If it's a fact, it's not racism. It's not personal. The fact that races diverged thousands of years ago suggest that they are genetically different through evolution. There's a lot to learn from genetic diversity rather than applying the racism badge to it every fucking time and ignoring it to pacify some over-sensitive idiots. This attitude is no better than witch hunts and mandatory religious laws.
The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes.
So many apologists here seem to think that you can just list facts, context-free, in some sort of objective manner. The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of value judgement.
For example, if you were to do a study on prison population in the US, you could end up presenting two facts :
> blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population
> poor people are dis-proportionally present in the prison population
These are both facts, but the one you choose to present gives a soundbite to somebody. Just because you are so magnificent as to not fall into the correlation=causality trap doesn't mean that you're not enabling racism.
By even presenting the first fact, you are implying that it is a fact worth mentioning to begin with. If you also found out that people who wear hats on Sunday are disproportionately present, would you mention it? presenting the fact shows that you believe the link between the two needs to be investigated in the first place.
We could also go into the whole "black/white is not a race" debate too, but the notion of race (as it is defined in common culture) has no place in many studies. Shared ancestry can be relevant in other studies too, but one of the defining characteristics of racist attitudes is how genetics/ancestry define you so much that it is OK to discriminate based on those factors alone. Enabling that sort of thinking (for very little scientific gain) is rarely worth it.
You are right in saying that "blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population" does not prove that, if all factors were equal, people who happen to have darker skin are somehow predisposed to end up in prison. That statement on its own doesn't tell us much and endlessly repeating it is prone to lead to racist beliefs among many people.
However, research that shows a group of people with a common ancestry share a genetic trait that is known to make them more or less susceptible to a certain disease or more or less responsive to certain treatments IS showing a causal link. It is most certainly worth mentioning because it will lead to better medical treatment. This is not an uninformed judgement call based on a naive interpretation of complex social issues. This isn't social science. This is natural science.
I'm hopeful that this research will be done with as little mention of "race" as possible. Race is a social construct, this research is related to shared ancestry. It should be "we'll do a genetic test, and if you have this genetic marker, we'll do X, otherwise, we'll do Y." So many people in the US are of mixed ancestry that it is unlikely that any social definition of race is going to be useful for making medical decisions without a genetic test.
> The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of value judgement.
Yes, but then the problem is not with the facts themselves, but the way they have been used, and I took the grandparent statement to be talking about the facts themselves.
you can't just present facts (even an excel spreadsheet of raw data will show what you tested against), so there is always at least some form of choosing mechanism.
> you can't just present facts (even an excel spreadsheet of raw data will show what you tested against)
A 'fact' is something that is fairly well established. Of course we can never know anything with absolute certainty. Given that notion of 'fact', are you saying there are no facts in, say, physics, or chemistry, or biology? And on top of that, are you saying they can't simply be presented?
>If it's a fact, it's not racism. It's not personal. The fact that races diverged thousands of years ago suggest that they are genetically different through evolution.
The simple fact diverged doesn't tell us in what ways were they diverged. Bigotry can easily fill the remaining wholes in our knowledge (which are vast) and assume eg. that blacks are more prone to die young etc. Who cares if it needs tons of research into social conditions to exclude it as a factor, when you can just take some biological differences and ascribe stuff to them.
>The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes
Well, "objective science" is mostly a BS notion in an era of government and corporate grants, paid research, and tons of huge interests and prejudices. Lab results, for any stuff that's not totally trivial, don't speak themselves, they require an interpretative context. That can be either provided by relentlessly searching for the truth by the scientist or by quick copout and career/economic/governmental/social pressure.
You don't need to exclude social traits to get useful information but it does help objectivity. I assume your point is about the presentation of the facts rather than the facts themselves.
Rules are subject to interpretation. If it draws attention to the point then it is perfectly valid. In fact I think it's just here. When your point opposes religious thinking then you have to throw your toys out of the pram.
