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Please forgive me for asking a controversial question (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of these biological correlations with race, w

• ceejayoz 5y ago
  It can be both real physiological differences and a social construct, as "what level of bone density tips you from x to y" becomes a question, as does "is an x person with calcium deficiency actually a y person" sort of things that are obviously not the case.
  • roflc0ptic 5y ago
    As someone with a scientific bent who is of the left, I always find it incredibly frustrating when people say “x is a social construct”, because it’s technically true, but also utterly elides the dual nature of the category. Race is a social construct that can be used to infer true things (probabilities) about the real world! Other social constructs that have this property: sociology, economics, physics… This isn’t to say a lot of people who are into race science don’t wildly overstate their claims, but there isn’t literally nothing to it.
    • FeepingCreature 5y ago
      It's a deepity, ie. a statement with two interpretations, one true but trivial, and one enormously impactful but false.
      • roflc0ptic 5y ago
        that is a wonderful word, thanks
        • roflc0ptic 5y ago
          also, i miss reading your comments on SSC, are you on ASX?
          • FeepingCreature 5y ago
            Yeah, just not much to contribute lately.
    • bopbeepboop 5y ago
      Admitting reality and statistics into conversations about race is forbidden on the left for an obvious reason. It would require them to admit two faults they’re unable to — 1. Blacks have been destroyed by the welfare state and it’s the fault of the modern left that the black community is worse off than a few generations ago; and, 2. The reason they talk about things before 1980 is that because since then, the left has purposefully engaged in organized hate against Whites and Asians, in education and employment — and further have encouraged racial privilege, such as avowed racist Nick Cannon being celebrated in Hollywood. The left can’t talk facts about race because facts don’t fit their narrative.
    • esyir 5y ago
      Agreed on both fronts. There's a lot of attempts here to use "race is a social construct" to indirectly claim that race is meaningless, or at least imply that. People need to realise the following: - Race is a social construct - It's also a proxy for ancestry - Ancestry is a proxy for genetic history - None of the above contradict each other. It is possible that we could sufficiently redefine race and ethnicity such that the above isn't true, but as it is right now, race is at least moderately coupled to a biological signature. What should also be emphasized is that race isn't an end-all. The within race variation is far greater than the between-race variation.
      • mcguire 5y ago
        Are you positing a close ancestral link between Africans and Australian natives, say closer than between either and northwestern Europeans?
    • pessimizer 5y ago
      You can't say anything about someone's bone density by deciding that they are black. Averaging the bone density of everyone that you've defined as black might be predictive of distributions of the bone densities of large numbers of people you've defined as black. But it's just because of the metrics you've chosen. If you started defining race by bone density, and ignored ahistorical half-biblical half-mystical 19th-century human taxonomies, you might find that their classifications aren't interesting or useful for most things. If you controlled for effects that are affected by differential social treatment (like diet and upbringing), you might find most of your metrics are ghosts. The process of sorting people into boxes for differential treatment based on their qualities affects their qualities.
      • drdeca 5y ago
        The following is a response to only your first paragraph: Huh? If the distributions of bone densities among “people you would visually identify as ‘race X’ ” and “people you would visually identify as ‘race Y’ ” differ, then knowing that an individual would be someone you would visually identify as ‘race X’, gives you some amount of statistical information about their bone density. I guess you just mean that you can’t make any high-confidence statements that are substantially different than if you didn’t have that information? Small note on second paragraph: I don’t think the racial categories in question are even half-biblical? I mean, I know in the Old Testament there are lots of things referring to e.g. edomites, or Amalekites, etc. , but I don’t think these are really like, “races”, and I can’t think of anything that really supports the idea of a fixed set of racial categories. But perhaps I’m forgetting/missing something.
        • ceejayoz 5y ago
          > If the distributions of bone densities among “people you would visually identify as ‘race X’ ” and “people you would visually identify as ‘race Y’ ” differ, then knowing that an individual would be someone you would visually identify as ‘race X’, gives you some amount of statistical information about their bone density. Only if they differ substantially. If they look like https://evergreenleadership.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/BellCurve11.jpg https://evergreenleadership.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/B..., you can't conclude much from an individual's bone density measurement, even if "people of race X have 3% more bone density than people of race Y".
• mistermann 5y ago
  If you consider it from the perspective that race and culture are typically conflated into just race, then "race is a social construct" is fairly logical.
  • OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    >If you consider it from the perspective that race and culture are typically conflated into just race... I'd say that that only occurs in the odd case of 'Latino'. For some reason Spanish-speaking got amalgamated into a thing it didn't belong.
