Funny how the love question breaks the bell curve and just looks binary, presumably because you're only very upset if you're getting nothing and happy if you get anything at all, with minor variations beyond that.
The anxiety question is also interestingly bimodal. Apparently everybody thinks of themselves as either unusually anxious or unusually relaxed, very few people see themselves as being averagely anxious.
I would have thought that I'm unusually relaxed, but looking at this data makes me suspect that I'm actually averagely anxious. (This worries me but only a little bit)
I would like to hear a bit from the people who have had over 1000 lifetime sex partners. What is your life like? How many partners did you have to get through until you reached the rank of grand master of sex? (At least I would hope that someone with over 1k partners would be a gm of sex, gotta make all that grinding count for something!)
From what I've understood, there's a subgroup of gay men with hundreds to low thousands sexual partners. And ACX is more, not less, LGBT than the general population.
Presumably gay. For instance, last year, I saw a tweet during gay month where a gay man reported 30+ partners in a week, though it was perhaps his busy season. Hundreds of partners does not seem unusual in general. Grindr may indeed be one reason but there are still the old means too.
I was literally in the middle of typing an equivalent post when you beat me to it.
Prostitutes are a lot rarer than gay men (particularly on a site like this with few women), but most gay men don't get to quite those numbers, so it's probably meaningfully uncertain.
Does everyone in an orgy count as a partner, even if you didn't engage with all of them? I could see that as "I went to a lot of parties with group sex" being counted as "30+ partners this week".
I imagine it depends what the respondents consider sex partners, e.g. "that time me and a random person at a party made out and engaged in some frottage in the bathroom". If you have a lot of brief, unrepeated encounters of that sort, I could imagine getting up to 1,000 'partners'.
Either that, or we've got a lot of lizards answering surveys 😀
I've seen data which led me to an explanation of the seemingly impossible result (found in many surveys) that the average straight man has had twice as many sex partners as the average straight woman: About half of all sexual encounters are between a man and a (female? don't remember specifics now) prostitute. There are therefore a very small number of women who've had thousands of sex partners, small enough that they don't usually show up on surveys, so survey data shows men had twice as many female partners as women did male partners.
It would be interesting to see the distributions in this data for straight males, straight females, gay males, etc.
>I've seen data which led me to an explanation of the seemingly impossible result (found in many surveys) that the average straight man has had twice as many sex partners as the average straight woman
Men lie upward, women lie downward. Self report surveys are notoriously unreliable for questions about sex lives to the point of uselessness. There has been some tentative study of the behavior of the lying themselves; how much the deviation from the "true" number is, if the deviation follows a predictable trend etc. But these studies have the exact same problem as the originals. I quick google doesn't produce the specific study I'm remembering, but I did find this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4097026/. I remember reading somewhere once that men tend to double theirs while women tend to reduce theirs by 2/3rds. It all seems speculative though.
Were I to speculate even further, I don't think its entirely just people giving outright false numbers. Rather there are edge cases: oral sex, anal sex, homosexual experimentation, PiV sex that is quickly abandoned for various reasons. I imagine men are likely to include all the edge cases in their history while women are able to self-rationalize a great deal of them that "don't count".
The hypothesis that men lie upward was made in order to explain exactly this discrepancy, but nobody's tested that AFAIK. The discrepancy is precisely explained by accounting for female prostitutes.
I was going to say, of all the things you think people are going to lie about, *number of sexual partners* has got to be at the top, especially with the double standard pushing things in opposite directions for the sexes.
Please do bear in mind that there are a good number of women, & I'm one of them, who are not inclined to lie or self-rationalize in order to make the total lower. My total is about 20, which I think is pretty average for someone who's been around for a while, but if it's higher than average I don't care. If it's higher than average and therefore I count as a slut in some people's minds, good grief, I don't care. I've got nothing against sluts. What even is a slut? A woman who enjoys sex and doesn't try to keep the total number of partners really low? Sounds like a reasonable take on life to me. My female friends mostly have the same attitude. Sometimes this 89% male setting (according to most recent survey) sounds remarkably ignorant about the actual women of the present era. Hey, Eisenhower isn't president any more, guys, and most of us are not inclined to take a leaf out of Mamie's book.
Well, dear, I've been sexually active for several decades. When you're as old as me your total will be bigger, unless you find a life partner who keeps you happy and thrilled in bed, and that's even better than having a big total.
If we understood women we wouldn't be here, right? ;)
Seriously, I mean....yes, the double standard has waned significantly, but there are still enough who will (and certainly enough men who will exaggerate the totals) to drive discrepancies in the numbers.
You could probably go back through prior studies to see if the discrepancy had decreased over time. That would be a fun way to falsify my hypothesis.
15. Can't say I ever really enjoyed it that much, TBH. It was OK, but I don't really understand why men wreck their lives over it.
I'm in agreement with Charles UF, I think men tend to count 'that was sex' more than women (and conversely, 'I'm not in a relationship' more than women) where women go 'that wasn't really sex because...' (and then say 'yes I'm in a relationship' where the guy is 'nah, we're casual/friends with benefits, it's not like we're dating').
I recently learned the term "situationship", as in "I'm in a situationship". Not a relationship, something slightly more than casual, something like 'friends with benefits' but you don't need to be friends (e.g. sometimes you have sex with that guy from work, so you're 'in a situationship'). Me, I would just have called that old-style "casual sex"/"sleeping around", but I'm not modern enough for the subtleties of today's youth.
Thank you for asking. That's was me (and some other people, I see). I'm solo poly, and currently have four regular partners (one of whom I live with) and some vague number of FWBs. The key to this large number is that most weekends, I go to a local sex club for an orgy and say yes a lot. It doesn't occupy too much of my life or my mind; it's kind of like juggling a fifth romantic partner, in a way.
I'm a woman in my early 40's and somewhat conventionally attractive, so I'm reasonably popular and tend to average about 10-15 sex partners (about 90% male) per night that I go. Of course, the community there is ever evolving, so there's a lot of duplication from week to week and estimating exactly how many unique sex partners that I've had is a complicated modeling problem, but I've been doing this for about 8 years now, minus a couple for covid, on a frequency ranging from monthly to weekly, and so I made my best estimate.
And yes, I do consider myself quite skilled, thank you. Practice really does help, and the wide variety of partners, each with their own needs, is ideal for mastering a variety of techniques and tricks.
As for why...well, it's partially because it's fun, obviously, but mostly it feels like a community service (in a good way). A lot of people aren't getting as much sex as they really need to flourish, and that's a thing I seem to be unusually well psychologically suited to help them with, so I do. This city and this community are important to me and have given me a lot, and this is my way of giving back. I'm a slut because I feel deeply that it's the right thing to do.
How did you get into that? How do you stay safe i/r/t STDs? How do you think you're unusually well psychologically suited to doing this? I'm... kind of interested in the idea of this lifestyle myself, though I think I need more experience and knowledge of myself to know if it's something I actually want.
I found the club on FetLife at a time when I really needed validation of my worth as a sexual being, and it was super effective so I kept going and then it just became part of my life even though I have other sources for that validation now (my regular partners).
