13 ms·

Can computers cope with human races? (1989)

60 points by smk_ 5y ago

revolvingocelot 5y ago
(1989)
marginalia_nu 5y ago
This isn't really a problem with computers so much as with taxonomy. You pretty much always end up with sorites-esque delineation paradoxes when imposing taxonomies onto nature. No matter how refined your system of categories is, it's never complete.
- mdeck_ 5y ago
  This seems to be precisely what the article says. > The attempt to use computers to assist in racial classification tasks has helped sharpen the issues because computers can't deal with fuzzy concepts. If you try to define an ethnic code that is logically complete, consistent, and determinable for every person using current technology, you find that you can't. > There seems to be a silent conspiracy to deny the existence of mixed racial groups in the United States. Most such people have acquiesced to this conspiracy and don't even think of themselves in those terms. Instead, they go along with the idea that they are members of one of the races recognized by the government. In fact, they often identify with a traditional race that represents only a small fraction of their genetic heritage!
  - darkerside 5y ago
    Why doesn't k means clustering help? Maybe we'd even invent new racial groups for everyone to get mad about!
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      The problem isn't the clustering. The problem is choosing which individual points belong to which clusters, because every time people have mixed-race (or mixed-mixed-race) or whatever kids, which has been happening for millennia, a new 'cluster' gets invented. Basically, there are no nice separations between the clusters, there are just denser and sparser regions in the feature space, so assignment of a point to a single cluster doesn't make sense.
      - dekhn 5y ago
        it's almost a textbook case for unsupervised learning. Like, almost as if you could train a manifold that separated out people by genetic history (much of which was super-regionalized, and did lead to large phenotypic differences that clustered spatially)... and in that manifold "mixed-race" people would probably fall on points between two well-separated clusters. In fact there are entire scientific papers (mainstream) doing exactly this. We've learned all sorts of interesting things, like the total genetic diversity in africa is larger than the african/eurasian diversity split.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    There is a tension between the utility of categories, which is very much real; and their limitations, which are also real and inevitable. We absolutely need to categorize the world to make sense of it, even if the categories themselves are never going to be 100% complete or accurate. I think the takeaway should be awareness of the inherent limitations of categorization, not its attempted abolition. There may be a point in revisiting categories though, as they tend to ossify and become less useful with time; you can't step in the same river twice, and that map your grandfather drew may not quite be accurate anymore.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    Computers can deal with fuzzy concepts just fine, the problem is that we don't want fuzzy answers. Any reasonable way to get a computer to determine race will yield a fuzzy answer: based on your family tree you are 36% European, based on facial recognition the algorithm is 60% certain you are white, based on genetic sequencing you are 4% of African descent. All those are perfectly valid fuzzy answers. If you then try to match those to ridiculous categories like "Black, not of Hispanic origin" it obviously goes wrong quickly. What exactly is "Black"? Does one Spanish great-grandfather disqualify you from that category? Or only if that great-grandfather was from Brazil instead of Spain?
    - User23 5y ago
      > What exactly is "Black"? Does one Spanish great-grandfather disqualify you from that category? Interestingly you might get a very different answer to that question in Brazil than you would in the USA. I saw an interview with a Brazilian footballer that looked black to Americans sounding surprised when asked by an interviewer asked how racism affected him. His answer was, paraphrasing from memory, “what are you talking about I’m not black.” Meanwhile race in the USA is of major political importance. It matters for college admissions, government loans and contracts, and so on. By and large it’s on the honor system. So far at least there haven’t been many white presenting Americans identifying as black or mixed race when their DNA test shows 4% African ancestry.
      - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        > So far at least there haven’t been many white presenting Americans identifying as black or mixed race when their DNA test shows 4% African ancestry. This used to be more common when it was legally enforced by the state. See the fascinating history of "Walter White": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Francis_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Francis_White
netizen-936824 5y ago
Race has no scientific/empirical basis. Asking about skin pigment is a different question, but race is BS https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19934 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19934
- Bostonian 5y ago
  I believe that when you do a cluster analysis of people's traits or their genes, you do find categories similar to race.
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    Yes, however they aren't clearly delineated, which is the point OP is trying to make. You can have categories, but you can't assign individuals to them because they have lots of overlap.
    - _fnhr 5y ago
      But this "aren't clearly delineated" gets pedantic sometimes. The same issue is true for assigning hours into morning/day/evening/night, yet no-one talks about issues there. Stratifying something continuous into categories suddenly becomes bad when talking about ethnicity.
