OK the whole hormone thing is just a complete red herring. We're talking about the way to determine the sex of the individual. For which the only thing you need to know is, do they have XX chromosomes, in which case they're female, or XY, in which case they're male. That's all you need. If for whatever reason a male foetus has been exposed to very little testosterone during its development, it will probably have a lot of problems, but it will grow up to be a male with extremely undeveloped sexual characteristics. But still a male, not any non-binary nonsense. And what 'brain shape' has to do with anything, I'm still completely mystified.

Besides, as far as I can see gender dysphoria has very little to do with the amount of oestrogen/testosterone a person has. I remember recently taking a bus where the bus driver was wearing female clothes, and this was a huge, very male looking dude.

By definition, gender dysmorphia means you're one gender, but you feel like you're a different one. But if gender that you are can be determined unambiguously, and I've heard absolutely nothing that has persuaded me otherwise, that means what they're feeling is objectively different from reality, so by definition it's a delusion. A schizophrenic man sincerely and genuinely believes that the mole people from outer space are plotting to steal his memories or something. And I have absolutely no doubt that it really sucks to be this way. But you do not encourage the schizophenic's delusions.

This is starting to feel like one of those online discussions that goes around in circles and doesn't accomplish very much at all.

OK I've read all this and I'm still not seeing what these '17 types of brain' have to do with sex of the person in question.

By hormonal doses I imagine you mean testosterone and oestrogen? The production of those hormones is determined by the chromosomes of the person, i.e. by whether they're male or female. Males produce (more) testosterone, and women (more) oestrogen. Sex hormones produced by males and females will have some influence on various sexual characteristics, like male or female genitalia, ability to bear children for women (at least potentially), as well as secondary characteristics that result in sexual dimorphism. So for two women (who both have XX chromosomes, have female genitalia, can bear children etc), what does the 'shape of their brain' have to do with them being women? Maybe if you were to give a link to the study you're trying to reference it may make more sense.

That's just a complete non-sequitur. I believe I am the king of Atlantis. I desire to live in dignity and this belief is important for my sense of dignity, so for me, I'm right and everyone else should believe me. Having beliefs that are not based on reality is very dangerous. If other people insist on holding such beliefs, it's their problem but I have no intention of following them in their madness.

What does that have to do with anything? Everyone's brains are shaped differently in some way. A 'differently shaped brain' has never been seen as any kind of sexual characteristic as far as I'm aware. Even if it was, it would be very much a secondary sexual characteristic. This would be similar to claiming that being a very short man means you're in fact a woman or something else.

In that case, if you strongly feel something, even though this something is clearly objectively false, it's called a delusion. See for example the Capgras delusion where the sufferer believes that someone they know has been replaced with an identical looking impostor, or Cotard's syndrome where the affected person believes they're dead. What you do with patients suffering from delusions is you try to treat them as best you can. You do not try to convince everyone else that this delusion is in fact real.

Wow, some of those look like the courses from 'Community' comedy series. Most of them though seem to be traditional courses - mainly sociology, media studies maybe, physics and mathematics with a gimmick based on some popular cultural thing. This could be one of those, maybe journalism or politics with a gimmick. Depends on what kind of constrainsts the course places on the type of content the students are allowed to generate to gain their followers.

If they do genuinely plan to teach people how to film memes and pranks, or the female students how to jiggle their boobs into the camera, then yeah this is one of the milestones in the collapse of the modern civilization.

Scientifically that's completely irrelevant. Hormones are hormones, and XX and XY are XX and XY. A very low-testosterone male is still a low-testosterone male, not a female, or whatever new gender you want to invent. Same for low oestrogen females.

I feel like the whole non-binary alphabet nonsense was borne of confusion between the biological reality of gender/sex and social/cultural idea of what a male / female is. As far as biological reality goes, it really simple, XX is female and XY is male. Social idea of what male/female is far far more messy, but historically tends towards a muscular square jawed defender/provider male and sexy caring/nurturing domestic female. That is of course influenced by typical hormonal makeup of males/females, but also there's lots of historical/political etc factors that define the social idea of what a male and a female is.

This means of course that social definition of male/female varies quite a lot between different cultures/time periods. As an example, it used to be totally socially acceptable for an Italian male to be interested in cooking and clothes while otherwise pretty closely conforming to the usual male social stereotype. There were/are cultures where dancing was/is a totally normal activity for males. OTOH there are cultures where long before the rise of feminism women in leadership positions were seen as, maybe not exactly common, but not unheard of, in contrast to other cultures where it's completely unthinkable. Also the cultures where women fighting in a war sometimes happened, one or two cultures where it was apparently even fairly commonplace, vs cultures who considered it totally inconceivable.

I have no statistics to confirm this but it feels like there are a lot more male-to female transvestites than female to male ones. I suspect one of the reasons is that for what socially would be considered non-typical women there are a lot of socially acceptable stereotypes - tomboy, one of the guys, tough career woman etc. A man with a non-typical hormonal makeup would usually be suspected of being gay, even if that's not the case.

So people are unable to understand this difference between biology and social expectations in their head. Or maybe unwilling to understand, because they want to be a typical woman rather than a non-typical man. So they instead start demanding that science and reality alter themselves to conform to their confusion. Often these are the exact same people who claim to support science in other areas, like climate change. And somehow in their head these people see no inconsistencies in their beliefs. The extent to which people can rationalise things will always amaze me.

That'll confuse the hell out of a lot of people here. 'China and Russia are bad. AI is also bad. But China and Russia are against AI. Does not compute.'