    • goatlover 5y ago
      It happens for Europeans too. White has come to mean everyone of European descent, even though there's tons of ethnic, historical and regional differences across the continent. Asia even more so. Africa is also very diverse when you take into account Northern Africa. The whole Mediterranean area had lots of groups moving around for thousands of years across three continents.
      • OneEyedRobot 5y ago
        >White has come to mean everyone of European descent I'd be surprised if anyone in Europe even thought of themselves as 'white' until (perhaps) the post-WWII era. Wogs begin at Calais. >Africa is also very diverse when you take into account Northern Africa. I suppose that you could consider North Africa as a separate continent given the bordering desert. My understanding is that sub-Saharan Africa has more real-deal genetic diversity in human populations than the rest of the world put together (which makes sense given it's age). Obviously race is a real thing. Either a giant tree of relatedness with clusters of appearance + small construction differences or simply a way to form self-interested groups (go to any prison for 10 minutes). The fascination with it as of late is unfortunate, but I'm not sure if it's a reflection of resource depletion/overpopulation, a wave of quasi-religion, or people simply forming up teams for a big fight.
    • mistermann 5y ago
• happytoexplain 5y ago
  Yes, some anatomical differences are certainly affected by environment, but the quoted phrase is typically used in the context of treating races differently based on behavior ("X people are immoral", "Y people are stupid"). It's meant to encourage people to treat each other with equity and consider that such observed differences may be distorted by news, your like-minded cohorts, sociological conditions, etc, which are all theoretically addressable. But maybe I'm misunderstanding your question, since clearly the idea that races have anatomical differences is not contested by anybody - after all, anatomical difference is the very thing we base the word "race" on, colloquially. You don't need non-obvious differences to see that, since we already have obvious differences.
  • dahfizz 5y ago
    > since clearly the idea that races have anatomical differences is not contested by anybody This is not true. I had a college professor explain the "race is a social construct" idea, and her position was staunchly that there was _no_ biological basis for race. See also this article by the scientific american[1]: > Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. This is the idea that GP is responding to - clearly there must be some biological basis for race, if an AI can determine race from an x-ray. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...
    • ceejayoz 5y ago
      > This is the idea that GP is responding to - clearly there must be some biological basis for race, if an AI can determine race from an x-ray. Not necessarily; they could easily reflect societal differences. Bone density could be affected by diet, or medical care received, or environmental factors in poor neighborhoods, which might easily vary by race without there being a genetic cause for that variance. If it were a simple "all black people have a bone density of 3; all white people have a bone density of 2" you could pretty solidly conclude a biological component, but we're in the realm of small variances and probabilities that confound things quite a bit. I think the most likely explanation for these results is something like https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-from-its-creators-to-cheat-at-its-appointed-task/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-fr..., personally. Especially with the 8x8 pixelation example.
• savrajsingh 5y ago
  The differences exist on a spectrum and there’s no hard line between one or the other. Yes, as you mention, there are biological correlations. But at the edge cases, it’s quite subjective. How many races are there? Ask a different person and they’ll have a different list. Is Asian a race or is that ridiculously general? etc etc
• kace91 5y ago
  Race in the context of physical differences does not map to the social concepts of race. For example, US documents usually include Latino as a possible race, even though Latin Americans are white, black, indigenous Americans, or a mix - and Spaniards are what usually would be classified as white. If you check older forms you'd see Italians and Irish people categorized as a different (non white) category, etc.
  • JasonFruit 5y ago
    Do US documents do that? In my recollection, you're usually asked to specify a race, and then "Latino" is included in a separate ethnicity question.
    • neaden 5y ago
      You are correct. Most people who identify as Latino/Hispanic in the US consider that to be their race though, not ethnicity. So Census data has a lot of people who identify as Race: Other Ethnicity: Hispanic/Latino.
    • pushECX 5y ago
      You're correct. US documents generally have race and ethnicity separate, with Hispanic/Latino origin being an ethnicity.
  • eplanit 5y ago
    Race is distinct from Nationality. "Latino" is not a synonym for citizens of Latin American countries, but the name of a racial group which originated from that region of the world. It gets confusing with countries like China, Japan, and India, which are more racially homogeneous, and where the country name is the same as the (common) name of the predominate racial groups.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      The parent is talking about ethnicity (culture), not nationality. "Latino" isn't a race, it's an ethnicity. In particular, there are many "races" of people who are Latino (white Cubans, indigenous Mexicans, black Brazilians, etc can all be "Latino" despite different races and nationalities). Indeed the "latin" in "Latin America" and "Latino" was originally a language category--these peoples all spoke romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc).
