While transgenderism is by no means common, it is unusually
frequent in programmers, and by my observation even more so in more productive programmers who are more likely to be selected if selecting people from code written. The ‘programmer socks’ meme does appear to have some merit.
This sounds like complete anecdata. Just because jart is skilled at coding doesn't mean there is a statistically high proportion of trans people in the "skilled coders" demographic.
Definitely anecdata but I can +1 that all sorts of people outside the mainstream enjoy safety in online communities because of the anonymity. This has always been a draw since the early internet up through now. You can rise through the ranks of open source using only your words and your code.
>There is an elevated co-occurrence of autism in trans individuals, with recent meta-analyses suggesting that 11% of trans individuals are autistic. The presence of autism in trans young people can create clinical challenges by adding complexity to the presentation, assessment and management of those presenting to gender clinics. Although many trans young people display traits of autism, how these traits relate to the nature of their gender diversity is unclear.
>Despite the study’s limitations, the initial pilot data gives reason for additional research to be
conducted. Similar to Wei, Christiano, Yu, Blackorby, Shattuck, and Newman’s 9 findings, this
study also supports the commonly accepted assumption that individuals with ASD are very likely
to major in Computer Science.
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And to clarify, I did not vet these, it was a very lazy google search.
That fits with the common observation that men who identify as women typically understand women even less than other men, and often have some oddly inflexible and sexist ideals of womanhood - because their ASD traits make it difficult to understand people generally and can lead to underinformed mental models of the world around them, including human behavior.
If you just look at women and not men then it could be possible. Among the competitive female gamers the top spots with most overall money winnings are all trans, you have to go down a few spots to find a born female. Of course there are hundreds of men with similar winnings as those trans women, but point is that among extreme successes there can actually be way more trans women than other women.
That sounds like some kind of bias. First of all transgenderism does not seem to me to be more frequent in programmers. I've seen a handful out of like hundreds in the past few years. There might be more of a tendency to seek attention among trans people, or perhaps people like that stand out in your mind as memorable.
If you see lots of trans people where you work, they may very well be hiring or at least referring each other. I've seen that phenomenon with gay people too. Once in a while you'll run across a business with a lot of one kind of person.
I am to take your handful as 5 and hundreds as say 200, that is 2.5%. Which is far more than 0.5% for the general population so it appears on that point we agree.
My cohort is the category theorists / functional programming crowd which indeed has a higher percentage of trans people in it than even other programming cohorts. But this is not due to a hiring ring, they lack the numbers.
No more like 3 out of 500. I think you might be kinda right in most cases that they lack numbers for extensive hiring rings but anyone gay-adjacent is likely to relate to them. They are also more likely to have a leg up when it comes to getting hired at big companies because of their obsession with DEI.
As far as work quality, I think assuming trans people are better in some way is the same kind of fallacy as assuming autistic people are geniuses like Rain Man. Most of them probably aren't.
Geniuses are more rare than autistic people so while it is safe to assume that most autistic people are not geniuses it’s still very possible that a genius is much more likely to be autistic than the general population. You’re using a conditional probability incorrectly to straw-man your fallacy.
By my observations geniuses are very likely to be on the spectrum. At least 50%.
I really don’t know what the normal programmer experience is like, I exited the labor market before the DEI stuff really got traction. My rule of thumb is, of all the code that I’ve seen that I’ve been impressed by, it’s far more likely to be written by a transwoman than a non-trans woman by a significant margin. A disappointing observation for a straight male who had aspirations of dating a hacker-girl. Additionally the more impressive the code the higher percentage likelihood of transgenderism, I do think high IQ, autism spectrum / ADHD, and transgenderism are rather correlated.
>You’re using a conditional probability incorrectly to straw-man your fallacy.
No, I'm not.
>By my observations geniuses are very likely to be on the spectrum. At least 50%.
The problem is, you are disproportionately likely to notice someone being odd and then incidentally being a genius, than someone normal who happens to be a genius. There is also an issue with the "continuum" nature of the "spectrum" that makes people assume that any bookish person with lame social skills has a neurological affectation instead of just a lack of social experience.
>My rule of thumb is, of all the code that I’ve seen that I’ve been impressed by, it’s far more likely to be written by a transwoman than a non-trans woman by a significant margin.
So you're really saying, the code is more likely to be written by a biological man than a biological woman. That is statistically true. Most women have better things to do than slave away on some obnoxious code.
>A disappointing observation for a straight male who had aspirations of dating a hacker-girl.
I was lucky enough to date a cute engineer girl once. Unfortunately it didn't work out. It's like trying to date someone with 10x more options than a normal woman, who has like 10x more options than you by default. I could probably accuse her of being on the spectrum because of how she ended the relationship, but I think she just doesn't have enough common sense to accept the few minor flaws I have. Then again, idk who else she had waiting to date her in the background. It could be as simple as, she met someone with more money. She was rich and I wasn't, and that was a problem. As most women require a partner who makes more money than they do, having a girl who does the same job as you can be kind of a problem.
>Additionally the more impressive the code the higher percentage likelihood of transgenderism, I do think high IQ, autism spectrum / ADHD, and transgenderism are rather correlated.
I think all of those things are correlated because of social media, except for IQ. But at this point we are just speculating.
You are all kinds of wrong. Geniuses (>165IQ) are rare enough that you can feasibly put in the effort to study them individually and in detail. Most people are unlikely to have ever met a single one in person. It would be ridiculous to try to source general stats of geniuses from people you have met in person.
Again you're not understanding conditional probability, the code I've been impressed by has a strong selection criteria bias as I'm only impressed by a very very tiny percentage of code that I've read, additionally I don't read every line of code written. This selection criteria is so strong that the fact that men in total write more code than women is almost completely irrelevant.
A large part of science is dedicated to not finding obvious things out about IQ which is increasingly hard to do as statistical tooling and data has become widespread. Most academics are stuck with old data and tooling and a existential requirement to find only politically correct results. If you think DEI is bad then you should see the anti-racists pledges that must be made by academics for access to data. My findings are from a mountain of data and sophisticated tooling but unfortunately I can't make appeals to authority when posting anonymously.
