[HN Gopher] AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
___________________________________________________________________
AI Recognises Race in Medical Images
Author : stuartbman
Score : 116 points
Date : 2021-09-14 12:44 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (explainthispaper.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (explainthispaper.com)
| Huwyt_Nashi_070 wrote:
| Incredible that socioeconomic factors can even impact tissue
| composition and density.
| knicholes wrote:
| I wonder if it has anything to do with the machines that are
| being used to take the images. Maybe some groups have access to
| one type of imaging machine where other groups have access to
| some other type of imaging machine.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| Or some scans are ordered for a diagnostic that's more common
| in one group over another. I hope that the details show that
| treatment and diagnostic quality are indistinguishable between
| race classifications.
| lostlogin wrote:
| This is a good thought, but for all of said group to have the
| condition would be concerning.
| umvi wrote:
| I don't see why this is necessarily bad. An ML model is picking
| up on subtle anatomical or physiological differences between
| races. So what, that doesn't automatically mean the AI is racist
| or biased...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not necessarily bad, if it's actually working.
|
| The fact that it works on an 8x8 massively pixelated version of
| the x-ray points to the possibility that it's not actually
| working, which would be bad if you based patient treatment
| decisions on an training set that was actually teaching the AI
| something else entirely.
| cubano wrote:
| Huh?
|
| What do you mean, not working? That the AI was randomly
| choosing the correct race 82% of the time by luck?
|
| I'm confused by what your implying because it would seem to
| me that the authors went through many steps to try to
| pinpoint how the AI was doing this identification and how
| baffling it was to everyone that even with _a lot_ of x-ray
| information removed (8x8 pixels compared to say 4k), it
| somehow was still correctly picking the race.
|
| What would this "something else entirely" that you are
| implying actually be?
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| I'm just making this up, but...
|
| Perhaps hospitals that treat a disproportionate share of
| poor people (which themselves are disproportionately not
| white), tend to use a different brand of X-ray film, and
| that brand has different contrast ratios than that of the
| brand preferred by rich hospitals. Thus, they'd be
| detecting the different brand of X-ray film rather than
| anything about the patients themselves.
|
| Of course, at this level it's still hard to imagine
| generating that 82% hit rate. But maybe there are multiple
| factors along these lines.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > tend to use a different brand of X-ray film
|
| Most of us radiology folk abandoned film 20 years ago and
| went to digital systems (CR or DR). This doesn't negate
| your query though, as vendors do have different
| technologies and their images do not look the same.
| kovek wrote:
| That sounds like a great idea and they can test for it!
| Classify the scans on the "type of film" and then alter
| the scan and see if the model recognizes it
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > That the AI was randomly choosing the correct race 82% of
| the time by luck?
|
| No; as with the article I linked elsewhere in the thread
| (https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-
| fr...), that the AI might have found some _other_
| indicator, like filenames in the data set, or metadata in
| the images that included patient name, or differences in
| the _length_ of patient name (often redacted by black
| rectangles in x-rays in training data), or any number of
| other factors.
|
| This happens all the time in science. As another recent
| example of "whoops, turned out we were measuring the wrong
| thing", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-
| light_neutrino_ano...
|
| Another example around AI:
| https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/12/20993665/artificial-
| in...
|
| > One such resume-screening tool identified being named
| Jared and having played lacrosse in high school as the best
| predictors of job performance, as Quartz reported.
|
| Are lacrosse players naturally better workers? Probably
| not. Are they probably whiter, wealthier, better networks,
| etc. than the average population? Probably. These sorts of
| things - as with the 8x8 pixel example - start to point to
| confounding variables that need to be worked out and
| accounted for.
| dexen wrote:
| _> the AI might have found some other indicator, like
| filenames in the data set_
|
| The paper quite explicitly goes into testing and
| disseminating what exactly the AI detects. Two
| observations:
|
| - the classification clearly was primarily based on the
| visual content rather than spurious metadata, because
| various transformations of the visual content had the
| expected impact on classification correctness
|
| - the classification clearly wasn't based on one specific
| feature of the visual content but rather on multiple
| factors in the visuals, because various transformations
| to features (including masking out specific features like
| bone density) produced results matching expectations
| (usually gradual decrease in accuracy, with some
| thresholds).
|
| Conversely, if the classification was primarily based on
| factors other than the visual content, the visual
| transformations would have had negligible effect -
| possibly up to a threshold, and then would throw the AI
| completely off.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The faster-than-light neutrino experiment similarly went
| "we've tried to account for everything we can think of
| and still can't figure it out" when they published. It
| turned out to be a measurement error.
|
| The same may be true here, and I think it's the most
| _likely_ explanation.
|
| I'd be interested in whether the same model can be
| trained to predict patient wealth, hair color, style of
| clothing, religion, etc. from the same x-ray data sets.
| hgial wrote:
| Forgive me if I don't consider "you can tell someone's
| race from physical features" to be quite as extraordinary
| a result as "particles can travel faster than light".
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The point is less "they're equally significant
| conclusions" and more "sometimes the thing you thought
| you discovered isn't a thing".
| dexen wrote:
| I am dismayed by your example that runs counter to the
| modern science.
|
| While "faster than light neutrino" was highly unexpected
| and rather suspect from the start, the "bone geometry
| differs slightly between ethnic groups" is well
| established among the anthropologists of humans. There
| are also parallels in wider biology of animals -
| mentioning that to underscore it's as scientifically
| expected, and not merely construed for humans alone.
|
| The question here was how exactly is AI detecting it this
| well from _chest_ X-rays; the question centered around AI
| and possibly if it would unexpectedly influence the
| medical processes - rather than around the bone geometry
| itself.
|
| For sake of example, a random link from google search: ht
| tps://www.researchgate.net/publication/24427702_Ethnic_di
| f...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I agree that an AI model _might_ be able to glean race on
| a probabilistic basis from x-rays.
|
| This specific model's ability to do it from a _64 pixel
| version_ of said x-ray makes me skeptical it 's doing so
| successfully.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| That's 1/4 the size of the texture of a Minecraft block.
| An AI could easily be trained to identify the block type
| of a Minecraft block based on an 8x8 subsample of one of
| its textures, and there's no reason something similar
| couldn't happen with biological race. Unless you a priori
| assume all racial differences are socially constructed
| and/or only skin deep.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Every Minecraft block of a particular type is identical.
