Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Math and gender are frameworks on entirely different layers. Even "sex" isn't near the layer where ground truths in math reside, bc despite being highly bimodal, phenotype + genotype do not consistently cut cleanly. If you think logic behaves similarly, I do think you're confused

Mathematics has become vastly more rigorous over the past century, but perhaps this is where your "not being a mathematician" weakness is showing? What form of logic are you talking about? Which topos? Which set of axioms do you adopt?

Possibly, I really can't claim a lot of content knowledge re: maths. But I don't think that a field becoming more rigorous over time indicates that the content it has always concerned itself with is itself socially constructed (if that's what you're suggesting)

I don't think that's what Matt was saying, but you'd have to ask him. I think the field of math, and the definitions it uses and the consensus of say, using ZFC are all social constructions.

I think this is roughly pointing to what I'm calling the layer for "useful maths conventions," and I agree that they're socially constructed, but don't find that a helpful lens to understand them much like I don't find that helpful for understanding e.g. typing or data structures

When we discuss gender, we have layers for things like culture-informed self-identification & the interpersonal norms that cause us to assume something that correlates w/ sex with very limited information about genotype + phenotype. "Social construct" seems a very diff term there

Like I said, I think there are not-necessarily-wrong ways to understand virtually everything as "socially constructed." But I think we need to either maintain careful conversational hygiene or use new terms if we're going to be talking about cultural stuff in the same breath

I think I disagree because one underlying aspect and strength of referring to it as a social construct is that it dispels the magic or alure of "facts don't care about your feelings, logic proves me right" belief structures.