3 ms·

Sure, but discrete categories people come up with are less real the less they align-with/derive-from the actual how-things-are . I’m willing to talk about the

by drdeca 1y ago

Sure, but discrete categories people come up with are less real the less they align-with/derive-from the actual how-things-are . I’m willing to talk about the radius of a helium atom even though there is no sharp cut-off in distance beyond which the amplitude for an electron being found there becomes zero. But not every k-means clustering on a dataset reflects a real separation into types. Just because people draw lines in their model of the world, and just because these lines are sometimes useful, doesn’t mean those lines cleave reality at the joints.

otterley 1y ago
One can observe people’s skin color and other outward appearance attributes. Those are undeniably real. It doesn’t mean that the conclusions one makes from those observations are necessarily correct or useful, which I think is what the OP is getting at. And yet sometimes they are useful. Prople whose lineage originates in different places (race, if you will) do have medically significant differences (see the literature).
- drdeca 1y ago
  Yes, “amount of melanin content” is a real thing. And it is in large part attributable to genes which have correlations with both other genes (with medically relevant differences) and to geographic locations of ancestors. So, if by “race” one means “melanin content and geographic location of ancestors”, then that is a real thing. But the way these vary do not come in any particular natural grouping into categories; “race”, in the sense of a categorical variable (not just the concept of ancestry more generally), isn’t real, or, at least, it is less real than the distinction between male and female. If one has a random real-valued variable which has a continuous distribution, it may be useful to chunk it up into discrete buckets even if the way of chunking ends up being fairly arbitrary. Having a way of chunking it up into intervals being useful doesn’t imply that the arbitrary chunking is actually a natural categorical variable.

by drdeca 1y ago

otterley 1y ago

One can observe people’s skin color and other outward appearance attributes. Those are undeniably real. It doesn’t mean that the conclusions one makes from those observations are necessarily correct or useful, which I think is what the OP is getting at. And yet sometimes they are useful. Prople whose lineage originates in different places (race, if you will) do have medically significant differences (see the literature).

drdeca 1y ago
Yes, “amount of melanin content” is a real thing. And it is in large part attributable to genes which have correlations with both other genes (with medically relevant differences) and to geographic locations of ancestors. So, if by “race” one means “melanin content and geographic location of ancestors”, then that is a real thing. But the way these vary do not come in any particular natural grouping into categories; “race”, in the sense of a categorical variable (not just the concept of ancestry more generally), isn’t real, or, at least, it is less real than the distinction between male and female. If one has a random real-valued variable which has a continuous distribution, it may be useful to chunk it up into discrete buckets even if the way of chunking ends up being fairly arbitrary. Having a way of chunking it up into intervals being useful doesn’t imply that the arbitrary chunking is actually a natural categorical variable.