|
| The same is... not _remotely_ true for humans, or even
| two chest x-rays of the _same_ human.
| jcims wrote:
| What if it was an 8x8 grayscale photo of their face? We
| wouldn't be particularly surprised that it can guess
| race. The fact that we struggle to detect patterns in the
| data doesn't mean they don't exist.
| runako wrote:
| This is actually pretty funny. In much of the American
| Deep South, even Americans from other parts of the
| country can't identify race reliably when sitting next to
| a person.
|
| The notion that a classifier can reliably identify race
| based on an 8x8 grayscale is risible.
| jcims wrote:
| Your comment is the only one in this entire thread that
| mentions reliability. Even if it were a meaningful metric
| in the context of race, an AUC of .68-.72 is a puncher's
| chance at best.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > We wouldn't be particularly surprised that it can guess
| race.
|
| That's actually a _great_ example of this problem,
| though.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/21298762/face-depixelizer-ai-
| machin...
|
| > It's a startling image that illustrates the deep-rooted
| biases of AI research. Input a low-resolution picture of
| Barack Obama, the first black president of the United
| States, into an algorithm designed to generate
| depixelated faces, and the output is a white man.
|
| > It's not just Obama, either. Get the same algorithm to
| generate high-resolution images of actress Lucy Liu or
| congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from low-
| resolution inputs, and the resulting faces look
| distinctly white. As one popular tweet quoting the Obama
| example put it: "This image speaks volumes about the
| dangers of bias in AI."
| Jensson wrote:
| Wanting the AI to have the same racial bias as Americans,
| that is that Barrack Obama who is half white half east
| African should be categorised the same as someone with
| west African heritage is just dumb. Barrack Obama has a
| white mother and a father from Kenya, so has little
| resemblance to African Americans who have mostly west
| African heritage, only reason people don't see a
| difference is because they are so used to categorise
| people by skin color. Of course getting data from all
| areas of Africa and all mixes of people would be great,
| but there are limits and adding in more west Africans
| wouldn't have helped accurately depixel Obamas face.
| vilhelm_s wrote:
| In principle yes, but did you read the paper? They do a
| lot of completely crazy things like blurring the image
| until it's just fuzzy blobs, or doing a high-pass filter
| on it until it just looks like noise (they comment that a
| human could not even guess that it's an x-ray picture),
| and they still get very high accuracy. Basically no
| matter what they try they can still get the race out,
| with slightly lower percentage numbers. When reading it I
| also thought this is too good to be true, and they may
| have some kind of bug in their code...
| drdeca wrote:
| It seems clear that if you just, instead of blurring the
| image, set the images (or the part of the image with the
| x-ray scan) to the same image, then that would work to
| evaluate whether it is getting the information from the
| image or from some other source.
|
| Seeing as this would be easy to do, I imagine that if it
| is at all plausible from what they know that it is
| getting information from anything other than the x-ray
| scan, that they would have already tried this?
|
| I do wonder how good of a predictor something would be if
| it just went off the average brightness of the image.
| Probably very bad, but maybe better than chance? Well,
| better than chance on the training set is to be expected,
| the question I guess is whether it would be better than
| chance on the test or validation set (I'm not confident
| in my understanding of the distinction between testing
| set and validation set. Is the idea that if you are using
| the score on the testing set to decide when to stop
| training, and maybe what hyper parameters to use or
| something, and other things to determine which model, you
| only try the model on the validation set once you have
| decided on your final version of the model?)
| dexen wrote:
| _> crazy things like blurring the image until it's just
| fuzzy blobs_
|
| That... that doesn't influence one of the presumed ways
| the NN categorizes images: the _trend_ in bone geometry.
| The "blobs", while fuzzy, still largely retain the
| _relative proportions_ to each other. Or, in other words,
| _proportions_ of image elements are invariant for
| operations of scaling and of blurring.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| As an additional comment on this point:
|
| The fact that trained neural networks cannot tell us
| _why_ they give an answer and the best tool we have to
| explore that is to wiggle the inputs and see how the
| black box responds is a major concern for the whole
| space. Figuring out how to tag data with enough
| information to generate a "why" was an active area of
| research ten years ago and still is.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Can you explain to me how you recognize your mother's
| voice?
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I think the idea is that it's picking up on a coincidental
| correlational bias in the source data.
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| Since it's effectively the same anatomical structure,
| presented in a grayscale image, I think bone density would
| change the average color of the image regardless of what
| level of pixelation was applied. The chance of detection
| through some other method isn't ruled out though. It could be
| hitting off of something mundane like the margins on the edge
| of an image, how centered the torso is in frame, foreign
| objects in the body from procedures, any random thing that
| could bias the data can also lead to false positives. The
| only way to verify would be to use a new data set, ideally
| from new hospitals, and see if it has similar results.
| macksd wrote:
| But it does mean that AI models trained on data might end up
| just perpetuating racial correlations even when you don't think
| it's aware of race. It's another example of why
| interpretability is important: the model might end up depending
| on correlations you don't mean it to.
| hgial wrote:
| It might be helpful for folks to look at the blog post written by
| one of the authors:
|
| https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/ai-has-the...
|
| or the paper itself
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.10356.pdf
|
| I see a lot of "oh it's probably just picking up on x y z" when
| x, y, and z are things they explicitly checked for:
|
| 1) "It's probably just the names or other metadata" - they only
| gave it pixel data to train on. To control for things like
| metadata overlaid on the image (e.g., a name written on the
| image) they divided the images into 3x3 sections and trained
| classifiers on each section separately.
|
| 2) "It's probably some artifact of how the hospital marked up the
| images" - they used something like 7 different datasets from
| different hospitals and different modalities (X-Ray and CT).
|
| If it is cheating somehow, it's not doing it in an obvious way
| that you can think of in a minute or two. Also note that they had
| more than just medical folks working on the paper; the author
| list includes plenty of computer scientists. It's unlikely
| they're making an elementary ML mistake here.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| One major risk source I see is that the size of the training
| data for the races isn't the same. For white vs. black patient
| data, there's between a 2:1 and 3:1 ratio bias in both the
| training and test data (and a much higher ratio bias for
| Asian... as high as 20:1 in some of these categories).