If I'd posted this from my older account then the response would be different as HN treats older more established users differently.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
There is no interpretation to be made there. You willfully ignored it.
I didn't think you were new to HN, judging by your comment history, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps you've been banned before. Perhaps you feel your new identity gives you a vantage point from which to snipe at others. But either way, would you please clean up your writing?
I think this is the problem:
"There's too much woo and too many chipped shoulders and opportunists these days and they need a smackdown."
You feel you're on a mission, and that your mission supersedes following the rules. It doesn't.
News.YC is, among other things, an experiment to see if this fate can be avoided. The sites's guidelines explicitly ask people not to say things they wouldn't say face to face. If someone starts being rude, other users will step in and tell them to stop.
It sounds like we're going to be stuck with d0 for awhile. If they get banned, I assume they'll create a new account and do this all over again. I'm at least hoping they'll be reasonable.
"If it's a fact it's not racism" is a common misconception of someone who understands neither science nor racism.
The problem isn't the result of some study. In a small part it is the interpretation. The much bigger part is the value judgement.
There can't ever be a value judgement in science. If there is, it's not science.
Now, people do pass judgement across ethnical lines. It's natural because these boundaries are very visible. But it's not scientific ever.
The problem the author wants to address but doesn't understand is that people are finding new underpinnings for racist beliefs, and nobody calls them on their fallacy!
In fact, it can actually help killing nationalism as it shows that most cultural nations have a very diverse ancestry and thus are purely cultural phenomena.
Human races haven't diverged, though. Divergence requires isolation that isn't present in humans. People are incredibly mobile and people of different races frequently intermarry, ensuring that any traits that emerge in one get shared with all the others.
Aryan superiority was very much non-scientific and is a long way from any sort of fact. Either way, it's completely tangential. If certain nationalities are more prone to some diseases than others, then it's important to recognize this as it can be used for developing drugs that can help those nationalities directly. Sticking your head in the sand and chanting "race means nothing" doesn't help anybody dieing from a disease. As soon as someone starts actively persecuting people because of the research, then it does become racist however. That doesn't mean that the research is not important and shouldn't be done. It means education needs to improved (still).
That is to say that the differences between me and the most different human (with not chromosomal disaster like Downs) are so small as to make arranging humans into groups according to their genetics meaningless.
One issue (this also applies to some discussion of gender differences) is that people often organize discussion of group differences around comparing population means on some trait, and trying to come up with studies that have large enough statistical power to show a difference in means. What often gives a clearer picture, though, is to estimate the full distribution of some trait in different groups, not only a point estimate of the mean. In that case, the result often ends up much less impressive: you end up with two bell curves that almost exactly coincide. If they don't exactly coincide, a study with large enough statistical power can show a difference in means. But people often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X than women, with p < 0.05", the result is two disjoint bell curves, rather than two nearly-coincident bell curves.
> But people often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X than women, with p < 0.05", the result is two disjoint bell curves, rather than two nearly-coincident bell curves.
Which just means people are bad at understanding statistics. They have a folk understanding of "mean" that doesn't allow for differences in distribution.
Which is an endless source of unjustified outrage whenever you try to make demonstrably true statements about population means.
The whole educational fad to teach everyone to code is fine and all, but I want to see a fad for statistics...
I think the people attempting to make technically true but scientifically uninteresting statements about population means often have ulterior political motives (which is why they don't do analyses that are actually scientifically interesting), so I don't think the outrage is always unjustified. This can be seen in their paper titles and abstracts, and particularly their press releases, which make typically claims about differences between groups unsupported by the data. There's a whole cottage industry of "men are like X, women are like Y" folks who are rather tendentiously misrepresenting data to sell their books.