• curiousllama 5y ago
  I think everyone would agree that there are some pretty obvious biological racial markers that differentiate racial groups. Skin color comes to mind :) The social construct argument just says that the specific categories and lines we draw are fairly arbitrary. Why is an afghani middle eastern (white?) but a Pakistani south-Asian? Is a Russian from Vladivostok really more closely related to a brit than a Mongolian? Idk - but, to me, the social construct argument just says “who cares? The specific groupings are pretty arbitrary anyway”
  • antattack 5y ago
    I think we can agree that thanks to our minds we have leaped over our physical differences encoded in our DNA. Evolutionary differences have little influence on our survival and reproduction, socio-economic constructs and technology has pretty much taken over that role.
  • esyir 5y ago
    The funny thing is that it isn't really arbitrary at all. It's location based. Humans only recently gained the ability to travel vast distances, and in the past lived (and bred) within a small, localized region. The "arbitrary" location based ethnicities actually do reflect that genetic ancestry Of course, really wide ones like black/white/asian lose some of their meanings.
• jghn 5y ago
  "race" as we use it colloquially is a lot less fine grained than biological differences between humans. For instance there's not a monolithic genomic signature around "black" or "white" and yet those are categories we use for "race".
• 542458 5y ago
  You've apparently asked a very interesting question, judging by the volume of replies! The other replies here are mostly good, but I'd also like to note that "race is a social construct" refers to how "races" aren't really objective categories (What defines if somebody is "white"?) and more of a subjective thing, particularly at the margins. We can build classifiers that can match most people's (in our current cultural context) perceptions most of the time, but that doesn't make it a rigid natural phenomenon. For example, I could build a classifier that looks at household finances and decides if people are lower, middle, or upper-class. I'd bet that I could get it good enough that most people off the street would agree with the results most of the time. However, that doesn't make "social class" some sort of objective, unchanging, universal truth. Somebody from 100 years ago would probably find us all to be upper-class. Somebody from the far-flung future would (hopefully) find us mostly to be near-destitute.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    > You've apparently asked a very interesting question, judging by the volume of replies! Agreed, and upvotes too! It seems like I've struck upon something people have been interested in talking about. > The other replies here are mostly good, but I'd also like to note that "race is a social construct" refers to how "races" aren't really objective categories (What defines if somebody is "white"?) and more of a subjective thing, particularly at the margins. We can build classifiers that can match most people's (in our current cultural context) perceptions most of the time, but that doesn't make it a rigid natural phenomenon. I certainly believe this to be the case, but when I hear "race is a social construct" it's almost always in the context of denying biological differences between the races in the same way that some extreme (though mainstream and influential) people take "gender is a social construct" to mean that literally all differences between the sexes are socially constructed including height, weight, strength, etc (otherwise known as "blank slatism"). That said, unlike biological sex, there are fewer valid social implications that we can draw from race (e.g., there are a bunch of social implications which fall out from women's unique ability to bear children, but no analogues which fall out from race) and we have drawn many false implications from race which have been tremendously harmful to individuals of different races, so if we have to reduce everything to a slogan or a binary (as our simplistic society increasingly demands), then "race is a social construct" isn't a bad one.
• sillyquiet 5y ago
  IMO it's because it's very dubious the AI is doing what the paper is maintaining it's doing. People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Every individual has a set of biological features inherited from their ancestors which, theoretically, could include any or all so-called 'races'. Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'. Putting it another way, if we were alien visitors, and had in front of us a representative sample of dead bodies from the entire world, we would be hard pressed to sort those bodies into 'races' based on biological features. For example, we currently use melanin levels as a key indicator of 'race' today, but an alien, lacking the social context of the significance of say, high levels of melanin, may well consider it a secondary feature since its shared with otherwise unrelated people
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    > Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'. That doesn't mean race doesn't exist any more than the fact that height is a continuum doesn't mean that short people and tall people don't exist.
    • andrewzah 5y ago
      "That doesn't mean race doesn't exist" Exactly, although not in the traditional sense. There are many many overlapping genetic aspects in humans; We subdivide for political or social reasons, not strictly biological ones. To make the height comparison more fair, it would be as if we divided people into "bigs" or "littles" arbitrarily and formed political parties around it, etc. Height is one biological aspect and even then what is "tall" is subjective. For example, the US viewpoint of white or black(~=african) is a relatively recent way of looking at race. People don't slot neatly into X or Y buckets. I recommend reading the wikipedia article on Race [0]. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
      • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  Came here, wanting to, but afraid to, ask just this question. Glad you asked. Glad some were willing to give thoughtful answers.
