So, when I was a nerdling combing the shelves of my school and public libraries for books that looked like they hadn’t been checked out in decades (I imagine I was hoping to stumble across an ancient book of spells or some musty alchemical tome) I came across some books on the Duke University ESP studies conducted in the 1950’s.
Of course, I checked them ALL out. And kept renewing them, re-reading them until I got a reasonable grasp of the statistics. In the over four decades that have passed between then and now, most of what I read there has faded into vague notions that ESP of some sort probably does exist, but one set of conclusions arising from their data blew my juvenile mind. The claimed concrete evidence for anti-esp. A small subset of their subjects consistently scored significantly below chance when trying to predict die rolls, viewing Zener cards, etc. Remember the movie “The Cooler”? Yes,
What does this have to do with me and the title of this post? I’m convinced that I exhibit anti-gaydar/bidar. When given no other information than my own personal observations of a man, if my first guess is that he is probably gay or bi or somewhere not on the hetero-normative end of the Kinsey Scale, then, more likely than not, he will turn out to be absolutely straight, as in attracted exclusively to females. Even if I try and second or third guess myself, I end up wrong.
Yes, it is in fact annoying.
Unconventionaut 