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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?”
Advanced mathematicians see a numeric digit and ask “what’s that?”
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 } 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.
<s> Getting back to my original point; this distinction just goes to show how small minded mathematicians are! Under Conway’s supposed “reasonable” definition of a number, nimbers are merely games, not proper numbers. However, the nimbers are a perfectly good infinite field of characteristic 2. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that those are not numbers! </s>
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.
Can confirm. I was already struggling. But I just straight up refused to math with i
have you taught?
anytime you give people a new metaphorical hammer, they want to go around banging everything they can with it. then they get bored and forget about it.
pop psych is a great example. people love to go around diagnosing everyone with whatever new schema of diagnosis is popular and trendy. trans is very trendy right now and it’s become on point for kids to identify as trans or some other non binary sexual identity. whether or not it sticks in the future, not sure. there is a counter-movement as well towards reinforce trad gender binaries in the dating sphere for sure. i’ve noticed as i age that a lot more people start caring a lot more about trad gender role stuff than they did in my 20s.
Ehh not really its just to old if a concept for us to be appaled by that. Its not 15 century for imaginary numbers to cause riots.
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.
And then there was quantum.
“Noooooooooo!” -Albert Einstein
Which is also simple and elegant
And then string theory. Which . . .
He definitely miscalculused the turnstables…
relativity only applies at large scales and quantum at small scales.
for everything else, esp earth bound, classic mechanics is works just fine.
The point is that he just assumed there was nothing more to know. And he was wrong (tho I’m not gonna knock the dude who invented calculus too hard).
The comic is trying to point out that bigotry is generally born out of a lack of curiosity.
And i’d fundamentally disagree. plenty of curious people use their curiosity to perpetuate and develop new forms of bigotry.
history of science is loaded with people using new concepts to perpetuate and reinforce racism, sexism, etc. and that is still very much done today.
it’s a naive to assume curiosity is a cure for ignorance. some of the most curious and smart people I know are also the most racist/sexist and pridefully ignorant. some of the dumbest/least curious people I know the least bigoted.
if anything, i’d say the biggest correlation is about whether or not the person believes in a sense of a social pecking order/competition. those who deeply believe in it are furiously trying to crab bucket their way up it by pushing others below them. those who don’t… just don’t care about people’s perceived status no matter it’s basis.
knowledge is a cure for nothing. it’s just knowledge. and knowledge changes over time.
Interesting take. Thanks for sharing.
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 :)
Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.
Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.
In other groups it’s not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.
Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.
Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.
Eukaryotic sex determination isn’t a binary and it isn’t even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It’s a grab-bag of whatever doesn’t perma-fuck your genome.
Source: me, I’m a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.
And bee queen generate full-animal-sized flying sperm, aka drones.
I would say gender is probably centered about around psychology, ranges mostly from sociology to biology, with a just little bit going into chemistry
maybe like
What’s the y-axis?
it’s a normalized distribution. The y-axis is unitless.
practical importance to gender
As perceived by me
(only the most scientific of measurements)
More yes
purity.
as in whether it applies to the real world is entirely a symbolic construct that has no use/reflection of the real world.
I don’t entirely agree, because gender identity is known to be at least partially biological, e.g. there are correlations between transgender, skin elasticity, and hyper-flexibility.
plenty of animals can gender swap, be hermaphrodites, or produce asexually.
What kind of fungi should I consider for the maximum giggles?
But it easy, we just make it complicated with social bullshit and attention craving. The fact that no one is exactly set to be perfect copies, doesnt mean anything. The fact that outliers exist, doesnt mean anything. You ask the owner of a dog if its a boy or a girl, they will tell you. And you wanna know how they know? They looked between its legs. It really is, that easy.
The kind of logic being pushed today, is basically saying that you cant class human beings as a bipedal species because 200 per million people are born with no legs. Which is dumb as fuck.
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
Moving the goal posts sure does make sense!!!
Honestly, people would probably object more to advanced math than advanced biology if they were exposed as much to it. Or basic math. Or elementary math…
Math is extremely irrational.
Math is not real sometimes. Imaginary, even.
Math even is non-constructible a lot of the time!
i
I mean, aye!
j, k
Wait, now there are 3?
e0…e7
What now mutha fucka?
Octonions, my beloved
So true and it’s a great to remind them of that sort of thing.
You know, you’d think all of the people who say it’s purely down to genetics would be natural allies with, you know, molecular biologists (applied genetics). They’d be all like “it’s a Y chromosome or nothing” and the biologists would be all like “yeah chromosomes!” because we fucking love chromosomes but no. In fact, it’s noticeably absent when you start to think about it.
I wonder why that might be?
The short answer is “because it’s infinitely more complicated than that.”
Just because you carry the genetic code for anything at all, it doesn’t mean you’ll express it. The default setting for our DNA is off. So, if something isn’t telling it to transcribe, it won’t do it. A whole load of reasons could cause that, even before we get to mutations and partial expression or chimeras etc.
Anyway, what i mean is yeah, this meme!
Edit: also, don’t beleive the AI. Early fetuses are female, until the Y is activated. You could have an inactivated Y and the fetus could be a woman capable of having children. The default setting is female, not intersex. It could be either but unless a specific event happens, it will always be female. It’s a subtle but important difference. This means that all fetuses are female and then turn into a male.
Do the two tails left of M and right of F mean there are males more male than cis males, and similarly with females?
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.
yes.
It is well known that the sex chromosome exists in a superposition of X and Y chromosomes, after all.
Not sure if you’re joking or being sarcastic, but here are a few examples where the mere absence / presence of a Y can’t determine sex & gender.
- Sometimes a person has XY chromosomes, but the body developed in a female manner because the fetal cells were resistant to testosterone. Such a person has good claim to being a woman (she developed that way) or a man (he has a Y chromosome; his brain could have been sensitive still to the testosterone to still develop male-coded)
- Sometimes a person has XX chromosomes, but the body developed in a male manner. Usually (though not always) this is caused by part of a Y chromosome ending up on an X. Such a person has good claim to being a man (he developed that way) or a woman (maybe she lacked enough testosterone to male-encode the brain).
- Other conditions such as XXY combinations, or chimeras (some cells XX, some cells XY), or other intersex conditions where some body parts develop male, some female.
To me personally, I view trans people as a type of intersex person. It seems entirely possible that you might have a person whose brain cells were more or less resistant to testosterone and/or exposed to testosterone and truly is a man/woman in a woman’s/man’s body. You don’t need to bring choice or culture into it - I think biology alone provides good evidence to believe trans people about what gender they claim to be.
Always wear your glasses. Sans glasses, I read the Advanced Math panel saying the square root of -1=1, and thought, “that’s doesn’t sound right.”
The problem is those morons haven’t taken any of the advanced classes and probably got D’s in the basic ones.
Sqrt(-1) is still wrong tho. I’m commuting a sin by writting it. Correct expression is i^2=-1
Wouldn’t the square root just give plus/minus i? Seems correct enough.
No. The symbol √ signifies the principal square root of a number. Therefore, √x is always positive. The two roots of x, however, are ±√x. If you therefore have y²=x and you want to find y, you mustn’t write y=√x, but rather y=±√x to be formally correct.
But (-i)^2=-1 as well. So we still need a convention to distinguish i from -i.
Simply define it as i = e^(iπ/2) 🤣
