21 ms·

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 so

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
    But I've think you've gotten looped around here to a stance that fails to account for the original context. It wouldn't be that surprising if an AI could categorize people into "tall" vs "short" from pixelated medical images; certainly nobody would say, as the parent comment did, that the AI must be cheating because there's no such thing as being biologically tall.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      But no one would argue that the definitions of "tall" and "short" weren't social constructs, even as the fact of human length from heel to crown clearly is not a social construct.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- woodruffw 5y ago
  This is an error on two counts: it conflates a spectrum on a single qualiry with spectra across multiple qualities, and it presumes the existence of people who are the “most” of their race (the way that there is a tallest and a shortest person). The first isn’t what race is, and the second is absurd.
- uniqueid 5y ago
  Funny, I read this immediately after leaving a comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525122) using height categories as an example of a social construct.
- makeworld 5y ago
  Race is socially constructed, just like the idea of who is short and tall is. The objective things in each case are genes and height, which are not socially constructed.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Does it? I'm 6'5" (196cm in Roman Catholic[1]); in Amsterdam I'm at the upper range of normal while in many other places I am Godzilla and have to watch my step to avoid crushing things. [1] A humorous reference. Sorry.
jollybean 5y ago
That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically. 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do from the first pictures they have of us, not an 'Enlightened Alien' scientific form of categorization). If all they had were 'pictures' of us, the race categories we use would be the obvious grouping, or something resembling that. They would see that most of the people in Sub Saharan Africa looked quite different from those in East Asia. (And difference between Sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians is more than 'melanin'). There's a 'continuum' between every biological grouping, that doesn't mean those categories don't exist. It just means we're going to argue a lot about where and how to draw the lines. Race as a 'Social Construct' relates to all of the other attributes that we associate with race, and individual lived experiences due to how they are perceived etc.. To your point, Aliens wouldn't immediately pick up on the 'Social Construct' bit, at least not right away and so they wouldn't have the prejudices that we do, but if they could only observe from afar, they would see exactly what we see, and visual distinctions would be the 'first order of separation' even if it was, after further understanding (i.e. genetics) a less important distinction as you hint. Edit: someone provided this like I'd like to also include it [1] which illustrates some of the current debate over the notion of race, and that it's clearly politicized. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the grouping we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. An alien taxonomist, perhaps. We humans go "bug! whale! snake! cow!" most of the time even for species found here on our own planet.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Yes, and if we were to most crudely distinguish between sub-groups of 'bugs whales and cows' we would do it first and foremost based on immediate appearance. We would even name the sub-groups firstly the artifacts that differentiate them physically. Blue Whale, Grey Whale Black Bear, Brown Bear. As we develop a better understanding, we'd also probably later determine that the genetic differences may not map very well to the physical attributes ... but due to historical groupings based on visual cues, we'd continue to overstate/understate the differences in the textbooks and in pop culture.
phkahler 5y ago
>> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about this because an engineer I worked with had a father in dentistry and told me my kid had "German teeth in an Irish mouth" which matched her ancestry, which he didn't know - just said that in response to my description of the crowding. So YES, races have biological differences. If not, we wouldn't be able to tell where people are from. I get that it's not cool to discriminate based on race, but it's not OK or even practical to deny that it exists (see dentistry example above).
- packetlost 5y ago
  I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best. No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due to shared ancestry, it's the classification itself that doesn't match up well with reality.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of race amounts to labeling different clusters in an N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always entails some amount of approximation (clusters are inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because it's useful. For example, the boundaries between languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label them because it's useful to do so--is it roughly the same with race? Or is race categorically different for some reason that I'm not understanding?
    - sillyquiet 5y ago
      Our concept of race is way too course-grained to make it useful in this sense. And those clusters of features you mention would not correlate to what we consider a race.
btbuildem 5y ago
Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin, but let's not pretend that such an obvious visual variation as skin tone would be overlooked. White cat, tabby cat, grey cat, etc? We don't try to say one sort of cat is better than other, but we can tell them apart very well. Maybe what you're saying is that the aliens would not have the same prejudices associated with that marker as we have.
- sillyquiet 5y ago
  No, I am saying that skin tone would not be as important a feature. For example, lining up those dead bodies by skin tone alone would have Central Africans mixed in with South Americans, Austronesians, and South Asians, Northern Europeans mixed in with East Asians and Inuit, Southern Europeans mixed in with Indians,Central Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs, etc etc.
  - heywherelogingo 5y ago
    But it's not limited to skin tone. Have you never been able to identify an albino African as African?
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      But you're moving away from the premise of the GP.
      - heywherelogingo 5y ago
        I don't see how.
- benjaminjackman 5y ago
  Supposing there are Aliens FWIW I don’t know that they would perceive the same visible spectrum that we do, which might effect their ability to differentiate by color. And they might not even perceive colors at all perhaps focusing on patterns or perhaps use some sort acoustical sonar system of high pitched shrieks or an electrocapacitive perception captured by elongated dactyltennae hands with which they can sense the world around them.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
herbstein 5y ago
> 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'. Exactly. One of the people I'll always point to as evidence that race is a social construct is Barack Obama. He was the "first black president". In reality he is, genetically, as "white" as he is "black". We still call him black because of the color of his skin. If people insist for long enough that racial categories are inherently biological you'll eventually end up in one-drop judgement territory. Not a great place to have a discussion.
- mcguire 5y ago
  One does wonder how the AI would do by the 1/16th legal definition.

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
  But I've think you've gotten looped around here to a stance that fails to account for the original context. It wouldn't be that surprising if an AI could categorize people into "tall" vs "short" from pixelated medical images; certainly nobody would say, as the parent comment did, that the AI must be cheating because there's no such thing as being biologically tall.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    But no one would argue that the definitions of "tall" and "short" weren't social constructs, even as the fact of human length from heel to crown clearly is not a social construct.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
woodruffw 5y ago
This is an error on two counts: it conflates a spectrum on a single qualiry with spectra across multiple qualities, and it presumes the existence of people who are the “most” of their race (the way that there is a tallest and a shortest person). The first isn’t what race is, and the second is absurd.
uniqueid 5y ago
Funny, I read this immediately after leaving a comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525122 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525122) using height categories as an example of a social construct.
makeworld 5y ago
Race is socially constructed, just like the idea of who is short and tall is. The objective things in each case are genes and height, which are not socially constructed.
mcguire 5y ago
Does it? I'm 6'5" (196cm in Roman Catholic[1]); in Amsterdam I'm at the upper range of normal while in many other places I am Godzilla and have to watch my step to avoid crushing things. [1] A humorous reference. Sorry.

jollybean 5y ago

That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically. 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do from the first pictures they have of us, not an 'Enlightened Alien' scientific form of categorization). If all they had were 'pictures' of us, the race categories we use would be the obvious grouping, or something resembling that. They would see that most of the people in Sub Saharan Africa looked quite different from those in East Asia. (And difference between Sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians is more than 'melanin'). There's a 'continuum' between every biological grouping, that doesn't mean those categories don't exist. It just means we're going to argue a lot about where and how to draw the lines. Race as a 'Social Construct' relates to all of the other attributes that we associate with race, and individual lived experiences due to how they are perceived etc.. To your point, Aliens wouldn't immediately pick up on the 'Social Construct' bit, at least not right away and so they wouldn't have the prejudices that we do, but if they could only observe from afar, they would see exactly what we see, and visual distinctions would be the 'first order of separation' even if it was, after further understanding (i.e. genetics) a less important distinction as you hint. Edit: someone provided this like I'd like to also include it [1] which illustrates some of the current debate over the notion of race, and that it's clearly politicized. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

ceejayoz 5y ago
> 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the grouping we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence. An alien taxonomist, perhaps. We humans go "bug! whale! snake! cow!" most of the time even for species found here on our own planet.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Yes, and if we were to most crudely distinguish between sub-groups of 'bugs whales and cows' we would do it first and foremost based on immediate appearance. We would even name the sub-groups firstly the artifacts that differentiate them physically. Blue Whale, Grey Whale Black Bear, Brown Bear. As we develop a better understanding, we'd also probably later determine that the genetic differences may not map very well to the physical attributes ... but due to historical groupings based on visual cues, we'd continue to overstate/understate the differences in the textbooks and in pop culture.

phkahler 5y ago

>> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about this because an engineer I worked with had a father in dentistry and told me my kid had "German teeth in an Irish mouth" which matched her ancestry, which he didn't know - just said that in response to my description of the crowding. So YES, races have biological differences. If not, we wouldn't be able to tell where people are from. I get that it's not cool to discriminate based on race, but it's not OK or even practical to deny that it exists (see dentistry example above).

packetlost 5y ago
I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best. No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due to shared ancestry, it's the classification itself that doesn't match up well with reality.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of race amounts to labeling different clusters in an N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always entails some amount of approximation (clusters are inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because it's useful. For example, the boundaries between languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label them because it's useful to do so--is it roughly the same with race? Or is race categorically different for some reason that I'm not understanding?
  - sillyquiet 5y ago
    Our concept of race is way too course-grained to make it useful in this sense. And those clusters of features you mention would not correlate to what we consider a race.

btbuildem 5y ago

Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin, but let's not pretend that such an obvious visual variation as skin tone would be overlooked. White cat, tabby cat, grey cat, etc? We don't try to say one sort of cat is better than other, but we can tell them apart very well. Maybe what you're saying is that the aliens would not have the same prejudices associated with that marker as we have.

sillyquiet 5y ago
No, I am saying that skin tone would not be as important a feature. For example, lining up those dead bodies by skin tone alone would have Central Africans mixed in with South Americans, Austronesians, and South Asians, Northern Europeans mixed in with East Asians and Inuit, Southern Europeans mixed in with Indians,Central Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs, etc etc.
- heywherelogingo 5y ago
  But it's not limited to skin tone. Have you never been able to identify an albino African as African?
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    But you're moving away from the premise of the GP.
    - heywherelogingo 5y ago
      I don't see how.
benjaminjackman 5y ago
Supposing there are Aliens FWIW I don’t know that they would perceive the same visible spectrum that we do, which might effect their ability to differentiate by color. And they might not even perceive colors at all perhaps focusing on patterns or perhaps use some sort acoustical sonar system of high pitched shrieks or an electrocapacitive perception captured by elongated dactyltennae hands with which they can sense the world around them.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

herbstein 5y ago

> 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'. Exactly. One of the people I'll always point to as evidence that race is a social construct is Barack Obama. He was the "first black president". In reality he is, genetically, as "white" as he is "black". We still call him black because of the color of his skin. If people insist for long enough that racial categories are inherently biological you'll eventually end up in one-drop judgement territory. Not a great place to have a discussion.

mcguire 5y ago
One does wonder how the AI would do by the 1/16th legal definition.