• jollybean 5y ago
  The way we interpret race is largely a social construct due to 'apparent' physical differentiation, less so underlying biological or genetic factors. We end up segregating ourselves for a variety of reasons, in which case groups that are physically very distinguished end up forming almost an ethnic basis. For example, two groups with varying genetic makeup and maybe a number of non-obvious biological differences, but who otherwise looked identical - would have the similar life experience in terms of their social treatment by other groups. But irrespective of how a person is socialized - if you're Black, people are going to treat you one way, and if you're White, people are going to treat you a little different. That 'lived experience' differential is a somewhat unavoidable. The degree of that variability is obviously debatable, but surely it exists to some degree. I suppose you could make a parallel in ethnicity: a century ago, the difference between a Scottish-American and an English-American would have been apparent by lineage, accent, Church affiliation, and that might have affected relationships, status etc.. Whereas after a few generations of integration, there is definitely 'no' (or not much) difference between those two groups, and no vector for differentiation/discrimination. The historical ethnic situation was a 'social construct'. That said, some of the argumentation used to promote the idea that there is no genetic basis for race is a little odd, the 'Africans have more genetic variation than other groups combined' is often used, but frankly I do not understand how that doesn't mean there are material differences between them and other groups. And of course there is no 'hard line' between groups, but there is also no 'hard line' between the Scottish and English, there are many people who have attributes of both cultures, but that doesn't negate the existence of either group. I think we're a bit oversensitive these days to these issues. Systematic racism exists and we should think about it, but that doesn't mean there's a boogeyman behind every door. I think in this case it's also worth examining what exactly the AI is finding out, because it may not be just 'bone marrow'.
• Kharvok 5y ago
  Race is a proxy for clustering groups of biological traits
  • ackfoobar 5y ago
    > of biological traits or genes I saw a visualization of the clustering on twitter. https://twitter.com/rokomijic/status/1426614501856751620 https://twitter.com/rokomijic/status/1426614501856751620
• retrac 5y ago
  Race, of course, is based on physical traits. But the groupings and boundaries are culturally determined and very arbitrary. Minor nose and cheek shape differences are obvious to the Hutu and Tutsi (enough they massacred each on the premise they are different racial groups) but to the average American they're both just black. Similarly, a century ago, it was entirely obvious to the British and the Italians that they were different races of people, although closely related. Today that idea is completely alien in America, where they're both white. Perhaps the best example is the American views on what defines blackness. Because I grew up in a community where mixed race white/black was seen as a distinct race from white or black, I have a very hard time interpreting race the way Americans do sometimes -- Barrack Obama and Kamala Harris's mixed parentage is obvious to me, which makes them obviously not black to me (think like in the same way Obama is obviously not white) and I have a hard time wrapping my head around Americans seeing them as such, but apparently they do, since even a small amount of physical traits that suggest recent African descent categorizes you as black there.
• anotheraccount9 5y ago
  Because race is not a social construct.
  • andrewzah 5y ago
    I initially had this same belief, but I realized I had such a limited understanding of race after reading the wikipedia article on it [0]. That we divide not based on actual genetics but visible markers makes it a social construct. And the way we've chosen to look at race politically has changed over time. "Because the variation of physical traits is clinal and nonconcordant, anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries discovered that the more traits and the more human groups they measured, the fewer discrete differences they observed among races and the more categories they had to create to classify human beings. The number of races observed expanded to the 1930s and 1950s, and eventually anthropologists concluded that there were no discrete races.[93] Twentieth and 21st century biomedical researchers have discovered this same feature when evaluating human variation at the level of alleles and allele frequencies. Nature has not created four or five distinct, nonoverlapping genetic groups of people." 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
    • esyir 5y ago
      A more accurate view would be that it really is both. It's a social construct, but it's not fully arbitrary, being historically (and currently) used as a proxy for ancestry, and thus genetics. >That we divide not based on actual genetics but visible markers makes it a social construct This is going too far towards the other end. Physical characteristics stem from genetic variations, and consistent patterns in appearance are often linked to some shared ancestry. It's not the end-all, but it's hardly without cause either.
• JulianMorrison 5y ago
  How race is a social construct: it was imposed as an idea for reasons that were not connected to physiological fact (although often claiming the contrary at the time, the claims were the same kind of made up BS as phrenology, another idea from the same time period). There are biological correlations with inherited genetic lineage. That only has weak correlation with assigned race. Lots of different lineages of people are "black", Africa is big and diverse. Lots of different lineages of people are "white". But for example, if your lineage is from a malarial region, your chances of being a genetic sickle cell carrier are higher. Most people from those areas are dark skinned, so it correlates with being "black". Also there's the impact of racism, which affects everything from nutrition to poverty to pollution exposure, and does so on an individual, a regional, and a national scale. And this has biological consequences.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• iSnow 5y ago
  Nature does not create "bins" to sort people or things. Some traits are clustered and we latch on the most visible clusters to define "races". In reality, there is broad overlap and if you look up close, the whole concept becomes hairy. Someone with a father of Scandinavian descent and a mother with African lineage, what is that person, black, white, 50/50? It's the same with gender/sex. While the biological substrate is clearly variable, the categories are social.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • soundnote 5y ago
    Not quite: Sex is very clearly split into two distinct mechanisms. There's definitely sex-linked distributions of different traits, like male and female typical ranges of height, or agreeable personality, risk-seeking/risk aversion and so on, where both sexes operate the same mechanism. Races are mostly clusters in variation within one mechanism - eg. skin color is largely a gradient of more or less melanin, and what gets selected for depends on the environment. It's not intrinsically linked to the whole cluster of race-typical traits, those just are in the same genetic bundle that gets inherited from generation to generation, and most of those traits can be mixed. Sex itself has a sharp divide from the mechanisms themselves being completely different.
    • throwaway894345 5y ago
      To advance your point, the ability to bear children is kind of the definitional distinction from which all of these biological distinctions derive as well as tons of social distinctions. Race has no such analogue.
      • heywherelogingo 5y ago
        How about cat vs dog?
        • throwaway894345 5y ago
• tomp 5y ago
  It’s biologically defined the same way as height is biologically defined, and socially defined the same way as ”tall” (180cm+) is defined.
• ggggtez 5y ago
  It's not a surprise that race effects how someone looks. It doesn't take a genius to see things like different colored skin, different nose, or height differences... The question is what about the looks of a chest X-ray are connected to race. I agree with the research here, it's non obvious what is being extracted by the AI. If I had to guess, maybe something about the quality of the scan itself. Perhaps one race was scanned at one particular hospital, vs a different hospital scanning a different race. Then it's just picking out the different scanner.
  • soundnote 5y ago
    Or: Race is a rough proxy for breeding populations that have been separated for long time, and subject to different environments' selection pressure. Over time, selection and blind luck build up all manner of small differences, which both observably exist at the surface (so why not inside the body) and that you'd expect to exist from basic evolutionary principles. You'd expect a Norwegian forest cat, a Saharan desert cat and a Burmese to be different in innumerable small ways because they grow up in totally different environments. You'd also expect there to be a lot of overlapping, well, catness to them all. Lions purr, after all. There's nothing complicated about any of it, humans just tie themselves into knots when it comes to humans in a way they don't when it comes to cats. With that said, the simple explanation is that the AI picks up on these small patterns in a way humans don't. The brain and neural networks are fundamentally pattern-recognition engines. The AI is just seeing something we don't either notice or can't see.
    • ceejayoz 5y ago
      > Lions purr, after all. They do not, actually. Incapable of it; cheetahs are the only big cats that can do it. https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/1995/Questions-and-Answers-About-Wildlife https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/1995/Questio... > Purring ability, rather than size or behavior, is one of two chief distinctions between the two main genera of cat, Felis and Panthera.
      • soundnote 5y ago
• echopurity 5y ago
  The idea of detecting "race" from an 8x8 grayscale of someone's lungs is such obvious racist pseudo-science that of course it's repeatedly posted and top ranking at HN. Why would these narcissists even publish results this bad?
• eptcyka 5y ago
  The genetic differences between different people in Africa are far greater than the genetic differences between black and white people in North America. The term "race" as used to describe belonging to a different groups which generally experience their lives vastly differently to other groups is thus inherently social. The hypothesis goes as follows - if black and white people are so similar to each other biologically, why are their life experiences so different? It would seem that there's more to it than just the biochemical composition of our bodies that dictates what kind of a life you'll have.
  • zepto 5y ago
    > The genetic differences between different people in Africa are far greater than the genetic differences between black and white people in North America. This is often repeated, but the point of the question is that the OP calls this into question.
