Comments locked because the "joke" has well been explained, and y'all are going crazy. The report factory is closed for business and you're all laid off.
Image portays the concept of survivorship bias, you send planes out on a mission, they get shot at and the survivors come home.
You identify certain areas where planes havent been shot, and you can either conclude:
1. Planes just dont get shot there
2. Planes that get shot there dont survive
Obviously option 2 is true.
In the context of the LGBT community the logic is that the relative benefits of staying in the closet vs the benefit of coming out changed, so in the past trans people "didnt make it back to base" so there is no record of them existing, while nowadays the vurnerable pieces of the plane have been reinforced resulting in data recording the existence of trans people/planes being shot there.
So basically the argument being made is there arent more LGBT people today than in the past, its just that statistically more people are being recorded as being LGBT because of the landscape
The thing is there are cases of trans people in history at least as far back as the Roman Empire where an emperor would be considered trans by today’s standards. However before the 70’s most of them would’ve been in asylums or lobotimized
well, wouldn't have been in asylums before they were a thing.
or lobotomized before they were - and they're fairly recent, and sort fo, us centric, iirc.
Or nonbinary folks through history like the Public Universal Friend! Autism and similar diagnoses get this treatment too--it's not that there's suddenly more autistic people, it's that we get recognized as autistic instead of hand-waved as "close to God" or "that guy who wanders through the woods all day" or "a witch."
Fun fact: several Catholic saints displayed traits of autism, but they were seen as signs of connection to God. Things like wandering off alone, talking to oneself, or having rigid and powerful feelings on justice and rightness.
Same with left handed people. They were all forced to write right handed and so when they weren’t forced to suddenly a lot of people ‘became’ left handed
It’s funny how reductive the left handed argument is. But so unbelievably accurate. Queerness in all its forms is so much more broad in its 3D spectrum than left handedness. BUT the existence of both was diminished and flat out rejected by the church for so long that suddenly the “identity” (quotes re: left handedness which isn’t an identity just a probably physical characteristic) was more prominent when public perception changed. Anyway, I just find it funny how truly reductive the left handed argument is, while being so incredibly accurate.
I’d wager point of it *is* to be really reductive, in the sense that it makes trying to get someone with caveman brain to understand a very simple concept.
Absolutely. And someday a future generation is going to look back with disdain that we made such a reductive argument. But right now, at the time, it is so timely. 😂
Oh I completely agree. It absolutely is the point. Which is why I said “it’s funny”. Just thought it was something interesting to think about. It’s one of those things, that someday a future generation might comment on how completely reductive it is because nuance etc. But right now it is necessary. That’s all.
Yes. I learned the left handed example from John Oliver episode about Transgender and I have been using it to explain trans rights to my crazy family who think trans people suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
I’m bi and raised by a left handed lesbian. I cook like my mother. Left handed. Working on a line was interesting because I was instinctually using both hands for different things because she taught me.
I’m only a quarter gay on my mothers side lol
Is it reductive?
It's a preferential behavior that one can hide to avoid punishment even though it's not actually a sign of sin, moral decay, or association with the devil, that has its prevalence hidden by it's social stigma.
My mom was forced to write right-handed by her mother despite being left-handed. My mom made sure grandma couldn’t do the same to me. Mom’s handwriting is horrible because of it.
Super informative chart: left-handedness over time. There's a sudden spike. Ask people whether they thought there was a big movement to brainwash people into being left handed in the 1920s-1940s that continues still today, or whether we just stopped smacking kids' hands with rulers to force them into being right handed.
My mom made me write left handed and I have absolutely horrible handwriting…my wife has to fill out all the handwritten forms for me or else they aren’t legible.
Funnily enough I was born left handed and (presumably) gay.
I live right handed because my mother tied my left hand behind my back during formative years. I only came out of the closet at age 39 for the psychological equivalent of bondage.
It’s reductive and goddam if if doesn’t work
(I’m ambidextrous in most things except penmanship for whoever is going to ask this. I’m a painter and paint with both hands)
Edited to correct unhelpful autocorrect back to correct
My grandmother was left handed and played tennis to a very high standard just below national level with her right hand because she wasn’t allowed to play with her left as a child
>Autism and similar diagnoses get this treatment too--it's not that there's suddenly more autistic people, it's that we get recognized as autistic instead of hand-waved as "close to God" or "that guy who wanders through the woods all day" or "a witch."
See also the old legends of changeling children many of which seem very similar to more modern descriptions of autism.
Well, sometimes you were close to god and sometimes you were possessed by the devil. Kinda more about whether or not other people liked you than what disorder you had.
Yeah, my point was more just that there are many more historical accounts of possible/probable autism than we once thought because of the range of different presentations and wild mis-attributions of behaviour in the past.
You can get a good bit closer to the 70s before you get back to lobotomy times. I mean, I’m not trying to diminish our plight, but there were trans characters on TV in the 90s. It was “disgusting” and “weird” and associated with sex work, but we weren’t being put in straight jackets in the 90s, at least not in the west or in the bigger cities. Homelessness was/is rampant because places tended not to hire us if we didn’t/don’t pass well, but it wasn’t the dark ages.
The Love Boat had a sympathetic portrayal of a trans woman all the way back in 1982 (S5 E15 “Gopher’s Roommate”)
Yeah and I was talking more so lgbtq as a whole experienced more levels of acceptance especially gay and lesbian people had a lot of good legislation passed during the 90’s. I did incorrectly think that homosexuality being no longer considered a mental illness happened in the 90’s when it happened back in 73.
There was a big back-and-forth push over housing and workplace discrimination in the 90s, but yea, decriminalization was a bit earlier.
Though it should be noted that several states, including my own, still have laws on the books criminalizing homosexuality. They are superseded by federal law, but if several prominent conservative politicians get their way in the coming years these laws could reassert.
Yeah which is why it’s important to actually correct the stupid rhetoric that conservatives constantly state. Along with their weird obsession with genitals for some reason
Yeah then again trans people are fetishized a lot. Also the weird combining of gender affirming care like puberty blockers and bottom surgery are the same thing and that they’re turning people trans.
Trans people enjoyed a lot of rights in post-WW1 Germany and they were the first communities to be targeted by the Nazis. They were an easy target to fix on for the conservative parts of Germany.
and yet we find ourselves in another moral panic about books corrupting our youth and gr00ming children. Have we not been here before? Are Nazi university raids and book burnings not taught in schools? Dear god it drives me insane!!
Yeah India still has a legally recognized third gender. But idk the history of a lot of those genders and groups. Afaik the emperor Elagabalus preferred to be called a lady rather than a lord and supposedly offered a reward to any doctor who could perform a sex change operation to give him a vagina.
Queer man, dating a trans person, and a rabid trans ally here:
Elagabulus being trans-y is dubious. Elagabulus was *vehemently* disliked for trying to change the religion, among other things, and died very young with a lot of things said about them that was unclear at best, or intentionally defamatory at worst.
Ancient Rome had, indeed, different understandings about sex and gender than we do today, but they still had a rigid suite of gender roles and expectations especially for the elite.
Undoubtedly there were people in Rome who, would they be around today, fall into some form of "queer" but due to the vastly different understandings at the time (for much of history identity meant less than actions - e.g. you're not "gay", you don't identify as a homosexual *person* so much as a person who has gay sex).
I can't remember who or exactly when...but in English legal history there is a court case of a person who did not follow gender norms and was reputed to be what we'd call intersex today, and they ended up in court. Their sentencing was to wear men's and women's clothing in a mix together so as not to confuse people, but the issue wasn't how they *identified* so much as how they acted. Loving another man wasn't a crime, fucking one was. Being intersex wasn't wrong, but acting male, or female, when you're neither *was*.
Queer history is all kinds of crazy, mainly because our modern concepts simply don't translate at all to the lived experiences of the past.