In particular, that two populations have differing means is trivially true for nearly any two population groups and choice of traits, even randomly split ones, so simply demonstrating a population mean difference is nearly never interesting. If you choose any trait that can vary between people, and you manage to find every person in two finite population groups and compute a mean (so at this point you have zero sampling error, since you have a complete population count), the two means will very rarely be literally identical. There is some exact rational number that is "the average height of HN posters who registered on a January 2" and a rational number that is "the average height of HN posters who registered on a January 3", and these numbers are almost certainly different. Therefore demonstrating a difference in means is simply an exercise in getting a large enough sample size to prove something that is nearly always true. But going through the effort to collect the sample to "prove" that Jan-2nders are taller than Jan-3rders or vice-versa is not scientifically interesting, even though one of the two is almost certainly true. And it would certainly not be justified to hang much interpretation off my result, in which I speculated wildly about how evolutionary differences resulted in the Jan-3rders having (slightly) shorter height.
Now if you could show unexpectedly large differences, like many Jan-2nders are > 6ft while very few Jan-3rders are < 6ft, such that the population curves differ by more than a trivial amount, that could be an interesting result that merits further study. But then you need to be talking about distribution estimates and comparing curves and error bands, not talking about population means and quoting p-values.
One interesting issue the article raises is putting children into different schools based on their genetics. As far as I understood it, the genetics of intelligence wasn't this well understood...
I couldn't find anything on the matter. For me their is still no evidence for practical use of genetics in Education....
But she warned that science could be "misused" to propagate the belief that people inherently have different abilities
...
based on skin colour or ethnic background
Is the issue the variability or the link to causality? Because surely there is variability. The other issues get into statistical considerations relating to interpreting the genome itself. The argument that there is no genetic basis of {race} seems highly flawed at face value. So the question still remains about the co-variance matrices between the two sets of variations. This is where there seems to be a fine line with respect to identifying the data; understandin the data; and drawing conclusions (right or wrong) from the data. But without doing any of that work, it seems highly presumptive to argue there is no information {in that data} per-se, and/or to completely disregard it (out of hand). None of this has anything to do as of yet with granting political or social priveledge to certain people or others.
"There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined."[1]
From a genetic perspective there is basically no basis for the traditional categorization of race. Two people of the same skin color, from the same country, who would be considered by traditional definitions to be the same race, can have completely different genetic lineages. There is a National Geographic documentary that discusses this called "The Human Family Tree" that is available on Netflix.
Is it really important to you that race be traced back to genetics?
I mean, is it really important we have this concept?
You realize that your brain is not your skin right? The whole concept of race not existing is that if you look at genetic diversity for markers we can correlate to function, there is no difference between the "races" greater then the difference we find within each population - i.e. the population does not exist, beyond visual cues.
But you know, it's probably really important we be utterly pedantic on this point. Because heaven help us if we don't acknowledge people's skin color can be different in a consistent way. That seems really important and we must mention it a lot. For some reason.
My understanding of the point is that genetics exist, but they rarely map along the lines of what we understand as races. It's an artificial taxonomy which works for a few things (like sickle cell) but from a genetic perspective you could draw the lines many ways.
This stuff really makes my head spin. I consider myself a rationalist, a Bayesian even. If something is true, I'd like to believe it; if something is false, I'd like to believe it is false.
Whatever is true of race, I would like to believe. Even if it's politically incorrect, or even if it's not, I would like to believe whatever is true.
But I don't know what to believe. There doesn't even seem to be a noticeable leaning in the evidence for one side or the other. Experts in the appropriate fields say 'There is no scientific basis for the concept of race.' Experts in the appropriate fields also say 'Clearly there are racial differences.'
Is it a semantic issue mostly? Are some people just afraid of the inconvenient truth? Or is the other side peddling an 'inconvenient truth' for racists-motivated reasons? I am not coming close to having a grasp on this issue.
Racism is not about having a belief about a property. That "Bayesianism".
Racism is defined as making a judgement of value across ethnical boundaries.
