as you describe is the exact opposite of arbitrary.

you could indeed split me into categories but the resulting assignments would not be arbitrary at all. It would be arbitrary if you also chose to categorize people with blonde hair as brownies, or people under 6 feet tall as talleys (both the hair and height are physical observable and measurable properties)

This post was edited by El1te on Mar 28 2023 03:54pm

That is horrifying lol

As I believe you're a scientist as well (microbiology?) you should understand arbitary well when in comes to units

the majority of units in science are not arbitrary are are defined from measurable quantities - e.g. the SI unit of force, N, is not arbitrary, it is defined as kg⋅m/s2

in contrast, you may often see 'arb' as a unit on instrumentation which is indeed an arbitrary unit to make the number easy to interpret (integer and low-decimal place values between 1 and 100)

another arbitrary unit is the atomic unit (Hartrees or au), which is arbitrary because it scales all the physical constants to 1 to simply make the math simpler.

This post was edited by El1te on Mar 28 2023 03:59pm

It is completely arbitrary that I defined tall as above six feet.

I could have just as easily defined as four feet

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Mar 28 2023 03:59pm

the definition of tall in this case is arbitrary, but then assigning someone tall based on the arbitrary definition is not arbitrary.

in relation to the topic of male/female, you're basically saying its arbitrary that female is defined as person w/ vagina

You're simply arguing a trivial conclusion. You're arguing that up is not up and down is not down because "up" and "down" are just arbitrary created words from the Latin script.

since you're also a scientist you should understand that anything at all only has meaning if it is defined relative to an arbitrarily assigned point.

e.g. electrons are only negative charged because they are defined as such. You could instead define them as Positively charged and absolutely nothing in physics changes as long as you reverse the charge for everything else.

In this case in a parallel universe maybe people with vaginas are called Men and people with penises are called Women. It doesn't change the physical reality that exists

This post was edited by El1te on Mar 28 2023 04:04pm

Being comfortable with these concepts and being comfortable with ambiguity is a necessity for doing good science.

If you can't even figure out that categorization is something we do for convenience and not objectivity then you won't do very good work.

I think you let wearing that big white coat get to your head lmao

I'm saying that assignments happen not based on objective facets but because we want to make the categories.

So a person is a ssigned female at birth, not observed female, because if we never defined female or never observed them in the light of being female they wouldn't get that designation. Same as you were never given the designation of "talley" even though you are taller than 4 feet

lmao, must suck to descend from the losers of both world wars

this is what you do with your life now?

Aren't you from the U.S ?