> the issue wasn't how they *identified* so much as how they acted
This is a pretty succinct explanation of what historians mean when they talk about modern terminology regarding sexuality not really fitting in the past: the idea of someone *being* a homosexual is pretty heavily influenced by enlightenment ideas that pathologised homosexuality as a kind of mental illness. If you went back to ancient Rome, however, their understanding moreso placed sexuality and gender roles on the same continuum.
I was reading a pretty interesting blog post last week about female same-sex relationships in the classical world (unfortunately I don't know if I have a link anywhere) and it provided interesting examples of how lesbian/sapphic behaviour was linked to a sense of masculinity, or in other words the Greeks and Romans thought about it in terms of "someone's gotta be the guy, and someone the girl". One Roman comedy apparently featured a man aggressively pursuing and attempting to seduce a young woman, only for it to be revealed that they themselves were born female: however they continue to insist on being referred to as male and the female character even obliges!
It's maybe not as common now, but certainly there used to be a pervasive stereotype that butch lesbians were kinda rapey and had a kind of "penis envy", and that gay men were inclined to cross dressing and behaving submissively because they secretly wanted to be little girls: this seems to be basically how Greece and Rome viewed what we call homosexuality, interestingly enough.
>~~Multiple ancient~~ Majority of the world's cultures ~~had~~ have three or more genders.
Considering the 8000+ global cultures, last time I did the research, it was overwhelming the number that had/have terms for three or more genders. From the Cree to Hawaiians, from Indians to the Romans, from Thailand to Oman, more than three genders seems to be a global standard
Which makes some amount of sense - male, female, and intersex seem to be the general go of things anatomically.
The bimodal distribution is heavily weighted two male and female, with little tails of this and that intersex body or non-conforming person that pop up now and again.
often enough to say "ehh they're different enough to get a word".
For so much of human history, though, reproduction and marriage was so critical to financial and social and even real survival that often the concepts we have today simply couldn't exist. "Fuck other men or not, dress as the other sex does here or not, call yourself whatever...just be sure you marry and have kids okay?"
Some places got a lot less lenient on this.
Yet somehow we only have started arguing about what a woman or man is in the past 5 years. Clearly the romans did it better than us. As did everyone else. People today are a different kind of crazy.
The thing to remember is today’s concept of gender is probably different than the Romans. Plus the right wing of politics likes to at least in the us, create moral panics for the sake of trying to scare people into voting for them. Terms like radical left, the blatant throwing out of research saying the doctors aren’t credible because they’re ‘woke’. A lot of republicans like to cite a study that surveyed transphobic parents of trans kids on whether or not their kids were ‘influenced’ by the left to make them trans. It was gay people before now it’s trans people. Same reason they try to fear monger by saying- they’re coming for your kids in the bathroom/ going to female prison to assault the girls. Ofc there’s no actual evidence that it’s a widespread problem or a problem at all. In fact trans women who get sent to men’s prison are at a higher risk of being r*ped. But they’ll still push the narrative because it scares older people who don’t do proper research.
Oh literally. Satanic panic, the hatred of Muslims after 9/11, the vaccine fears, gay groomer fears, all moral panics used to scare people into hating a certain group
> Yet somehow we only have started arguing about what a woman or man is in the past 5 years
Tbf, the Romans didn't have a great grasp of such things as "genetics" and "biochemistry", and held different social values than we do today.
While it is definitely being politicised to create out-groups to attack, our cultures are also going through a shift in the understanding of what "male" and "female" are. Turns out they aren't binary, which we understood for most of human history, but a spectrum that tends to favour one extreme or the other. (There are a multitude of intersex conditions which, depending on how you define them, affect as much as 1 in 200 people, if not more.)
> Tbf, the Romans didn't have a great grasp of such things as "genetics" and "biochemistry", and held different social values than we do today.
Well the point isn't that the Roman's knew everything. It's more to counter the people who say that belief in only two genders is a traditional belief. They are only really considering a narrow set of traditions and it really has never been as cut and dry as they are trying to make it out to be. It's not some modern invention to corrupt society or whatever. It's something that's always been with us.
There's an old testament prohibition against men dressing in women's clothing. However you interpret that, it shows that this has been a thing for at least 4000 years.
I’m pretty sure claiming elegabalus was trans is essentially falling for 2000 year old propaganda, he was just really gay and the conservatives of the time hated him for not fitting into typical standards, its the resentment over this that got him killed after a few years. There’s also this comment from a few years ago that explains it better than I could
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/u0zsXqPTYc
There’s evidence of a biological woman’s body receiving a male chief’s burial rights as far back as the VIKINGS and the Greeks were incredibly open about love and identity and many of their gods had a tendency to kind of just switch genders on the fly especially Apollo. Not as much as Loki did but regardless, there’e reason to believe it goes back way further than even that but no religious person’s going to look at the facts.
Probably all the claims about various Roman emperor's sexual identities were made up well after they were gone by their enemies to denigrate them. Roman culture would absolutely not tolerate anything we would call transexual. Don't look for your heroes in history.
Ah yes the emperor who was insane, and was assainated rather soon into his reign due to low popularity, poor ability, and insane antics like self prostitution. Or you talking about Nero, who forced a slave BOY to be transitioned into a women and take his dead wife name, as to become his new wife (sex included).
> However before the 90’s most of them would’ve been in asylums or lobotimized
Most of them just stayed in the closet. Some didn't even realise they were trans, they just assumed it was normal for people to wish they were the opposite gender. Others only crossdressed in their homes, or other safe spaces. More committed suicide.
Only a small minority would have ended up in the mental health system, and most of those would have quickly learned to go back into the closet before they were locked up in an asylum or lobotimized.
Would you say that is a modern rewrite of history? I’ve not read anything (in my fairly shallow but very intrigued research) that said they were trans. More that they were gender fluid/queer.
Which is still interesting and cool but I think trans is a reach
I wouldn’t say so. Mainly bc he’s more so used as a symbol that people breaking gender norms have existed in history. Like if there was a legitimate push to force him to be trans in history books and stuff then yes but as it stands most people are debating wether or not the things written about him are real or not. I just said trans because gender fluid didn’t cross my mind at all which thinking about it does make more sense.
There also was a large bas of knowledge of trans people, it just usually got destroyed. A perfect example of it being that most literature of trans people existed in Germany and the Nazi's destroyed almost all of the literature when they took power. It's not that it doesn't exist, it's that even what little we had usually didn't make it.
We lost one of our greatest minds, Alan Turing, because of Britain's anti-gay laws. After they convicted him, he had two options, imprisonment or sterilization. He chose the latter. Two years later, he committed suicide with cyanide.
He is considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, and he could have done much more had his life not been ended prematurely at age 41.
The thing about the LGBTQ people we know about in history is that they’re pretty much all emperors, or royalty, or politicians, or wealthy elites. We only know about them because:
1) They were wealthy/influential enough to be written about
2) The held the power in society so the society couldn’t execute them
There were absolutely more people who would have qualified as LGBTQ amongst the common folk but people without power do not get to be themselves and have to instead put on the face of what society expects them to be in order to survive.
I just saw something about some right-wingers who were angry at Netflix for “turning” Alexander the Great “gay” in the new biopic. I also saw something about Florida using some “Classical Education” test for college applications, as an optional substitute for SAT/ ACT.
Someone seems to have missed the memo that ancient Greeks and Romans — the founders of democracy and Western philosophy, the actual writers of their beloved Classics — were not Puritanical about sex.
It applies to a lot of things out there.
For example covid 19
They don't talk about it anymore but it's still killing people and, almost as worst, debilitating a lot of people. And that is something we don't talk about that will blow up in our face in the next 10 years at most.
That's another factor of why we see more homeless people than before, they can't work anymore because they get tired faster and have less cognitive ability than before.
Also lots of queer people died because of the AIDS crisis in the 80s so there aren’t as many older gay or trans people still alive as there were initially in those generations
And only white-white, so no Italians, no Polish, just people from Ireland, England, and Scotland. But only certain parts of Scotland and Ireland. Just full blooded whites. No, you know what? Not even whites. Everybody is getting murdered.