|
| This gives the CNN more information on one race than another,
| which can create a classifier that performs very well on the
| training and test data it has access to but then flakes
| spectacularly on data outside the training set (because the
| source isn't representative of the total variance in the global
| population).
| motohagiography wrote:
| Any clustering similarity scheme for biometric data would yield
| similarity categories that we may or may not name "races" though.
|
| We could probably do the same with text analysis, where the
| emergent distinct flavours would create categories. A previous HN
| story that did specifically this
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568709) could have just
| as easily been called "tribes."
|
| The bigger question is whether the categories provide heuristics
| with valuable predictive illumination. "Valuable," being the key
| term to solve for.
|
| Ethnicity information in medicine may be a fast heuristic for
| testing for things like melanoma and diabetes, but even that this
| fast sorting rule might provide a time/steps shortcut or
| intuitive leap to test for a diagnosis is likely really more an
| artifact of the cost of testing and examination than the result
| of a physical/biological determinant.
|
| I'd conjecture that a world with tricorders where the cost of
| scanning for disease is equal and controlled, would likely yield
| results that were less-ethnically correlated - and then edge
| cases that were exclusively ethnically correlated, e.g. over a
| very polarized distribution. There's also the question of whether
| the tricorder measures complete things, and who decides.
|
| This is to say, there are differences and combinations that may
| aggregate into categories, but the meaning of the differences is
| dynamic, subjective, and a function of what level of abstraction
| you are looking at them from. E.g. at the level of a statement
| like "most foo people are bar," you've already cancelled out most
| of the information about your sample, so the coherence of
| something that low-information is going to be limted as well.
|
| In this sense, the "social construct," description is a response
| to these noisy dynamics, and it's consistent to a point. In this
| view, race is only ever a determinant when we let it be, as the
| result of chosen and learned interpretations of these cognitive
| grouping dynamics. When the cost of errors is low, we can afford
| to unlearn these abstractions. Modernity and civilization implies
| the cost is low.
|
| Taking that further, when the real cost of errors is high enough,
| you get a reinfocement effect on the bias where the surviving
| population is made up mainly of people who exercised that fast
| heuristic (hence long-lived homogenous populations), because the
| tolerant ones evoltionarily select out as a result of that high
| error cost.
|
| I could even extend this further to define racists today as
| people who percieve a high cost to being wrong in their
| generalizations, which correlates well with being poor, but also,
| very rich, just less so in the middle between. Anti-racism
| becomes a kind of signal that shows you can afford to be wrong,
| and oddly, racism in this model is intended to signal you have a
| lot to lose. If you want to reduce racism, solve for the security
| issues for people who percieve a high cost to being wrong about
| openness. If you want more racism, just antagonize people who
| percieve that they have a lot to lose. I'd wonder how well that
| generalizes.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand what it's good for? Couldn't you
| just look? Or better yet, ask?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "Huh, why are the bacteria near that mold all dead?"
|
| "Who cares, just make another petri dish and start over."
|
| Sometimes, the utility of a piece of info is not immediately
| obvious.
|
| In this particular case, if there's a genuine difference
| between races on x-rays, it could significantly impact patient
| care as automated x-ray reading becomes a thing.
| askesum wrote:
| Greyhound and Schaefer are separate races. The fastest Schaefer
| would lose a race with the slowest Greyhound. Jamaicans seem to
| be faster than swedes. But still, the fastest swede is faster
| than almost every jamaican. Swedes and jamaicans are not separate
| races.
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| There's only one race. Ethnicity may vary.
| Huwyt_Nashi_070 wrote:
| Any other 60-IQ takes to share?
| dahfizz wrote:
| ethnicity = race
|
| race = something_else()
|
| You're just redefining words, we are all still talking about
| the same concepts. This is unhelpful pedantry.
| goatlover wrote:
| There's one species of humans still around. Race is a non-
| scientific category that got made up a few centuries ago, and
| has continually changed over that time. Ethnicity is the
| regional and cultural group of usually related people that
| everyone prior to western colonization understood as separate
| groups. Often you could assimilate into a different
| ethnicity.
|
| So Romans would have understand themselves to be different
| from Greeks, Persians, Egyptians and Jews.
| dexen wrote:
| "Euphemism treadmill" [1] is a real problem when medical
| terminology enters common circulation. Various medical terms
| have shifted into insult or slur territory over the years - a
| risky example being "mentally retarded". Note it started as a
| polite expression used in stead of earlier expressions that
| already fell victim to euphemism treadmill - and now is
| understood as an insult. "Handicapped" is an example that
| went from polite ersatz word to bordering on insulting in our
| lifetimes.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| Maybe so. The point I think should stand however, pedantry or
| no because -
|
| First, ethnicity (1) is very much not race (2). Second, and I
| assumed (wrongly, apparently) that a reader might follow this
| discussion to a logical end, which is to question why
| determining race using AI or any other means is even
| neccessary or remarkable. The article briefly knocks on that
| door in the last section (titled "so what"), but has nothing
| on offer.
|
| If I'm simply redefining words then I'm marginalising years
| of racism. Mandela, MLK and many many more must similarly be
| pedants, no?
|
| (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_group
|
| (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
| macksd wrote:
| Unless you're the US government, then ethnicity refers to
| whether or not you're Hispanic, and race encompasses all other
| distinctions.
| [deleted]
| soundnote wrote:
| This caused glorious meltdowns on Twitter. Some people just don't
| want to face reality.
| lostlogin wrote:
| What reality is that? I haven't seen the thread sorry, have you
| a link?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Please forgive me for asking a controversial question
| (particularly so early in the morning), but if there are all of
| these biological correlations with race, what does it mean that
| "race is a social construct"? Is the idea that black people have
| greater bone mineral density (per TFA) due to social or
| environmental causes (e.g., diet)? For what it's worth, I'm a
| staunch egalitarian and I don't see that changing either way.
|
| EDIT: Really pleased with the largely constructive conversation
| in this thread. Was worried that this was going to be coopted as
| an ideological flame thread. Thanks for the insightful answers
| and good faith engagement. Keep up the good work!
| kace91 wrote:
| Race in the context of physical differences does not map to the
| social concepts of race.