"Blacks in the US get sick more often" is not racism, it's a scientific belief with evidence. "Africans are genetically more prone to have bad health" is a belief without enough evidence, which might be fueled by a subconscious judgement.
"We don't need to put an effort into improving African-American Health, because they are disease-riddled anyway" clearly is a value judgement and devoiding a part of the human species of rights the other part enjoys.
It was never said that all humans where alike and to be handled the same way. You won't give the same birth control methods to male and female individual for instance. When speaking of equality, I think it is implied equality before society: equal rights, same laws, no irrelevant discrimination (I don't know how it works but I guess sellers are partially chosen depending on how they look and how attractive they are). It would not mean that you mean to be blind to factual and neutral evidence which leads to technical efficiency. From the original article:
> Published research has shown that blacks are more likely than whites to have a blood type that causes sickle cell disease and can protect against malaria, and are more likely to have a certain gene called APOL1, which protects against a parasite that causes sleeping sickness.
It is quite a good example of information that could help put a diagnosis on a person taking into account racial aspects. And I doubt it would count as racist in any way. Because not everything is black or white, they is a grey area:
> She cited new research urging that children be identified based on their genetically predetermined educational abilities and then put in separate schools that could be used to foster different kinds of learning.
This is a border line case: technically, it might mean more proficient teaching using adapted methods for both groups. However, this is also segregation. A way to draw some line would be to avoid discriminating social interactions: in this case, X kids are only interacting with X kids, which make a bias on the population distribution.
tl;dr: calling "racism" on non-biased factual evidence is quite harsh, but we need to be cautious when using such facts
Note: "non-biased" because Nazis did pretend to have factual evidence against Jews, but it was only pseudo-science propaganda (and, well, they only used it to justify arbitrary discrimination)
> She cited new research urging that children be identified based on their genetically predetermined educational abilities and then put in separate schools that could be used to foster different kinds of learning.
is, we already know that constructing social categories based on biological traits is bullshit, simply because the relevant criteria are not given by science. Science can only give a classification of some measure, but it can not reasonably define if the measure is relevant. For an extreme example, even if you get a "obviously relevant" distribution, you have to choose at which values you draw the line.
But lets assume for the sake of the argument, that there is initially no difference in the outcome of the education ( defining this is left as an exercise to the reader), one of the school types will be perceived as better. So it will get more applications, can afford harsher selection criteria and actually become better. At which point the better school will probably get more resources, and the cycle continues.
So calling "racism" on non-biased factual evidence is harsh. Assuming that non-biased factual evidence includes citations to the roughly 100 years of research how oppressive structures develop. (These 100 years of research are usually called feminism.) But we know that precisely these footnotes are the first to be dropped.
I think ignoring the differences between races (e.g. hypertension medicine targeted at african americans) is as wrong as ignoring the fact, that genetic differences between 2 people, which might be considered as being from the same "race", might be much greater.
Furthermore "white knighting" for races (i.e. probably non-caucasian ones) is very likely not much better than racism itself (same as the people fighting "for" women and against the jerks at conferences etc.).
"the belief that people inherently have different abilities based on skin colour or ethnic background.". It certainly appears at present that this is largely true.
It's odd that on the one hand some people proclaim they are from a certain 'race'. On the other hand they don't want any characteristics of this 'race' to be drawn to anyone's attention because that's 'racism'. Meanwhile we get on with our lives and treat folk as we find them.
That entire article is nothing but moral supremacy dribble that's attacking science by using the R word to immediately claim victory and stop all discussion.
The people that used to wear white sheets on their heads, are now the same group of people that the author belongs to... They've just found a new way to make themselves feel superior.
They are the people that claim they are open minded, stand for diversity of ideas, and open discussions.
Yet the moment you present a counter-view to what they believe, you're a racist, a Nazi, your work should be shunned, and you should lose all chances of gainful employment.