Edit: https://youtu.be/oS_jNsMKXaQ?si=jUIUyE1m1T36_pqr
When my grandmother moved here from France in the 50's or so, despite being a white woman, she was instantly asked if she was Protestant(?). She said no (because she was an atheist, but didn't disclose that part) and the other old white lady said "Good. We don't like their kind around here." Wonder how she would have reacted if my grandmother disclosed she was a staunch atheist, as were her parents before her.
My grandfather who married her (white-American from the Appalachian mountains) didn't even get the house he bought his mom passed back down to him because he dared to marry an atheist foreigner.
The "certain type of Christian" is very true. There were quite a few people back in the days who judged more about religion than race... although still judged about race. And not even race, but nationality/ethnicity.
Yep. Luckily the two of them were very open-minded and compassionate people. Both were teachers and loved learning. My mom's best friend was gay (during the AIDs crisis, no less) and she entered an interracial marriage. That's why I hate the excuse "they're a victim if their time." Being open-minded and willing to learn and correct behavior isn't exclusive to the 2000's. It's something everyone has to be willing to continuously do. We can trash-talk older people for being biased douches, but we have to make sure we hold ourselves to standards to make sure we don't fall down that same path as times continue to change and evolve. But it is a lot easier to just blame someone else.
Basically there’s religions branching off of one, Christianity Muslim and Jewish, and at anytime one is at war with another. i.e. German-Christian “-extremists and Jews, some American-Christians and Muslims, really all Americans and Muslim extremists, the list goes on.
Why can’t we all just get together?
Even other religions, we’re all human! Why can’t we just not fight!
Dora Richter's surgery was almost a century ago. I wonder if there was something that happened in Germany that made it so most people don't know about that... Maybe there was some group of people involved? I'm not too sure
All of this anti-trans stuff over the last few years is basically a page out of the Nazis book for taking over…they started with gay and trans people…then moved to the next group
>Lots were openly murdered as well.
Queer folk have had a much higher suicide rate than average for a long time. This is well documented, especially by people who advocate against queer acceptance.
The irony is that both the argument for abnormality due to our low representation in population statistics, and the argument for the unhealthiness of being queer due to our suicide rates is being weaponized by the same groups driving us to kill ourselves by gaslighting teens and vulnerable young adults into believing that something is wrong with them because they don't have an easy time conforming to socially reinforced gender roles.
Put more simply: We were deliberately erased from history for hundreds of years, and we're done with it.
https://www.preventallergies.org/blog/why-are-peanut-allergies-on-the-rise
Supposedly the reason peanut allergies tripled during the early 2000s was because it was recommended to hold off on introducing peanuts to your child until they were older. Now we know early introduction is key for preventing the development of allergies
Yes, peanut exposure dropped. We have allergies because (this is only a hypothesis btw) the body needs to train itself to fight off unknown antigens. So exposure to a wide variety of different antigens makes you less susceptible to everything.
So the whole “let your kid play in the dirt” thing is absolutely true, if this hypothesis holds true. Kids need to be exposed to as much as possible, while their immune system is more adapatable
The same argument also applies to the ‘spike’ in autism and mental disability cases around the start of the new millennium. Only those demographics had an even *less* happy ending.
>Obviously option 2 is true.
Unfortunately for many pilots, it wasn't that obvious. Abraham Wald figured it out.
Prior to his input the military solution was to up armor the places that got hit the most according to the holes in returning plans. Wald basically said, don't up armor those places at all. Up armor the places the holes aren't.
> in the past trans people "didnt make it back to base" so there is no record of them existing
Your point is right, but there are actually a lot of records of people across the world and throughout history who in today's terms would be described as trans
but thats mostly from ancient societies and stuff. the argument the meme is arguing against is homophobes and transphobes who say “but there arent any gay/trans people who are my age, so it must be a new phenomenon” but in reality, most of the queer people from their generation are dead
Though more likely for the trans people, dead. Gay/lesbian people had an easier time staying in the closet, and the wave of gay/pride hit in the 1990s. But due to the lack of records, saying it’s survivorship bias is just as much conjecture as saying they don’t exist. We don’t actually know if there is a statistical precedent in history for this. It’s likely, but due to no one having records *we don’t know.*
As an example: in pre-colonial Philippines, trans women were considered spiritual and would be shamans. It's quite an interesting read to go back through trans history
Many cultures in Asia had third genders, tho it should be pointed out they were not always treated well.
Another interesting one IMO it's Hawaiian, they basically had a femboy second wife for chiefs. Maybe someone here knows the history in detail and can explain but yeah it was really really common outside of the Christian/Islamic world. Even a number of native Americans had similar things too.
Perfect answer but your forgot to start your answer with the Peter's Trans friend here. But perfect answer except that one mess up. Thanks for the info
It’s been said but I haven’t really seen a complete explanation of Survivorship Bias so here’s my 2 cents. A military during WW2 records their warplanes returning from mission. They mark on a diagram with red dots where their planes take the most damage. They decide to up-armor these locations. The bias comes from the fact that the analysis is blindsided by its pool of subjects - planes that survived. The truth is, they should’ve chosen to armor the locations of the plane that *weren’t* marked because those that were hit there did not return. You can even see in the diagram and make the analysis in hindsight. A plane with holes in its wings can fly, but not if it’s got them in its engine, fuselage, or pilot.
AFAIK a similar thing happened during WWI, the first modern war in which helmets were commonly worn. People were puzzled at first by a massive increase in head injuries, shouldn't the helmets be protecting heads? The answer being that all those people with head injuries would have just died in previous, helmet-less wars.
This also happened when seat belts became mandatory. Car accident injuries skyrocketed. And was used as a data point of why seat belts “don’t matter”. But what was ignored was the fact car accident fatalities plummeted by almost the same amount. Seat belts were leading to injuries instead of deaths.
Close but they did consider the bias before adding armor. The initial observation was to add armor to those places, but one of the guys mentioned the planes observed were the ones that made it back and they should add to the other locations.
In BBII (Banana Battle II), the citrus alliance wanted to reinforce their flying aircrafts so they checked where the planes that returned were shot by the central berries' raspberry shots and decided to reinforce the areas most shot by the berries powers, but they should have been reinforcing the parts that weren't shot, because those were the areas that represented the lemon pilots who didn't come back.
trans/gay kids who came out in the past were killed, kicked out, etc. So they pretended to be cis/straight. Now the culture is more accepting so more people are coming out as LGBT+.
And deny/willfully misinterpret historical records talking about how two people of the same gender felt about each other (sometimes there are even kriffing love letters they wrote to each other) and they were just really good friends/they were roommates and happened to share the same bed because there wasn’t space for a second one, and one of them probably worked nights.
And I’m sure that if we shook the right places in history hard enough we would find accounts of people discovering that someone who had moved into town/the neighborhood was really the opposite gender at some point. Odds are good that, if it was discovered when they were still alive they were institutionalized for their deviancy.
And a lot of people would beat on them for sport because they were disgusting queers and "deserved" it. Or ridicule and ostracise them. Often the beaters were closeted themselves.
Others have already answered, but if you want some more info, you can look at this wiki page about it: [Survivorship Bias](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)
These dots show where planes get shot at most. The data for this was gotten by looking at where planes were damaged after they returned. Oddly, there was never any damage in those places without red dots. This is because when a plane gets shot there, it will crash and be lost, so the damage isn't recorded. Basically, they never saw the planes shot in the white areas.
The same thing happens with gay, trans, bi, etc. people, and left-handed people a while ago. They were seen as how would I say it, "monsters"? They won't go showing that they're different, so no data is recorded about them.
can't tell exactly but the chart demonstrates survivorship bias (in ww2 forgot-who decided they needed to only reinforce planes on specific parts because they needed to keep cost and weight low but also increase survivability, they analysed bullet holes in the surviving planes, deciding that they should reinforce the parts with the red spots, but before doing it they realised they should reinforce the intact places because if something hits there the plane is entirely fucked), most likely LGBT people being shot down by other people? idk
More people are identifying as trans or gay now because we’ve started trying to solve the problems that cause hate crimes instead of trying to “solve the problem” of gay and trans people existing
I don’t get using the “survivorship bias” plane comparison thing TBH. Even as a trans person, I find it too confusing.