With STIs I have a three-pronged approach of 1) always using condoms for PIV, 2) getting on PrEP for HIV, and 3) testing every few months; I've been lucky so far and stayed negative for everything (except obviously the really common HSV strains that most sexually active adults have).
As for being psychologically well-suited...I don't know. I've seen enough to confirm the commonplace observation that women in this lifestyle often become emotionally detached and burn out in a variety of ways. I don't observe this in myself, in fact, I'd say it's helped me a lot with my personal relationships and emotional openness. I don't know what the difference is. Is it my autism? My autogynephilia? Dumb luck? Some combination of the three, I guess.
Good luck to you, and I definitely encourage experimentation. Try to go with a trusted friend to start if at all possible.
Please ignore the haters--it's hard for most of us to find our niche in life. I am not that outgoing and find the whole process way too stressful, but if it makes you happy and it makes everyone else happy and everyone's safe, it has to be considered a net good.
Yes. I was lucky to have one of the best surgeons in the world, and although I'm happy to talk about my transness, it doesn't usually come up in the context of the club unless I bring it up. It is definitely relevant to my experience, though; there's a common saying "a slut is a woman with the morals of a man" and I think about that a lot ;)
I did want to ask about that, I have heard of a lot of other trans women who experienced reduced or absent sexual sensitivity after getting bottom surgery. I assume you retain function, do you think that's entirely a function of your surgeon, or of the type of surgery, or both? Also I don't know if you've had FFS, and if you think that's contributed anything to your experience? Part of the reason why I've put off surgery for so long is that the prospect of going through the process to find a surgeon/team that's good enough seems so daunting, and the consequences so important.
My surgeon (Dr. Chettawut, in Bangkok) does seem to have some techniques that I've never seen replicated, so I'd have to say it's a combination of both. I have full function, and can orgasm both from clitoral stimulation and from penetration, though it took me several years of practice after surgery to really get good at the latter. I've had bottom surgery and breast augmentation (both with Chettawut) but no FFS; I'm genetically lucky enough that I don't feel that I need it; I'm already generally read as a woman with a particularly striking nose and jawline, and I'm happy with that.
I agree that it's super important to pick a good surgeon; I owe a lot of my happiness to Dr. Chettawut's skill and I've known trans women whose experiences after bottom surgery have been a lot less positive.
Wow, gotcha! I recognize that name. I wonder how long the wait times are though. How did you decide on him? He doesn't seem to be too expensive, apparently?
Congrats on what sounds like an overall successful medical transition!
I am reporting this comment, which is dumb, crass, mean-spirited and not backed up by even a wisp of argument or evidence. You appear to believe that your EWWW reflex is evidence enough. To put it another way, Wanda: Hissing revulsion for someone else's take on life out of your butt isn't a sign of intelligence, just of flatulence.
I'm reluctant to raise this, but I think the compelling question here is whether the above person is being explicit about their transgender status with every one of their partners OR everyone in this environment has opted in to being fine with bisexual sex.
Because if they're not, they are
(1) raping people, on the now standard definition of informed consent
(2) validating one of the most extreme and universally mocked anti-LGBT arguments that people will be made to have gay sex against their will.
If they are being consistently transparent, then my complete apologies. I really really hope that nobody is being tricked into same-sex activity (or if you prefer, what they may very reasonably view as same-sex activity). But I've seen transgender activists outright say that they don't have to disclose their true sex to a sexual partner, and the idea that this could be happening (and that after years of laughing at the idea as beyond silly, the lgbt movement could be actually tricking people into unwanted homosexual acts, and simply rules-lawyering the definitions to deny it) is horrifying.
It looks from the context like Wanda is primarily reacting to this possibility, although I could be wrong.
EDIT: Oh and by the way, all of the above applies to gay people being tricked into heterosexual sex as well, which I think is far far more common since they're already in a community with strong taboos against questioning trans ideology.
C'mon, Wanda, that's mean even by my standards. Whether Sophia is a guy, a gal, or whatever is not wholly relevant in "I sleep with a lot of people" unless we're going to talk about male sex drive and male socialisation around sex, and that's getting too detailed into a discussion of "this is why I put down that number on the survey" which, after all, is the main reason as to "how come some people put down high numbers?"
Women (cis) go to sex clubs as well as men (cis) and trans people and gay people and poly pan kinky people, I don't approve of the entire thing but that's not because my objections are founded on "you're not really a woman".
You're trying really hard to provoke offence, here, and it gladdens me to see Sophia rise about it so graciously.
But maybe... stop? Whatever your feelings on various questions of policy or ethics in this area, what possible good could come from treating trans people themselves poorly?
Since when is criticizing someone's obviously-disordered (at a bare minimum he's sexually compulsive) life choices 'treating them badly'? Read this person's account of their lifestyle: this is an obviously unhealthy person. I refuse to avoid calling that out. It does no one any favors to normalize mental illness.
I understand that transgenderism is a controversial topic and that you're obviously on the side that doesn't consider it a mental illness. That's fine, we disagree. However self-righteous you may feel, don't forget that a different perspective on the topic exists and that your position is the minority one, both historically and globally. If you want to advocate for transgenders being treated equally then fine - part of that is forcing them to experience open criticism from those who disagree with them. If they're unable to do that then they don't deserve society's respect or protection, and you do them no favors by treating them like children who have to be sheltered from opposition or criticism. They have to take their lumps just like everybody else.
I said nothing uncivil, simply pointed out a glaring inconsistency in their position. If they don't want to be teased then they shouldn't take such absurd positions. Transgenderism isn't even philosophically coherent much less empirically validated and I won't go to any special lengths to restrain either my disgust or my critique of what appears to many people to be an obviously deranged perspective - just as I wouldn't hold back from criticizing pedophiles, flat earthers, creationists, or those who endorse female circumcision. Sex is a somatic categorization not a psychological one. No amount of 'identification' can change it and it's simply a category error to argue that it does (as the recent Cass report suggests). I'm in no way saying that people can't do what they want - they can put out both eyes and go around claiming to be Oedipus for all I care - but don't expect me to view it as normal or healthy. Now if you want to argue about the merits of the ontology be my guest, but don't act surprised when someone raises an eyebrow at a [trigger warning: about to use a term which does not assume the validity of self-identification] man who's role-playing a woman when he announces "he-he I'm such a dirty slut that I'm practically a man". It's like the Emperor complaining that his new clothes are awfully drafty. Don't get upset when someone yells, "Yeah, that's because you're naked."
Whatever dude. The community of people you want to do stuff with gets to decide what's acceptable. I gave up on kink and stopped identifying as poly at least in part because all the kinksters and poly people were woke and I knew I would eventually get in trouble, or annoy someone and have them spread lies about me. I don't get to tell them what the boundaries for inclusion in their community are.
If the people in the sex club are fine with her, and they evidently are, she gets to go there and have a good time.
I just find it weird that you can be afraid of toxic wokeness (to the extent that you'll change your lifestyle because of it), and then say "I don't get to tell them what the boundaries for inclusion in their community are" which is literally the essence of wokeness: that some things (all things?) aren't up for debate.
No. Literally everything is up for debate. The last decade has shown beyond possible doubt that people simply can't be trusted with the tiniest exception to that rule.
