3 ms·

You seem to be confused. What's the continuous variable here that you are measuring to assign the discrete label (alive/not alive) to? If you want to do that

• oh_sigh 5y ago
  Right. A bunch of variables all exist whose values let us ultimately apply the label of alive or not alive. So how can one pick the right set of variables and weight them appropriately to determine if a fetus is alive? Isn't it kind of arbitrary at a certain point? As in, we know when something is definitely not alive (when it is gametes in separate humans), and we know when something is definitely alive (when a baby is born and it is crying), but anywhere between those two is just an arbitrary choice. You on your own definition of life would apparently want to restrict the rights of women relative to what they have currently. This is a dangerous idea and should not be allowed.
  • romwell 5y ago
    Yes, it is kind of arbitrary at certain point, that's why we have the debate about it in this country. I am not sure where you are going with this given the subject of the comment I was responding to. I chose my definition from the rights-of-women perspective. My understanding is that a fetus is generally non-viable outside of a host body, and thus not "alive" by my definition. On the other hand, we havd C-sections and incubators. If a baby can be safely extracted with a C-section, placed in an incubator, and survive, my understanding is that the choice to abort is no longer available. Of course, I can be wrong here. My point was that at least I can make a definition here that does not depend on a choice of an arbitrary value of a continuous variable. My definition of "alive" depends on the choice of which variables to look at, not on arbitrary thresholds. And I don't insist on it being The Truth. Another example: "Heart rate" is a continuous vafiable, but the distribution of its values has a large gap between 0 (no heart rate) and nonzero values (the lowest observed was 27bpm). So you don't need to make a choice for a clustering algorithm to work. You can run K-means on "heart rate" and get these 2 clusters: 0 and everything else. This allows one to make a definition of "alive" based on heart rate. That's not my definition, but it's a usable one. This is not feasible with race if we use the variables commonly understood to be associated with race: skin color, height, nose shape, etc. There are no gaps in those variables. Even eye color varies continuously [2], and it's not clear how to assign labels [1]. Color in general is a good analogy for race. You see the colors vary in a rainbow. You can tell the difference between red, green, and blue. But you can't run K-means on a rainbow to get 7 colors out. Or any number but 1, for that matter. You need to make a call yourself where to draw those lines. This reflects in languages. Russian has distinct words for what we'd call "blue" in English; But also English has words like cyan, turquoise, navy, etc., which other languages may not have. Color, in end, is a social construct. [1] https://www.edow.com/general-eye-care/eyecolor/ https://www.edow.com/general-eye-care/eyecolor/ [2]https://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mytheyecolor.html https://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mytheyecolor.html