Asklemmy

Most school science is oversimplification by design. It’s part of the learning process. Yo first learn colors, then when you are ready can learn about wavelengths, color spaces, biology of the eye, color psicology and many many other knowledge fields.

Even when you get into the anatomy of the eye you get “false” information, like the “perfect” cones that only percibe one color, or the misconception that every color is equal. More advanced education gives you more context and nuances.

In the taste and tongue case can be useful to explain that senses are the product of discrete sensors. That you don’t taste with your tongue but with specialized little taste buds. The different concentrations are mostly real, so the tongue map is a first step, even being so so far from the objetive and complex truth.

The problem is people that think they only need whatever high school education they got to be experts in pandemics, gender, biological sex, business, economics, history, politics and everything else.

Take note that I’m not only talking about a formal education. You can really learn a lot (most things? Maybe everything?) by yourself. But you have to be critical with your sources. You have to know how to learn. You have to understand how little you know about everything and how much you still have to learn.

Most “do your own research” people in the internet do not do actual research, don’t know how to do research and I don believe they know what research is.

Yeah it's a thing for Nickel-Cadmium batteries which aren't used much anymore.

According to the Minnesota Department of Health, if your house was built before 1940, then you should let the water run for 3-5 minutes before drinking it or cooking with it. Showering is probably fine, since they recommend doing showering and running the dishwasher first as one way to let the water run before cooking.
This should especially apply if the water has been sitting in the pipes for a long time (e.g. after a holiday).

Nah. There's a million studies that look at isolated physical traits, but mostly have one of two common problems. 1) they are often written by people with an explicitly anti trans inclusion bias and 2) they look at physical traits in isolation without attempting to quantify if and how those traits apply to sports.

If trans women can out perform cis women, it only takes one to set a women's world record, yet that just doesn't happen. There are often articles claiming this has happened, but when you look closer, it turns out that they're talking about age/regional/federation specific records that are mis presented as world records.

If trans women out perform cis women, we should expect to see them more likely to end with podium finishes than the cis women they're competing with. It should be pretty trivial to gather the data and show that advantage. But it doesn't happen, because the truth is, trans women are on average, more likely to under perform compared to cis women.

No study that looks at a trait in isolation and makes educated guesses about the effect of hormone replacement on that trait is ever going to tell you how real world sporting outcomes will be impacted.

The only thing that will tell you that is actual real world sporting results, and the limited results we have so far don't show any hint of an advantage. If it is in there, it's small enough that it's not immediately obvious. We both know that if it was obvious, the media would be screaming it from the hills.

Some numbers. There are 50,000 athletes in the Olympics each year. From memory, there have been 4 or 5 Olympics in which trans people have been able to participate. So, that's at least 200,000 athletes participating in that time. Now, trans people make up 1% of the population. Lets say that trans people are 10x less likely to get involved in sports though due to external factors. Using those numbers, 1 in 1000 of those 200,000 athletes should have been trans, which comes out 200. Lets say trans people are 100 times less likely to participate in sports. Even then, we should have seen 20 trans athletes. And those athletes should have got more gold medals than you would expect. Instead, we have had exactly 1 trans woman athlete in that time, and she came last in her event.

That's what people are afraid of.

No amount of articles about testosterone and puberty change the reality that people are trying to exclude a vulnerable minority to solve a problem they can't even show to exist in the first place.