Sunday redemption hypercycle 2: Gays Theorem?

Even if I'm not adding a huge amount of wordcount per workblock, the
key is to keep the timer starting and to be generally on-task while
the timer is running. There's lots of hours in a day—there's even lots
of hours in an afternoon.

diff --git a/content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md b/content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md
index 70a17a7..7c00753 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md
+++ b/content/drafts/gaydar-jamming.md
@@ -4,8 +4,6 @@ Category: commentary
 Tags: anecdotal, ideology, homosexuality
 Status: draft
 
-Two related anecdotes on the power of ideology over observation—
-
 In my high school journalism class back in the mid-'aughts, there was this fat Latino boy, L., who had distinctly "feminine" mannerisms. (I'm not even sure how to describe it in terms of lower-level precepts, [as if the memory is encoded by category](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/). You know it when you see it.)
 
 One day in high school journalism class, the topic of gender and handwriting came up, and it was remarked that L. also "wrote like a girl." Being the [proud antisexist ideologue that I was at the time](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), I [wrote in my notebook](/images/crossdreaming_notebook_samples.png) about how this observation about L.'s handwriting was disturbing, in a way.
@@ -18,10 +16,12 @@ I mean, I don't "know" that; I have no recollection of the kid ever _saying_ so
 
 Something I still can't reconstruct from memory—or maybe [lack the exact concepts to express](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—is to what extent I "sincerely" thought that stereotyping didn't _work_, and to what extent I was self-righteously "playing dumb". Though my notebooks bear no record of it, I must have known _about_ the stereotype ... I didn't have a concept of Bayesian reasoning as normative ideal, though?
 
-Maybe another anecdote from a few years later is informative about the thought process. In the early 'tens, while [slumming in community college](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/#back-to-school), I took the "Calculus III" course from a really great professor who respected my intellectual autonomy, and, as it happens, the man had a very distinctive voice.  I'm not even sure how to describe it in terms of lower-level precepts, but you know it when you hear it. And I wondered, on the basis of his voice, whether he was gay.
+Maybe another anecdote from a few years later is informative about the thought process. In the early 'tens, while [slumming in community college](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/#back-to-school), I took the "Calculus III" course from Prof. H, a really great teacher who respected my intellectual autonomy, and, as it happens, the man had a very distinctive voice.  I'm not even sure how to describe it in terms of lower-level precepts, but you know it when you hear it. And I wondered, on the basis of his voice, whether he was gay.
 
 At this point in my ideological evolution, I _did_ have a concept of Bayesian reasoning as normative ideal. But I thought to myself, well, base rates: _most_ people aren't gay, and the professor's voice isn't _enough_ evidence to overcome that prior; he's probably not gay.
 
-Looking back, there's nothing wrong with the _form_ of my reasoning—[base rate neglect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy) is in fact a thing—but I suspect I was _quantitatively_ in the wrong?
+Looking back, there's nothing wrong with the _form_ of my reasoning—[base rate neglect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy) is in fact a thing—but I suspect I was _quantitatively_ in the wrong? If 3% of men are gay, you "only" need log<sub>2</sub>(97/3) ≈ 5 bits of evidence to think that someone probably is.  Is a sufficiently distinctive "gay voice" that much evidence—something you're 32 times more likely to hear from a gay man than a straight man?
+
+I ... actually think it plausibly is? I think I was reaching for "base-rate neglect" as an excuse for my old egalitarian prior that stereotypes are invalid. But even if the likelihood ratio isn't quite that large—if I only had 3 bits of evidence that L. or Prof. H. were gay, that's still an update from 3% to 20%. [Gaydar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaydar) is real! Of _course_ it's real (to some quantitative extent).
 
-If 3% of men are gay, you "only" need log<sub>2</sub>(97/3) ≈ 5 bits of evidence to think that someone probably is. 
+[TODO: incorporate studies footnoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaydar to see how big the voice effect actually is]