That said I, too, am not too concerned with what people do in their own bedrooms. I draw the line at redefining words though. Especially when it's a deliberate form of mind control, which the trans movement is in spades.
True. It is contradictory. But the thing is, you can't make people like you. And you can't make them sleep with you either. (Well, you can, but it's been a crime for thousands of years.)
I think there are probably higher orders of human who can convince other people to change the rules for them. I can't do anything about that. The strong take what they can, the weak suffer what they must. It has been so since Thucydides. All I can do is hoard money and wait for the end.
If other people are willing to accept her as a woman, and they enjoy having sex with her and she enjoys having sex with them, who am I to tell them they're doing something wrong?
You should try reading this very blog! Its author has made some very persuasive arguments over the years about why there's really nothing to object to there.
But first you could try just thinking about it a bit more calmly, and less motivatedly. Why would you draw the line at redefining words, when that's both utterly futile (given that we do so constantly and have throughout history) and fairly arbitrary (given that there doesn't seem to be anything especially morally important about it)? Are you sure you're not just doing the classic conservative move of smuggling your objection to the minority behaviour/group into a series of clearly-related objections that you nonetheless pretend are principled and unrelated to your rejection of the behaviour/group? Like oh we're fine with gay people but we don't want children hearing about anything romantic/sexual, and the state should stay out of marriage (by not letting gay people do it), and religious freedom demands that we refuse to even recognise gay stuff.
You didn't care about redefining words when it was, oh I don't know, 'woke' (which you're now using it a way far departed from its original meaning). So why the sudden concern for the eternal preservation of original meanings? Everyone kind of knows why, which I think explains some of the hostility you're perceiving.
On mind control, I'm not sure what that means in this context but am sort of guessing that it's an unnecessarily loaded and scary sounding description of something which will seem more mundane if explained fully.
People are really bad at estimating how many times they've done something they've done a lot. "Played Basketball", "Played Settlers of Catan", "Eaten spaghetti", etc. are things where people expect they've done them an astounding number of times. Playing Settlers of Catan 30 times is actually a lot -- most people who have think they've played it hundreds, though.
There are certainly people out there with thousands of sex partners, but there is also good-faith misestimation likely at work.
Yeah, I think that sort of question is often better for estimation, though at high numbers I suspect a lot of people would fall for the same basic mental trick: "I learn like two board games every board game night and I must have been to hundreds of those", whether you're trying new games or meeting new partners.
I think when you've got larger numbers, the better way to estimate is by estimating a rate and a duration. Once a week for ten years is 500, once a month for 5 years is 60.
Interesting assumption; the only exceptionally promiscuous person I know reportedly has very average bedroom skills.
The speculation is that this is because they never get to do anything other than have 'first time' sex, because they don't get much - or maybe any? - repeat business.
So to them sex never gets past the slightly awkward 'getting to know you' stage, and they have never had the chance to refine their skills in any consistent way.
(Nor are they a GM of seduction, either - they are simply amiable, employed in a field that offers opportunity, and willing to say yes a lot.)
It would be interesting to see the age distribution on that. By age 40, you can get to 1000 lifetime partners with one a week. Lots of people spend more time watching movies than that, without having appreciably different lives otherwise.
By age 60 you can get there with one every other week. But to get there in your 20s though you'd need some really high frequency.
The reading comprehension clearly took a nosedive at the internet hours per day other than for work question, given the amount of answers that are >24.
I can't answer for 2010, 2007, etc. years old when getting a smartphone, but I put either 0 or 9999 to try to signify "Never had one", and I don't think I'm alone in that. So some of the answers which look like nonsense can be trimmed out on that basis.
Picking through the data in past surveys, I'm usually tempted to filter out anyone who gives more than one or two facially absurd answers. But then again, I've also found that in my own survey responses I'm less than perfect at even easy questions. Might be that a decent fraction of the lizardmen are just screwing up individual answers rather than systematically.
Your latter remark is my guess as well. I'd also guess/bet that the ACX commentariat's lizardman constant is lower than in (say) YouGov surveys, due to selection effects.
ACX readership selects for or against lizardmen? I think there are a lot of beliefs that are common here that many people would think of as lizardman-esque.
This reminds me of how SteamVR reports massively inflated usage time by tracking each instance of virtual reality, even when they're overlapping.
If I'm playing a VR game, using a program to show my Twitch chat in the headset, running the calorie tracker and using mixed-reality camera software to composite myself into the game for the stream, I'll be doing 4 or 5 hours of VR per real-time hour.
Could you change the data download links? My browser complains that the current page is on https, but the download links point to an http page. I'm sure other people could have the same issue.
You only need to change to `https`, that download link appears to already work .
There’s a definite discrepancy between reported political spectrum - with the majority left or centre - and schools choice which I would rate as fairly right wing. The majority are in favour (4 or 5) and there’s a large centrist group as well. More than 70% favourable.
I mean, there's probably also a discrepancy on the other side with COVID vaccination rate. ACXers aren't exactly typical right wingers or left-wingers.
Also perhaps a cultural difference between European left ideology, which is mostly social democratic, and American left ideology which is left libertarian.
(Aligned with Americans probably being a bit more worried about their schools than somebody in, say, Finland.)
There's remarkably little one can do to affect their school choice beyond moving or going to a special school like Montessori or one of the rare Christian schools, here.
School choice doesn't necessarily fit neatly into a political ideology. There are justifiable reasons to be for it or against it at both ends of the spectrum. My guess is that the divide is more at the political party level because of the alliance between the Democratic party and teachers unions.
It's largely a quirk of teachers unions supporting Democrats in the US, plus Republicans being anti-LBGT, pro-christian and so wanting to be able to take their money to a private religious school (or subsidize homeschooling).
But it doesn't always split that way. For example, a bunch of Republicans in rural Texas blocked school choice in Texas because public schools are important job centers in their districts.
> public schools are important job centers in their districts
Could you explain the logic on this further? Why would shifting kids from one type of school model to another disrupt an 'important job center'? Teachers outside traditional public schools don't count as employed?
private schools make public school pay look generous. lawmakers know this. the drive for "school choice" in the US is to get public subsidy for private schools, which usually means they are more affordable for middle-class parents but still too much for the poors. while whoever owns the school can profit from the difference between the money they get from tuition+subsidy and what they save by having lower pay.
Perhaps this is true in some jurisdictions, though not all. My wife teaches at a publicly-funded charter in my local area. Her pay is average for public schools in the area. Note that this school is still fully publicly funded. There's no tuition for students to attend, and there's no private institution or church running the program from the background. It's a non-profit organization.
She used to teach at a public school in a different region of the US. Her experience teaching at a charter school versus a district public school:
1. Charters have fewer requirements against teachers that have built up over the years under the force of bureaucratic momentum. This means she's less burdened with some D or R lawmaker's 'reform' effort they implemented 5-10-15 years back but never checked up on it to see if it worked or was even net-positive (mostly not). Much more teacher empowering for decisions to be localized. Much less draining on already-stretched teacher time.
2. No district means much of the school's success or failure is dependent on the competency of local administration. As such, poor admin is a risk to the whole school, with little teacher recourse. Fewer resources to backfill positions in case of unexpected teacher vacancies and the like. Much less stability from independent charters (though maybe some of these multi-school projects overcome this limitation, we have no experience with that).