|
| For example, US documents usually include Latino as a possible
| race, even though Latin Americans are white, black, indigenous
| Americans, or a mix - and Spaniards are what usually would be
| classified as white. If you check older forms you'd see
| Italians and Irish people categorized as a different (non
| white) category, etc.
| eplanit wrote:
| Race is distinct from Nationality. "Latino" is not a synonym
| for citizens of Latin American countries, but the name of a
| racial group which originated from that region of the world.
|
| It gets confusing with countries like China, Japan, and
| India, which are more racially homogeneous, and where the
| country name is the same as the (common) name of the
| predominate racial groups.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The parent is talking about ethnicity (culture), not
| nationality. "Latino" isn't a race, it's an ethnicity. In
| particular, there are many "races" of people who are Latino
| (white Cubans, indigenous Mexicans, black Brazilians, etc
| can all be "Latino" despite different races and
| nationalities). Indeed the "latin" in "Latin America" and
| "Latino" was originally a language category--these peoples
| all spoke romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese,
| etc).
| foldr wrote:
| > "Latino" is not a synonym for citizens of Latin American
| countries, but the name of a racial group which originated
| from that region of the world.
|
| It really isn't. Where are you getting this idea from?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Do US documents do that? In my recollection, you're usually
| asked to specify a race, and then "Latino" is included in a
| separate ethnicity question.
| pushECX wrote:
| You're correct. US documents generally have race and
| ethnicity separate, with Hispanic/Latino origin being an
| ethnicity.
| neaden wrote:
| You are correct. Most people who identify as
| Latino/Hispanic in the US consider that to be their race
| though, not ethnicity. So Census data has a lot of people
| who identify as Race: Other Ethnicity: Hispanic/Latino.
| curiousllama wrote:
| I think everyone would agree that there are some pretty obvious
| biological racial markers that differentiate racial groups.
| Skin color comes to mind :)
|
| The social construct argument just says that the specific
| categories and lines we draw are fairly arbitrary. Why is an
| afghani middle eastern (white?) but a Pakistani south-Asian? Is
| a Russian from Vladivostok really more closely related to a
| brit than a Mongolian? Idk - but, to me, the social construct
| argument just says "who cares? The specific groupings are
| pretty arbitrary anyway"
| esyir wrote:
| The funny thing is that it isn't really arbitrary at all.
|
| It's location based. Humans only recently gained the ability
| to travel vast distances, and in the past lived (and bred)
| within a small, localized region. The "arbitrary" location
| based ethnicities actually do reflect that genetic ancestry
|
| Of course, really wide ones like black/white/asian lose some
| of their meanings.
| antattack wrote:
| I think we can agree that thanks to our minds we have leaped
| over our physical differences encoded in our DNA.
| Evolutionary differences have little influence on our
| survival and reproduction, socio-economic constructs and
| technology has pretty much taken over that role.
| retrac wrote:
| Race, of course, is based on physical traits. But the groupings
| and boundaries are culturally determined and very arbitrary.
| Minor nose and cheek shape differences are obvious to the Hutu
| and Tutsi (enough they massacred each on the premise they are
| different racial groups) but to the average American they're
| both just black. Similarly, a century ago, it was entirely
| obvious to the British and the Italians that they were
| different races of people, although closely related. Today that
| idea is completely alien in America, where they're both white.
|
| Perhaps the best example is the American views on what defines
| blackness. Because I grew up in a community where mixed race
| white/black was seen as a distinct race from white or black, I
| have a very hard time interpreting race the way Americans do
| sometimes -- Barrack Obama and Kamala Harris's mixed parentage
| is obvious to me, which makes them _obviously_ not black to me
| (think like in the same way Obama is obviously not white) and I
| have a hard time wrapping my head around Americans seeing them
| as such, but apparently they do, since even a small amount of
| physical traits that suggest recent African descent categorizes
| you as black there.
| RattleyCooper wrote:
| The idea of a social construct is just a social construct man
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Or rather, a spook.
| jghn wrote:
| "race" as we use it colloquially is a lot less fine grained
| than biological differences between humans. For instance
| there's not a monolithic genomic signature around "black" or
| "white" and yet those are categories we use for "race".
| badrabbit wrote:
| The problem is the question itself, both the one you asked and
| the one the researchers asked. Is it recognizing ethnicity or
| race? Clumping ethnicities as "race" is the social construct.
| It's not just skin that is different between people. If a
| certain culture prizes certain features in people, people with
| those traits will breed more, thus amplifying biological
| features within a socio-cultural group.
|
| My question is, using medical imaging can it particularly
| identify say people of african origin but it cannot tell apart
| east vs west africans? Can it uniquely identify asians but can
| it not tell apart an indian person from a Korean? Or given
| proper training can it discern between north and south koreans
| or between a french person and a greek person?
|
| Race is a social construct not because groups of people are all
| identical but because both science and major-religion have
| concluded that humans share a common human(homosapien)
| ancestry, therefore there is one human race and multiple
| ethnicities and geographical super-ethnicities (south east
| asian and north european for example).
|
| Edit: This is also why race on id cards is silly. Not because
| you don't want to identify people based on appearance but
| because ethnicity is more granular and leads to less confusion.
| Would it be more identifying to say indian or asian? African or
| north-african?
|
| I strongly believe the modern black/white/asian "race" is a
| darwinian invention to try and understand and classify nature
| better, based on intuition instead of science.
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| Because race is _not_ a social construct.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I initially had this same belief, but I realized I had such a
| limited understanding of race after reading the wikipedia
| article on it [0]. That we divide not based on actual
| genetics but visible markers makes it a social construct. And
| the way we've chosen to look at race politically has changed
| over time.
|
| "Because the variation of physical traits is clinal and
| nonconcordant, anthropologists of the late 19th and early
| 20th centuries discovered that the more traits and the more
| human groups they measured, the fewer discrete differences
| they observed among races and the more categories they had to
| create to classify human beings. The number of races observed
| expanded to the 1930s and 1950s, and eventually
| anthropologists concluded that there were no discrete
| races.[93] Twentieth and 21st century biomedical researchers
| have discovered this same feature when evaluating human
| variation at the level of alleles and allele frequencies.
| Nature has not created four or five distinct, nonoverlapping
| genetic groups of people."