      - snovv_crash 5y ago
        That's because the hours don't get personally affected by their classification. I suspect it would suddenly be a big deal if the minimum wage for day vs. night work was different. And anyways, is 4am morning or night? You'll get different answers in a city compared to on a farm, for example.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Belief is not evidence
    - 5y ago
throwawaysleep 5y ago
No, as race is a social construct. There is no agreed upon and objective definition of what black means or white means.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  That's exactly what the article says. It's a chronicle of the authors experience with the government demand that he, a man of mixed race, classify himself into rigid racial boxes, and how those boxes don't actually exist in reality.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  The same could be said about literal colors, they exist along a continuum. Where does "very dark grey" become "black", or "very light grey" become white? If something is blue-green, is it blue or green? Etc etc
  - echopurity 5y ago
    [dead]
alex_tsayun 5y ago
Yes, we can.
fortran77 5y ago
It's interesting that today, in the United States, many people from the "middle east" (depending on their religion) classify themselves under the BIPOC umbrella and not category "5" as described in this essay.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  Not sure how in an American context you can qualify people from the Middle East as Non-Minority? If anything they would have to be category 2 (Asian or Pacific Islander), since the Middle East is located in Asia. But really, that list is missing a couple dozen categories, or at least an "other" category.
  - fortran77 5y ago
    Two of my four grandparents are from Gaza, expelled in 1929. That side of the family has been there for “ever” as far as we know. (The other two grandparents are from Belarus of mid-Eastern ancestry). We are not considered a “minority” in the United States for purposes of “diversity hiring” because we are Jewish.
    - tartoran 5y ago
      With Jewish it is equally confusing as they are considered white while at the same time a minority of sorts if taken by religion, though there are jews of many varied ethnicities. The moral of the story is that trying to clasify people into incongruent groups is a nonsense.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    The official USA racial classification guidelines says that middle east should be classified as white. That is why.
    - fortran77 5y ago
      Many consider mid-easterners to be "people of color", for example "Vox" magazine: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/8/18272072/ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-racism-sexism https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/8/18272072/il...
indymike 5y ago
In a word, no, mainly because humans cannot really cope with race.
TimTheTinker 5y ago
This was a fascinating article. I recommend reading it all the way to the end. One of my favorite sections: > Though many people clearly believe that racial and ethnic classifications are somehow linked to science, I observe that their relationship to genetics is a lot like astrology's link to astronomy. The analogy is imperfect, however; very few government officials are willing to publicly admit that they plan their lives around astrology (though some apparently do), but nearly all of them publicly plan their programs around ethnic classifications. Indeed, the government pours millions of dollars each year into reaffirmation of this belief and requires that private industry join in the massive delusion. > The widespread delusion about racial and ethnic classification has not been confined to the nonscientific world, unfortunately. As Lancelot Hogben remarked 56 years ago [2]: “Geneticists believe that anthropologists have decided what a race is. Ethnologists assume that their classifications embody principles which genetic science has proved to be correct. Politicians believe that their prejudices have the sanction of genetic laws and the findings of physical anthropology to sustain them.” > While there often are visible differences between people from areas that are widely separated, these differences are very small compared with the physical similarities of all humans
auggierose 5y ago
I grew up in Germany, but the first time I really learnt about the concept of race was when I went to the doctor in the US, where you need to fill in your "ethnicity". Same in the UK. I don't think anything can be more racist than being asked about your race or your ethnicity, because really, what exactly is that? Am I here for a medical appointment, or a psychological and philosophical introspection of myself? I usually just fill in Cosmopolitan there.
- bloqs 5y ago
  From a genetic perspective, its shockingly backwards. Classic US oversimplification and pidgeon holing too. We are all a bastard amalgamation.
  - hh3k0 5y ago
    > But precision medicine only works if scientists have studied people who are similar to you. If your genes are rare or unusual compared to those researchers have examined in the past, you could end up getting the wrong treatment. Since the vast majority of genetics studies are done on people of European ancestry, members of other racial groups may lose out on the benefits of precision medicine entirely. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicine-is-getting-more-precise-for-white-people/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicine-is-getting-mor...
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  Libraries in the UK ask for ethnicity when you register even nowadays, so do uni applications. Weird.
  - hh3k0 5y ago
    University applications probably do for reasons related to equality policies. I'm sure they have some affirmative action equivalent over there.
