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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2026

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  • I have a psychology degree, and I’m back in school pursuing a nursing degree, so I’m currently retaking human development. Both when I originally studied it about 12 years ago and today, we distinguished biological sex from gender and its social and psychological components.

    Biological sex is absolutely real, but it isn’t synonymous with gender. Biological sex concerns reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, hormones, and other biological characteristics. Gender also involves identity, social roles, and cultural expectations.

    Children begin learning gender roles and stereotypes through socialization in infancy. According to gender schema theory, by around age three, most children can label their own gender. Around four, they develop gender stability, understanding that boys generally grow into men and girls into women. By around six, they develop gender constancy, understanding that changing clothing, hairstyles, or activities doesn’t necessarily change someone’s gender.

    Interestingly, children tend to enforce gender stereotypes most rigidly around ages five to six. By seven or eight, they generally become more flexible and accepting of peers who don’t conform to traditional gender expectations.

    So yes, biological sex exists and is relevant to sexual reproduction. But that doesn’t mean the social roles, expectations, and identities associated with sex are themselves biological facts.




  • I think there’s a broader question here from an evolutionary perspective. Humans are fundamentally tool users, and technology has been central to our development as a species. It’s possible that this evolutionary niche we’ve occupied will eventually reach its limits and contribute to our own downfall, but I’m not convinced AI is uniquely responsible. It’s part of a much longer trajectory of technological progress.

    We’ve evolved to solve problems and use tools to make our lives easier. That doesn’t mean technological progress is inevitable, but these tendencies, combined with competition, make it difficult to imagine us ever really stopping. Even if we stopped today, who’s to say another generation of humans 10,000 years from now wouldn’t continue down the same path?

    I don’t think this is exclusively about capitalism. Capitalism certainly incentivizes growth and reducing labor costs, but competition, greed, and the pursuit of technological advantages have existed under other economic systems too. That doesn’t diminish the legitimate concerns about how AI is being used against workers.

    I also wonder whether our short lifespans make us particularly bad at considering the long-term consequences of our innovations. Who is going to sacrifice the opportunities of their own generation to prevent a possible catastrophe centuries from now, especially when there’s no guarantee it would stop technological progress?

    I have a degree in psychology and particularly enjoyed evolutionary psychology, so I think it’s worth asking whether the deeper problem is our own nature, and whether our capacity for collective restraint can keep pace with our ability to innovate.

    I know this raises more questions than it answers, but we’ve faced civilization-changing technologies before, from the printing press and electricity to nuclear weapons. AI won’t be the last. Perhaps the more important question is how we learn to manage these transformations when our tendency to create them seems so deeply rooted in who we are.






  • Change takes time and we are moving in the wrong direction. You’re giving the “both sides” argument and I don’t buy it for a fucking minute. We didn’t have these aggressive ICE tactics under any Dem, we didn’t have wildly reduced NIH, medicare, and medicaid funding under Dems (including food inspection changes that are working against us). We didn’t have “woke is the cause of all things evil” under Dems (and DEI includes protections for disabled people). We didn’t have environmental regulations wiped out under Dems. We didn’t have our election integrity threatened under Dems… I could go on. All these things are incredibly important but because you buy into the “both sides” argument all you can see are the extremes.






  • Same, adderall works but my heart rate is going up too much and I take it sparingly. Trying to exercise more and quit smoking (I know, awful) but for now I’m just not taking it and doing my best. Which right now consists of working on a bunch of lemmy scripts instead of studying for pre-nursing, although I’d prefer CS but I’m afraid of the industry and I’m old (43). FML