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[-] Ricochet@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 hours ago

From ChatGPT: “So, biologically there are mostly two (with natural variations like intersex), but socially and culturally, there are multiple genders depending on how people understand and express themselves.”

[-] Ibaudia@lemmy.world 6 points 5 hours ago

Chatgpt is wrong here, sex is more like a series of bimodal bell curves measuring traits like gonad type, chromosomes, hormone levels, secondary sex characteristics, neurobiology, and probably some more I'm forgetting. For each trait, one bimodal peak can be labeled something like "typically male" and the other "typically female". For instance, hormones would have "higher testosterone" for one peak and "higher estrogen" for the other. You can usually categorize male vs female by weighing where an animal falls on these bell curves across all traits, but that's more of an art than a science, since the scientific perspective is more "sex is a composite profile" than "sex is a binary to be categorized".

That's why you always hear people say 'it's a spectrum" or "it's socially constructed", because that's the easiest way to explain it in simple terms (even if it is non-descriptive and annoying to hear as a shibboleth)

[-] Gladaed@feddit.org 1 points 5 hours ago

Dingus, you mixed biological and social gender. Biology usually talks about biological genders.

[-] Katrisia@lemmy.today 4 points 11 hours ago

Advanced whatever will always lead to philosophy, and there are no definitive answers there or elsewhere. You can debate the meaning of a state of matter, of gender, of life, of number, etc. (That's why there is philosophy of physics, biology, mathematics, chemistry...). So I don't think that's the point.

Yes, both sex and gender get complex, but the answer to conservatism isn't to say that advanced science has it all figured out because that would be a lie. They'll ask us to demonstrate ontological categories that we cannot demostrate through science. It might be true sometimes the: "you are conservative because you rely on basic science, and progressivism and other leftists ideas lie on advanced science", but ultimately, the debate is open and we need to be careful not to bluff about science being on our side because science has its limits.

Philosophy is the final battleground, and in there we do have strong arguments, but still, I feel this "smarter than thou" attitude is not it.

[-] affiliate@lemmy.world 90 points 1 day ago

i think that if more people were exposed to advanced math there would be a reactionary trend of people going around and asking mathematicians “what is a number?”

[-] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 8 points 13 hours ago

I believe that's what happens anytime they say that we probably shouldn't focus on memorizing a multiplication table, or try to teach anything in a way that puts more focus on understanding how numbers work than on symbolic memorization.
And that's like... Elementary school.

[-] dandelion 26 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

sort of like the reactionary trend of pulling your kids out of school because Common Core has changed how math is taught so critical thinking and conceptual understanding is incorporated, rather than teaching math by rote memorization?

[-] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 5 points 18 hours ago

I'm shocked that the US only adopted this in 2009. I'm pretty sure my mum, who went to primary school in the 70s, recognized number lines when I was taught to use them on 2005ish. I'm having a hard time imagining how else you'd explain it.

[-] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 hours ago

First you make them memorize single digit subtraction X - Y where X >= Y. Then you extend that to small double digit numbers.
Then you teach "borrowing". 351-213. Subtract the 1s column. Can't take 3 from 1, so borrow 10 from the 5 in the 10s column, making 11 in the 1s column and 4 in the 10s.

Definitely more clear, right?

[-] dandelion 7 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

look, we work very hard on being reactionary here in the U.S., we're a world leader in reactionary politics, and not teaching math well is crucial to keeping a vibrant ~~slave~~ worker population, otherwise they might start, you know, thinking for themselves

[-] homura1650@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago

I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.

I find this outrageous. Why can't ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?

[-] Inucune@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago
[-] homura1650@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

Where in those axioms does it say that ↑ = {0|∗} = {0 | {0|0} } is not a number? No where, that's where!

The actual reason that ↑ is simply that it is too ill behaved. The stuff I thought were the "numbers" of combinatorical game are actually just called Conway games. Conway numbers are defined very almost identically to Conway games, but with an added constraint that makes them a much better behaved subset of Conway games.

I suppose you could call this an axiom of combinatorical game theory; but at that point you are essentially just calling every definition an axiom.

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[-] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 89 points 1 day ago

I'm a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.

[-] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 16 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I would wager you have more of an idea of what a state of matter is than biologists do of what a species is. Humans like to put things into neat boxes but nature is under no deal obligation to cooperate.

[-] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 hours ago

I'd actually argue the opposite. With states of matter, we're attempting to delineate how reality groups together sets of related properties that vary between conditions in similar ways for different substances.
Looking for the edges that nature drew.