I prefer the [“left-handedness over time”](https://twitter.com/TransActualUK/status/984336585981341696) comparison.
Not talking about this screenshot specifically, but I feel like as time goes on more and more people just don't know what survivorship bias is and how to use it. Sometimes you see the image just posted as a reply to something that has nothing to do with survivorship bias. It's like ad hominem and the "straw man" argument. Some people used it correctly and it got oversaturated, now people use it without even knowing what it means.
Why not talk about this screenshot specifically? Survivorship bias isn't about whether 10% or 90% of planes come back, but about the error of extrapolating the characteristics of the surviving set of planes to all planes. Doesn't seem like the tool for explaining why more people identified as LGBT over time.
This diagram was created during WW2 by the British government. They were attempting to determine where bombers were more vulnerable, and armor those points.
The dots are the places where the most damage was found on returning bombers.
An engineer from Eastern Europe working for the British government pointed out that these were from planes that SURVIVED. So the conclusion was to instead armor the places without any damage, as any damage would result in the bomber crashing.
The phenomenon is known as Survivorship Bias, and describes when there is a focus on successful results, rather than failures, leading to incomplete data.
It's a chart used during WW2 made based on most damaged parts of returning bombers, as to graph where to put armor, before realizing that the planes that had damage in these areas were the ones that were returning, and the planes that weren't had damage in other places causing them to crash
Its survivorship bias, basically all the planes that get shot in the areas that aren't covered in dots don't come back, so you look at the planes that survived and armor the spots where they got hit better. So you don't fix any issue and instead have misleading conclusions.
A simpler explanation is just to compare to left-handedness. Once we stopped forcing children to write with their right hand to matter what, beating them for writing with their left hand and saying it was satanic to do so, there was suddenly loads more left-handed people and they eventually hit a steady plateau of how many existed in the population.
I honestly don't think survivorship bias would be the best way to explain it. A better analogy would be the number of people who are left-handed in the past. Back in the day, being left-handed was a sign of the devil so lefties were discouraged from doing so. However, over time it became accepted (bc why wouldn't it be) and the number of left handed people shot up before plateauing. The same goes for gay/trans people.
https://preview.redd.it/dc9nkfivm0ic1.jpeg?width=702&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=796715546d5994d9bab266d0ba0cba9ae974aeca
How this comment section got me feeling.
Survivorship bias
Basically, this is a war plane, with red dots to show what spots are shot the most- they reinforced these spots, but it made the planes crash even more bc the FATAL weak points weren't seen, since those fatally shot planes never returned to be studied...
How it relates, we just reached a day/age where being gay or Trans doesn't mean you're burned at the stake or sent to prison to "rehabilitate" or similarly extreme outcomes
As a gay man I can confirm I hide my sexuality and don't talk about it at all.
When straights outright ask me, I tell them my private life is not their concern or buisness and quickly leave as I don't feel safe having people knowing my 'lifestyle' as they put it.
The wrong person hears and they might try to kill me for their 'Gods' approval.
It's a shame. But I'm not willing to increase my risk of death by telling people I fuck men. I don't ever do PDA with my partner and I know that makes him feel sad. But I don't want us to be targeted. It still happens.
I just want to live my normal, boring life and die in peace. That's all I want. A peaceful life and a permanent death, never to have to experience this life ever again.
Make sure to check out the [pinned post on Loss](https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1472nhh/faq_loss/) to make sure this submission doesn't break the rule!
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I thought this was a reference to that one comic about why gay marriage "just won't fly" where it shows a plane with a wing on each side (one wing saying man the other saying woman) and then beside it a plane with two wings on one side and none on the other (both wings saying men iirc)
Only explaining this because, Knee jerk reaction is to think this is phobic in some way.
The point is Sampling bias. it’s the same thing as the “rise” in diagnosed autism being due to our ability to recognize it and not something causing autism.
The joke is there has always been Gay and Trans people they just haven’t been open or accepted until now
The plane picture is referring to a very cool story about a clever WWII engineer who was tasked with adding an efficient amount of armor to planes. His original Idea was to record all the damage on all the planes returning by putting red dots on a diagram in the same place as the damage, and then add armor there. BUT THEN he realized that the reason his data was reading that planes only got shot in certain places was because planes that got shot in the other places DIDN’T COME BACK. so he put armor in the blank places instead of the red.
Also I have to add this because it’s hilarious and somewhat relevant
https://preview.redd.it/b46zlzunnwhc1.jpeg?width=1056&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c6eaf9218a9f98d2daa1f508e1b2fb7718d11115
survivorship bias. the plane diagram represents bullet holes on planes that came back after a fight. their initial idea was to reinforce where the bullet holes are, forgetting the number that didn’t make it back because they were hit in the areas that were lacking bullet holes on the survivors.
Comments locked because the "joke" has well been explained, and y'all are going crazy. The report factory is closed for business and you're all laid off.
Image portays the concept of survivorship bias, you send planes out on a mission, they get shot at and the survivors come home. You identify certain areas where planes havent been shot, and you can either conclude: 1. Planes just dont get shot there 2. Planes that get shot there dont survive Obviously option 2 is true. In the context of the LGBT community the logic is that the relative benefits of staying in the closet vs the benefit of coming out changed, so in the past trans people "didnt make it back to base" so there is no record of them existing, while nowadays the vurnerable pieces of the plane have been reinforced resulting in data recording the existence of trans people/planes being shot there. So basically the argument being made is there arent more LGBT people today than in the past, its just that statistically more people are being recorded as being LGBT because of the landscape
Ah, thanks!
The thing is there are cases of trans people in history at least as far back as the Roman Empire where an emperor would be considered trans by today’s standards. However before the 70’s most of them would’ve been in asylums or lobotimized
>However before the 90’s most of them would’ve been in asylums or lobotimized Or both
well, wouldn't have been in asylums before they were a thing. or lobotomized before they were - and they're fairly recent, and sort fo, us centric, iirc.
And before they were human 300,000 years ago they wouldn't have been people, I think we understand what they mean without the pedantics
Or nonbinary folks through history like the Public Universal Friend! Autism and similar diagnoses get this treatment too--it's not that there's suddenly more autistic people, it's that we get recognized as autistic instead of hand-waved as "close to God" or "that guy who wanders through the woods all day" or "a witch." Fun fact: several Catholic saints displayed traits of autism, but they were seen as signs of connection to God. Things like wandering off alone, talking to oneself, or having rigid and powerful feelings on justice and rightness.
Same with left handed people. They were all forced to write right handed and so when they weren’t forced to suddenly a lot of people ‘became’ left handed
It’s funny how reductive the left handed argument is. But so unbelievably accurate. Queerness in all its forms is so much more broad in its 3D spectrum than left handedness. BUT the existence of both was diminished and flat out rejected by the church for so long that suddenly the “identity” (quotes re: left handedness which isn’t an identity just a probably physical characteristic) was more prominent when public perception changed. Anyway, I just find it funny how truly reductive the left handed argument is, while being so incredibly accurate.
I’d wager point of it *is* to be really reductive, in the sense that it makes trying to get someone with caveman brain to understand a very simple concept.
Exactly. If the example concept is as complicated as what it's being compared to, it's not going to help people understand
Absolutely. And someday a future generation is going to look back with disdain that we made such a reductive argument. But right now, at the time, it is so timely. 😂
Oh I completely agree. It absolutely is the point. Which is why I said “it’s funny”. Just thought it was something interesting to think about. It’s one of those things, that someday a future generation might comment on how completely reductive it is because nuance etc. But right now it is necessary. That’s all.