3. Back when our old district leadership was lobbying against school choice movements in the state, one argument against allowing charter schools was that they would hollow out the public schools as all the 'best' students left for charters. Our experience has been the opposite: high-need students concentrate in charter schools. This includes classes that are majority autistic, ADHD, etc. The result is a very high need for special education resources within the charter schools, alleviating this sort of pressure from public schools.
Oddly, the result is the exact same kind of sorting the opposition to charter schools worried about, except that this sorting is voluntary. I'm not sure what to make of this. On one hand, if the sorting is objectively bad then why do parents do this voluntarily? (They have to intentionally sign up for charters and transport the kids there, while their local public school will send a bus to pick their kids up.) If it's somehow bad in general, but good individually, should the state be removing the choices parents of high-need students exercise to get their kids a better education? Is there another explanation for what's happening here? I don't know.
What I do know is that none of the doomsday scenarios that were parroted when school choice was being discussed in our old district school were present in the city we moved to that had long-since implemented school choice.
In retrospect, it feels a lot like the arguments I heard in states where people aren't allowed to pump their own gas. Remove that restriction? How could we? That's a major public safety risk! Predictions aren't prophecy, and sometimes a policy has been successfully implemented elsewhere. Not all school choice movements have been successful, but not all have been unmitigated disasters either. It's fair to talk about pros and cons, but we shouldn't pretend this is completely unexplored territory.
"against allowing charter schools was that they would hollow out the public schools as all the 'best' students left for charters"
Ugh. Unless I'm misunderstanding it, this is one of the slimiest arguments I've ever heard. Smart kids are, what, there to be exploited and used by the school to help the dumb kids learn? And not, you know, actual people who are there to learn themselves and that the school should be helping flourish?
If this is the argument, this is beyond disgusting. And one of the only times that "this looks like something out of the Soviet Union" is an appropriate and rational response.
Sorting is good. If that happens by the best students leaving for charters, that fine too, not a doomsday scenario.
Different education is optimal for different kinds of children (both by talents and by psychological disorders). Sorting is more-or-less neutral for the kids an unsorted school's education would be primarily geared towards, and bad for the kids that are different from that.
More concretely, an unsorted school's education probably primarily designed for the dumbest kids. And the smart kids lose much more from that than the dumb kids gain from the presence of some smart kids they despise as nerds. And if the education is designed for the smart kids, it's bad for the dumb kids, and still worse for the smart kids than a school where they have more similar kids around them.
Private schools in the US tend to have better working conditions than their public equivalents, because e.g. private school administrators can expel the sort of students who make teachers' lives hell. Also, they generally aren't unionized the way public schools almost invariably are; which is good for some teachers but worse for others.
So, the private school teachers lose the wage premium the union would command, but they're OK with that because its a much more pleasant environment. If they weren't OK with that, they'd go over to the public schools where the unions guarantee job security and higher wages so long as you're willing to grit your teeth and bear it until seniority kicks in.
Eh, people can rate themselves as liberal to lefty *except* when it comes to "where my kids go to school", then it's "I want a good school so they'll get good grades so they get good careers". If that means "local public school is hell-hole", then even the impeccably liberal will want the choice to send Junior to a better one.
Think of all the mini-scandals years back in the UK over Labour politicians publicly declaring their support for the public schools then it's revealed they're sending their own kids to private schools.
Irish/UK definition of liberal is not exactly the same as American, but I mean more socially liberal than politically; I suppose the equivalent would be mainstream Democratic Party in the US where there is support for the social justice causes but not to the extent of the extreme fringes, though liberals over here can be more economically right-wing as all the parties are moving towards the centre.
The majority of respondents are US residents, so liberal-to-lefty may mean more 'I don't like Trump' or 'I don't dislike gay or trans people' or 'I don't want to ban abortion'.
This also holds for relatively pro noncoercive eugenics, relatively against social justice, pro free speech, but also very against Donald Trump. Etcetera.
This is what one should expect in subculture's that manage to be more detached from the political polarization where people feel the need to agree with their own side's take on things. (Of course those views are influenced by the subculture, but that's because it is selecting for people who have some degree of shared core of ~understanding, even if they don't always agree)
Isn't part of the fun of being a rationalist being able to make up your own mind, so your beliefs don't have to track everyone else's even if you've picked a side?
One, Scott has a very pronounced (by his usually relaxed measures) aggression against schools. Two, the alliance with schools choice for non-libertarian right (and the alliance between conservatives and libertarians more generally) in the US is conceptually weird (as Scott put it elsewhere, "I despair of any theory that will tell me why school choice is right-coded"). Three, the _reason_ for that particular alliance is, to the first approximation, ability to use/fund religious schools, I doubt that's the motivation behind people with school choice here.
(This is guesswork because I am on the other side of the question, predicting that most otherschooling will suck and the rest is better organizable within the system.)
Trolling aside, the demographics of this blog aren't entirely intuitive, and aren't what you'd expect if your heuristic for ACX readership were "smart people with advanced degrees, disproportionately in STEM".
East and South Asians seem strikingly uninterested in the blog, given their representation in the above group. This shows up domestically, where white people make up a vastly larger share of the US survey respondents than their share of the US workforce at large tech companies. It also shows up internationally, where a vastly larger per capita share of the respondents come from northern Europe (even excluding native English speakers) than from India.
Download the xlsx / csv file linked in the post, it contains exactly that.
Derp. Right; thanks. I missed that somehow.
It’s a pity that the full question is not always presented on the charts. So it’s just Speech and some bar charts from 1-5.
(Presumably in that case given the audience and 1 was the plurality, 1 was full free speech and 5 restricted but it’s not clear).
Above the link to the results is a link to "See the full questions for the ACX survey"; if I'm understanding your concern right, that should solve it.
Thanks.
Funny how the love question breaks the bell curve and just looks binary, presumably because you're only very upset if you're getting nothing and happy if you get anything at all, with minor variations beyond that.
The anxiety question is also interestingly bimodal. Apparently everybody thinks of themselves as either unusually anxious or unusually relaxed, very few people see themselves as being averagely anxious.
I would have thought that I'm unusually relaxed, but looking at this data makes me suspect that I'm actually averagely anxious. (This worries me but only a little bit)
> (This worries me but only a little bit)
What a perfect coda to your comment
I would like to hear a bit from the people who have had over 1000 lifetime sex partners. What is your life like? How many partners did you have to get through until you reached the rank of grand master of sex? (At least I would hope that someone with over 1k partners would be a gm of sex, gotta make all that grinding count for something!)
This must be that ranked competitive sex I've heard all about.
Divide it all by ten. A large nerdy group of mostly heterosexual men here, some of them shagging all day and night.
Maybe it’s the app era
From what I've understood, there's a subgroup of gay men with hundreds to low thousands sexual partners. And ACX is more, not less, LGBT than the general population.
I'm more interested in the person who says they've had 0.7 lifetime sex partners.
Maybe he thinks blowjobs only partially count, or woke up after getting blackout drunk and thinks it's about 70% likely that sex happened?
Pulled out 70% way through the act?
Maybe they heard the "divide it all by ten" advice and decided to do it in advance to save us the trouble.
