3 ms·

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 technicall

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".

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".