    - Swenrekcah 5y ago
skissane 5y ago
In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US. Here, the government, media, etc, generally prefer to refer to people using fine-grained ethnicity/nationality terms, not in terms of coarse racial categories.
- thrown_22 5y ago
  > In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US. That's because a majority of Australians are one generation or less removed from being immigrants. It's rather hard to sell the idea of a united white/brown/yellow/black race to people whose grandparents won't talk to each other because of the last genocide.
wpietri 5y ago
I love this as an exploration, but I think it doesn't go quite far enough. Are (socially defined) racial categories ridiculous from a biological lens? Sure. Does that mean they are not real? No. Humans are primates for whom social power structures are deeply important. (And not the only ones; see de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics" for how it plays out in our nearest relatives.) As a species we are extremely good at building eusocial power systems, and we use that to get a lot done. But those can depend on a lot of effectively arbitrary markers to do that. Look at the British class system. What outsiders would call slight shifts in accent, clothing, and manners mark major division in social power. The US wasn't nearly as classist, but it undeniably started out as a racialized and gendered power system. (E.g., 1700+ members of congress owned slaves [1], with slaveholders being in the majority for the first 30 years. It wasn't until 1870 we saw a black person in a federal elected seat, and the first woman was in 1917.) So it's not a shock that state and federal bureaucracies would be extremely interested in which box a person fits into. These categories aren't biological, they're social, standing waves in our interactions. As a white man, there are many, many situations in the US where I get treated better just because of that. It's that lasting differential in social power that is what really defines racial categories. If we want to eliminate the categories, we first have to eliminate the power differential. Then the categories will go away on their own, the same way a lot of ancestry questions have become moot among white people (e.g., having ancestors of English vs German vs Irish vs Italian ancestry used to matter a fair bit). But as with the English class system, that power differential will not go away on its own; it has to be studied, recognized, and actively dismantled. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/congress-slaveowners-names-list/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/cong...
- mistrial9 5y ago
  good start but... Successful slave traders at the time of the Age of Expansion (1500s) used race mercilessly to define most trading of human captives. However, slave traders have been hated and banned by others at the same time. All 13 colonies of North America had their own laws from the beginning. Essentially, it was the Virginia colonies and similar that fit your description. The northern group forbid slavery, preached against it, and had strict laws to protect people of all races. This fundemental difference is more important than many people realize now, and eventually was the context for the US Civil War. source: a yankee
twistedpair 5y ago
Computers have successfully been used to time 5K and marathons for decades. Race is what you define it to be, such as in this ambiguous title. Whether we should have a concept of "race" is another matter.
- twistedpair 5y ago
  To clarify, race is a construct too often abused to implicate stratifications of groups of people. "Races" don't naturally exist, rather only a continuum of ethnological and physical differences across the rainbow of the human genome [0]. As it's used today, race can be very divisive and polarizing. While I'm white, I've toured and been deeply moved by the Apartheid museum in Capetown and driven past the Townships that show how severe and pervasive the only recently struct down laws that ensconced the white elite in private neighborhoods while relegating everyone else to shanty towns were, and still are years after said laws were struck down. While collecting racial data certainly plays a role in correcting for the still evident scars of past wrongs (and avoids denying the past), it strikes me as also reinforcing the existence of such racial constructs. I can only imagine what it feels like to be a teen in a minority group checking the box that they are that group on forms for every tooth filling, credit card application, warranty card, standardized test, and survey they take. I sincerely desire my future grandchildren can see a title like this article and think it's a discussion of footrace algorithms, that we can live in a post racial society at some point. We certainly are not there yet. There is much inequality to resolve and too many latent scars to heal. Will we make it in my lifetime? That's on all of us to affect. [0] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res...
vehemenz 5y ago
The observations here are astute, and I appreciate the novel computing angle. I mostly agree with the conclusion. I would add though that it is possible to construct a taxonomical, biological account of race, given our understanding of population genetics and phenotypes. This is basically what 23andMe does. However, with the exception of understanding and treating very specific medical conditions, these correlations are mostly meaningless or superficial at best. Obviously, this is not what anyone means by "race" in the ordinary sense, which is mostly incoherent and only serves as a shorthand to categorize people superficially.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
I've always found it interesting (as a Muslim from the Middle East) that Middle Eastern is almost always lumped under White. I have some Turkish blood and so am on the lighter side, but much of my friends and family back home are definitely not "white". I did have some friends from back home who moved to the US, and would tick "African / American" since we're technically from the African continent, though being from the North we wouldn't fit that in the traditional sense either. I guess we'd all be mongrels. I sometimes wonder what it will mean for my sons' sense of identity as they grow up seeing themselves grouped under the White group.. While still feeling like a minority due to the way they look/speak.
xg15 5y ago
As all scenarios that involve databases and "semantics" of the various fields, the actual meaning is heavily dependent on what the fields are supposed to be used for. In case of the US, the whole confusion seems to be that one would rather like not to talk about the use-cases as the whole topic is still politically sensitive. Maybe a more honest question would be "Are you a descendant of colonial-era slaves? Yes/No? Are you a descendant of colonial-era settlers? Yes/No?"
- notahacker 5y ago
  > Maybe a more honest question would be "Are you a descendant of colonial-era slaves? Yes/No? Are you a descendant of colonial-era settlers? Yes/No?" But I suspect that the answers "both" and "neither" would be extremely common, and the fuzzy self-identified physical appearance based proxy for that would map much better onto people's actual social status...
DaltonCoffee 5y ago
The one question about race I've always had is this: Why is the child of both black and white parents considered black? This seems racist to me, fundamentally.
xg15 5y ago
> In trying to apply a computer to a task that humans do, we often discover that it doesn't work. One common problem is that humans are able to deal with fuzzy concepts but computers are not -- they need precise representations and it is hard to represent a fuzzy concept in a precise way. However, if we look closer at such tasks, we often discover that the weakness actually lies not in the computer but in ourselves -- we didn't understand what we were doing in the first place. This was still published before the latest iteration to evade the insight that your question is ill-posed took hold: AI magic! Why go through the trouble to ask yourself if your classification system makes sense if you can just draw up some random examples and train a classifier? And if the classifier happens to perform poorly, it's clearly the fault of the algorithm and not that your classifications are completely arbitrary. Modern algorithms are even smart enough to find out what you're "really" looking for and will happily detect skin color as the most significant feature for racial classifications.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wayoutthere 5y ago
Computers cannot cope with illogical concepts such as race. Race as applied in the US is a thousand contradictions trying to justify the emotions of a minority of the population who needs a visibly identifiable underclass to make themselves feel more secure in their position in life. Which is why race makes little sense — it changes over time to suit the needs of whatever political interests exist at any given point. It’s a purely emotional concept with no consistent definition in any physical reality.
hogrider 5y ago
So giving an anti racist form answer = you're a commie as far as they're concerned. Nice.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Speaking of not being able to cope with human races: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beliefs_and_activism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beli... >Eric S. Raymond: Political beliefs and activism >[...] Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist."[28][29] Progressive campaign The Great Slate was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, "I’ve been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." It is estimated that as of March 2018 over $30,000 has been raised in this way.[30] [28] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26 [29] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7239 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7239 [30] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17092684/great-slate-fundraising-congressional-campaign https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17092684/great-slate-fundr... http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=129 http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=129 >"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S Raymond http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_armedndangerous_archive.html#81815163 http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_armedndangero... "A clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he [Steven den Beste] is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are." -Eric S Raymond https://quotepark.com/quotes/1862991-eric-s-raymond-when-i-hear-the-words-social-responsibility-i-w/ https://quotepark.com/quotes/1862991-eric-s-raymond-when-i-h... >"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." -Eric S Raymond When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. "Geeks Win: A survey of the oddballs who write the codes that make the 21st-century world go round". The New York Times Book Review: p. BR18. 4 November 2001. ISSN 03624331. https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848 >"The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots." -Eric S Raymond https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833 >"... The minimum level of training required to make someone effective as a self defense shooter is not very high... unfortunately, this doesn't cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average IQ of 85 if it's statistically representative of American blacks as a whole. I've never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn't want to." -Eric S Raymond

60 points by smk_ 5y ago

(1989)

This isn't really a problem with computers so much as with taxonomy. You pretty much always end up with sorites-esque delineation paradoxes when imposing taxonomies onto nature. No matter how refined your system of categories is, it's never complete.

mdeck_ 5y ago
This seems to be precisely what the article says. > The attempt to use computers to assist in racial classification tasks has helped sharpen the issues because computers can't deal with fuzzy concepts. If you try to define an ethnic code that is logically complete, consistent, and determinable for every person using current technology, you find that you can't. > There seems to be a silent conspiracy to deny the existence of mixed racial groups in the United States. Most such people have acquiesced to this conspiracy and don't even think of themselves in those terms. Instead, they go along with the idea that they are members of one of the races recognized by the government. In fact, they often identify with a traditional race that represents only a small fraction of their genetic heritage!
- darkerside 5y ago
  Why doesn't k means clustering help? Maybe we'd even invent new racial groups for everyone to get mad about!
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    The problem isn't the clustering. The problem is choosing which individual points belong to which clusters, because every time people have mixed-race (or mixed-mixed-race) or whatever kids, which has been happening for millennia, a new 'cluster' gets invented. Basically, there are no nice separations between the clusters, there are just denser and sparser regions in the feature space, so assignment of a point to a single cluster doesn't make sense.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      it's almost a textbook case for unsupervised learning. Like, almost as if you could train a manifold that separated out people by genetic history (much of which was super-regionalized, and did lead to large phenotypic differences that clustered spatially)... and in that manifold "mixed-race" people would probably fall on points between two well-separated clusters. In fact there are entire scientific papers (mainstream) doing exactly this. We've learned all sorts of interesting things, like the total genetic diversity in africa is larger than the african/eurasian diversity split.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  There is a tension between the utility of categories, which is very much real; and their limitations, which are also real and inevitable. We absolutely need to categorize the world to make sense of it, even if the categories themselves are never going to be 100% complete or accurate. I think the takeaway should be awareness of the inherent limitations of categorization, not its attempted abolition. There may be a point in revisiting categories though, as they tend to ossify and become less useful with time; you can't step in the same river twice, and that map your grandfather drew may not quite be accurate anymore.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  Computers can deal with fuzzy concepts just fine, the problem is that we don't want fuzzy answers. Any reasonable way to get a computer to determine race will yield a fuzzy answer: based on your family tree you are 36% European, based on facial recognition the algorithm is 60% certain you are white, based on genetic sequencing you are 4% of African descent. All those are perfectly valid fuzzy answers. If you then try to match those to ridiculous categories like "Black, not of Hispanic origin" it obviously goes wrong quickly. What exactly is "Black"? Does one Spanish great-grandfather disqualify you from that category? Or only if that great-grandfather was from Brazil instead of Spain?
  - User23 5y ago
    > What exactly is "Black"? Does one Spanish great-grandfather disqualify you from that category? Interestingly you might get a very different answer to that question in Brazil than you would in the USA. I saw an interview with a Brazilian footballer that looked black to Americans sounding surprised when asked by an interviewer asked how racism affected him. His answer was, paraphrasing from memory, “what are you talking about I’m not black.” Meanwhile race in the USA is of major political importance. It matters for college admissions, government loans and contracts, and so on. By and large it’s on the honor system. So far at least there haven’t been many white presenting Americans identifying as black or mixed race when their DNA test shows 4% African ancestry.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      > So far at least there haven’t been many white presenting Americans identifying as black or mixed race when their DNA test shows 4% African ancestry. This used to be more common when it was legally enforced by the state. See the fascinating history of "Walter White": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Francis_White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Francis_White

netizen-936824 5y ago

Race has no scientific/empirical basis. Asking about skin pigment is a different question, but race is BS https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19934 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19934

Bostonian 5y ago
I believe that when you do a cluster analysis of people's traits or their genes, you do find categories similar to race.
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  Yes, however they aren't clearly delineated, which is the point OP is trying to make. You can have categories, but you can't assign individuals to them because they have lots of overlap.
  - _fnhr 5y ago
    But this "aren't clearly delineated" gets pedantic sometimes. The same issue is true for assigning hours into morning/day/evening/night, yet no-one talks about issues there. Stratifying something continuous into categories suddenly becomes bad when talking about ethnicity.
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      That's because the hours don't get personally affected by their classification. I suspect it would suddenly be a big deal if the minimum wage for day vs. night work was different. And anyways, is 4am morning or night? You'll get different answers in a city compared to on a farm, for example.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Belief is not evidence
  - 5y ago

throwawaysleep 5y ago

No, as race is a social construct. There is no agreed upon and objective definition of what black means or white means.

beaconstudios 5y ago
That's exactly what the article says. It's a chronicle of the authors experience with the government demand that he, a man of mixed race, classify himself into rigid racial boxes, and how those boxes don't actually exist in reality.
HPsquared 5y ago
The same could be said about literal colors, they exist along a continuum. Where does "very dark grey" become "black", or "very light grey" become white? If something is blue-green, is it blue or green? Etc etc
- echopurity 5y ago
  [dead]

alex_tsayun 5y ago

Yes, we can.

fortran77 5y ago

It's interesting that today, in the United States, many people from the "middle east" (depending on their religion) classify themselves under the BIPOC umbrella and not category "5" as described in this essay.

wongarsu 5y ago
Not sure how in an American context you can qualify people from the Middle East as Non-Minority? If anything they would have to be category 2 (Asian or Pacific Islander), since the Middle East is located in Asia. But really, that list is missing a couple dozen categories, or at least an "other" category.
- fortran77 5y ago
  Two of my four grandparents are from Gaza, expelled in 1929. That side of the family has been there for “ever” as far as we know. (The other two grandparents are from Belarus of mid-Eastern ancestry). We are not considered a “minority” in the United States for purposes of “diversity hiring” because we are Jewish.
  - tartoran 5y ago
    With Jewish it is equally confusing as they are considered white while at the same time a minority of sorts if taken by religion, though there are jews of many varied ethnicities. The moral of the story is that trying to clasify people into incongruent groups is a nonsense.
- Jensson 5y ago
  The official USA racial classification guidelines says that middle east should be classified as white. That is why.
  - fortran77 5y ago
    Many consider mid-easterners to be "people of color", for example "Vox" magazine: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/8/18272072/ilhan-omar-rashida-tlaib-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-racism-sexism https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/8/18272072/il...

indymike 5y ago

In a word, no, mainly because humans cannot really cope with race.

TimTheTinker 5y ago

This was a fascinating article. I recommend reading it all the way to the end. One of my favorite sections: > Though many people clearly believe that racial and ethnic classifications are somehow linked to science, I observe that their relationship to genetics is a lot like astrology's link to astronomy. The analogy is imperfect, however; very few government officials are willing to publicly admit that they plan their lives around astrology (though some apparently do), but nearly all of them publicly plan their programs around ethnic classifications. Indeed, the government pours millions of dollars each year into reaffirmation of this belief and requires that private industry join in the massive delusion. > The widespread delusion about racial and ethnic classification has not been confined to the nonscientific world, unfortunately. As Lancelot Hogben remarked 56 years ago [2]: “Geneticists believe that anthropologists have decided what a race is. Ethnologists assume that their classifications embody principles which genetic science has proved to be correct. Politicians believe that their prejudices have the sanction of genetic laws and the findings of physical anthropology to sustain them.” > While there often are visible differences between people from areas that are widely separated, these differences are very small compared with the physical similarities of all humans

auggierose 5y ago

I grew up in Germany, but the first time I really learnt about the concept of race was when I went to the doctor in the US, where you need to fill in your "ethnicity". Same in the UK. I don't think anything can be more racist than being asked about your race or your ethnicity, because really, what exactly is that? Am I here for a medical appointment, or a psychological and philosophical introspection of myself? I usually just fill in Cosmopolitan there.

bloqs 5y ago
From a genetic perspective, its shockingly backwards. Classic US oversimplification and pidgeon holing too. We are all a bastard amalgamation.
- hh3k0 5y ago
  > But precision medicine only works if scientists have studied people who are similar to you. If your genes are rare or unusual compared to those researchers have examined in the past, you could end up getting the wrong treatment. Since the vast majority of genetics studies are done on people of European ancestry, members of other racial groups may lose out on the benefits of precision medicine entirely. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicine-is-getting-more-precise-for-white-people/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/medicine-is-getting-mor...
ricardobayes 5y ago
Libraries in the UK ask for ethnicity when you register even nowadays, so do uni applications. Weird.
- hh3k0 5y ago
  University applications probably do for reasons related to equality policies. I'm sure they have some affirmative action equivalent over there.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago

skissane 5y ago

In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US. Here, the government, media, etc, generally prefer to refer to people using fine-grained ethnicity/nationality terms, not in terms of coarse racial categories.

