• 43 Posts
  • 296 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It’s possible to reduce the privacy issues by using APIs with a local frontend. Given that APIs usually cater to companies instead of end consumers they actually have simple opt-outs for information logging.

    Requires a bit of know-how, and you’ll be paying for your llm per use (not that bad actually, I’ve personally averaged <10$/yr in api costs) but at least you get to have all your personal issues on your local device instead.

    For a chatGPT-like experience you probably want the ooga booga web generation ui but there’s others too.














  • It’s targeting testosterone level, which varies by person and there are cis women with higher levels than some men.

    I’m going to stop you right there. Given changes that are slowly permeating both language and legal systems across the world, “man” or “woman” doesn’t really have anything to do with biology anymore, nor are terms like “cis” or “trans” really relevant to biology (more so a persons current legal/presenting gender compared to the one they were assigned at birth). As such they aren’t useful terms when discussing in the context of what biologically is normal with regards to hormone levels.

    The terms that do exist and are relevant (at least in English, my other native language doesn’t have separate words for sex and gender which can complicate medical discussions and also makes folks more attached to the biological definition -_-) are male, female and intersex. When looking at a healthy human female they won’t have anywhere near the testosterone levels of a healthy male - it’s a 5x order of magnitude between the upper female and lower male ranges, even when accounting for PCO/S - which isn’t necessarily unhealthy, but just that extra 10-20% outside the normal female range can be enough to start having effects such as growing facial hair in puberty. The gap - along with XY individuals with low testosterone and XX individuals with high testosterone are those who end up developing in an intersex manner, in one way or another (this is already during the fetal stage).

    Honestly I feel like we’re getting far from the original conversation here, but it’s part of what makes these topics so inherently difficult. Balancing between how sensitive some people can find the topic on a social level (particularly when having dealt with actual bad actors), the huge risk of misinterpretations/miscommunications and then the medical field dealing with the biological situation that ultimately is the basis of all this. Evaluating these topics is amongst the most difficult ethical dilemmas we have in the field - right up there with human euthanasia and I don’t think there can be a single “right” answer. You’re going to end up with different people being hurt wherever the balance is struck and that really, really sucks.


  • but if we need to protect women’s “fair” competition strongly for some reason, shouldn’t we also have leagues for all types of people?

    I think you’re being sarcastic here, but there is a trend in that direction, with paralympics and such. It all comes down to this. How is the protected class of athletes defined? If a space for female athletes is going to exist at all, there needs to be some definition, which inevitably is going to feel arbitrary to some. The one they’ve gone with excludes males and most intersex individuals - allowing a little wiggle room here for folks with XY who have no male testosterone production which medically speaking makes it into a “woman at birth with low androgens” competition since those people will usually have a female phenotype at birth.

    In the case of Imane - it may speculatively (after now reading a little about the circumstances and the “leaked” results) be a case of XY intersex with some kind of androgen dysfunction, either through reduced production via enzyme deficiency or partial insensitivity to testo. Being from a less developed country it’s quite possible that Imane wouldn’t even be aware of such a condition until it came to light due to the testing, and even if it was noticed earlier by Algerian medical professionals it may have been hidden from the patient due to how controversial intersex individuals are in traditionally muslim countries. This was the case for a long time even in the west, some countries even into the 2000’s - “in the best interest of the patient”. Quite tragic really.


  • You can though - at least to the extent that we in empirical science usually refer to “proving” or “disproving” (or rather, indicate or contraindicate a hypothesis). In this case it’d be studies/metastudies on injuries in different kinds of matchups (which can either show a statistically significant difference or not) or in performance of different athletes.

    The case you linked here is regarding football, not boxing, which simply makes it a question of performance rather than also safety (as it is with boxing or other combat sports). The key difference in judgement here is the same reason that there are weight classes - simply wouldn’t be safe (or fair for that matter) to match up a 120kg vs a 60 kg athlete - the latter might literally get killed.

    Performance wise, the most “fair” might be to sort athletes into leagues based on testosterone levels. It’s already known that higher testosterone levels tend to correlate with higher performance, so rather than imposing an arbitrary limit where only the athletes in the “sweet spot” just below the limit get to excel, grade them into brackets based on that. Women’s sports were established in the first place to give women a fair chance at competing, since male vs female competitions in the vast majority of cases end up very one sided.




  • Thing is, my time is limited. I don’t have time to look into every single thing. No, this isn’t some empiric process on my part. It comes down to judgement.

    On the one hand there is a well established organization (and several others actually, I did do a cursory internet search) backed by an army medical professionals, which will get sued into oblivion by these athletes if they are egregiously wrong. What they’re saying also happens to check out with my own knowledge on the topic and news that has circulated (both in regular papers and on occasion medical news).

    On the other hand, there are a bunch of random internet strangers who, without citing any external sources say that the well established organization is wrong and lying.

    So, which one would you be inclined to believe?

    Again, feel free to drop in some material that you think disproves this, I would love to have a look!