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
| esyir wrote:
| A more accurate view would be that it really is both.
|
| It's a social construct, but it's not fully arbitrary,
| being historically (and currently) used as a proxy for
| ancestry, and thus genetics.
|
| >That we divide not based on actual genetics but visible
| markers makes it a social construct
|
| This is going too far towards the other end. Physical
| characteristics stem from genetic variations, and
| consistent patterns in appearance are often linked to some
| shared ancestry. It's not the end-all, but it's hardly
| without cause either.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| How race is a social construct: it was imposed as an idea for
| reasons that were not connected to physiological fact (although
| often claiming the contrary at the time, the claims were the
| same kind of made up BS as phrenology, another idea from the
| same time period).
|
| There are biological correlations with inherited genetic
| lineage. That only has weak correlation with assigned race.
| Lots of different lineages of people are "black", Africa is big
| and diverse. Lots of different lineages of people are "white".
| But for example, if your lineage is from a malarial region,
| your chances of being a genetic sickle cell carrier are higher.
| Most people from those areas are dark skinned, so it correlates
| with being "black".
|
| Also there's the impact of racism, which affects everything
| from nutrition to poverty to pollution exposure, and does so on
| an individual, a regional, and a national scale. And this has
| biological consequences.
| [deleted]
| uniqueid wrote:
| if there are all of these biological correlations with race,
| what does it mean that "race is a social construct"?
|
| I could divide people into 'tall', 'medium' and 'short'
| buckets. Someone else could categorize them all into just two
| categories (eg: 'tall' and 'short') instead, and someone else
| might argue that I've chosen bad cutoffs, and tell me I
| incorrectly put a bunch of 'medium' people in the 'short'
| bucket. People have differences, but the criteria by which we
| choose to group them is subjective.
| IshKebab wrote:
| That is only true if the distribution of things within the
| continuum is not "lumpy". For height it isn't, but for other
| things it is. For example gender is highly bimodal, yet still
| a continuum. Would you say that "male" and "female" are
| subjective socially constructed categories? Of course not.
|
| Race is probably somewhere in-between. There are people all
| over the spectrum but there are pretty clear large groups
| with sparsely populated gaps in-between them.
| andreyk wrote:
| From what I understand, the definition of a social construct is
| a bit nuanced, and it's possible to both believe race is a
| social construct and that it correlates with things.
|
| As a metaphor, let's say we create two categories in the world
| for all people - tallers (people above six feet in height) and
| shorters (people below six feet in height). Human height
| objectively exists, but these categories are social constructs.
| Likewise, human variations in genes based on ancestry clearly
| exists, but the discrete racial categories we define (black,
| white, asian, etc.) are social constructs since we could create
| other discrete categories (Irish, Slavic, etc.).
|
| So saying race is a social construct does not mean your genetic
| make up does not matter or correlate with anything, but that
| grouping people into the set of commonly agreed upon races is
| not the inherent way it has to be. At the same time, these
| groupings do represent distinct genetic make up and so
| correlate with physical attributes. It's just that different
| groupings with different correlations are also possible.
|
| This video explains it pretty well IMO:
| https://youtu.be/koud7hgGyQ8
| JamesBarney wrote:
| So if you were going to create a test for "Is this a social
| construct?" What would it be?
|
| It seems like the definition from your comment would be
| "Could we take this labeling system, and define different
| labels or the labels differently?"
|
| I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought experiment
| she proposes she take a continuous trait(height) and
| arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about how
| this is kinda silly. But this is something we do all the
| time, with hypertension, diabetes, disabled, Alzheimer's, the
| 1%, capitalism, Canadian, etc...
|
| And many of these categories are far more continuous than
| something like sex and gender which as far as categories go
| are pretty discrete.
|
| Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are
| then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost
| everything we care about in the world is a social construct.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought
| experiment she proposes she take a continuous trait(height)
| and arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about
| how this is kinda silly.
|
| Something can be continuous but still very clustered, and
| the extent to which it's "silly" depends on the uniformity
| of the distribution. It can still be useful to label the
| clusters in the distribution.
|
| Another reason to subdivide a continuous dimension is that
| there could be a threshold after which some other dependent
| variable begins its inflection point (think of a
| hockeystick distribution). For example, there's probably
| some blood pressure value beyond which we begin to rapidly
| see serious adverse health effects--it's useful to call
| this "hypertension" or something. For another example,
| there's a threshold for the average temperature of the
| planet beyond which global warming "runs away". These are
| useful thresholds even though the dimensions are
| continuous.
| awild wrote:
| > Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are
| then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost
| everything we care about in the world is a social
| construct.
|
| That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value
| judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it
| as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some
| secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so,
| just historical by-products and might need rethinking or
| recontextualisation. Being a woman and being of the female
| sex might seem to be identical, but womanhood is not the
| same as having a certain genomic makeup, and therefore
| womanhood is obviously a social construct. The video above
| even outlines how female-Ness might be considered a social
| construct but I'm not smart enough to explain that to you
| where abigail will do it much better.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I guess another way to put this when someone says "race
| is a social construct". What are they trying to
| communicate about race?
| sangnoir wrote:
| > What are they trying to communicate about race?
|
| That the hard racial boundaries are unscientific (despite
| attempts to make it so), and that it's artificial and
| depends on consensus, and therefore is subject to change,
| and is typically subjective to the involved social group:
| the "one drop rule" is an example of how arbitrary this
| can get.
|
| As sibling pointed out, in the United States, Italians
| and Jewish folk used to be _not_ white, but are now
| widely considered to be white, despite not having any
| genetic or cultural changes in the interval between the
| shift in categorization.
| Traster wrote:
| Well, when you say something is a social construct it
| opens the door to find explanations for why that social
| construct has arisen. You open the door to questioning
| why those specific categories have been chosen. Why is it
| that in the early 20th century Italian was a race and now
| those people would be considered white (in America). It
| turns the conversation away from what is distinctive
| about a group and towards why we regard those
| distinctions as important.
