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I think this growth is more plausibly explained by changes in public tolerance of homosexuality making people more comfortable declaring something than a commen

I think this growth is more plausibly explained by changes in public tolerance of homosexuality making people more comfortable declaring something than a commensurate increase in mould in food...

robbedpeter 5y ago
People can also choose for themselves within the constraints of their biological predilection. Society becoming tolerant then becomes subject to sexuality fads, and the percentage of people is identifying openly with sexuality of any stripe will fluctuate around a baseline. The percentage of people who are genetically, intrinsically, unchangeably bound to a particular identity will reveal itself over time so long as culture remains tolerant. To correct for fads and fashion, we'll probably need a few centuries. Absent sufficient data, confounding factors will make any assertions about external factors affecting sexuality impossible to falsify. We'll have reverse engineered the brain, and genetic influence on behavior and personality, long before we've collected enough data to empirically correlate sexuality accurately enough to validate hypotheses like "mold is making people hay."
b112 5y ago
Thing is, we literally have no idea. There was the "hide this" aspect, truly and surely. But we have never, even today, had an accurate, truthful rendering of numbers. So the numbers could have risen, fallen, been the same. One thing I will say, stating it's always been the same over all human history seems flawed. Even if it's genetic, genes change in populations over time.
- willis936 5y ago
  "Relatively constant" doesn't mean "5.0%". It means it's always been present (which is true as far as we can tell, it's even present in other mammals), and it's always been a small minority.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    More important still, regardless of what the actual level is, we haven't seen any evidence of sudden outbreaks of homosexuality in populations reliant on a particular contaminated source of food, or apparent decline in homosexuality following stricter controls on food storage, or any of the sorts of things you'd expect if homosexual attraction was generally cause by exposure to particular foodstuffs (cf the leaded gasoline and criminality hypothesis, which sounds pretty speculative but gets more plausible when people start modelling data on regional levels and controlling for other causal factors)
    - b112 5y ago
      To be fair, studying homosexuality from the perspective of "it's not natural/genetic" can end a career. Seriously.
      - notahacker 5y ago
        It can, but there are a lot of people studying causes of homosexuality nevertheless. And even if there weren't, if the back-of-the-envelope evidence points in the opposite direction (if there's any correlation at all between homosexuality and fungi in foods, it's that we're observing more people declare themselves to be homosexual in populations eating commercially produced and processed food screened for zearalenone which is the opposite of the expected result if zearalenone is the causal factor, and "outbreaks" of homosexuality amongst groups with shared diets simply aren't observed) it's not a theory with much in its favour.
      - willis936 5y ago
        The issue is threatening the freedoms of a group by treating their sexual orientation pathologically. Even referring to homosexual "outbreaks" is pretty troubling to me. Humans are capable of some awful things with very little perturbation.
      - narrator 5y ago
        Yes, which is why this guy studying rabbits as livestock in 1987 was the last guy to even try. There's several anecdotal reports on YouTube of people doing gut cleanses and then losing their homosexual urges[1]. They said it was worms or parasites doing it, but I couldn't find any evidence for a possible casual link. I started digging around in pubmed for something else related and found these citations and started connecting dots. While replying in this thread, I just discovered the one about the vegetarians having more fusarium in their gut than standard diet eaters. There are a couple of random threads on internet forums asking why the LGBTQ people are more likely to be vegetarian. The rabbit hole grows! My guess would be the heavily processed food in standard diets probably has a lot more anti-mold preservatives in it or something like that. Absolutely nobody who values their career will ever follow up on this hypothesis, so I just throw it out there for open discussion when it's on topic. Btw, I do some independent alt health research, but I have no credentials so I'm not worried that I'm never going to get a grant again for even coming up with this idea. I couldn't get one in the first place. [1]https://youtu.be/2mG7DbMQ_gM https://youtu.be/2mG7DbMQ_gM

I think this growth is more plausibly explained by changes in public tolerance of homosexuality making people more comfortable declaring something than a commensurate increase in mould in food...

robbedpeter 5y ago

People can also choose for themselves within the constraints of their biological predilection. Society becoming tolerant then becomes subject to sexuality fads, and the percentage of people is identifying openly with sexuality of any stripe will fluctuate around a baseline. The percentage of people who are genetically, intrinsically, unchangeably bound to a particular identity will reveal itself over time so long as culture remains tolerant. To correct for fads and fashion, we'll probably need a few centuries. Absent sufficient data, confounding factors will make any assertions about external factors affecting sexuality impossible to falsify. We'll have reverse engineered the brain, and genetic influence on behavior and personality, long before we've collected enough data to empirically correlate sexuality accurately enough to validate hypotheses like "mold is making people hay."

b112 5y ago

Thing is, we literally have no idea. There was the "hide this" aspect, truly and surely. But we have never, even today, had an accurate, truthful rendering of numbers. So the numbers could have risen, fallen, been the same. One thing I will say, stating it's always been the same over all human history seems flawed. Even if it's genetic, genes change in populations over time.

willis936 5y ago
"Relatively constant" doesn't mean "5.0%". It means it's always been present (which is true as far as we can tell, it's even present in other mammals), and it's always been a small minority.
- notahacker 5y ago
  More important still, regardless of what the actual level is, we haven't seen any evidence of sudden outbreaks of homosexuality in populations reliant on a particular contaminated source of food, or apparent decline in homosexuality following stricter controls on food storage, or any of the sorts of things you'd expect if homosexual attraction was generally cause by exposure to particular foodstuffs (cf the leaded gasoline and criminality hypothesis, which sounds pretty speculative but gets more plausible when people start modelling data on regional levels and controlling for other causal factors)
  - b112 5y ago
    To be fair, studying homosexuality from the perspective of "it's not natural/genetic" can end a career. Seriously.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      It can, but there are a lot of people studying causes of homosexuality nevertheless. And even if there weren't, if the back-of-the-envelope evidence points in the opposite direction (if there's any correlation at all between homosexuality and fungi in foods, it's that we're observing more people declare themselves to be homosexual in populations eating commercially produced and processed food screened for zearalenone which is the opposite of the expected result if zearalenone is the causal factor, and "outbreaks" of homosexuality amongst groups with shared diets simply aren't observed) it's not a theory with much in its favour.
    - willis936 5y ago
      The issue is threatening the freedoms of a group by treating their sexual orientation pathologically. Even referring to homosexual "outbreaks" is pretty troubling to me. Humans are capable of some awful things with very little perturbation.
    - narrator 5y ago
      Yes, which is why this guy studying rabbits as livestock in 1987 was the last guy to even try. There's several anecdotal reports on YouTube of people doing gut cleanses and then losing their homosexual urges[1]. They said it was worms or parasites doing it, but I couldn't find any evidence for a possible casual link. I started digging around in pubmed for something else related and found these citations and started connecting dots. While replying in this thread, I just discovered the one about the vegetarians having more fusarium in their gut than standard diet eaters. There are a couple of random threads on internet forums asking why the LGBTQ people are more likely to be vegetarian. The rabbit hole grows! My guess would be the heavily processed food in standard diets probably has a lot more anti-mold preservatives in it or something like that. Absolutely nobody who values their career will ever follow up on this hypothesis, so I just throw it out there for open discussion when it's on topic. Btw, I do some independent alt health research, but I have no credentials so I'm not worried that I'm never going to get a grant again for even coming up with this idea. I couldn't get one in the first place. [1]https://youtu.be/2mG7DbMQ_gM https://youtu.be/2mG7DbMQ_gM