With species though, we drew the lines. We drew them with a mind towards ensuring it's objectively measurable but it's still not a natural delineation. Taxonomists (biologists are actually a different field) mostly run into uncertainty with debating which categorization property takes precedence, and what observations of species have actually been made.
So while they debate which system to use, the particulars of the systems are pretty concrete.

[-] lunarul@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

States of matter and species are both cases where we drew the lines based on what we thought was obvious. Then we ran into cases that were not so obvious anymore and challenged how we define these lines.

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[-] serenissi@lemmy.world 112 points 1 day ago

though the meme is cool, gender isn't particularly a biology (or 'advance biology') thing. biology deals with sexes, their expressions and functionalities. gender is more of a personal and social concept but often related to sex characteristics (cis).

and yes, advanced biology tells sex determination isn't as easy as XX or XY or even looking at genitals like a creep.

and oh, for giggles consider fungi :)

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[-] ch00f@lemmy.world 172 points 1 day ago

When Newton worked out the laws of motion, he figured they had to be correct because they were so simple and elegant.

He had no idea that relativity was going to come in and fuck his shit up.

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[-] k4gie@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

Do the two tails left of M and right of F mean there are males more male than cis males, and similarly with females?

[-] dandelion 21 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

The peaks do not designate "cis", you can be cis and fall anywhere on the chart - being cis is about the sex you were arbitrarily assigned at birth (and whether that assignment aligns or conflicts with your actual gender identity).

And when doctors change assignments, it's really unclear whether you're cis or not if you transition - e.g. a baby assigned female at birth who is then weeks later assigned male at birth later transitions to be a girl, she was originally assigned female at birth - is she trans or cis?

Instead the peaks represent the most common combination of male and female sex traits in humans, with the slopes representing less common combinations of traits, e.g. to the left of the male peak might be men who experience excessive androgenization like lots of body hair, maybe precocious puberty, early balding, and so on (more male traits than average).

This chart as a model of sex actually doesn't make much sense, since sex has been redefined in light of how complex sex is and the differences in sexual development that occur.

Where on the chart would we put someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS)? With CAIS a person is born with XY chromosomes and thus has a typical male karyotype, but their androgen receptors do not respond to androgens, so none of the masculinization is able to occur - leading the person to look, develop, and usually live as a woman.

The chart implies a spectrum, when the reality of biological sex is much more complex than a simple spectrum would allow - more like a constellation. Each sex differentiated trait is an axis / spectrum of its own, and there are thousands of ways differentiation can happen.

EDIT: oh, and to answer your question, it sounds like your question is really whether the peaks on a bimodal distribution represent a smaller number than the tails in aggregate, and the answer is that it depends on how you select your aggregates and how much of the peak you lump together. I think the entire point of the bimodal distribution, though, is to show that the majority fall on the peaks while the tails represent a minority.

That said, a MRI study found that when examining brain sex, >90% of people (mostly cis) were not able to be classed as having fully male or female brains, so realistically I think it's fair to say most people are sexually divergent in some way.

[-] squaresinger@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago

Well, clearly. If you define a male characteristic as something that's more common in men than in women and vice-versa, then e.g. being tall would be a "male characteristic".

Height isn't a binary thing with men being exactly Xcm tall and women exactly Ycm, so there's people who have more of said male characteristic and people who have less. And you also have women who have more of this characteristic and some men (e.g. there are some women that are taller than some men).

The same can be done for every characteristic that's associated with a gender. Genitals are on a spectrum (large clitoris vs micropenis), fat distribution is on a spectrum (e.g. there are men with breasts and women without), body hair is on a spectrum, hormone distribution is on a spectrum and so on and so on.

If you take a lot of characteristics at once it becomes clear in most cases whether the person you are dealing with is a man or a woman (though there are some where that's more difficult or impossible), but if you take just a single characteristic (e.g. height) it's impossible to say whether the person you are dealing with is definitively a man or a woman.

[-] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 8 points 1 day ago

It means that traditionally understood cis male can still have some female characteristics (no facial hair, higher pitched voice, bad at driving) but some males will have none.

[-] dandelion 8 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

bad at driving is a male trait

(though that's partially for social reasons, biological factors are not the only relevant)

[-] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 4 points 21 hours ago

Yeah, I was kidding.

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[-] Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org 33 points 1 day ago

If certain people could almost understand they would be very upset

[-] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 113 points 1 day ago
[-] skisnow@lemmy.ca 18 points 22 hours ago

A lot of problems in the world can be attributed to people who think "if I don't understand something, it must be because the experts saying it are all wrong".

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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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