  • soundnote 5y ago
    Differences between African groups being bigger than between blacks and whites in NA don't make the rough categorization no longer work. For example, there's rather little genetic variety within dogs, or between dogs and wolves, but that doesn't say much about how impactful the variation is: Chihuahuas and Huskies are genetically really similar to each other, but no one in their right minds would disagree that you can comfortably put them in different, very real, very genetics-based buckets. In general, arguments of variation within a group are not arguments against considering between-group differences, or those between-group differences being real. The variation within a category cannot be dismissed, though, it's hugely important for understanding the world properly and for guiding personal conduct.
    • foldr 5y ago
      The following article has a detailed explanation of why the analogy with dog breeds is not a good one: https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-019-0109-y https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...
• uniqueid 5y ago
  if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? I could divide people into 'tall', 'medium' and 'short' buckets. Someone else could categorize them all into just two categories (eg: 'tall' and 'short') instead, and someone else might argue that I've chosen bad cutoffs, and tell me I incorrectly put a bunch of 'medium' people in the 'short' bucket. People have differences, but the criteria by which we choose to group them is subjective.
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    That is only true if the distribution of things within the continuum is not "lumpy". For height it isn't, but for other things it is. For example gender is highly bimodal, yet still a continuum. Would you say that "male" and "female" are subjective socially constructed categories? Of course not. Race is probably somewhere in-between. There are people all over the spectrum but there are pretty clear large groups with sparsely populated gaps in-between them.
    • uniqueid 5y ago
      Your comment merits a more thoughtful reply than this, but I discussed the same issue here some months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26876186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26876186) and it's hard to work up enthusiasm now.
    • KittenInABox 5y ago
      I would argue that "male" and "female" can be subjective socially constructed categories in certain contexts. For example, intersex people exist, people with hormone conditions exist. Whether these people are male or female is a very hairy and nuanced conversation that is viewed on a case-by-case basis, and sometimes creates controversies, such as women who have XY chromosomes and naturally elevated testosterone being disqualified from competing as women in elite sports. See: Caster Semenya, who is disqualified from competing as a woman because she has XY chromosomes and naturally elevated testosterone. She's intersex. Her only supposed recourse is to take medication to force her testosterone levels lower to be qualified as a woman. Of course, the organization is now defining who counts as a woman to qualify for women's sports is likely making socially constructed categories.
• VictorPath 5y ago
  > if there are all of these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that “race is a social construct”? What race is Obama? And how is your answer to that question not a social construct?
• the_third_wave 5y ago
  Racism - judging people by the colour of their skin - has been on life support for a long time [1] in most liberal republics/democracies but nefarious actors are attempting to revive it in the name of identity politics. It is this type of race which can be detected using X-rays. The same group tends to support the doctrine of cultural relativism [2]. Claiming all cultures are equally valid they call criticism of behaviour related to specific cultural traits "racism", mangling the definition of that term in the process. Cultures, by definition, are social constructs. Cultural relativism is not the norm and should not become such since there are differences between cultural traits where it is possible to state that some are objectively better than others. As an example, the cultural trait of genital mutilation is objectively worse than that of leaving girls' bits alone - and I'm open to stating the same about boys even though that would raise up a storm of protest. The cultural trait of parents marrying off their offspring without said offspring having a say in the matter is objectively worse than than that of having the offspring decide for themselves who they want to share their life with. The cultural trait of having people who achieved success within the bounds of the law - whether those be inventors, writers, athletes, successful farmers, builders or architects or anything else - is objectively better than that of having successful criminals and hoodlums as role models - yes, "street culture" with gang bangers as role models is objectively worse than whatever name can be given to cultures which have/had those inventors (etc) as role models. X-rays can not be used to detect whether you might mutilate your newborn's genitals, marry off your 5yo daughter to your 20yo nephew or leave your children to be raised by the local street gang leaders since these traits do not depend on the colour of your skin even though there is often a correlation; correlation does not imply causation [3]. Take for example Michael Skråmo [4], a Swedish-Norwegian man who very much looked the part of such but ended up as a recruiter for islamic state in the Nordic countries. Contrast him to e.g. Luai Ahmed, a Yemeni refugee who lives in Sweden and is a vocal critic of everything Skråmo stood for. It was not Skråmo's white skin and blonde hair which made him ready to pick up a Kalashnikov, it is not Ahmed's brown skin and black hair which made him averse to the negative cultural traits related to islam. MLK was right when he longed for a society where people would be judged on the content of their character and we were well on our way of achieving that goal. Unfortunately there are those who derive their identity - and income - from their purported position as fighters against racism (without scare quotes), a fight which was nearing its conclusion. While most old soldiers fade away [5] some have taken it upon themselves to revive their old enemy so as to keep their purpose - and income - alive. Their culture is not mine and I consider it to be objectively worse than, e.g. MLK's. If you then consider that MLK was a "black" man while I am of north-west European descent and as such have "white" skin the truth becomes clear, it is not the colour of our skin which makes us alike - it is the content of our character. Race is not a social construct. Culture is. Nature is not a social constrict, Nurture is. [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/11/racism-america-history/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/11/racism-america-histor... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Skr%C3%A5mo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Skr%C3%A5mo [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_soldiers_never_die https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_soldiers_never_die
• goto11 5y ago
  “Race is a social construct” does not mean that inheritable biological differences between groups people does not exist. It means that the categories we use to classify people into races are cultural. For example the "black" and "white" categories in the US.
