, 12% Lesbian”.
No, the data showed people who could solve the Schrodinger Equation being more likely to accept MWI, contrary to shminux’s hypothesis, so the p-value would be 0.13 in a one-tailed test for the opposite of shminux’s hypothesis. I guess that means the p-value for a one-tailed test for shminux’s hypothesis would be 0.87.
Well, there also are nine times as many male-born males as female-born females, for that matter.
See http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/7xfh