I see after I awaken in my time zone that there have been quite a few thoughtful comments on the interesting article kindly submitted here, many of them replies to top-level comments. For participants on Hacker News who like to read whole books or scientific articles on facts about the world they live in, I recommend a specialized bibliography on race
kept in Wikipedia user space and updated from time to time. The actual articles on Wikipedia about the topic of "race" are mostly very low in quality and frequently edit-warred, with one of those articles being one of the ten most edit-warred articles on all of English Wikipedia.
The basic fact we can all rely on as we think about these issues is that we are all very closely related to one another, throughout humankind. Every human being is more closely related to and more similar to every other human being than most people imagine. That's a consistent finding of molecular genetics research.
The United States Census Bureau says
"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."
In other words, "race" categories used by the United States government are arbitrary and are not based on science. A confirmation of this fact is the disagreement between any two countries' categories for "race"--the same individual can change categories as the individual crosses national borders.
Feldman, Marcus W.; Lewontin, Richard C. (2008). "Chapter 5: Race, Ancestry, and Medicine". In Koenig, Barbara A.; Lee, Sandra Soo-jin; Richardson, Sarah S. Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-4324-6. is a good current book chapter on medical implications of race research informed by genetics. The article notes on page 93 "Finally, it must be borne in mind that the taxonomic problem cannot be inverted. That is, while clustering methods are capable of assigning an individual to a geographic population with a high degree of certainty, given that individual's genotype, it is not possible to predict accurately the genotype of an individual given his or her geographical origin. Thus, knowing an individual's ancestry only slightly improves the ability to predict his or her genotype. The more polymorphic the markers, the more difficult this is." Another book chapter, Harpending, Henry (2007). "Chapter 16: Anthropological Genetics: Present and Future". In Crawford, Michael. Anthropological Genetics: Theory, Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 457. ISBN 978-0-521-54697-3, points out that "On the other hand, information about the race of patients will be useless as soon as we discover and can type cheaply the underlying genes that are responsible for the associations. Can races be enumerated in any unambiguous way? Of course not, and this is well known not only to scientists but also to anyone on the street." A specific example of "race" failing to explain a medical observation is hypertension (high blood pressure), already mentioned in this thread before I posted. The book chapter by a specialist on the development of blood pressure medicines, Kahn, Jonathan (13 August 2013). "Chapter 7: Bidil and Racialized Medicine". In Krimsky, Sheldon; Sloan, Kathleen. Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Columbia University Press. p. 132. ISBN 978-0-231-52769-9. points out that "In medical practice what matters is our shifting understanding of the correlations between such evolving social identities and the evolving economic, political, and environmental conditions to which they may be related. For example, what are we to make of the fact that African Americans suffer from disproportionately high rates of hypertension, but Africans in Nigeria have among the world's lowest rates of hypertension, far lower than the overwhelmingly white population of Germany? Genetics certainly plays a role in hypertension. But any role it plays in explaining such differences must surely be vanishingly small."
I have been to different parts of the world, and have met people from all over the world. Sometimes I have met persons of one "race" who look just about exactly like people I know from another "race," and I have found kindred people (as to any personal characteristic you care to name) among people from all over the world of all different "races." The race categories are not informative, or at least not informative about individual genomes. In some societies, "race" is a salient enough category that an individual's personal experience can be profoundly influenced by race categorization. If you haven't read the book before, you could read the book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin to learn more about that.
Some people have massive, powerful shoulders. And they need them. To carry that chip on their shoulder for so long.
Whether their personal chip is racism, sexism, or any other -ism, their chip is the real problem. So, how do we stop them foisting their chips onto the rest of civilised society?
Sounds far too simplistic. Some people are born arseholes, some blame the world for their bad lot in life, others still take pleasure in causing problems and generally trolling. Finally a small honest few may derive their chip from personal experience, the most honest experience. I agree we should review what happened in their respective situations, and work to avoid that in the future. But the rest? Not worth the attention they so desperately seek.
The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes.