antonfire · HackerTrans

letztes Jahrdiscuss

As a fun aside on language, I prefer "they", explicitly, e.g. I pick "they" in pronoun dropdowns, I often wear a "they" pronoun pin, and so on. But insofar as people think in terms of these different versions of "they", I prefer the "'unknown/unspecified' version" over the "'prefers they' version"! Turns out that's hard to communicate.

If being annoying by (not-)answering with "mu" to all gender/pronoun questions communicates it better, maybe it's a point in favor of being annoying!

IMO it points at some cracks in the perspective that there are different versions in the first place.

antonfire

letztes Jahrdiscuss

You said "this makes sense", but the rest of your comment is essentially still in disagreement.

> A subtler approach that started with "why shouldn't boys wear pink?" and progressed from there would have already finished the job by now.

That's happening. There's been a lot of progress, and it hasn't finished the job. Not even as far as cis people are concerned.

(I guess it would be coherent to believe that the subtler approach hasn't worked because of less-subtle approaches like a push for transgender health care. I think that's naive.)

It's a bit cliche, and you might be tired of hearing it, but for what it's worth this conversation brings to mind the "disappointed with the white moderate" paragraph in MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail.

> But if sufficiently changing and making flexible our expectations for what it means to be male and female would have been sufficient to make most transgender people comfortable, why did we choose the much harder sell instead?

I think your sense of "sufficiently changing" isn't aligned with the sense of "sufficiently changing" I would need to tentatively grant that, if you think such a change is an easier cultural sell than "some people are born in the wrong body".

antonfire

letztes Jahrdiscuss

> We could make a lot of progress in trans acceptance very quickly by just reframing the whole thing in these terms. [...] But arguing that males shouldn't need to live up to an artificial and incredibly outdated standard of masculinity? That would be a much, much easier sell.

It's an "easier sell" of a different thing.

I'm not seeing a "we" forming here as far as "trans acceptance" is concerned.

Judging from your comment history, your perspective on this seems to basically be grounded in an objection to (more generously: apprehension about) transgender healthcare practices. On purportedly scientific grounds, while ascribing a "politically-driven" motivation in terms of groupthink to people who support these practices. So I think your motivation to ascribe this to a "cultural thing" is grounded in a desire to decouple it from the healthcare thing, because you think it serves an overall political project better.

I'm with you on loosening gender roles. I'm not with you on reducing trans acceptance to that.

> why are we doubling down on gender binaries and talking about switching genders instead of creating a campaign that would both get at the root of the issue and be easier to swallow for a larger portion of the country?

In my personal life, I am probably about as far from "doubling down on gender binaries" as anyone you are likely to encounter. In my experience, I find many more people who are genuinely working past "doubling down on gender binaries" in transgender spaces than I do outside them.

My not-doubling-down-on-gender-binaries approach to it is not an easy pill to swallow for a large portion of the country. It may not even be an easy pill to swallow for you. (E.g. "which" bathroom do you want me in? How easily do you think the rest of the country will swallow that?)

antonfire

letztes Jahrdiscuss

Kind of a tangent, but I think the cultural/social side is bigger and messier than your questions suggest, and I think boiling this down to "biological vs cultural" misses that.

> If gender is a social construct, is identifying as transgender the result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like?

I suspect "identifying as" cisgender is the outcome of this kind of cookie-cutter pressure to much the same degree, if not more. This tends to go unnoticed even in conversations where people are directly engaging with the ideas. (Even though that's part of what "gender is a social construct" is meant to suggest.)

A rhetorical question for cis people: to what degree do you feel your cisgenderness is a result of feeling pressure to conform to a cookie-cutter definition of what someone with male/female parts is meant to be like? I suspect there's more meat to genuinely unpacking this than you might think. Trans people's answers to this might not be that different from cis people's.

"It's a social construct" is an invitation to peek behind (or at least recognize) an abstraction; but it's just a peek into a quite complex story.