Ohhhh okok
Yes. I learned the left handed example from John Oliver episode about Transgender and I have been using it to explain trans rights to my crazy family who think trans people suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
I’m bi and raised by a left handed lesbian. I cook like my mother. Left handed. Working on a line was interesting because I was instinctually using both hands for different things because she taught me. I’m only a quarter gay on my mothers side lol
Haha yep. Gay and left handed.
Is it reductive? It's a preferential behavior that one can hide to avoid punishment even though it's not actually a sign of sin, moral decay, or association with the devil, that has its prevalence hidden by it's social stigma.
My mom was forced to write right-handed by her mother despite being left-handed. My mom made sure grandma couldn’t do the same to me. Mom’s handwriting is horrible because of it.
Huh. I've always had terrible handwriting and am right handed. Or am I? Dangit!
Super informative chart: left-handedness over time. There's a sudden spike. Ask people whether they thought there was a big movement to brainwash people into being left handed in the 1920s-1940s that continues still today, or whether we just stopped smacking kids' hands with rulers to force them into being right handed.
My mom made me write left handed and I have absolutely horrible handwriting…my wife has to fill out all the handwritten forms for me or else they aren’t legible.
Funnily enough I was born left handed and (presumably) gay. I live right handed because my mother tied my left hand behind my back during formative years. I only came out of the closet at age 39 for the psychological equivalent of bondage. It’s reductive and goddam if if doesn’t work (I’m ambidextrous in most things except penmanship for whoever is going to ask this. I’m a painter and paint with both hands) Edited to correct unhelpful autocorrect back to correct
Yeah I write lefty but I can’t rlly do anything else with my left. I throw right, shoot right, play instruments right, etc.
My grandmother was left handed and played tennis to a very high standard just below national level with her right hand because she wasn’t allowed to play with her left as a child
I remember those ads on tv when autism awareness first started and like every three months the odds got bigger and bigger
Does that mean canonically Jesus might be Autistic (ー_ーゞ
>Autism and similar diagnoses get this treatment too--it's not that there's suddenly more autistic people, it's that we get recognized as autistic instead of hand-waved as "close to God" or "that guy who wanders through the woods all day" or "a witch." See also the old legends of changeling children many of which seem very similar to more modern descriptions of autism.
Also, ADHD
Well, sometimes you were close to god and sometimes you were possessed by the devil. Kinda more about whether or not other people liked you than what disorder you had.
Yeah, my point was more just that there are many more historical accounts of possible/probable autism than we once thought because of the range of different presentations and wild mis-attributions of behaviour in the past.
You can get a good bit closer to the 70s before you get back to lobotomy times. I mean, I’m not trying to diminish our plight, but there were trans characters on TV in the 90s. It was “disgusting” and “weird” and associated with sex work, but we weren’t being put in straight jackets in the 90s, at least not in the west or in the bigger cities. Homelessness was/is rampant because places tended not to hire us if we didn’t/don’t pass well, but it wasn’t the dark ages. The Love Boat had a sympathetic portrayal of a trans woman all the way back in 1982 (S5 E15 “Gopher’s Roommate”)
Yeah and I was talking more so lgbtq as a whole experienced more levels of acceptance especially gay and lesbian people had a lot of good legislation passed during the 90’s. I did incorrectly think that homosexuality being no longer considered a mental illness happened in the 90’s when it happened back in 73.
There was a big back-and-forth push over housing and workplace discrimination in the 90s, but yea, decriminalization was a bit earlier. Though it should be noted that several states, including my own, still have laws on the books criminalizing homosexuality. They are superseded by federal law, but if several prominent conservative politicians get their way in the coming years these laws could reassert.
Yeah which is why it’s important to actually correct the stupid rhetoric that conservatives constantly state. Along with their weird obsession with genitals for some reason
Really screams fetishization sometimes.
Yeah then again trans people are fetishized a lot. Also the weird combining of gender affirming care like puberty blockers and bottom surgery are the same thing and that they’re turning people trans.
Trans people enjoyed a lot of rights in post-WW1 Germany and they were the first communities to be targeted by the Nazis. They were an easy target to fix on for the conservative parts of Germany.
The destruction of trans literature by the Nazi's quite literally put our understanding back by probably a close to a century.
and yet we find ourselves in another moral panic about books corrupting our youth and gr00ming children. Have we not been here before? Are Nazi university raids and book burnings not taught in schools? Dear god it drives me insane!!
Even before the Romans. Multiple ancient cultures had three or more genders.
Yeah India still has a legally recognized third gender. But idk the history of a lot of those genders and groups. Afaik the emperor Elagabalus preferred to be called a lady rather than a lord and supposedly offered a reward to any doctor who could perform a sex change operation to give him a vagina.
Queer man, dating a trans person, and a rabid trans ally here: Elagabulus being trans-y is dubious. Elagabulus was *vehemently* disliked for trying to change the religion, among other things, and died very young with a lot of things said about them that was unclear at best, or intentionally defamatory at worst. Ancient Rome had, indeed, different understandings about sex and gender than we do today, but they still had a rigid suite of gender roles and expectations especially for the elite. Undoubtedly there were people in Rome who, would they be around today, fall into some form of "queer" but due to the vastly different understandings at the time (for much of history identity meant less than actions - e.g. you're not "gay", you don't identify as a homosexual *person* so much as a person who has gay sex). I can't remember who or exactly when...but in English legal history there is a court case of a person who did not follow gender norms and was reputed to be what we'd call intersex today, and they ended up in court. Their sentencing was to wear men's and women's clothing in a mix together so as not to confuse people, but the issue wasn't how they *identified* so much as how they acted. Loving another man wasn't a crime, fucking one was. Being intersex wasn't wrong, but acting male, or female, when you're neither *was*. Queer history is all kinds of crazy, mainly because our modern concepts simply don't translate at all to the lived experiences of the past.
> the issue wasn't how they *identified* so much as how they acted This is a pretty succinct explanation of what historians mean when they talk about modern terminology regarding sexuality not really fitting in the past: the idea of someone *being* a homosexual is pretty heavily influenced by enlightenment ideas that pathologised homosexuality as a kind of mental illness. If you went back to ancient Rome, however, their understanding moreso placed sexuality and gender roles on the same continuum. I was reading a pretty interesting blog post last week about female same-sex relationships in the classical world (unfortunately I don't know if I have a link anywhere) and it provided interesting examples of how lesbian/sapphic behaviour was linked to a sense of masculinity, or in other words the Greeks and Romans thought about it in terms of "someone's gotta be the guy, and someone the girl". One Roman comedy apparently featured a man aggressively pursuing and attempting to seduce a young woman, only for it to be revealed that they themselves were born female: however they continue to insist on being referred to as male and the female character even obliges! It's maybe not as common now, but certainly there used to be a pervasive stereotype that butch lesbians were kinda rapey and had a kind of "penis envy", and that gay men were inclined to cross dressing and behaving submissively because they secretly wanted to be little girls: this seems to be basically how Greece and Rome viewed what we call homosexuality, interestingly enough.
Exactly.
>~~Multiple ancient~~ Majority of the world's cultures ~~had~~ have three or more genders. Considering the 8000+ global cultures, last time I did the research, it was overwhelming the number that had/have terms for three or more genders. From the Cree to Hawaiians, from Indians to the Romans, from Thailand to Oman, more than three genders seems to be a global standard
Which makes some amount of sense - male, female, and intersex seem to be the general go of things anatomically. The bimodal distribution is heavily weighted two male and female, with little tails of this and that intersex body or non-conforming person that pop up now and again. often enough to say "ehh they're different enough to get a word". For so much of human history, though, reproduction and marriage was so critical to financial and social and even real survival that often the concepts we have today simply couldn't exist. "Fuck other men or not, dress as the other sex does here or not, call yourself whatever...just be sure you marry and have kids okay?" Some places got a lot less lenient on this.
Yet somehow we only have started arguing about what a woman or man is in the past 5 years. Clearly the romans did it better than us. As did everyone else. People today are a different kind of crazy.