| golemiprague wrote:
| That's seems to be more of a comment about semantics and
| language. Yes, language is a construct in which we
| classify certain phenomena but you can still argue that
| the phenomena itself is not a social construct but rather
| something with some intrinsic "natural" truth, a truth we
| describe by using language or sometimes we don't because
| we are afraid to loose our jobs.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| In my experience, the implication is that things which
| are social constructs have no basis in reality and are
| thus not useful (and their use is harmful). I'm often
| inclined to respond, "money is also a social construct",
| but I'm afraid they would agree and proceed into some
| anti-capitalist, utopian diatribe.
| mig39 wrote:
| Thanks for the great explanation. The height analogy made it
| click for me.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Also, passing would work for height. Suppose you're 5'11
| but your friends are around 6'1 and you were close friends
| in kindergarten (when you were all shorter of course). You
| begin wearing platforms that add about an inch to your
| height. You hang out with other tallers and so people just
| assume that's what you are, they likely don't insist on
| measuring you in bare feet at every opportunity. Laws
| affecting this social construction of "tallers" have much
| less impact on you than might seem to be the case looking
| at a medical chart. You would be said to "pass" for a
| taller.
|
| Passing was (and to a lesser extent remains) crucial in the
| US and many places where variations in appearance were
| crucial to racial assumptions. If you _look_ white and you
| _act_ white then, most of the time to a first approximation
| you are white. But of course this opportunity is much more
| open to a relatively pale-skinned person than to a dark-
| skinned poor person which is a further problem on top of
| the problem that now people are lying about who they are.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| One of the other things to point out is that race doesn't
| correlate all that well with genetics in humans. People who
| would be described as black have so much genetic diversity
| that there can be no reasonable argument that there's a
| genetic basis for their racial label. Certain health
| conditions or biological differences often have to make far
| more specific categories than race.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| But with the taller/shorter, you would commonly have two
| tallers producing a shorter, or two shorters producing a
| taller. If we were talking about husbandry, we would say that
| tallers and shorters don't "breed true".
|
| But with race, you never have two white people produce a
| black person, or vice versa (and no, a black person with
| albinism is not a white person).
| dekhn wrote:
| Even disregarding albinism, it's possible for people of
| northern european descent with fair skin to have darker
| skinned children. For example, in a case where the parents
| have germ line mutations that they pass on to their child,
| there could be (improbably) a collection of mutations that
| greatly increased the quantity of melanin. However, skin
| color is a complex trait with many small differences coming
| from a large number of different genes, so large changes in
| skin color are very unlikely. Nothing of what I am
| describing is albinism, and would have been part of the
| process of natural selection for fair-skinned people in
| northern climates with less solar exposure.
| runnerup wrote:
| "never" is too strong here. Two black people occasionally
| produce a white baby without albinism. There's a lot of
| genes that code skin color and you can have a bunch of
| recessive "white skin" genes and still be very black-
| skinned yourself. Then sometimes your child gets all the
| recessive white-skin genes from both parents.
|
| I had a personal friend who was white with two black
| parents, not albino, and genetic tests proved paternity.
|
| However, can I ask what the point of your hypothetical is?
| I'm not sure what message or conclusion I'm supposed to get
| from it, in context of the discussion.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Well, if they are black people with white ancestors(or
| white people with black ancestors), then they aren't the
| people I was thinking about. Almost certainly, the only
| reason your black friends produced a white baby, is
| because they had white ancestors at some point.
|
| If two doberman pinschers had a puppy that looked like an
| English bulldog, it would be strange and newsworthy. But,
| if the two doberman's actually had grandparents that were
| English bulldogs, the mystery would be fairly easy to
| solve.
|
| At least part of this confusion is associated with the
| culture of race(at least in the US) as opposed to the
| genetics of race. For example, we consider Barack Obama
| black, but he is equally as white as he is black. There's
| no genetic basis for making that kind of determination.
| runnerup wrote:
| > Well, if they are black people with white ancestors(or
| white people with black ancestors), then they aren't the
| people I was thinking about.
|
| Africa is very, very, very genetically diverse compared
| to the rest of the world. I don't think there exists a
| population which doesn't contain genes for lighter skin.
|
| I think race labels make some sense in a social/cultural
| context: In America we can call someone "black" when they
| are 75+% white, because for their entire childhood/life,
| socially, society at large treated them similarly as they
| treat people who are "100% black".
|
| But race doesn't make sense in a genetic context. It's
| probably far more absurd than defining the difference
| between an accent vs dialect vs language. Even though
| there are clear differences between individuals/families,
| the boundaries are absolutely arbitrary.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Skin color isn't race. I would expect this AI to detect
| your white-skinned friend as black because all his other
| traits would be black-like.
| arketyp wrote:
| That's actually an interesting observation, though perhaps
| a bit besides the point for an analogy that wasn't meant to
| be perfect. Regression to the mean does not seem to apply
| the same way to skin color, even though presumably it is
| also a polygenetic trait to quite some extent.
| mcguire wrote:
| The heritibility of human height is 79%
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y). The
| heritibility of human skin color is 82%
| (https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228).
| oh_sigh wrote:
| That's relative lightness/darkness of skin pigmentation
| of the butt of Mongol people. Of course there is
| variation even among races, even among family members of
| the same race in skin tone.
|
| Which do you think is _more common_ , based on your
| quoted stats?
|
| a) To see white parents who have a genetic child who has
| black skin, or black parents who have a genetic child who
| has white skin (disregarding albinism)
|
| or
|
| b) two tall parents have a genetic child who is short as
| an adult, or two short parents to have a genetic child
| who is tall as an adult
| runnerup wrote:
| Whats the point?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| The point is showing that the heritability of skin tone
| and height are about the same is meaningless when talking
| about skin tone differences among races.
|
| Literally, news articles are written and go viral about
| "black couple has white baby", whereas there has never
| been an article "Two 6'3" people have an adult child who
| is only 5'5""
|
| If you had a series of 100,000 parents+genetic children
| paraded in front of you, do you think it would be more
| common to see two parents who are both rather taller or
| both rather shorter than their child, or would it be more
| common to see two parents who are appear to be of one
| race, but their child appears to be of a different race?
|
| If your answer isn't "I'd expect those things to happen
| at about the same rate", then you should question what
| exactly the sources are saying for the person who posted
| about the heritability of height vs skin tone.