Presumably gay. For instance, last year, I saw a tweet during gay month where a gay man reported 30+ partners in a week, though it was perhaps his busy season. Hundreds of partners does not seem unusual in general. Grindr may indeed be one reason but there are still the old means too.
Or a hooker. Or both.
I was literally in the middle of typing an equivalent post when you beat me to it.
Prostitutes are a lot rarer than gay men (particularly on a site like this with few women), but most gay men don't get to quite those numbers, so it's probably meaningfully uncertain.
Does everyone in an orgy count as a partner, even if you didn't engage with all of them? I could see that as "I went to a lot of parties with group sex" being counted as "30+ partners this week".
I mean, who has the time though? I only have time for 21 meals a week, and I can eat some of those while walking.
i would predict more lizardmen than aella or gay men.
I imagine it depends what the respondents consider sex partners, e.g. "that time me and a random person at a party made out and engaged in some frottage in the bathroom". If you have a lot of brief, unrepeated encounters of that sort, I could imagine getting up to 1,000 'partners'.
Either that, or we've got a lot of lizards answering surveys 😀
I've seen data which led me to an explanation of the seemingly impossible result (found in many surveys) that the average straight man has had twice as many sex partners as the average straight woman: About half of all sexual encounters are between a man and a (female? don't remember specifics now) prostitute. There are therefore a very small number of women who've had thousands of sex partners, small enough that they don't usually show up on surveys, so survey data shows men had twice as many female partners as women did male partners.
It would be interesting to see the distributions in this data for straight males, straight females, gay males, etc.
>I've seen data which led me to an explanation of the seemingly impossible result (found in many surveys) that the average straight man has had twice as many sex partners as the average straight woman
Men lie upward, women lie downward. Self report surveys are notoriously unreliable for questions about sex lives to the point of uselessness. There has been some tentative study of the behavior of the lying themselves; how much the deviation from the "true" number is, if the deviation follows a predictable trend etc. But these studies have the exact same problem as the originals. I quick google doesn't produce the specific study I'm remembering, but I did find this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4097026/. I remember reading somewhere once that men tend to double theirs while women tend to reduce theirs by 2/3rds. It all seems speculative though.
Were I to speculate even further, I don't think its entirely just people giving outright false numbers. Rather there are edge cases: oral sex, anal sex, homosexual experimentation, PiV sex that is quickly abandoned for various reasons. I imagine men are likely to include all the edge cases in their history while women are able to self-rationalize a great deal of them that "don't count".
Besides lying and edge cases, there is also some people not responding, so the averages you get are averages of subsamples.
The hypothesis that men lie upward was made in order to explain exactly this discrepancy, but nobody's tested that AFAIK. The discrepancy is precisely explained by accounting for female prostitutes.
I was going to say, of all the things you think people are going to lie about, *number of sexual partners* has got to be at the top, especially with the double standard pushing things in opposite directions for the sexes.
Please do bear in mind that there are a good number of women, & I'm one of them, who are not inclined to lie or self-rationalize in order to make the total lower. My total is about 20, which I think is pretty average for someone who's been around for a while, but if it's higher than average I don't care. If it's higher than average and therefore I count as a slut in some people's minds, good grief, I don't care. I've got nothing against sluts. What even is a slut? A woman who enjoys sex and doesn't try to keep the total number of partners really low? Sounds like a reasonable take on life to me. My female friends mostly have the same attitude. Sometimes this 89% male setting (according to most recent survey) sounds remarkably ignorant about the actual women of the present era. Hey, Eisenhower isn't president any more, guys, and most of us are not inclined to take a leaf out of Mamie's book.
Well, dear, I've been sexually active for several decades. When you're as old as me your total will be bigger, unless you find a life partner who keeps you happy and thrilled in bed, and that's even better than having a big total.
If we understood women we wouldn't be here, right? ;)
Seriously, I mean....yes, the double standard has waned significantly, but there are still enough who will (and certainly enough men who will exaggerate the totals) to drive discrepancies in the numbers.
You could probably go back through prior studies to see if the discrepancy had decreased over time. That would be a fun way to falsify my hypothesis.
15. Can't say I ever really enjoyed it that much, TBH. It was OK, but I don't really understand why men wreck their lives over it.
I'm in agreement with Charles UF, I think men tend to count 'that was sex' more than women (and conversely, 'I'm not in a relationship' more than women) where women go 'that wasn't really sex because...' (and then say 'yes I'm in a relationship' where the guy is 'nah, we're casual/friends with benefits, it's not like we're dating').
I recently learned the term "situationship", as in "I'm in a situationship". Not a relationship, something slightly more than casual, something like 'friends with benefits' but you don't need to be friends (e.g. sometimes you have sex with that guy from work, so you're 'in a situationship'). Me, I would just have called that old-style "casual sex"/"sleeping around", but I'm not modern enough for the subtleties of today's youth.
Thank you for asking. That's was me (and some other people, I see). I'm solo poly, and currently have four regular partners (one of whom I live with) and some vague number of FWBs. The key to this large number is that most weekends, I go to a local sex club for an orgy and say yes a lot. It doesn't occupy too much of my life or my mind; it's kind of like juggling a fifth romantic partner, in a way.
I'm a woman in my early 40's and somewhat conventionally attractive, so I'm reasonably popular and tend to average about 10-15 sex partners (about 90% male) per night that I go. Of course, the community there is ever evolving, so there's a lot of duplication from week to week and estimating exactly how many unique sex partners that I've had is a complicated modeling problem, but I've been doing this for about 8 years now, minus a couple for covid, on a frequency ranging from monthly to weekly, and so I made my best estimate.
And yes, I do consider myself quite skilled, thank you. Practice really does help, and the wide variety of partners, each with their own needs, is ideal for mastering a variety of techniques and tricks.
As for why...well, it's partially because it's fun, obviously, but mostly it feels like a community service (in a good way). A lot of people aren't getting as much sex as they really need to flourish, and that's a thing I seem to be unusually well psychologically suited to help them with, so I do. This city and this community are important to me and have given me a lot, and this is my way of giving back. I'm a slut because I feel deeply that it's the right thing to do.
How did you get into that? How do you stay safe i/r/t STDs? How do you think you're unusually well psychologically suited to doing this? I'm... kind of interested in the idea of this lifestyle myself, though I think I need more experience and knowledge of myself to know if it's something I actually want.
I found the club on FetLife at a time when I really needed validation of my worth as a sexual being, and it was super effective so I kept going and then it just became part of my life even though I have other sources for that validation now (my regular partners).
With STIs I have a three-pronged approach of 1) always using condoms for PIV, 2) getting on PrEP for HIV, and 3) testing every few months; I've been lucky so far and stayed negative for everything (except obviously the really common HSV strains that most sexually active adults have).
As for being psychologically well-suited...I don't know. I've seen enough to confirm the commonplace observation that women in this lifestyle often become emotionally detached and burn out in a variety of ways. I don't observe this in myself, in fact, I'd say it's helped me a lot with my personal relationships and emotional openness. I don't know what the difference is. Is it my autism? My autogynephilia? Dumb luck? Some combination of the three, I guess.
Good luck to you, and I definitely encourage experimentation. Try to go with a trusted friend to start if at all possible.
Gotcha, thanks! I appreciate it.
Please ignore the haters--it's hard for most of us to find our niche in life. I am not that outgoing and find the whole process way too stressful, but if it makes you happy and it makes everyone else happy and everyone's safe, it has to be considered a net good.
For those confused by this account, Sophia's profile identifies them as a trans woman. Which clears things up a bit.
This is one of the many reasons I don't go to sex clubs. *shudders*
Yes. I was lucky to have one of the best surgeons in the world, and although I'm happy to talk about my transness, it doesn't usually come up in the context of the club unless I bring it up. It is definitely relevant to my experience, though; there's a common saying "a slut is a woman with the morals of a man" and I think about that a lot ;)
I did want to ask about that, I have heard of a lot of other trans women who experienced reduced or absent sexual sensitivity after getting bottom surgery. I assume you retain function, do you think that's entirely a function of your surgeon, or of the type of surgery, or both? Also I don't know if you've had FFS, and if you think that's contributed anything to your experience? Part of the reason why I've put off surgery for so long is that the prospect of going through the process to find a surgeon/team that's good enough seems so daunting, and the consequences so important.
My surgeon (Dr. Chettawut, in Bangkok) does seem to have some techniques that I've never seen replicated, so I'd have to say it's a combination of both. I have full function, and can orgasm both from clitoral stimulation and from penetration, though it took me several years of practice after surgery to really get good at the latter. I've had bottom surgery and breast augmentation (both with Chettawut) but no FFS; I'm genetically lucky enough that I don't feel that I need it; I'm already generally read as a woman with a particularly striking nose and jawline, and I'm happy with that.
I agree that it's super important to pick a good surgeon; I owe a lot of my happiness to Dr. Chettawut's skill and I've known trans women whose experiences after bottom surgery have been a lot less positive.
Wow, gotcha! I recognize that name. I wonder how long the wait times are though. How did you decide on him? He doesn't seem to be too expensive, apparently?
Congrats on what sounds like an overall successful medical transition!
>"a slut is a woman with the morals of a man"
Agreed, your behavior is unusually masculine. I wonder what could account for that.
Good times though. Enjoy.
Thanks, I do. I'm not Aristotelian enough to worry overly much about essences
I am reporting this comment, which is dumb, crass, mean-spirited and not backed up by even a wisp of argument or evidence. You appear to believe that your EWWW reflex is evidence enough. To put it another way, Wanda: Hissing revulsion for someone else's take on life out of your butt isn't a sign of intelligence, just of flatulence.
I'm reluctant to raise this, but I think the compelling question here is whether the above person is being explicit about their transgender status with every one of their partners OR everyone in this environment has opted in to being fine with bisexual sex.
Because if they're not, they are
(1) raping people, on the now standard definition of informed consent
(2) validating one of the most extreme and universally mocked anti-LGBT arguments that people will be made to have gay sex against their will.
If they are being consistently transparent, then my complete apologies. I really really hope that nobody is being tricked into same-sex activity (or if you prefer, what they may very reasonably view as same-sex activity). But I've seen transgender activists outright say that they don't have to disclose their true sex to a sexual partner, and the idea that this could be happening (and that after years of laughing at the idea as beyond silly, the lgbt movement could be actually tricking people into unwanted homosexual acts, and simply rules-lawyering the definitions to deny it) is horrifying.
It looks from the context like Wanda is primarily reacting to this possibility, although I could be wrong.
EDIT: Oh and by the way, all of the above applies to gay people being tricked into heterosexual sex as well, which I think is far far more common since they're already in a community with strong taboos against questioning trans ideology.
What is an EWWW reflex? Sorry, I haven't heard of that particular acronym before and a quick google didn't show anything.
C'mon, Wanda, that's mean even by my standards. Whether Sophia is a guy, a gal, or whatever is not wholly relevant in "I sleep with a lot of people" unless we're going to talk about male sex drive and male socialisation around sex, and that's getting too detailed into a discussion of "this is why I put down that number on the survey" which, after all, is the main reason as to "how come some people put down high numbers?"
Women (cis) go to sex clubs as well as men (cis) and trans people and gay people and poly pan kinky people, I don't approve of the entire thing but that's not because my objections are founded on "you're not really a woman".
She can make whatever decisions she wants about her life, they're evidently working out for her.
You're trying really hard to provoke offence, here, and it gladdens me to see Sophia rise about it so graciously.
But maybe... stop? Whatever your feelings on various questions of policy or ethics in this area, what possible good could come from treating trans people themselves poorly?
Since when is criticizing someone's obviously-disordered (at a bare minimum he's sexually compulsive) life choices 'treating them badly'? Read this person's account of their lifestyle: this is an obviously unhealthy person. I refuse to avoid calling that out. It does no one any favors to normalize mental illness.
I understand that transgenderism is a controversial topic and that you're obviously on the side that doesn't consider it a mental illness. That's fine, we disagree. However self-righteous you may feel, don't forget that a different perspective on the topic exists and that your position is the minority one, both historically and globally. If you want to advocate for transgenders being treated equally then fine - part of that is forcing them to experience open criticism from those who disagree with them. If they're unable to do that then they don't deserve society's respect or protection, and you do them no favors by treating them like children who have to be sheltered from opposition or criticism. They have to take their lumps just like everybody else.
I said nothing uncivil, simply pointed out a glaring inconsistency in their position. If they don't want to be teased then they shouldn't take such absurd positions. Transgenderism isn't even philosophically coherent much less empirically validated and I won't go to any special lengths to restrain either my disgust or my critique of what appears to many people to be an obviously deranged perspective - just as I wouldn't hold back from criticizing pedophiles, flat earthers, creationists, or those who endorse female circumcision. Sex is a somatic categorization not a psychological one. No amount of 'identification' can change it and it's simply a category error to argue that it does (as the recent Cass report suggests). I'm in no way saying that people can't do what they want - they can put out both eyes and go around claiming to be Oedipus for all I care - but don't expect me to view it as normal or healthy. Now if you want to argue about the merits of the ontology be my guest, but don't act surprised when someone raises an eyebrow at a [trigger warning: about to use a term which does not assume the validity of self-identification] man who's role-playing a woman when he announces "he-he I'm such a dirty slut that I'm practically a man". It's like the Emperor complaining that his new clothes are awfully drafty. Don't get upset when someone yells, "Yeah, that's because you're naked."
Whatever dude. The community of people you want to do stuff with gets to decide what's acceptable. I gave up on kink and stopped identifying as poly at least in part because all the kinksters and poly people were woke and I knew I would eventually get in trouble, or annoy someone and have them spread lies about me. I don't get to tell them what the boundaries for inclusion in their community are.
If the people in the sex club are fine with her, and they evidently are, she gets to go there and have a good time.
I just find it weird that you can be afraid of toxic wokeness (to the extent that you'll change your lifestyle because of it), and then say "I don't get to tell them what the boundaries for inclusion in their community are" which is literally the essence of wokeness: that some things (all things?) aren't up for debate.
No. Literally everything is up for debate. The last decade has shown beyond possible doubt that people simply can't be trusted with the tiniest exception to that rule.
That said I, too, am not too concerned with what people do in their own bedrooms. I draw the line at redefining words though. Especially when it's a deliberate form of mind control, which the trans movement is in spades.
True. It is contradictory. But the thing is, you can't make people like you. And you can't make them sleep with you either. (Well, you can, but it's been a crime for thousands of years.)
I think there are probably higher orders of human who can convince other people to change the rules for them. I can't do anything about that. The strong take what they can, the weak suffer what they must. It has been so since Thucydides. All I can do is hoard money and wait for the end.
If other people are willing to accept her as a woman, and they enjoy having sex with her and she enjoys having sex with them, who am I to tell them they're doing something wrong?
> I draw the line at redefining words though.
You should try reading this very blog! Its author has made some very persuasive arguments over the years about why there's really nothing to object to there.
But first you could try just thinking about it a bit more calmly, and less motivatedly. Why would you draw the line at redefining words, when that's both utterly futile (given that we do so constantly and have throughout history) and fairly arbitrary (given that there doesn't seem to be anything especially morally important about it)? Are you sure you're not just doing the classic conservative move of smuggling your objection to the minority behaviour/group into a series of clearly-related objections that you nonetheless pretend are principled and unrelated to your rejection of the behaviour/group? Like oh we're fine with gay people but we don't want children hearing about anything romantic/sexual, and the state should stay out of marriage (by not letting gay people do it), and religious freedom demands that we refuse to even recognise gay stuff.
You didn't care about redefining words when it was, oh I don't know, 'woke' (which you're now using it a way far departed from its original meaning). So why the sudden concern for the eternal preservation of original meanings? Everyone kind of knows why, which I think explains some of the hostility you're perceiving.
On definitions of words I think https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ is great, to the extent that I forget it's about transgender stuff at all and often want to link it just to reduce the level of confusion in a given conversation.
On mind control, I'm not sure what that means in this context but am sort of guessing that it's an unnecessarily loaded and scary sounding description of something which will seem more mundane if explained fully.
People are really bad at estimating how many times they've done something they've done a lot. "Played Basketball", "Played Settlers of Catan", "Eaten spaghetti", etc. are things where people expect they've done them an astounding number of times. Playing Settlers of Catan 30 times is actually a lot -- most people who have think they've played it hundreds, though.
There are certainly people out there with thousands of sex partners, but there is also good-faith misestimation likely at work.
Would they be better at estimating something like "the number of different board games I've played", though?
Yeah, I think that sort of question is often better for estimation, though at high numbers I suspect a lot of people would fall for the same basic mental trick: "I learn like two board games every board game night and I must have been to hundreds of those", whether you're trying new games or meeting new partners.
I think when you've got larger numbers, the better way to estimate is by estimating a rate and a duration. Once a week for ten years is 500, once a month for 5 years is 60.
Interesting assumption; the only exceptionally promiscuous person I know reportedly has very average bedroom skills.
The speculation is that this is because they never get to do anything other than have 'first time' sex, because they don't get much - or maybe any? - repeat business.
So to them sex never gets past the slightly awkward 'getting to know you' stage, and they have never had the chance to refine their skills in any consistent way.
(Nor are they a GM of seduction, either - they are simply amiable, employed in a field that offers opportunity, and willing to say yes a lot.)
It would be interesting to see the age distribution on that. By age 40, you can get to 1000 lifetime partners with one a week. Lots of people spend more time watching movies than that, without having appreciably different lives otherwise.
By age 60 you can get there with one every other week. But to get there in your 20s though you'd need some really high frequency.
The reading comprehension clearly took a nosedive at the internet hours per day other than for work question, given the amount of answers that are >24.
Also, some people were 2010, 2007 etc. years old when they got a smartphone or started using social media.
I think some people used implausibly high numbers to mean "never", as the form only accepted numbers as input
Unless they look exactly like the years in which they could have gotten them, like they do in this example!
I can't answer for 2010, 2007, etc. years old when getting a smartphone, but I put either 0 or 9999 to try to signify "Never had one", and I don't think I'm alone in that. So some of the answers which look like nonsense can be trimmed out on that basis.
It's probably just lizardmen
Picking through the data in past surveys, I'm usually tempted to filter out anyone who gives more than one or two facially absurd answers. But then again, I've also found that in my own survey responses I'm less than perfect at even easy questions. Might be that a decent fraction of the lizardmen are just screwing up individual answers rather than systematically.
Your latter remark is my guess as well. I'd also guess/bet that the ACX commentariat's lizardman constant is lower than in (say) YouGov surveys, due to selection effects.
ACX readership selects for or against lizardmen? I think there are a lot of beliefs that are common here that many people would think of as lizardman-esque.
What if they’re using more than one internet at a time?
This reminds me of how SteamVR reports massively inflated usage time by tracking each instance of virtual reality, even when they're overlapping.
If I'm playing a VR game, using a program to show my Twitch chat in the headset, running the calorie tracker and using mixed-reality camera software to composite myself into the game for the stream, I'll be doing 4 or 5 hours of VR per real-time hour.
Could you change the data download links? My browser complains that the current page is on https, but the download links point to an http page. I'm sure other people could have the same issue.
You only need to change to `https`, that download link appears to already work .
original:
http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2024_public.xlsx
http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2024_public.csv
suggested:
https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2024_public.xlsx
https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/2024_public.csv
(As far as actual security gain, for xlsx this could *potentially* allow a MITM attacker to add a malicious macro, csv is likely fine regardless)
Thanks for the tip, fixed.
There’s a definite discrepancy between reported political spectrum - with the majority left or centre - and schools choice which I would rate as fairly right wing. The majority are in favour (4 or 5) and there’s a large centrist group as well. More than 70% favourable.
I mean, there's probably also a discrepancy on the other side with COVID vaccination rate. ACXers aren't exactly typical right wingers or left-wingers.
Also perhaps a cultural difference between European left ideology, which is mostly social democratic, and American left ideology which is left libertarian.
(Aligned with Americans probably being a bit more worried about their schools than somebody in, say, Finland.)
There's remarkably little one can do to affect their school choice beyond moving or going to a special school like Montessori or one of the rare Christian schools, here.
School choice doesn't necessarily fit neatly into a political ideology. There are justifiable reasons to be for it or against it at both ends of the spectrum. My guess is that the divide is more at the political party level because of the alliance between the Democratic party and teachers unions.
I would hazard a guess that "school choice is right wing" may not be as true as it was pre-COVID.
School choice being right wing is a US thing? In my country it's not on the agenda of any major political party
It's largely a quirk of teachers unions supporting Democrats in the US, plus Republicans being anti-LBGT, pro-christian and so wanting to be able to take their money to a private religious school (or subsidize homeschooling).
But it doesn't always split that way. For example, a bunch of Republicans in rural Texas blocked school choice in Texas because public schools are important job centers in their districts.
> public schools are important job centers in their districts
Could you explain the logic on this further? Why would shifting kids from one type of school model to another disrupt an 'important job center'? Teachers outside traditional public schools don't count as employed?
private schools make public school pay look generous. lawmakers know this. the drive for "school choice" in the US is to get public subsidy for private schools, which usually means they are more affordable for middle-class parents but still too much for the poors. while whoever owns the school can profit from the difference between the money they get from tuition+subsidy and what they save by having lower pay.