I believe what's happening is either this is a desperate false flag operation by AI companies - our enemies are against it, so clearly this means we must keep shovelling more money into the AI furnace. Or, probably more likely, China and Russia (mistakenly) believe that AI is a good thing and are trying to make sure their own domestic AI does not fall too far behind. I know there are Chinese companies who have their own LLMs which are actively trying to compete against Anthropic and co.

I'd argue that social media has never been about actually socialising. You've always had the ability to find out what was happening in your friends' lives, via email, phone, texting, or even the old-fashioned face to face conversation. Even from the start, I believe social media has been about the illusion of social status. I have 100 online friends/followers! 500 people liked my last post! Wow, I'm famous! Of course later it turned into a political ragebait engine, in the process turning the political landscape in America and to a lesser extent Europe into a hellscape of polarization and mob mentality. All in order to get people to look at more ads for shit they're never going to buy anyway.

Yes, this is a very good parody of what long-term use of social media does to people's minds and how they end up talking in slogans and hyperbole. This is definitely a parody, right?

It's a bit more complicated that that I think. Youtube has a lot of really good stuff on it, a lot of it educational or sometimes just entertaining without being dumb (mostly stuff from a decade or so ago). I know that most videos on the platform is dumb clickbait, brainrot and now AI slop, I know that youtube bosses themselves desperately tried to turn the platform into brainrot central like tiktok but they haven't quite succeeded. Youtube has a lot of videos, even if 0.5% of everything there is useful that's still an awful lot of useful stuff, and it would be doing a disservice to children to ban access to that.

For X, Facebook, Instagram, absolutely ban them, I'd also ban them for adults as well, just legislate the fucking things out of existence. Also, is bluesky on the list of banned platforms? Because it absolutely should be. Like I said though, youtube has redeeming features. Twitch as I understand hosts a lot of gaming content which is the sort of things you'd expect children to enjoy. So a blanket ban on everything that looks like social media is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Maybe a good solution would be to allow playing youtube videos but in embedded form only. You find a link to a video via google or whatever else, when you click on a link, it plays but you don't have access to comments or the recommended videos or suggested 'play next' videos or anything else, the video just ends. If you try to go to youtube.com or whatever local site it's blocked.

So the CEO of a company that wants to sell AI weapons to Pentagon thinks that US needs a bigger army (and thus spend more on weapons) and that AI weapons will be really important. You don't say. Oh, let's have Japan and Germany spend more on weapons, which we just happen to have in stock. This whole 'book' could be reduced to one sentence - 'please buy more of our products' (and a bit of super generic libertarian stuff sprinkled in). It's basically a big advertisement. I wonder how many suckers actually bought this here literary masterpiece.

Indeed, so good job that these people can't possibly deliver anything even remotely like that. The claims they make are breathtakingly shameless.

Real memories include things like what something smelled like, what it felt like to the touch, the emotions you felt at the time. How are they going to "frictionlessly recall" that exactly?

So what this sounds like, you can enter into their app "what did I do on June 15th, 2023?" And it'll tell you something like 'According to your Linkedin, you had a meeting with a big client, and according to your wife's Instagram, you had a meal with her at such and such restaurant'. It can't be anything more than that. So, it's a glorified database search. "Memory singularity" my foot.

The real purpose of this is probably constructing this 'memorome', i.e. a huge collection of data about any sucker that'll buy their app, to be sold to advertisers obviously. I'm not even sure they can do that, e.g. I doubt Facebook will hand them over all the data they hold on a particular person. It may well be limited to just publically accessible stuff.

It's not quite so simple. The most rural countries with lowest levels of education have the highest fertility rates, those countries also tend to be the poorest. If you look here, at first glance it does indeed look like the poorest countries have the highest fertility rates and vice versa. If you look a little closer at the bottom of the list though, you'll see very rich nations like Japan and South Korea alongside less wealthy ones like Ukraine, Belarus, (arguably) Poland and the Baltic states. In Ukraine's case the war is obviously a factor, but still you see what I mean.

If you live on a small farm in a non-developed nation, without indoor plumbing or electricity, raising children is cheap. You just need enough food to feed them. Your large extended family which lives nearby, maybe even in the same house, will help with raising very young children. Then when they're even slightly older they can start helping with with farm work which needs less strength as well as looking after even younger siblings. When they've grown up they may be able to provide for you when you get old, because there may be no functioning state welfare. That's what happens in the sub-Saharan African nations and other very rural nations with the highest fertility rates.

When you live in the city though, raising children is expensive. Your family likely lives far away from you and can't help with raising them. You have to spend most of your time working in an office somewhere. In the meantime you have to pay for childcare, which in developed nations tends to be very expensive if not subsidised by the government. The expectation of money you need to spend on clothing, school expenses etc for the children is so much higher in developed countries. A lot of lower earning young couples will simply not be able to afford having 2+ young children at the same time. If you wait until your one child grows up and leaves the nest until you have another, at that point you may be too old and no longer able to have children. That's especially considering that couples often won't start having children until they've completed their university education and got a long-term job and some financial security.

Very wealthy people in developed nations will often have large families - see Musk, Trump, Zuckerberg. When money is not a concern, many people will choose to have large families.

Where I live the retirement savings system is quite different, so maybe I'm not understanding the US system well (or, at all). But I'm sure many people with retirement savings are not financially savvy and will delegate all decisions on how to invest their savings to some financial management companies, brokers, banks or however it works in the US. So doesn't that now allow those companies to invest people's savings into cryptocurrency, obviously with potentially very unfortunate results for said savings? Can they at least be potentially sued for financial mismanagement if they invest people's savings into some crypto and it loses all its value?