|
| The feeling I get is that many people _really_ , _really_
| don 't want race to be real. Because it if it isn't real,
| then you can't say there are differences among the races.
| So, they will argue against common sense and try to say
| things like height is just as heritable as skin tone as a
| rebuttal to the fact that pretty much always, two white
| parents don't give birth to black babies, and two black
| parents don't give birth to white babies.
|
| I see the same kind of mental logic at play with LGBT-
| supporters, where there is a strong insistence that being
| gay is genetic, and not a choice. That way, you can't
| chalk it up to lifestyle choices that you can just
| change. Personally, I don't really see why it matters
| whether being gay is genetic or a choice, because there
| is literally nothing wrong with being gay, whether you
| are born that way or whether you "just" choose to be that
| way.
| mcguire wrote:
| I admit that my previous comment was tongue-in-cheek; I
| found it interesting that the two numbers were so close.
| To make up for it, I'll try a more serious response.
|
| I suspect you are making a category error comparing "two
| parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter
| than their child" and "two parents who are appear to be
| of one race, but their child appears to be of a different
| race".
|
| To put the two into the same category, you could compare
| "two parents...taller or shorter than their child" and
| "two parents...lighter skinned or darker skinned than
| their child"---two aspects that are single traits. And
| no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, unless
| you were specifically thinking about Robert Wadlow and
| Zeng Jinlian giving birth to Chandra Bahadur Dangi or two
| parents of Danish descent giving birth to a child with a
| Bantu skin color. (And no, I don't know the relative
| frequencies of such events.)
|
| The other way to resolve the category error, if you
| prefer to compare bundles of traits, would be two people
| of Italian extraction giving birth to a stereotypical
| Irish child. That sounds pretty unlikely, especially
| prior to modern travel and migration patterns.
|
| But the real, underlying question that is the base for
| "many people really, really don't want race to be real"
| is, "So what?"
|
| Yes, human beings tend to share traits with other closely
| related people. So what? Individual variation is pretty
| large, too.
|
| Historically, Italians and Irish were considered to be
| different races. Not so much today, because "race" is a
| social construct and the difference between the Irish,
| southern Europeans, and the canonical northern European
| isn't a big deal today.
|
| Races are defined to be a way of applying a group of
| conclusions, which may be difficult to perceive directly,
| to an individual who has an easily perceived marker for
| the race. That can be more-or-less neutral to somewhat
| pernicious. ("You are Asian, therefore you must be
| lactose intolerant!" Well, maybe.) Or it can be straight
| up evil, especially if the conclusions you are making are
| simply made up to enforce your superiority to the
| individual.
|
| As a result, race is _either_ not real, or real but
| completely uninteresting. Any other option is
| intellectual laziness at best and at worst....well, it
| leads to poor outcomes.
|
| Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether
| homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can
| see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be
| gay!" might prefer one over the other.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| > And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case,
|
| With all due respect, I don't believe you're being honest
| here. And that goes to my point about people _wanting_
| race to not be a social construct. I believe you 're
| lying to yourself(or just lying to me) that you wouldn't
| be crazy surprised in either case.
|
| > But the real, underlying question that is the base for
| "many people really, really don't want race to be real"
| is, "So what?"
|
| Exactly. You don't want race to be real, you think it
| might be misused if it was real, and so you argue that it
| isn't real. That is not a compelling basis for an
| argument. A good argument for the earth being round is
| not that you're scared of people punching you in the nose
| if you say it is flat.
|
| > Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether
| homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can
| see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be
| gay!" might prefer one over the other.
|
| Yes, I can see how they would prefer that. But it has no
| bearing on the reality of whether being gay is genetic,
| or a choice, or possibly both, and really has no place in
| scientific analysis of sexuality.
| mcguire wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| bordercases wrote:
| This fails to capture why the term of "social construct" has
| to be brought in instead of just talking about physical
| differences across a threshold. In these discussions, one may
| want to use the term "social construct" instead of "physical
| classification" because it implies an arbitrary degree of
| freedom for discounting a term based on its social and
| pragmatic significance.
|
| This then lets you argue about the value of certain kinds of
| physical evidence over others when making social judgements,
| without having to consider the direct consequences of such
| evidence. In that sense calling the distinction between
| tallers and shorters a "social construct" does more than you
| let on when you are just subbing it for "shorthand definition
| for a rough threshold of height". It means you can give non-
| epistemological grounds for ignoring physical evidence.
| [deleted]
| charlescearl wrote:
| Basically groups may have physical characteristics. European
| nations starting from at least the 1500s began using these
| physical/religious groupings to mark certain groups for
| predatory expropriation and premature death.
|
| To quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore: "The racial in racial capitalism
| isn't secondary, nor did it originate in color or
| intercontinental conflict, but rather always group-
| differentiation to premature death. Capitalism requires
| inequality and racism enshrines it."[1]
|
| Cedric J. Robinson (among others) have discussed how capitalism
| and racialization are continually co-created.
|
| 1. Abolition Geography and the problem of innocence, in Futures
| of Black Radicalism.
| iSnow wrote:
| Nature does not create "bins" to sort people or things. Some
| traits are clustered and we latch on the most visible clusters
| to define "races".
|
| In reality, there is broad overlap and if you look up close,
| the whole concept becomes hairy. Someone with a father of
| Scandinavian descent and a mother with African lineage, what is
| that person, black, white, 50/50?
|
| It's the same with gender/sex. While the biological substrate
| is clearly variable, the categories are social.
| [deleted]
| soundnote wrote:
| Not quite: Sex is very clearly split into two distinct
| mechanisms. There's definitely sex-linked distributions of
| different traits, like male and female typical ranges of
| height, or agreeable personality, risk-seeking/risk aversion
| and so on, where both sexes operate the same mechanism.
|
| Races are mostly clusters in variation within one mechanism -
| eg. skin color is largely a gradient of more or less melanin,
| and what gets selected for depends on the environment. It's
| not intrinsically linked to the whole cluster of race-typical
| traits, those just are in the same genetic bundle that gets
| inherited from generation to generation, and most of those
| traits can be mixed.