Perhaps this is true in some jurisdictions, though not all. My wife teaches at a publicly-funded charter in my local area. Her pay is average for public schools in the area. Note that this school is still fully publicly funded. There's no tuition for students to attend, and there's no private institution or church running the program from the background. It's a non-profit organization.
She used to teach at a public school in a different region of the US. Her experience teaching at a charter school versus a district public school:
1. Charters have fewer requirements against teachers that have built up over the years under the force of bureaucratic momentum. This means she's less burdened with some D or R lawmaker's 'reform' effort they implemented 5-10-15 years back but never checked up on it to see if it worked or was even net-positive (mostly not). Much more teacher empowering for decisions to be localized. Much less draining on already-stretched teacher time.
2. No district means much of the school's success or failure is dependent on the competency of local administration. As such, poor admin is a risk to the whole school, with little teacher recourse. Fewer resources to backfill positions in case of unexpected teacher vacancies and the like. Much less stability from independent charters (though maybe some of these multi-school projects overcome this limitation, we have no experience with that).
3. Back when our old district leadership was lobbying against school choice movements in the state, one argument against allowing charter schools was that they would hollow out the public schools as all the 'best' students left for charters. Our experience has been the opposite: high-need students concentrate in charter schools. This includes classes that are majority autistic, ADHD, etc. The result is a very high need for special education resources within the charter schools, alleviating this sort of pressure from public schools.
Oddly, the result is the exact same kind of sorting the opposition to charter schools worried about, except that this sorting is voluntary. I'm not sure what to make of this. On one hand, if the sorting is objectively bad then why do parents do this voluntarily? (They have to intentionally sign up for charters and transport the kids there, while their local public school will send a bus to pick their kids up.) If it's somehow bad in general, but good individually, should the state be removing the choices parents of high-need students exercise to get their kids a better education? Is there another explanation for what's happening here? I don't know.
What I do know is that none of the doomsday scenarios that were parroted when school choice was being discussed in our old district school were present in the city we moved to that had long-since implemented school choice.
In retrospect, it feels a lot like the arguments I heard in states where people aren't allowed to pump their own gas. Remove that restriction? How could we? That's a major public safety risk! Predictions aren't prophecy, and sometimes a policy has been successfully implemented elsewhere. Not all school choice movements have been successful, but not all have been unmitigated disasters either. It's fair to talk about pros and cons, but we shouldn't pretend this is completely unexplored territory.
that sounds good, but unusual compared to most of the country.
"against allowing charter schools was that they would hollow out the public schools as all the 'best' students left for charters"
Ugh. Unless I'm misunderstanding it, this is one of the slimiest arguments I've ever heard. Smart kids are, what, there to be exploited and used by the school to help the dumb kids learn? And not, you know, actual people who are there to learn themselves and that the school should be helping flourish?
If this is the argument, this is beyond disgusting. And one of the only times that "this looks like something out of the Soviet Union" is an appropriate and rational response.
Sorting is good. If that happens by the best students leaving for charters, that fine too, not a doomsday scenario.
Different education is optimal for different kinds of children (both by talents and by psychological disorders). Sorting is more-or-less neutral for the kids an unsorted school's education would be primarily geared towards, and bad for the kids that are different from that.
More concretely, an unsorted school's education probably primarily designed for the dumbest kids. And the smart kids lose much more from that than the dumb kids gain from the presence of some smart kids they despise as nerds. And if the education is designed for the smart kids, it's bad for the dumb kids, and still worse for the smart kids than a school where they have more similar kids around them.
Wait, are you saying private schools in the US typically pay less to teachers than their public equivalents? How does that work?
In my country, private schools typically pay a little more than public schools so they can have the best teachers.
Private schools in the US tend to have better working conditions than their public equivalents, because e.g. private school administrators can expel the sort of students who make teachers' lives hell. Also, they generally aren't unionized the way public schools almost invariably are; which is good for some teachers but worse for others.
So, the private school teachers lose the wage premium the union would command, but they're OK with that because its a much more pleasant environment. If they weren't OK with that, they'd go over to the public schools where the unions guarantee job security and higher wages so long as you're willing to grit your teeth and bear it until seniority kicks in.
Many of the laws in this domain are means tested, so so that poor families have priority over middle-class families.
And when it comes to charter schools what you're saying doesn't apply.
Eh, people can rate themselves as liberal to lefty *except* when it comes to "where my kids go to school", then it's "I want a good school so they'll get good grades so they get good careers". If that means "local public school is hell-hole", then even the impeccably liberal will want the choice to send Junior to a better one.
Think of all the mini-scandals years back in the UK over Labour politicians publicly declaring their support for the public schools then it's revealed they're sending their own kids to private schools.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-do-my-labour-friends-send-their-children-to-private-school/
Sure. But here the comments are anonymous so people can pretend.
But they can't pretend to themselves.
Are you using the US definition of "liberal", or is the usage where more liberal means less free standard in Ireland or the UK too?
Irish/UK definition of liberal is not exactly the same as American, but I mean more socially liberal than politically; I suppose the equivalent would be mainstream Democratic Party in the US where there is support for the social justice causes but not to the extent of the extreme fringes, though liberals over here can be more economically right-wing as all the parties are moving towards the centre.
The majority of respondents are US residents, so liberal-to-lefty may mean more 'I don't like Trump' or 'I don't dislike gay or trans people' or 'I don't want to ban abortion'.
This also holds for relatively pro noncoercive eugenics, relatively against social justice, pro free speech, but also very against Donald Trump. Etcetera.
This is what one should expect in subculture's that manage to be more detached from the political polarization where people feel the need to agree with their own side's take on things. (Of course those views are influenced by the subculture, but that's because it is selecting for people who have some degree of shared core of ~understanding, even if they don't always agree)
Isn't part of the fun of being a rationalist being able to make up your own mind, so your beliefs don't have to track everyone else's even if you've picked a side?
Fun? You think we are here for fun?!
*You* don't think fighting over finer and finer shades of definition isn't fun?
This....is....Athens!
(More or less.)
One, Scott has a very pronounced (by his usually relaxed measures) aggression against schools. Two, the alliance with schools choice for non-libertarian right (and the alliance between conservatives and libertarians more generally) in the US is conceptually weird (as Scott put it elsewhere, "I despair of any theory that will tell me why school choice is right-coded"). Three, the _reason_ for that particular alliance is, to the first approximation, ability to use/fund religious schools, I doubt that's the motivation behind people with school choice here.
(This is guesswork because I am on the other side of the question, predicting that most otherschooling will suck and the rest is better organizable within the system.)
A magisterial survey of Elite Human Capital 💯 organized by one of its prime paladins.
Trolling aside, the demographics of this blog aren't entirely intuitive, and aren't what you'd expect if your heuristic for ACX readership were "smart people with advanced degrees, disproportionately in STEM".
East and South Asians seem strikingly uninterested in the blog, given their representation in the above group. This shows up domestically, where white people make up a vastly larger share of the US survey respondents than their share of the US workforce at large tech companies. It also shows up internationally, where a vastly larger per capita share of the respondents come from northern Europe (even excluding native English speakers) than from India.
i am surprised by more east asian than south asian readers, anecdotally i've seen far more south than east.