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Comment by trackofalljades | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible that what you're seeing in this data is less about inaccuracy and more about how comfortably out people are?

It says the estimates skew greater for younger people and women responding. Well are younger people and women more likely to know which of their friends are LGBT, because of a host of societal reasons that tend to influence men or older folks to wall off their feelings and communicate less about such things?

I'm just saying, having lived in more than a dozen locations in five states and a Canadian province for the past several decades, the 4.5% number feels low to me (as in, impossibly so).

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4.5% self-report as LGBT. That's an important distinction to make, and I too would be surprised if it's accurate.

Also, the "what's your estimate" question specifies "gay or lesbian", whereas the self-identity question apparently includes the B and T. Obviously this would make the high estimate for just "gay or lesbian" even further off, but it still doesn't say anything good about the article's conclusion.

Maybe a minor point, but I think sexual fluidity remains under-addressed by these polls. Some people are, for all intents and purposes, identifying as LGBT during, say, their college years, but then go on to settle down with an opposite-sex spouse.

If the person once identified as LGBT, but doesn't today, is it based on what they "actively" are? Or if you ever once identified as LGBT, for purposes of polling, you remain in that category for life?

Not a minor point at all. I think sexual fluidity is one of the most relevant aspects of sexuality and I would love to see it measured. Labels like "Gay" and "Bi" are way too simplistic.

The medical terminology is better, its often "Men who have sex with men" or something similar that removes the need to understand the subjects mental state and simply focus on the important clinical data.

That's better, but doesn't separate men who have sex with manly men from those who only have sex with traps. It also excludes those who don't have sex at all for one reason or another.

  sexual fluidity

Based on your context, "sexual preference fluidity" would be the appropriate term.

What's the ambiguity here? For self-identity matters we already have the expression "gender fluidity".

Because sexual preference and gender identity are completely different things.

Yes, I've addressed that in my comment. I was wondering if there was some third aspect I wasn't considering.

It's risen by 1 percentage point since 2012 when they started tracking this, and for millennials, the number is around 8.2%. They don't seem to have data for zoomers yet. [1] This would suggest (imo) that 4.5% is in fact a significant underestimate, but I don't know necessarily that it's as far off as 20%

[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population...

Its also important to remember that as humans we tend to vastly over-estimate the incidence of relatively rare things. We tend to think that something happens based on how often we encounter it, without considering the total number of encounters.

4.5% is about 1 in 22. 8.2% is 1 in 12. Even accounting for the fact that most LGBT people are as private about their sexuality as straight people are, its often enough that you're likely to encounter LGBT people on a frequent basis.

> the 4.5% number feels low to me (as in, impossibly so).

I think it's contextual to location. A lot of LGBT people move to cities for acceptance. If you live in a big city, you're more liking to know relatively more LGBT people than if you lived in a rural or suburban area.

Age is also huge. It's easy to forget that half of the population is over 38.

If your an urbanite you have a huge observational bias simply if you accept that rural homosexuals are more likely to migrate to the city.

Reason for the migration include less discrimination, but also higher concentration (making hooking up easier).

Therefore your perceived rate of homosexuality would be grater.

For what it’s worth the self reported rate of 5 percent is the same when I first cared to look it up, about 15 years ago. I would imagine that, if the self reported rate had significant error with it, the decreasing stigma would have changed it

I dislike to come across as overly sensitive, but I dislike how clinical sounding "homosexual" is. Just say gay people or LGBT. It isn't a condition. The DSM was wrong for a long period of time.

LGBT doesn't mean homosexual. Gay doesn't mean homosexual. Homosexual means LG.

Scientific terms are not value judgements.

Don't worry about how you come across, worry about how you are.

To be fair, I think it can be difficult to appreciate how it sounds if you aren't LGBT. If you're straight, you haven't been exposed to being demoralized because of your sexual orientation.

I understand the perfectly valid scientific use of it-- I'm just saying that sometimes people weaponize it. When you come across anti-gay rhetoric, it almost never uses the word 'gay'. It has phrases like "the homosexual agenda". The wording is specifically chosen to imply the group is lesser than others.

The preferred word of the ingroup will become the insult from the outgroup while the ingroup settles on a new term and round and round.

You can't really expect the written word to use the current preferred term.

The problem is never the words, it's the person behind them.

I hear “gay agenda” just as often, not to mention it was by far the more common high school taunt.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=gay%20agen...

I’m sorry you feel that way, but “gay” sounds more offensive to me (e.g. “the gays” or “that’s gay”) and, ironically, euphemistic. LGBTQ sounds clinical (it’s an abbreviation!) and only half the letters relevant here.

Homosexuality is the most precise word (literally same-sexuality) to denote LG and DSM is hardly the originator of the word (the DSM was, is, and always will be, a mess. But that’s another issue).

The second thing I thought / wondered... 'do most people underestimate how many rural or and suburban people are out there?' - if most people polled are from well internet-connected areas and skew mostly urban cities, it might not be overestimating for the area as opposed to underestimating the amount of people that are not city dwellers. Maybe another poll is needed or has been done. /random-thought

The 30% figures others have mentioned seem high to me (as in, impossibly so).

I left the US in 2005. My gay friends and many in the gay community in S.F. estimated amongst themselves at the time that about 10% of people were gay or lesbian, while the general public estimates were more like 4%. They estimated higher because they knew people who were not out of the closet. But even the gay community didn't think it so high as 30%.

I gather that there is some kind of virtue signal "brownie points" thing going on in the US now (from what I read, I'm not there and perhaps I've been mislead, If I'm wrong I'm wrong, no offense intended) which makes people behave in ways designed to signal virtue to each other for social brownie points, and perhaps this is what is contributing to these high estimations. This new social norm disproportionally affects younger people and women.

The debate is really down to who 'counts' as gay. Kinsey (who really pioneered this work), for example, included everybody who had ever had a consensual same sex sexual encounter or who regularly had same sex fantasies, no matter how they self identified.

Well are younger people and women more likely to know which of their friends are LGBT

Studies about various social things plus first-hand experience lead me to say "probably."

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