  • maininformer 5y ago
    Isn't that ethnicity? Race: biological category Ethnicity: Cultural category
    • goto11 5y ago
      Both race and ethnicity are cultural categories. Example: Barack Obama is considered black in the US even though he has a white mother. This is a consequence of American culture, the historical "one drop" rule.
      • deleted 5y ago
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• kgwgk 5y ago
  Everything is a social construct depending on how you look at it. Some people say that biological sex is a social construct.
• andreyk 5y ago
  From what I understand, the definition of a social construct is a bit nuanced, and it's possible to both believe race is a social construct and that it correlates with things. As a metaphor, let's say we create two categories in the world for all people - tallers (people above six feet in height) and shorters (people below six feet in height). Human height objectively exists, but these categories are social constructs. Likewise, human variations in genes based on ancestry clearly exists, but the discrete racial categories we define (black, white, asian, etc.) are social constructs since we could create other discrete categories (Irish, Slavic, etc.). So saying race is a social construct does not mean your genetic make up does not matter or correlate with anything, but that grouping people into the set of commonly agreed upon races is not the inherent way it has to be. At the same time, these groupings do represent distinct genetic make up and so correlate with physical attributes. It's just that different groupings with different correlations are also possible. This video explains it pretty well IMO: https://youtu.be/koud7hgGyQ8 https://youtu.be/koud7hgGyQ8
  • mig39 5y ago
    Thanks for the great explanation. The height analogy made it click for me.
    • tialaramex 5y ago
      Also, passing would work for height. Suppose you're 5'11 but your friends are around 6'1 and you were close friends in kindergarten (when you were all shorter of course). You begin wearing platforms that add about an inch to your height. You hang out with other tallers and so people just assume that's what you are, they likely don't insist on measuring you in bare feet at every opportunity. Laws affecting this social construction of "tallers" have much less impact on you than might seem to be the case looking at a medical chart. You would be said to "pass" for a taller. Passing was (and to a lesser extent remains) crucial in the US and many places where variations in appearance were crucial to racial assumptions. If you look white and you act white then, most of the time to a first approximation you are white. But of course this opportunity is much more open to a relatively pale-skinned person than to a dark-skinned poor person which is a further problem on top of the problem that now people are lying about who they are.
• deleted 5y ago
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• HWR_14 5y ago
  From what I understand, race is a social construct doesn't mean that there can be no physical differences. After all, humans have been able to tell* what race someone is with their stupid human eyes. It's making a claim the important aspects of race are a social construct. If the defining physical differences between races is both melanin and sternum width, that doesn't seem to be more relevant than just skin melanin. * In many cases. It's more error prone than most people want to admit.
  • pessimizer 5y ago
    > humans have been able to tell* what race someone is with their stupid human eyes. It's more that humans have been able to define, with significant disagreements, what race someone is with their stupid human eyes. Race is nothing but a collection of these judgments. I'm not brown because I'm black, I'm black because I'm brown.
    • HWR_14 5y ago
      >It's more that humans have been able to define, with significant disagreements, what race someone is with their stupid human eyes. Sorry, that's also true. My asterisk was talking more about the inability to visually tell the difference in many cases. The black people in America who could pass as white in the 1950's (or now). Or how Latino and Middle-Eastern people often get confused. There are numerous cases, both specific and general. But yes, it's not an objective truth being measured, and I'm sorry if I implied otherwise.
• RattleyCooper 5y ago
  The idea of a social construct is just a social construct man
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Or rather, a spook.
