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That's what confuses me. Some people say race is a construct, but then why do ads for sickle cell medicine only have black actors in them? I don't see how cloa

That's what confuses me. Some people say race is a construct, but then why do ads for sickle cell medicine only have black actors in them? I don't see how cloaking or censoring ideas of race benefits humanity. I know there's specific problems that are more common in my race. I WANT doctors and scientists to acknowledge that and use that information to improve treatments. I don't feel outraged, just sort of confused as to what the incentives at play here are.

vmception 5y ago
what they're trying to convey is that certain phenotypes have correlations to an overly broad construct, and with your example it is only showing that certain debilitating evolutionary paths are correlated or exclusively within a subset of people with those phenotypes not that hard, to me, let me know when you get there though
- nefitty 5y ago
  You're being unnecessarily condescending when my comment was sincere and inviting of new information. I'm not really sure what you intended to accomplish with that last line, except making yourself feel superior to a stranger online who hasn't read some book or taken some class you have?
  - vmception 5y ago
    yeah you’re right, so without that last line what do you think its not supposed to be new information, its supposed to deconstruct that people in the largest continent on the planet have the most genetic diversity and only chose/were forced to group together for shared representation after noticing they all got a shitty parallel experience in some other continents the same concept applies to other groups that happen to overlap in some unique phenotypes
    - nefitty 5y ago
      Ah ok, that makes sense. Thanks for acknowledging my criticism of your comment and clarifying your idea.
wrp 5y ago
The problem is in the variation of what people mean by "race". In popular culture, people generally use it as a synonym for ethnicity. In genetics, it means the same as "breed" does when referring to animals. The first is a social construct. The second is a grouping of heritable traits.
csee 5y ago
It is both a social construct as well as a physically real thing. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, and more people need to understand that. Most of the debate in this area is language games. Consider running a PCA on a matrix of everyone's alleles < actually, this is legit interesting, has anyone done it? >. Hypothesis: A bunch of the top few components will correspond to commonly understood racial groups that people have created based on observable phenotypic clusters. In this sense, it's a real physical thing. Duh. However, at the same time, the components are an abstraction, and the common conceptualization of what these components mean and how they relate to reality is somewhat of a mental construction. There will be other high variance components that don't relate to racial categories. We probably don't even notice them. And our racial categories probably don't map that cleanly to the actual underlying components.

vmception 5y ago

what they're trying to convey is that certain phenotypes have correlations to an overly broad construct, and with your example it is only showing that certain debilitating evolutionary paths are correlated or exclusively within a subset of people with those phenotypes not that hard, to me, let me know when you get there though

nefitty 5y ago
You're being unnecessarily condescending when my comment was sincere and inviting of new information. I'm not really sure what you intended to accomplish with that last line, except making yourself feel superior to a stranger online who hasn't read some book or taken some class you have?
- vmception 5y ago
  yeah you’re right, so without that last line what do you think its not supposed to be new information, its supposed to deconstruct that people in the largest continent on the planet have the most genetic diversity and only chose/were forced to group together for shared representation after noticing they all got a shitty parallel experience in some other continents the same concept applies to other groups that happen to overlap in some unique phenotypes
  - nefitty 5y ago
    Ah ok, that makes sense. Thanks for acknowledging my criticism of your comment and clarifying your idea.

wrp 5y ago

The problem is in the variation of what people mean by "race". In popular culture, people generally use it as a synonym for ethnicity. In genetics, it means the same as "breed" does when referring to animals. The first is a social construct. The second is a grouping of heritable traits.

csee 5y ago

It is both a social construct as well as a physically real thing. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, and more people need to understand that. Most of the debate in this area is language games. Consider running a PCA on a matrix of everyone's alleles < actually, this is legit interesting, has anyone done it? >. Hypothesis: A bunch of the top few components will correspond to commonly understood racial groups that people have created based on observable phenotypic clusters. In this sense, it's a real physical thing. Duh. However, at the same time, the components are an abstraction, and the common conceptualization of what these components mean and how they relate to reality is somewhat of a mental construction. There will be other high variance components that don't relate to racial categories. We probably don't even notice them. And our racial categories probably don't map that cleanly to the actual underlying components.