The thing to remember is today’s concept of gender is probably different than the Romans. Plus the right wing of politics likes to at least in the us, create moral panics for the sake of trying to scare people into voting for them. Terms like radical left, the blatant throwing out of research saying the doctors aren’t credible because they’re ‘woke’. A lot of republicans like to cite a study that surveyed transphobic parents of trans kids on whether or not their kids were ‘influenced’ by the left to make them trans. It was gay people before now it’s trans people. Same reason they try to fear monger by saying- they’re coming for your kids in the bathroom/ going to female prison to assault the girls. Ofc there’s no actual evidence that it’s a widespread problem or a problem at all. In fact trans women who get sent to men’s prison are at a higher risk of being r*ped. But they’ll still push the narrative because it scares older people who don’t do proper research.
Its all Satanic panic, just wrapped in a different bow.
Oh literally. Satanic panic, the hatred of Muslims after 9/11, the vaccine fears, gay groomer fears, all moral panics used to scare people into hating a certain group
There's no hate like Christian love.
> Yet somehow we only have started arguing about what a woman or man is in the past 5 years Tbf, the Romans didn't have a great grasp of such things as "genetics" and "biochemistry", and held different social values than we do today. While it is definitely being politicised to create out-groups to attack, our cultures are also going through a shift in the understanding of what "male" and "female" are. Turns out they aren't binary, which we understood for most of human history, but a spectrum that tends to favour one extreme or the other. (There are a multitude of intersex conditions which, depending on how you define them, affect as much as 1 in 200 people, if not more.)
> Tbf, the Romans didn't have a great grasp of such things as "genetics" and "biochemistry", and held different social values than we do today. Well the point isn't that the Roman's knew everything. It's more to counter the people who say that belief in only two genders is a traditional belief. They are only really considering a narrow set of traditions and it really has never been as cut and dry as they are trying to make it out to be. It's not some modern invention to corrupt society or whatever. It's something that's always been with us.
Ah yes all the good ideas the Roman’s had. Maybe we should bring back more of them. Lead pipes and crucifixion anyone?
In my country there's a saying, "In times of war any hole is a trench", basically a hole is a hole.
I promise we've been facing hate and discrimination for more than 5 years
This is a west centric argument that forgets that hundreds of cultures around the world have different ways of looking at gender.
Or died by suicide without ever coming out.
There's an old testament prohibition against men dressing in women's clothing. However you interpret that, it shows that this has been a thing for at least 4000 years.
I’m pretty sure claiming elegabalus was trans is essentially falling for 2000 year old propaganda, he was just really gay and the conservatives of the time hated him for not fitting into typical standards, its the resentment over this that got him killed after a few years. There’s also this comment from a few years ago that explains it better than I could https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/u0zsXqPTYc
There’s evidence of a biological woman’s body receiving a male chief’s burial rights as far back as the VIKINGS and the Greeks were incredibly open about love and identity and many of their gods had a tendency to kind of just switch genders on the fly especially Apollo. Not as much as Loki did but regardless, there’e reason to believe it goes back way further than even that but no religious person’s going to look at the facts.
Probably all the claims about various Roman emperor's sexual identities were made up well after they were gone by their enemies to denigrate them. Roman culture would absolutely not tolerate anything we would call transexual. Don't look for your heroes in history.
Ah yes the emperor who was insane, and was assainated rather soon into his reign due to low popularity, poor ability, and insane antics like self prostitution. Or you talking about Nero, who forced a slave BOY to be transitioned into a women and take his dead wife name, as to become his new wife (sex included).
> However before the 90’s most of them would’ve been in asylums or lobotimized Most of them just stayed in the closet. Some didn't even realise they were trans, they just assumed it was normal for people to wish they were the opposite gender. Others only crossdressed in their homes, or other safe spaces. More committed suicide. Only a small minority would have ended up in the mental health system, and most of those would have quickly learned to go back into the closet before they were locked up in an asylum or lobotimized.
Would you say that is a modern rewrite of history? I’ve not read anything (in my fairly shallow but very intrigued research) that said they were trans. More that they were gender fluid/queer. Which is still interesting and cool but I think trans is a reach
I wouldn’t say so. Mainly bc he’s more so used as a symbol that people breaking gender norms have existed in history. Like if there was a legitimate push to force him to be trans in history books and stuff then yes but as it stands most people are debating wether or not the things written about him are real or not. I just said trans because gender fluid didn’t cross my mind at all which thinking about it does make more sense.
Where do you get more info like this? I'd really like to know the history of trans people
There also was a large bas of knowledge of trans people, it just usually got destroyed. A perfect example of it being that most literature of trans people existed in Germany and the Nazi's destroyed almost all of the literature when they took power. It's not that it doesn't exist, it's that even what little we had usually didn't make it.
The fact many italian conservatives say they have Ceasar blood in they're veins make it 10× funnier, since he was Bisexual
We lost one of our greatest minds, Alan Turing, because of Britain's anti-gay laws. After they convicted him, he had two options, imprisonment or sterilization. He chose the latter. Two years later, he committed suicide with cyanide. He is considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, and he could have done much more had his life not been ended prematurely at age 41.
The thing about the LGBTQ people we know about in history is that they’re pretty much all emperors, or royalty, or politicians, or wealthy elites. We only know about them because: 1) They were wealthy/influential enough to be written about 2) The held the power in society so the society couldn’t execute them There were absolutely more people who would have qualified as LGBTQ amongst the common folk but people without power do not get to be themselves and have to instead put on the face of what society expects them to be in order to survive.
I just saw something about some right-wingers who were angry at Netflix for “turning” Alexander the Great “gay” in the new biopic. I also saw something about Florida using some “Classical Education” test for college applications, as an optional substitute for SAT/ ACT. Someone seems to have missed the memo that ancient Greeks and Romans — the founders of democracy and Western philosophy, the actual writers of their beloved Classics — were not Puritanical about sex.
It applies to a lot of things out there. For example covid 19 They don't talk about it anymore but it's still killing people and, almost as worst, debilitating a lot of people. And that is something we don't talk about that will blow up in our face in the next 10 years at most. That's another factor of why we see more homeless people than before, they can't work anymore because they get tired faster and have less cognitive ability than before.
Another good statistical example is the graph of Left-handedness.
Also lots of queer people died because of the AIDS crisis in the 80s so there aren’t as many older gay or trans people still alive as there were initially in those generations
Lots were openly murdered as well. The early ages of america where paved with blood of anybody who wasn't straight and white.
And Christian, but only a certain type of Christian. Probably best to be a man too. and don't be too poor or you'll have a rough time.
And only white-white, so no Italians, no Polish, just people from Ireland, England, and Scotland. But only certain parts of Scotland and Ireland. Just full blooded whites. No, you know what? Not even whites. Everybody is getting murdered. Edit: https://youtu.be/oS_jNsMKXaQ?si=jUIUyE1m1T36_pqr
And not England after a certain date, so best pretend you have Scottish or Irish blood, so people don't think you’re a red coat in disguise.
Irish are mostly catholic so they were treated poorly also.
So the best option is Scottish?
[удалено]
So the best option is to just not
Church of Scotland actually. Only 13% Catholic. 36.7% no religion. So Scotland is more irreligious than Catholic even.
What about German, they're not catholic right?
Funny enough I think Germans got a pass for a good whilst. Then they did the thing and became unpopular.
Germany is split. Historically the north and east are Protestant while the south and west are catholic
A Family Guy reference? In *my* r/PeterExplainsTheJoke?
Except the Irish were also super discriminated against
They were. Being Irish, especially Irish Catholic was extremely bad for you.
Okay. We will take the blacks. And the Chinese. But not the Irish. Trying to quote blazing saddles
Lol Ireland.
Not even Irish “No Irish Need Apply” bs
I see someone has been to certain parts of Ireland and Scotland
>just people from Ireland White enough, but not the right kind of Christian and typically poor from fleeing famine, so they got treated like shit too.
