knightly the Sneptaur

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • It’s been so frustrating to have to put up with Democrats that try to enforce a Republican-style party line instead of building the coalition they need to win.

    It’s even more frustrating when they put a hundred times more effort into trying to build a coalition with members of the party they claim to be a threat to Democracy instead of their own left wing.



  • This argument has always struck me as odd as in virtually every other discussion we would accept that the exception ‘proves the rule’.

    This is category theory, the existence of exceptions means that the model is incomplete because it cannot categorize everyone. In this case, the exceptions prove that the rule cannot be binary, but must instead be bimodal to allow for the variation seen in the population.

    Humans have two hands, except when they don’t due to something impacting fetal development.

    Are you defining people without two hands as non-human, or are you admitting that defining humanity as exclusively two-handed will necessarily fail to account for all the exceptions to the rule?

    Or just let the exceptions be exceptions with no social stigma rather than refusing to recognise that the vast majority of humans, and mammals, can be accurately identified as one of two distinct sexes.

    Again, this is category theory. Exceptions mean you have forgotten to account for someone. Admitting that some people don’t fit neatly into the only two boxes you’ll recognize as legitimate is itself a form of social stigma that you perpetuate with your desire to “let exceptions be exceptions”.

    All you have to do is recognize the obverse, that regardless of how vast the majority of allosexual folks and critters might be, it is not the totality.




  • I think I was fairly clear, it is a binary system that has some rare exceptions.

    You are describing a “Bimodal Distribution”, where most but not all fall into one of two categories.

    If it were a binary system, there would be no exceptions.

    Saying sex is a binary is saying there are only males and only females.

    In healthy examples of mammals where development has occurred normally this is true.

    Intersex mammals aren’t “unhealthy”, they’re simply different.

    This whole ‘its a spectrum’ argument is like saying humans aren’t bipedal, there’s a spectrum because some people are born without legs! It doesn’t make any sense.

    That doesn’t mean that society should refuse to accept, include and support people born without the ability to walk.

    Make up your mind, are people who are not bipedal still human?

    If they are, then obviously humanity is not exclusively bipedal and attempting to define us as such will cause problems with everyone from non-bipedal infants to the non-bipedal elderly and disabled folks of all ages.



  • Who are you talking about that is insisting there can be no deviation from the norm?

    Right-wingers, the only people who have ever had a problem with diversity.

    Banning words and discussions is absolutely the wrong way to go.

    I’m confused about what you mean, because the only people doing that are the “Don’t Say Gay” Florida Republicans.

    And my point is very simple. Don’t ban words.

    I get the feeling that you’re going to be angry when I point out that the only people banning words are the ones who want to make it illegal to teach kids that people like me exist.

    Have open discussions. Don’t support censorship of opinions or words.

    Make up your mind, do you want to actually have open discussions or do you think that avoiding censorship of the “opinions and words” of discriminatory groups is more important than the presence of the groups they discriminate against?

    Stop trying to control what people should think, and stop trying to teach them what you think is right.

    What do you think “teaching” is?


  • But I think instead of trying to change words and ban conversations, maybe it’s better to teach people to accept and even enjoy more variations?

    This is naive.

    How are we supposed to teach people to accept variation when they insist that there can be no deviation from the norm?

    Because right now it’s a bit ridiculous. We are told to ignore obvious differences between people so nobody feels marginalized.

    I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make here. Just a moment ago you were complaining that the language we use to talk about this topic was a problem, now we’re supposedly telling people not to talk about it? Pick a lane!


  • I think it’s fine that everyone gets to say what their gender is, as long as the archetypal roles stay the same - man or female.

    But otherwise, sure, people can define their gender how they like.

    I’m noticing a contradiction here.

    Gender can be a word for how people define themselves, as long as we instead use “archetypal roles” to define what our physical body looks like.

    And for those of us who don’t fit those archetypes?

    I think what is frustrating is when people start to say that we shouldn’t include our physical body type at all in discussions. That’s taking it too far in my opinion.

    Generally, it is considered impolite to talk to strangers about one’s genitals.

    Going to the doctor and not telling what body type you are makes diagnosis impossible in same cases.

    The medical setting is one of the few contexts where talking about one’s anatomy isn’t considered a faux pas.

    And for what reason? That part doesn’t make any sense to me.

    Do you want the historical explanation of how puritainism affected our culture?

    Race, body type, and other things are important to know in many cases.

    They’re relevant a lot less often than you’d think.


  • I’ll take this as a good faith question, and the short answer is that gender is a lot more complicated than that.

    Yes there are two archetypal roles involved in sexual reproduction, but even that isn’t so simple. There isn’t just one feature that defines male or female, but a combination of traits including chromosomes, gametes, anatomy, hormones, etc. In the real world, some folks are born with features that don’t all agree with one or another archetype. Intersex people aren’t common, about 1 in 2,000, but their existence proves that sex isn’t just a binary. There’s diversity to sex that requires a more complicated scheme to account for everybody.

    Gender, likewise, doesn’t follow the one-or-the-other model. Most folks are cisgender, but some folks have a gender that doesn’t agree with what people assume their sex is, or no gender at all, or a gender that doesn’t fit into the man/woman spectrum. It gets complicated quickly because gender is where sex and society intersect. Some cultures have different expectations based on gender, and some even have more than two recognized genders. That’s why we say “gender is a social construct”, because we all get to define for ourselves what it means to be a man, woman, or otherwise. And that’s also how gender is constructed, it’s a social project we all engage in collectively whether we realize it or not. Most just pass along the traditional gender roles that were passed to them, but those can change rather rapidly as society changes, like when clean-shaven faces became “manly” in response to WW1 soldiers having to shave so that their gas masks could maintain a good seal.








  • LLMs arent “bad” (ignoring, of course, the massive content theft necessary to train them), but they are being wildly misused.

    “Analysis” is precisely one of those misuses. Grand Theft Autocomplete can’t even count, ask it how many 'e’s are in “elephant” and you’ll get an answer anywhere from 1 to 3.

    This is because they do not read or understand, they produce strings of tokens based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next. If prompted for an analysis they’ll output something that looks like an analysis, but to determine whether it is accurate or not a human has to do the work.



  • I think you are confused about the delineation between local and federal governments.

    I am not, I simply don’t believe the delineation is relevant since taxpayers fund both the state and federal budgets.

    Also, this feels like you are too capitalism-pilled

    This is me being “reasonable” and working within the constraints of the system. If we aren’t going to have free universal college et al then we can at least trade some of the bloated military budget for a public works program.

    People would seriously read through them for 1 day, and then they’d be like, “clear”, “clear”, “clear” without looking at half of them.

    Sounds to me like a 50% improvement over zero human eyes.

    It’s not like you’re gonna find and fund another group to review the first group’s work, after all.

    Why not? We could hire three teams to do it simultaneously in every state in the country and the cost would still be a tiny fraction of how much was wasted on the F-35 program.