"Social construct" doesn't necessarily mean something to rise above, or to dismantle, or to deny. Money is a social construct. Human rights are a social construct. Friendship is a social construct. Sure, one can usefully imagine oneself "above" those things at times, but it's unclear whether aspiring to that is a good idea, and realistically most people won't attain it even if they do. Culturally we must find some relationship to those things anyway, we cannot ignore them.

As I see it, gender is an aspect of a messy evolving cultural system. Yes, the concept of "transgender" is part of that system, though it certainly doesn't fit into that system in quite the same way as "man" and "woman". Trans people tend to challenge or pressure many aspects of this system in some ways that cis people tend not to, but that's not the same thing as denying the system in whole. (Some people do see "gender abolition" as an aspirational ideal; many don't.)

Broadly, I think "is being transgender also just a social construct that can and maybe should be addressed by loosening up our tight expectations for gender roles" vastly underestimates the scope and scale of this cultural system, the degree to which it's tangled up in our lives, and the difficulty of untangling it.

antonfire

letztes Jahrdiscuss

> Some women are tetrachromats with an extra colour sense, while men are more likely to have red/green colour blindness.

If I'm not mistaken, red/green color blindness is more common in men because it's caused my a mutation on the X chromosome (which men tend to have fewer of). I would guess a similar thing about tetrachromacy.

So those are probably unrelated to color-perception changes due to exogenous estrogen.

antonfire

letztes Jahrdiscuss

> Perhaps this is an insensitive question/comment, but do trans women feel like they have the wrong body or the wrong wholesale gender?

It varies.

> In my experience with trans women I know, they still seem to relate primarily to men (they still gravitate towards male dominated interests) whereas many gay men I know seem to relate primarily with women, and gravitate towards women interests.

For whatever it's worth, I think observations like this are as useful a cue to look inward for an explanation as they are to look outwards.

For one thing, part of the whole "gender" thing is the way people's preconceptions lead them to parse information about others (and themselves!), and your sense of trends is probably influenced by that. (E.g. when a (gay) man gravitates towards "women interests" that may just be more salient than when a woman does, so you notice it more.) For another, you might be in a lot of male-dominated spaces (e.g. this one), so the set of trans women you know is probably not that representative. These might not be the whole story, but they certainly have a role to play in whatever reconciliation you're seeking. Gender is difficult to navigate: we're all swimming in it.

For me personally: I'm "nonbinary", whatever that means. As I see it today, for me being trans feels like more of a "wrong wholesale gender" thing than a "wrong body" thing. (But I'm open to the idea that I'm just not in touch with my body.) Part of the "wholesale gender" thing is the realization at some point in my life that "gender" was playing a much bigger role in my life than I had realized, including how I relate to people, what interests I gravitate towards, and so on. Something I find deeply aversive.

But I'm also averse to, like, rearranging my whole life to retroactively "fix the gender story" around it, just to make myself more legible. You might parse me as gravitating towards interests that line up with my assigned gender at birth (AGAB), and maybe even as relating to people primarily of my AGAB, and so on. I'm sure some people go further and functionally take this as an excuse to continue to relate to me through the lens of my "birth gender" or what have have you. I'm sure it's easier. From my perspective, I suspect those people are underestimating how much of a clusterfuck the whole "gender" thing is.

antonfire

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

A polynomial with a single variable is more or less what you would mean by "use base-infinity digits" in the first place.

Roughly, in base 10, the number represented by the sequence of digits d_0, d_1, ..., d_n is d_0 + d_1 * 10 + d_2 * 10^2 + ... + d_n * 10^n.

In "base infinity", the "number" represented by the sequence of digits d_0, d_1, ..., d_n is the polynomial d_0 + d_1 * x + d_2 * x^2 + ... + d_n * x^n.

