Put a human with good social skills in a box, expose it to a representative sample of people of various sexualities and reward it when it guesses right; the human brains social functionality is a very powerful specialized Bayesian engine. :p
Alternatively, just take your own brain and expose it to a large representative sample of people of varying sexualities and only check what they were afterwards. Not quite as technically powerful, but more portable and you get some extra metadata.
Thanks for the idea. I like the first version of your proposal better than the second, as it risks zero social penalty for wrong guesses.
I’m currently going through Eliezer’s long (“intuitive”) explanation of Bayes’ theorem (the one with the breast cancer and blue-eggs-with-pearls examples), and from what I was able to understand of it, we would need to find out:
Prior: how many of the total men are gay
Conditionals: how many gay men seem to be gay, and how many straight men seem to be gay
… to reach at the posterior (how many men who seem to be gay happen to be gay).
Your proposal sounds useful to solve both conditionals. I guess the main complication is that “to seem to be gay” is terribly difficult to define, and would require endless updates as your life goes through different societies, fads, subcultures, and age groups.
OK, I just ran some numbers based on wild guesses. Assuming 10% of all men are gay, and 80% of gay men look gay, and 15% of straight men look gay, my napkin calculation gives about 37% chance that a man who looks gay is actually gay.
Doesn’t look like any gaydar based on perceived behavior would be too reliable.
Of course, if any of my steps was wrong, please let me know.
True, I should have used more general wording than “looks gay;” it would only be one component of the gaydar criteria. The problem is finding how to state it in not-loaded language. It would be impractical to use “matches stereotypically effeminate behavior.”
Put a human with good social skills in a box, expose it to a representative sample of people of various sexualities and reward it when it guesses right; the human brains social functionality is a very powerful specialized Bayesian engine. :p
Alternatively, just take your own brain and expose it to a large representative sample of people of varying sexualities and only check what they were afterwards. Not quite as technically powerful, but more portable and you get some extra metadata.
Thanks for the idea. I like the first version of your proposal better than the second, as it risks zero social penalty for wrong guesses.
I’m currently going through Eliezer’s long (“intuitive”) explanation of Bayes’ theorem (the one with the breast cancer and blue-eggs-with-pearls examples), and from what I was able to understand of it, we would need to find out:
Prior: how many of the total men are gay
Conditionals: how many gay men seem to be gay, and how many straight men seem to be gay
… to reach at the posterior (how many men who seem to be gay happen to be gay).
Your proposal sounds useful to solve both conditionals. I guess the main complication is that “to seem to be gay” is terribly difficult to define, and would require endless updates as your life goes through different societies, fads, subcultures, and age groups.
Yea, it might risk social penalties for kidnapping and enslavement, but those seem nowhere as strict. :p
OK, I just ran some numbers based on wild guesses. Assuming 10% of all men are gay, and 80% of gay men look gay, and 15% of straight men look gay, my napkin calculation gives about 37% chance that a man who looks gay is actually gay.
Doesn’t look like any gaydar based on perceived behavior would be too reliable.
Of course, if any of my steps was wrong, please let me know.
A gaydar doesn’t have to depend on how gay a person looks superficially. There are plenty of other cues.
True, I should have used more general wording than “looks gay;” it would only be one component of the gaydar criteria. The problem is finding how to state it in not-loaded language. It would be impractical to use “matches stereotypically effeminate behavior.”
“Stereotypically effeminate behavior” and “gay male behavior” are practically disjoint.
This comment made me reassess my confidence in being able to tell if someone is gay or not.