thrown_22 5y ago
> In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US. That's because a majority of Australians are one generation or less removed from being immigrants. It's rather hard to sell the idea of a united white/brown/yellow/black race to people whose grandparents won't talk to each other because of the last genocide.

wpietri 5y ago

I love this as an exploration, but I think it doesn't go quite far enough. Are (socially defined) racial categories ridiculous from a biological lens? Sure. Does that mean they are not real? No. Humans are primates for whom social power structures are deeply important. (And not the only ones; see de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics" for how it plays out in our nearest relatives.) As a species we are extremely good at building eusocial power systems, and we use that to get a lot done. But those can depend on a lot of effectively arbitrary markers to do that. Look at the British class system. What outsiders would call slight shifts in accent, clothing, and manners mark major division in social power. The US wasn't nearly as classist, but it undeniably started out as a racialized and gendered power system. (E.g., 1700+ members of congress owned slaves [1], with slaveholders being in the majority for the first 30 years. It wasn't until 1870 we saw a black person in a federal elected seat, and the first woman was in 1917.) So it's not a shock that state and federal bureaucracies would be extremely interested in which box a person fits into. These categories aren't biological, they're social, standing waves in our interactions. As a white man, there are many, many situations in the US where I get treated better just because of that. It's that lasting differential in social power that is what really defines racial categories. If we want to eliminate the categories, we first have to eliminate the power differential. Then the categories will go away on their own, the same way a lot of ancestry questions have become moot among white people (e.g., having ancestors of English vs German vs Irish vs Italian ancestry used to matter a fair bit). But as with the English class system, that power differential will not go away on its own; it has to be studied, recognized, and actively dismantled. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/congress-slaveowners-names-list/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/cong...

mistrial9 5y ago
good start but... Successful slave traders at the time of the Age of Expansion (1500s) used race mercilessly to define most trading of human captives. However, slave traders have been hated and banned by others at the same time. All 13 colonies of North America had their own laws from the beginning. Essentially, it was the Virginia colonies and similar that fit your description. The northern group forbid slavery, preached against it, and had strict laws to protect people of all races. This fundemental difference is more important than many people realize now, and eventually was the context for the US Civil War. source: a yankee

twistedpair 5y ago

Computers have successfully been used to time 5K and marathons for decades. Race is what you define it to be, such as in this ambiguous title. Whether we should have a concept of "race" is another matter.

twistedpair 5y ago
To clarify, race is a construct too often abused to implicate stratifications of groups of people. "Races" don't naturally exist, rather only a continuum of ethnological and physical differences across the rainbow of the human genome [0]. As it's used today, race can be very divisive and polarizing. While I'm white, I've toured and been deeply moved by the Apartheid museum in Capetown and driven past the Townships that show how severe and pervasive the only recently struct down laws that ensconced the white elite in private neighborhoods while relegating everyone else to shanty towns were, and still are years after said laws were struck down. While collecting racial data certainly plays a role in correcting for the still evident scars of past wrongs (and avoids denying the past), it strikes me as also reinforcing the existence of such racial constructs. I can only imagine what it feels like to be a teen in a minority group checking the box that they are that group on forms for every tooth filling, credit card application, warranty card, standardized test, and survey they take. I sincerely desire my future grandchildren can see a title like this article and think it's a discussion of footrace algorithms, that we can live in a post racial society at some point. We certainly are not there yet. There is much inequality to resolve and too many latent scars to heal. Will we make it in my lifetime? That's on all of us to affect. [0] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res...

vehemenz 5y ago

The observations here are astute, and I appreciate the novel computing angle. I mostly agree with the conclusion. I would add though that it is possible to construct a taxonomical, biological account of race, given our understanding of population genetics and phenotypes. This is basically what 23andMe does. However, with the exception of understanding and treating very specific medical conditions, these correlations are mostly meaningless or superficial at best. Obviously, this is not what anyone means by "race" in the ordinary sense, which is mostly incoherent and only serves as a shorthand to categorize people superficially.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