Multiplying these "numbers" (polynomials) is like decimal multiplication, except the digits can be arbitrarily high and you do no carrying at all.

antonfire

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

The standard multiplication algorithm is an algorithm for taking base-b representations of two numbers and outputting the base-b representation of the product of those numbers. A base-b representation of a number is a sequence of digits. A sequence is a function.

This is not a large conceptual chasm. It is boilerplate for actually talking about decimal (or binary or hex or whatever) representations of numbers. Here is one version of that boilerplate, spelled out:

Think of a base-10 representation of a natural number as a function with domain N (the set of natural numbers) and codomain {0, ..., 9}, where f(0) is the ones digit, f(1) is the tens digit, f(2) is the hundreds digit and so on. (This function will be finitely supported, i.e. all but finitely many inputs to this function will give output 0.)

If f and g are the representations of two numbers n and m, then one can say the following about the representation of their product n * m:

  (1) Extend the codomain of f and g, to N, i.e. think of them as functions N -> N instead of functions N -> {0, ..., 9}.
  (2) Compute the convolution of those two functions, giving you another (still finitely supported) function h: N -> N. Usually at this point h will have values that are larger than 10.
  (3) Do all the carrying (e.g. repeatedly take the first n for which h(n) > 10, and subtract 10 from h(n) and add 1 to h(n+1)). Now all the values of h are in {0, ..., 9}, so you can think of h as a function N -> {0, ..., 9}.

The resulting function h is the base-10 representation of the product of the two numbers that f and g represent.

antonfire

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

Fun fact, you can construct and store a lookup table for sums of all possible pairs of O(log(n))-digit numbers in O(n) space. (And O(n) time, probably?)

So if your model of computation lets you look things up in a table like that in O(1) time, you can kind of get the situation I'm describing above. Maybe your model of computation shouldn't let you do this, but some do. Often if an algorithm takes up O(foo) space, we don't worry about the fact that lookups into that space should take Theta(log(foo)) time (to even read the address) rather than O(1) time, because things are assumed to "fit into memory".

Another fun way to be fussy along these lines is that the usual algorithms for sorting a list of n distinct items only give bounds of O(n (log n)^2) time. Each item takes around log(n) bits to even store, so comparing two of those can't be done in time O(1) in the worst case (in a model that forbids the kind of "cheating" I'm describing above). The best uniform bound you can hope for is time O(log n) per comparison. (Though in some sense the extra log(n) factor might "drop back out", because it takes O(n log(n)) space to even write down an input to this algorithm.)

antonfire

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

Do you interpret both as

> addition operations of numbers with an arbitrary number of bits deemed to take O(1) time

?

I was picturing a more restrictive model of computation in which your claim is along the lines of

> There's an O(n)-time algorithm, which, given two numbers with n digits and a magic black box that can add log(n)-digit numbers together in O(1) time, will output the product of those two numbers.

antonfire

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

The premise was

> addition operations of numbers with log(n) bits deemed to take O(1) time.

not

> addition operations of numbers with n bits deemed to take O(1) time.

antonfire

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

> If this is allowed by your model of computation, then you could use this magical O(1) addition to to implement multiplication in O(n).

How's that?

antonfire

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

The first few Google results for "sliding dot product" basically describe it as a convolution with the domain of one of the functions reversed. (Note as far as whether or not to reverse one of the functions, multiplication in base-b agrees with "convolution" and not with "sliding dot product".)

Elsewhere in the thread you seem to be suggesting that convolution is a way to convert between a frequency domain and a time domain, which suggests that you are confusing convolution with Fourier transforms. There's some nice relationships between these things, so they are often discussed together, but even then a single convolution happens either entirely in the time domain or entirely in the frequency domain, not as a way of going from one of those domains to the other. E.g. the pointwise product (in the frequency domain) of the Fourier transforms of two functions is the Fourier transform of the convolution (in the time domain) of those two functions.

There's also a chance you are focused on the difference between functions with a discrete domain and functions with a continuous domain. The term "convolution" is often applied to both.

antonfire

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

What's 111111111*111111111?

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