It is well known that the sex chromosome exists in a superposition of X and Y chromosomes, after all.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Bigot: "trans people aren't natrual according to science!!"
Scientist: "we've learned that trans people are natrual and this has helped us broaden our understanding of gender and human psychology"
Bigot: "stfu!! >:c
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.
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?”
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
There is a slight difference though in that complex numbers are a part of math but gender isn't really a part of biology.
Also the mathematicians wouldn't decline to give an answer.
Also the mathematicians wouldn’t decline to give an answer.
Are you sure? I only minored in math, but even I would struggle to provide an answer to this. It would have to be something incredibly vague, like "a number is a mathematical object that has certain consistent properties relevant to the field of study." Because otherwise you get situations like "is infinity a number?" and you can't answer categorically, because usually it's not, but then you look at the transfinite numbers where you can indeed have omega-plus-one as a number. And someone asks if you can have an infinite number of digits to the left of the decimal place, and you say "well, not in the reals, but there are the P-adic numbers..." and folks ask if you can have an infinitely small number and you say "well, in the reals you can only have an arbitrarily small number, but in game theory there are the surreal numbers, where..."
So yeah, I'm not sure "what is a number" is even a math question. It's more a philosophy question, or sometimes a cognitive science question (like Lakoff and Nuñez's "Where Mathematics Comes From").
Gender isn’t part of biology (as a social construct) but the complexity of sex absolutely is.
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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.”
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)
Dingus, you mixed biological and social gender. Biology usually talks about biological genders.
I'm a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.
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.
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.
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.
An abstraction used for grouping kinds of things together for the purposes of making thinking about them a lot faster.
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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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