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Ok, so race is real. What races are there? Is Irish a race? How, in fact, do you meaningfully define a race such that there aren't 20 races in sub-Saharan Afri

Ok, so race is real. What races are there? Is Irish a race? How, in fact, do you meaningfully define a race such that there aren't 20 races in sub-Saharan Africa for every one everywhere else? And then, what do you do with that information? I'm Irish, she is Southeast Asian, Ted over there is Mayan-German. Does it improve life in any significant way? If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. — Bokonon

oh_sigh 5y ago
You're right. Thinking is too hard and scary, let's go shopping! Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective, leading to an overall improvement in health outcomes. I'm not going to waste my sickle cell anemia test kits on testing Icelandic people. Do you apply this same logic to people who study esoteric branches of mathematics with no real possibility of improving life in any significant way? This all goes to my point that you don't want race to be real, so you argue that race is not real. Maybe it is convincing for you, but it is absolutely meaningless to me. It would be great if the universe worked that way though, all we would need to do is close our eyes and pretend cancer doesn't exist, and it would just go away!
- mcguire 5y ago
  Esoteric branches of mathematics do not have a long and ongoing history of being used to marginalize and take advantage of groups of people. And I notice you cannot answer any of my questions as to how you would define races.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Ok, so again, that is my point: Race is too dangerous to study, the bad people might make the wrong conclusions with it. I have no idea how you would define race. I don't know why you would expect me to. I also have no idea how you specifically define certain other aspects of biology that you probably accept as real and accurate, because I'm not a biologist or a geneticist.
- romwell 5y ago
  OK, I'll speak in terms you might get. Humans have a myriad of visible characteristics: height, weight, skin color, eye color and shape, hair color and type, shapes of facial features, and so on. All these characteristics vary continuously. If you see that data as points filling a high-dimensional cube, there's not going to be an empty space there. Some areas are going to be denser than the others, but there are no gaps there. What you try to do with "race" is you're trying to cluster this data. But there really is only one cluster. Might as well call rand() a million times to get a bunch of points in 0..1, and cluster that. Oh, but you've see black people! And white people! Well yeah, but it's all those people filling the spaces in between any two points that make it impossible to draw the line. The only way to draw the line is to make a call on where to draw it — that is, to make an arbitrary choice. Without it, your clustering algorithms would fail. Yes, there are high-density peaks on this data, especially if you look at any single characteristic. Yes, you can separate the peaks. But deciding on where to put the the threshold is choice — a social construct — that can leaves a lot of points without a "race" label (which race is Irish - Mexican?) and/or change which peaks make the cutoff (are Armenians a race, or noise in the dataset?). >Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective The scientists have two options: A) Look at the original data which you used to assign the race label (skin color, hair type, etc), and see if there's any correlation of that data with diseases B)Look at the data, cluster it using an arbitrary choice to be able to get more than one cluster, ignore a lot of people below the threshold, assign the labels, IGNORE THE RAW DATA, and then look for correlations between labels and diseases. Which approach do you think is more scientific?
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Do you believe that life begins at conception? Or at birth? Or is it somewhere in between? Do you feel comfortable marking the line where life possibly begins? If you mark it before birth, aren't you just giving ammunition to anti-abortion advocates to take away freedom from women? Should we just say that life begins at birth, and shut down anyone who asks otherwise, because anything else is dangerous and possibly arbitrary and not 100% accurate in rare cases?
    - 5y ago

oh_sigh 5y ago

You're right. Thinking is too hard and scary, let's go shopping! Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective, leading to an overall improvement in health outcomes. I'm not going to waste my sickle cell anemia test kits on testing Icelandic people. Do you apply this same logic to people who study esoteric branches of mathematics with no real possibility of improving life in any significant way? This all goes to my point that you don't want race to be real, so you argue that race is not real. Maybe it is convincing for you, but it is absolutely meaningless to me. It would be great if the universe worked that way though, all we would need to do is close our eyes and pretend cancer doesn't exist, and it would just go away!

mcguire 5y ago
Esoteric branches of mathematics do not have a long and ongoing history of being used to marginalize and take advantage of groups of people. And I notice you cannot answer any of my questions as to how you would define races.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Ok, so again, that is my point: Race is too dangerous to study, the bad people might make the wrong conclusions with it. I have no idea how you would define race. I don't know why you would expect me to. I also have no idea how you specifically define certain other aspects of biology that you probably accept as real and accurate, because I'm not a biologist or a geneticist.
romwell 5y ago
OK, I'll speak in terms you might get. Humans have a myriad of visible characteristics: height, weight, skin color, eye color and shape, hair color and type, shapes of facial features, and so on. All these characteristics vary continuously. If you see that data as points filling a high-dimensional cube, there's not going to be an empty space there. Some areas are going to be denser than the others, but there are no gaps there. What you try to do with "race" is you're trying to cluster this data. But there really is only one cluster. Might as well call rand() a million times to get a bunch of points in 0..1, and cluster that. Oh, but you've see black people! And white people! Well yeah, but it's all those people filling the spaces in between any two points that make it impossible to draw the line. The only way to draw the line is to make a call on where to draw it — that is, to make an arbitrary choice. Without it, your clustering algorithms would fail. Yes, there are high-density peaks on this data, especially if you look at any single characteristic. Yes, you can separate the peaks. But deciding on where to put the the threshold is choice — a social construct — that can leaves a lot of points without a "race" label (which race is Irish - Mexican?) and/or change which peaks make the cutoff (are Armenians a race, or noise in the dataset?). >Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective The scientists have two options: A) Look at the original data which you used to assign the race label (skin color, hair type, etc), and see if there's any correlation of that data with diseases B)Look at the data, cluster it using an arbitrary choice to be able to get more than one cluster, ignore a lot of people below the threshold, assign the labels, IGNORE THE RAW DATA, and then look for correlations between labels and diseases. Which approach do you think is more scientific?
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Do you believe that life begins at conception? Or at birth? Or is it somewhere in between? Do you feel comfortable marking the line where life possibly begins? If you mark it before birth, aren't you just giving ammunition to anti-abortion advocates to take away freedom from women? Should we just say that life begins at birth, and shut down anyone who asks otherwise, because anything else is dangerous and possibly arbitrary and not 100% accurate in rare cases?
  - 5y ago