I've always found it interesting (as a Muslim from the Middle East) that Middle Eastern is almost always lumped under White. I have some Turkish blood and so am on the lighter side, but much of my friends and family back home are definitely not "white". I did have some friends from back home who moved to the US, and would tick "African / American" since we're technically from the African continent, though being from the North we wouldn't fit that in the traditional sense either. I guess we'd all be mongrels. I sometimes wonder what it will mean for my sons' sense of identity as they grow up seeing themselves grouped under the White group.. While still feeling like a minority due to the way they look/speak.

xg15 5y ago

As all scenarios that involve databases and "semantics" of the various fields, the actual meaning is heavily dependent on what the fields are supposed to be used for. In case of the US, the whole confusion seems to be that one would rather like not to talk about the use-cases as the whole topic is still politically sensitive. Maybe a more honest question would be "Are you a descendant of colonial-era slaves? Yes/No? Are you a descendant of colonial-era settlers? Yes/No?"

notahacker 5y ago
> Maybe a more honest question would be "Are you a descendant of colonial-era slaves? Yes/No? Are you a descendant of colonial-era settlers? Yes/No?" But I suspect that the answers "both" and "neither" would be extremely common, and the fuzzy self-identified physical appearance based proxy for that would map much better onto people's actual social status...

DaltonCoffee 5y ago

The one question about race I've always had is this: Why is the child of both black and white parents considered black? This seems racist to me, fundamentally.

xg15 5y ago

> In trying to apply a computer to a task that humans do, we often discover that it doesn't work. One common problem is that humans are able to deal with fuzzy concepts but computers are not -- they need precise representations and it is hard to represent a fuzzy concept in a precise way. However, if we look closer at such tasks, we often discover that the weakness actually lies not in the computer but in ourselves -- we didn't understand what we were doing in the first place. This was still published before the latest iteration to evade the insight that your question is ill-posed took hold: AI magic! Why go through the trouble to ask yourself if your classification system makes sense if you can just draw up some random examples and train a classifier? And if the classifier happens to perform poorly, it's clearly the fault of the algorithm and not that your classifications are completely arbitrary. Modern algorithms are even smart enough to find out what you're "really" looking for and will happily detect skin color as the most significant feature for racial classifications.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wayoutthere 5y ago

Computers cannot cope with illogical concepts such as race. Race as applied in the US is a thousand contradictions trying to justify the emotions of a minority of the population who needs a visibly identifiable underclass to make themselves feel more secure in their position in life. Which is why race makes little sense — it changes over time to suit the needs of whatever political interests exist at any given point. It’s a purely emotional concept with no consistent definition in any physical reality.

hogrider 5y ago

So giving an anti racist form answer = you're a commie as far as they're concerned. Nice.

DonHopkins 5y ago

Speaking of not being able to cope with human races: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beliefs_and_activism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beli... >Eric S. Raymond: Political beliefs and activism >[...] Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist."[28][29] Progressive campaign The Great Slate was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, "I’ve been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." It is estimated that as of March 2018 over $30,000 has been raised in this way.[30] [28] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26 [29] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7239 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7239 [30] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17092684/great-slate-fundraising-congressional-campaign https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17092684/great-slate-fundr... http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=129 http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=129 >"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S Raymond http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_armedndangerous_archive.html#81815163 http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_armedndangero... "A clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he [Steven den Beste] is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are." -Eric S Raymond https://quotepark.com/quotes/1862991-eric-s-raymond-when-i-hear-the-words-social-responsibility-i-w/ https://quotepark.com/quotes/1862991-eric-s-raymond-when-i-h... >"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." -Eric S Raymond When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. "Geeks Win: A survey of the oddballs who write the codes that make the 21st-century world go round". The New York Times Book Review: p. BR18. 4 November 2001. ISSN 03624331. https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848 >"The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots." -Eric S Raymond https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833 https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833 >"... The minimum level of training required to make someone effective as a self defense shooter is not very high... unfortunately, this doesn't cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average IQ of 85 if it's statistically representative of American blacks as a whole. I've never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn't want to." -Eric S Raymond