okay so is there a multidimensional pythagorean theorem for coming up with a scalar distance between any two genders?
@starkatt yes, the pythagorean theorem extends easily to arbitrarily many dimensions
it's just the RMS of all the orthogonal measurements.
@starkatt Not RMS. The other thing. Just the root sum square.
@Felthry right. The trick is figuring out the axes of the coordinate system.
@starkatt they only need to be orthogonal, so you can just pick an arbitrary one and use the Gram-Schmidt process
unproductive rambling about mathematical operations on a vector approximation of gender
@starkatt The first place my brain goes is approximating instantaneous gender as a vector with nonzero components on various axes, including familiar ones like neutral, female, and male, but (a) are all of these genders orthogonal to each other and (b) what would this distance measure *mean?*
Like, I can see an application for taking the dot product of an instantaneous gender with a unit reference gender (which could itself be a combination of other reference genders) and using the ratio of that with the magnitude of the original gender as a proxy for how accurate the corresponding unidimensional description of that gender *is*, and I suppose that does require having the ability to measure the magnitude of an arbitrary gender ... but even then, there's an open question of which reference genders to use, and whether those are even orthogonal....
@starkatt if you model gender as ℝn then sure. but have I told you why I think we are morally obligated to model gender as a non-metric space?
@mcmoots I don't think you have?
@starkatt So, you can always construct a linear mapping from ℝn to ℝ. And if such a mapping *can* be constructed, kyriarchy *will* construct it and use it to reinforce the binary.
Therefore we should model gender using analogies that can't be mapped back to the number line.
@starkatt I think gender might be non-Euclidean.