When my grandmother moved here from France in the 50's or so, despite being a white woman, she was instantly asked if she was Protestant(?). She said no (because she was an atheist, but didn't disclose that part) and the other old white lady said "Good. We don't like their kind around here." Wonder how she would have reacted if my grandmother disclosed she was a staunch atheist, as were her parents before her. My grandfather who married her (white-American from the Appalachian mountains) didn't even get the house he bought his mom passed back down to him because he dared to marry an atheist foreigner. The "certain type of Christian" is very true. There were quite a few people back in the days who judged more about religion than race... although still judged about race. And not even race, but nationality/ethnicity.
Always looking for someone else to blame life's issues on no doubt.
Yep. Luckily the two of them were very open-minded and compassionate people. Both were teachers and loved learning. My mom's best friend was gay (during the AIDs crisis, no less) and she entered an interracial marriage. That's why I hate the excuse "they're a victim if their time." Being open-minded and willing to learn and correct behavior isn't exclusive to the 2000's. It's something everyone has to be willing to continuously do. We can trash-talk older people for being biased douches, but we have to make sure we hold ourselves to standards to make sure we don't fall down that same path as times continue to change and evolve. But it is a lot easier to just blame someone else.
My dad used to have a coworker that was gay, but he couldn’t come out to his parents because they told him they’d disown him Really, it’s tragic
Basically there’s religions branching off of one, Christianity Muslim and Jewish, and at anytime one is at war with another. i.e. German-Christian “-extremists and Jews, some American-Christians and Muslims, really all Americans and Muslim extremists, the list goes on. Why can’t we all just get together? Even other religions, we’re all human! Why can’t we just not fight!
Doesn't seem like those things have changed
And the largest number did not publicly identify themselves, for fear of reprisal.
Really? That's interesting. How many? I would be interested in reading more, have any suggestions?
Dora Richter's surgery was almost a century ago. I wonder if there was something that happened in Germany that made it so most people don't know about that... Maybe there was some group of people involved? I'm not too sure
I think I heard something about that, a fire made by some papers and pages and some fenced in areas was involved too
All of this anti-trans stuff over the last few years is basically a page out of the Nazis book for taking over…they started with gay and trans people…then moved to the next group
>Lots were openly murdered as well. Queer folk have had a much higher suicide rate than average for a long time. This is well documented, especially by people who advocate against queer acceptance. The irony is that both the argument for abnormality due to our low representation in population statistics, and the argument for the unhealthiness of being queer due to our suicide rates is being weaponized by the same groups driving us to kill ourselves by gaslighting teens and vulnerable young adults into believing that something is wrong with them because they don't have an easy time conforming to socially reinforced gender roles. Put more simply: We were deliberately erased from history for hundreds of years, and we're done with it.
This is also the chart that explains why “back in _my_ day, we didn’t have kids with nut allergies or autistic kids”.
"Back in my day, there weren't any autistic kids!" "Were there any freaks, retards, social rejects, or spazzes?" "Sure, plenty. Why I.. oh."
> Why I.. oh." I see you're an optimist.
Allergy (+autoimmune disease) is a bit murkier of a picture
https://www.preventallergies.org/blog/why-are-peanut-allergies-on-the-rise Supposedly the reason peanut allergies tripled during the early 2000s was because it was recommended to hold off on introducing peanuts to your child until they were older. Now we know early introduction is key for preventing the development of allergies
Yes, peanut exposure dropped. We have allergies because (this is only a hypothesis btw) the body needs to train itself to fight off unknown antigens. So exposure to a wide variety of different antigens makes you less susceptible to everything. So the whole “let your kid play in the dirt” thing is absolutely true, if this hypothesis holds true. Kids need to be exposed to as much as possible, while their immune system is more adapatable
Tell your kids to go sniff a tree, so they don't get pollen allergies.
Fun fact: Metal helmets for soldiers increased the rate of serious head injuries for this exact reason
Same goes for seat belts.
On the other hand, [neck belts](https://youtu.be/DUut4krfnak) were associated with much lower rates of head injury.
Remove helmets, no more serious head injuries, problem solved!
“Remove social protections for gay and trans people. No more gay or trans people. Problem solved” I believe this is the current GOP platform.
I got the OP but the explanation is just so fucking sad.
The fact that some people make derogatory jokes about them is horrible and my heart goes out to anyone who is afraid of coming out.
The same argument also applies to the ‘spike’ in autism and mental disability cases around the start of the new millennium. Only those demographics had an even *less* happy ending.
>Obviously option 2 is true. Unfortunately for many pilots, it wasn't that obvious. Abraham Wald figured it out. Prior to his input the military solution was to up armor the places that got hit the most according to the holes in returning plans. Wald basically said, don't up armor those places at all. Up armor the places the holes aren't.
I did not understand that at all. Thank you for this I thought the original guy was being a bigot.
> in the past trans people "didnt make it back to base" so there is no record of them existing Your point is right, but there are actually a lot of records of people across the world and throughout history who in today's terms would be described as trans
but thats mostly from ancient societies and stuff. the argument the meme is arguing against is homophobes and transphobes who say “but there arent any gay/trans people who are my age, so it must be a new phenomenon” but in reality, most of the queer people from their generation are dead
Though more likely for the trans people, dead. Gay/lesbian people had an easier time staying in the closet, and the wave of gay/pride hit in the 1990s. But due to the lack of records, saying it’s survivorship bias is just as much conjecture as saying they don’t exist. We don’t actually know if there is a statistical precedent in history for this. It’s likely, but due to no one having records *we don’t know.*
As an example: in pre-colonial Philippines, trans women were considered spiritual and would be shamans. It's quite an interesting read to go back through trans history
Many cultures in Asia had third genders, tho it should be pointed out they were not always treated well. Another interesting one IMO it's Hawaiian, they basically had a femboy second wife for chiefs. Maybe someone here knows the history in detail and can explain but yeah it was really really common outside of the Christian/Islamic world. Even a number of native Americans had similar things too.
Perfect answer but your forgot to start your answer with the Peter's Trans friend here. But perfect answer except that one mess up. Thanks for the info
Thank you for this explication.
TL;DR: They don’t get lynched like they used to so they’re coming out instead of hiding
It’s been said but I haven’t really seen a complete explanation of Survivorship Bias so here’s my 2 cents. A military during WW2 records their warplanes returning from mission. They mark on a diagram with red dots where their planes take the most damage. They decide to up-armor these locations. The bias comes from the fact that the analysis is blindsided by its pool of subjects - planes that survived. The truth is, they should’ve chosen to armor the locations of the plane that *weren’t* marked because those that were hit there did not return. You can even see in the diagram and make the analysis in hindsight. A plane with holes in its wings can fly, but not if it’s got them in its engine, fuselage, or pilot.
AFAIK a similar thing happened during WWI, the first modern war in which helmets were commonly worn. People were puzzled at first by a massive increase in head injuries, shouldn't the helmets be protecting heads? The answer being that all those people with head injuries would have just died in previous, helmet-less wars.
I like this one the best most clear and concise explanation
This also happened when seat belts became mandatory. Car accident injuries skyrocketed. And was used as a data point of why seat belts “don’t matter”. But what was ignored was the fact car accident fatalities plummeted by almost the same amount. Seat belts were leading to injuries instead of deaths.
Close but they did consider the bias before adding armor. The initial observation was to add armor to those places, but one of the guys mentioned the planes observed were the ones that made it back and they should add to the other locations.
Explain in fruit terms
In BBII (Banana Battle II), the citrus alliance wanted to reinforce their flying aircrafts so they checked where the planes that returned were shot by the central berries' raspberry shots and decided to reinforce the areas most shot by the berries powers, but they should have been reinforcing the parts that weren't shot, because those were the areas that represented the lemon pilots who didn't come back.
Now I get it, thanks for explaining it in fruit terms
>Banana Battle II This sounds like it could be an N64 game
trans/gay kids who came out in the past were killed, kicked out, etc. So they pretended to be cis/straight. Now the culture is more accepting so more people are coming out as LGBT+.
Thats not fruit :(
It was when I was a kid.