• pmarreck 5y ago
  If the software is told of the existence of race via an attribute in its ML training, then it will see race in additional data. Otherwise, it won't, IMHO. Also, due to omission of many other variables (such as culture), those variables are being conflated with race. I personally think a lot of what is commonly accused of being racism, sexism etc. is really just "culturalism" or "preferentialism"... let me think of an example... Given two bars, one filled with rap music and the other filled with techno music, and I pick the techno one every time... am I racist (assuming the predominant race in these 2 bars differs)? Or just preferentialist, culturalist or (frankly) "techno-ist" (if that were a thing)? Because I think it's much harder to get angry about preferences than it is to get angry about racism, I think that given a choice, we need to consider the less-triggery inputs to a perceived problem
• deleted 5y ago
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• mcguire 5y ago
  As someone pointed out in another reply, "races" are buckets people are distributed into, frequently based on physical aspects. The point of saying "race is a social construct" is the nature of those buckets. Northern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and Eastern Europeans (or rather people descending from those areas) differ in a number of physical aspects. Are they different races? For those who think race matters today, it seems not---they are all "white". Back in the heyday of scientific racism in the first half of the 20th century, they absolutely were---that is why the US had different immigration limits for different parts of Europe. Are native Australian people the same race as Africans?---there's no especially close genetic relationship as far as I know. Physical differences exist. How you use those differences to divide people into groups and, more importantly, how you treat people of those groups is a social construct.
  • bordercases 5y ago
    Or by haplogroups.
• charlescearl 5y ago
  Basically groups may have physical characteristics. European nations starting from at least the 1500s began using these physical/religious groupings to mark certain groups for predatory expropriation and premature death. To quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “The racial in racial capitalism isn’t secondary, nor did it originate in color or intercontinental conflict, but rather always group-differentiation to premature death. Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.”[1] Cedric J. Robinson (among others) have discussed how capitalism and racialization are continually co-created. 1. Abolition Geography and the problem of innocence, in Futures of Black Radicalism.
• badrabbit 5y ago
  The problem is the question itself, both the one you asked and the one the researchers asked. Is it recognizing ethnicity or race? Clumping ethnicities as "race" is the social construct. It's not just skin that is different between people. If a certain culture prizes certain features in people, people with those traits will breed more, thus amplifying biological features within a socio-cultural group. My question is, using medical imaging can it particularly identify say people of african origin but it cannot tell apart east vs west africans? Can it uniquely identify asians but can it not tell apart an indian person from a Korean? Or given proper training can it discern between north and south koreans or between a french person and a greek person? Race is a social construct not because groups of people are all identical but because both science and major-religion have concluded that humans share a common human(homosapien) ancestry, therefore there is one human race and multiple ethnicities and geographical super-ethnicities (south east asian and north european for example). Edit: This is also why race on id cards is silly. Not because you don't want to identify people based on appearance but because ethnicity is more granular and leads to less confusion. Would it be more identifying to say indian or asian? African or north-african? I strongly believe the modern black/white/asian "race" is a darwinian invention to try and understand and classify nature better, based on intuition instead of science.
• casefields 5y ago
  Lots of great replies but missing the most important from a scholarly journal: Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ3bwqXZT2m8MI2egSRAQs1GMqmorJIhoHWX https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ3bwqXZT2m8MI2egSRA... Side note: If you've seen Ken Burn's docs then you've probably seen her before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_J._Fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_J._Fields
• kumarvvr 5y ago
  Race is both biological and social. Biologically, forget about bone density etc. Skin color, facial features, face shape, etc are discernable directly. Race as a social construct is the idea (originally rooted in imperialism and colonialism) that certain races are inferior mentally and societal development wise. A few Brits saw Africans residing in huts and living on farming using primitive tools and concluded that they could not develop any further than that and that their brain development was limited. (Of course, this was perpetrated to enable guilt free enslaving and "civilizing" them and exploiting them for labour. I am sure that if African societies were simply introduced to western civilization and allowed to trade and travel, the ideas from west would have been adopted and assimilated much quickly) So, biologically, races are distinct, identifiable and have evolved to meet the needs of their local environment. But socially, races as inferior or superior was perpetrated with ulterior motives and have been shown as false time and again.
• yesOfCourse9 5y ago
  I am not so sure it matters. Every human biology can be seen as a gradient of physical shape and material composition but falling within a rough spec. I don’t see making race a social construct as all that useful. Not to take it away, because I say the same about gender and sexual preferences; so long as people aren’t being fascist and abusive, ethno-scientific objects need not be constrained to appearance.