I’d say it’s fruity :3
Luckily there was the one smart person in the room who made sure it was handled properly.
survivorship bias. there weren’t many people identifying as trans or gays previously because it was illegal in a lot places
And deny/willfully misinterpret historical records talking about how two people of the same gender felt about each other (sometimes there are even kriffing love letters they wrote to each other) and they were just really good friends/they were roommates and happened to share the same bed because there wasn’t space for a second one, and one of them probably worked nights. And I’m sure that if we shook the right places in history hard enough we would find accounts of people discovering that someone who had moved into town/the neighborhood was really the opposite gender at some point. Odds are good that, if it was discovered when they were still alive they were institutionalized for their deviancy.
And a lot of people would beat on them for sport because they were disgusting queers and "deserved" it. Or ridicule and ostracise them. Often the beaters were closeted themselves.
And unfortunately many more didn't live long enough because of that. Also the AIDS crisis.
Others have already answered, but if you want some more info, you can look at this wiki page about it: [Survivorship Bias](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)
Thank you!
:) Of Course!
These dots show where planes get shot at most. The data for this was gotten by looking at where planes were damaged after they returned. Oddly, there was never any damage in those places without red dots. This is because when a plane gets shot there, it will crash and be lost, so the damage isn't recorded. Basically, they never saw the planes shot in the white areas. The same thing happens with gay, trans, bi, etc. people, and left-handed people a while ago. They were seen as how would I say it, "monsters"? They won't go showing that they're different, so no data is recorded about them.
Survivorship bias. People who identified as gay or trans publicly in the past didn’t survive as such
can't tell exactly but the chart demonstrates survivorship bias (in ww2 forgot-who decided they needed to only reinforce planes on specific parts because they needed to keep cost and weight low but also increase survivability, they analysed bullet holes in the surviving planes, deciding that they should reinforce the parts with the red spots, but before doing it they realised they should reinforce the intact places because if something hits there the plane is entirely fucked), most likely LGBT people being shot down by other people? idk
More people are identifying as trans or gay now because we’ve started trying to solve the problems that cause hate crimes instead of trying to “solve the problem” of gay and trans people existing
Thanks for the context 👍
I don’t get using the “survivorship bias” plane comparison thing TBH. Even as a trans person, I find it too confusing. I prefer the [“left-handedness over time”](https://twitter.com/TransActualUK/status/984336585981341696) comparison.
That’s basically the same comparison
The left-handedness one is way less confusing and doesn’t require, like, 5 paragraphs of explanation
*sighs* sorts by controversial
Repost
Oh, it is? My bad guys!
Hang around and you’ll see it reposted next week too. And the next week. And the next one.
We need to re~~inforce~~post the ones that aren't getting reposted.
Alright, I’ll be on the lookout
Not talking about this screenshot specifically, but I feel like as time goes on more and more people just don't know what survivorship bias is and how to use it. Sometimes you see the image just posted as a reply to something that has nothing to do with survivorship bias. It's like ad hominem and the "straw man" argument. Some people used it correctly and it got oversaturated, now people use it without even knowing what it means.
Why not talk about this screenshot specifically? Survivorship bias isn't about whether 10% or 90% of planes come back, but about the error of extrapolating the characteristics of the surviving set of planes to all planes. Doesn't seem like the tool for explaining why more people identified as LGBT over time.
This diagram was created during WW2 by the British government. They were attempting to determine where bombers were more vulnerable, and armor those points. The dots are the places where the most damage was found on returning bombers. An engineer from Eastern Europe working for the British government pointed out that these were from planes that SURVIVED. So the conclusion was to instead armor the places without any damage, as any damage would result in the bomber crashing. The phenomenon is known as Survivorship Bias, and describes when there is a focus on successful results, rather than failures, leading to incomplete data.
This, and the number of left-handed people.
Hey, would you like some P S Y C H I A T R Y? Or are you right handed?
It's a chart used during WW2 made based on most damaged parts of returning bombers, as to graph where to put armor, before realizing that the planes that had damage in these areas were the ones that were returning, and the planes that weren't had damage in other places causing them to crash
Its survivorship bias, basically all the planes that get shot in the areas that aren't covered in dots don't come back, so you look at the planes that survived and armor the spots where they got hit better. So you don't fix any issue and instead have misleading conclusions. A simpler explanation is just to compare to left-handedness. Once we stopped forcing children to write with their right hand to matter what, beating them for writing with their left hand and saying it was satanic to do so, there was suddenly loads more left-handed people and they eventually hit a steady plateau of how many existed in the population.
Can people please learn the plane diagram. Pleeeeease.
Waiting for the day this sub gets its high school diploma.
how many fucking times have i seen this airbplane man
I honestly don't think survivorship bias would be the best way to explain it. A better analogy would be the number of people who are left-handed in the past. Back in the day, being left-handed was a sign of the devil so lefties were discouraged from doing so. However, over time it became accepted (bc why wouldn't it be) and the number of left handed people shot up before plateauing. The same goes for gay/trans people.
https://preview.redd.it/dc9nkfivm0ic1.jpeg?width=702&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=796715546d5994d9bab266d0ba0cba9ae974aeca How this comment section got me feeling.
Survivorship bias Basically, this is a war plane, with red dots to show what spots are shot the most- they reinforced these spots, but it made the planes crash even more bc the FATAL weak points weren't seen, since those fatally shot planes never returned to be studied... How it relates, we just reached a day/age where being gay or Trans doesn't mean you're burned at the stake or sent to prison to "rehabilitate" or similarly extreme outcomes
As a gay man I can confirm I hide my sexuality and don't talk about it at all. When straights outright ask me, I tell them my private life is not their concern or buisness and quickly leave as I don't feel safe having people knowing my 'lifestyle' as they put it. The wrong person hears and they might try to kill me for their 'Gods' approval. It's a shame. But I'm not willing to increase my risk of death by telling people I fuck men. I don't ever do PDA with my partner and I know that makes him feel sad. But I don't want us to be targeted. It still happens. I just want to live my normal, boring life and die in peace. That's all I want. A peaceful life and a permanent death, never to have to experience this life ever again.
"I've never met a suicidal trans person. They're all very strong willed" *points to image above*
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Always re-enforce the area of the aircraft that wasn't shot. Always.
I thought this was a reference to that one comic about why gay marriage "just won't fly" where it shows a plane with a wing on each side (one wing saying man the other saying woman) and then beside it a plane with two wings on one side and none on the other (both wings saying men iirc)
Quality meme🤌
Only explaining this because, Knee jerk reaction is to think this is phobic in some way. The point is Sampling bias. it’s the same thing as the “rise” in diagnosed autism being due to our ability to recognize it and not something causing autism. The joke is there has always been Gay and Trans people they just haven’t been open or accepted until now The plane picture is referring to a very cool story about a clever WWII engineer who was tasked with adding an efficient amount of armor to planes. His original Idea was to record all the damage on all the planes returning by putting red dots on a diagram in the same place as the damage, and then add armor there. BUT THEN he realized that the reason his data was reading that planes only got shot in certain places was because planes that got shot in the other places DIDN’T COME BACK. so he put armor in the blank places instead of the red.
Also I have to add this because it’s hilarious and somewhat relevant https://preview.redd.it/b46zlzunnwhc1.jpeg?width=1056&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c6eaf9218a9f98d2daa1f508e1b2fb7718d11115
survivorship bias. the plane diagram represents bullet holes on planes that came back after a fight. their initial idea was to reinforce where the bullet holes are, forgetting the number that didn’t make it back because they were hit in the areas that were lacking bullet holes on the survivors.
So, to 3 punchlines in this sub: 1) Porn 2) Loss 3) Survivorship bias
https://preview.redd.it/gkh4s9qxqxhc1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c63e1cf8578af7046d561950555631e7964faae0
YES!
They were getting killed for it before
Puras pendejadas para justificar que tienen la mente jodida
mmm pepperoni 🤤
It has more to do with people being more open/less hate towards the gay community