|
| Sex itself has a sharp divide from the mechanisms themselves
| being completely different.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| To advance your point, the ability to bear children is kind
| of the definitional distinction from which all of these
| biological distinctions derive as well as tons of social
| distinctions. Race has no such analogue.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| How about cat vs dog?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm not following.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| "the definitional distinction".. ?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I don't know what point you're making, but my
| "definitional distinction" remark meant that "sex" is
| more or less _defined_ by the ability of one group to
| bear children (fertility issues aside, of course). Not
| sure if that addresses your concern.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| There is no "concern". Think about the other part of your
| comment rather than the gender bit. Good luck.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| If you insist on being unclear I'm not going to work to
| tease out your meaning. Have a good day.
| VictorPath wrote:
| > if there are all of these biological correlations with race,
| what does it mean that "race is a social construct"?
|
| What race is Obama? And how is your answer to that question not
| a social construct?
| 542458 wrote:
| You've apparently asked a very interesting question, judging by
| the volume of replies!
|
| The other replies here are mostly good, but I'd also like to
| note that "race is a social construct" refers to how "races"
| aren't really objective categories (What defines if somebody is
| "white"?) and more of a subjective thing, particularly at the
| margins. We can build classifiers that can match most people's
| (in our current cultural context) perceptions most of the time,
| but that doesn't make it a rigid natural phenomenon.
|
| For example, I could build a classifier that looks at household
| finances and decides if people are lower, middle, or upper-
| class. I'd bet that I could get it good enough that most people
| off the street would agree with the results most of the time.
| However, that doesn't make "social class" some sort of
| objective, unchanging, universal truth. Somebody from 100 years
| ago would probably find us all to be upper-class. Somebody from
| the far-flung future would (hopefully) find us mostly to be
| near-destitute.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| >Somebody from the far-flung future would (hopefully) find us
| mostly to be near-destitute.
|
| I love thinking about future historians view of today, I
| think it's better and more useful than futurism.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > You've apparently asked a very interesting question,
| judging by the volume of replies!
|
| Agreed, and upvotes too! It seems like I've struck upon
| something people have been interested in talking about.
|
| > The other replies here are mostly good, but I'd also like
| to note that "race is a social construct" refers to how
| "races" aren't really objective categories (What defines if
| somebody is "white"?) and more of a subjective thing,
| particularly at the margins. We can build classifiers that
| can match most people's (in our current cultural context)
| perceptions most of the time, but that doesn't make it a
| rigid natural phenomenon.
|
| I certainly believe this to be the case, but when I hear
| "race is a social construct" it's almost _always_ in the
| context of denying biological differences between the races
| in the same way that some extreme (though mainstream and
| influential) people take "gender is a social construct" to
| mean that _literally all differences between the sexes are
| socially constructed_ including height, weight, strength, etc
| (otherwise known as "blank slatism").
|
| That said, unlike biological sex, there are fewer valid
| social implications that we can draw from race (e.g., there
| are a bunch of social implications which fall out from
| women's unique ability to bear children, but no analogues
| which fall out from race) _and_ we have drawn many false
| implications from race which have been tremendously harmful
| to individuals of different races, so if we have to reduce
| everything to a slogan or a binary (as our simplistic society
| increasingly demands), then "race is a social construct"
| isn't a bad one.
| foldr wrote:
| >some extreme (though mainstream and influential) people
| take "gender is a social construct" to mean that literally
| all differences between the sexes are socially constructed
| including height, weight, strength, etc (otherwise known as
| "blank slatism").
|
| Could you give a reference to someone who actually says
| this?
| mcguire wrote:
| Perhaps those arguing against the idea that "gender is a
| social construct"?
| runako wrote:
| > when I hear "race is a social construct" it's almost
| always in the context of denying biological differences
| between the races in the same way that some extreme (though
| mainstream and influential)
|
| Racial segregationists in the Americas literally had to
| write laws delineating races based on factors external to
| that individual (e.g. their parentage). That is: even
| people who believed in a racial hierarchy also believed it
| was not possible to objectively identify a person's race
| without knowing e.g. the races of that person's parents.
|
| Race has never been considered a generally observable fact
| about a person.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| But is this only because they lacked a theoretical
| understanding of genetics (including an understanding of
| which combinations of genes that express the features
| that we attribute to race, which we still presumably lack
| by-and-large) and sequencing technology?
| runako wrote:
| > which combinations of genes that express the features
| that we attribute to race
|
| If an arbitrarily large grouping of genotype combinations
| is necessary to categorize people, perhaps that
| categorization scheme is not useful? I would imagine that
| the number of "races" generated via the mechanism you
| posit would measure in the hundreds or thousands,
| rendering it unrelated in practice to the word "race" as
| it is used.
| casefields wrote:
| Lots of great replies but missing the most important from a
| scholarly journal:
|
| Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America:
| https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ3bwqXZT2m8MI2egSRA...
|
| Side note: If you've seen Ken Burn's docs then you've probably
| seen her before:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_J._Fields
| sillyquiet wrote:
| IMO it's because it's very dubious the AI is doing what the
| paper is maintaining it's doing.
|
| People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is
| some discrete set of features common to a whole population.
| Every individual has a set of biological features inherited
| from their ancestors which, theoretically, could include any or
| all so-called 'races'. Human beings have a continuum of
| features that is heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'.
|
| Putting it another way, if we were alien visitors, and had in
| front of us a representative sample of dead bodies from the
| entire world, we would be hard pressed to sort those bodies
| into 'races' based on biological features.
|
| For example, we currently use melanin levels as a key indicator
| of 'race' today, but an alien, lacking the social context of
| the significance of say, high levels of melanin, may well
| consider it a secondary feature since its shared with otherwise
| unrelated people
| [deleted]
| jollybean wrote:
| That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the
| fact that it can also exist physiologically.
|
| 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into
| groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today,
| because our visible characteristics are the most immediately
| obvious artifacts of our existence.
|
| (Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be
| an obvious, first order thing to do from the first pictures
| they have of us, not an 'Enlightened Alien' scientific form
| of categorization).
|
| If all they had were 'pictures' of us, the race categories we
| use would be the obvious grouping, or something resembling
| that.
|
| They would see that most of the people in Sub Saharan Africa
| looked quite different from those in East Asia. (And
| difference between Sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians is
| more than 'melanin').
|
| There's a 'continuum' between every biological grouping, that
| doesn't mean those categories don't exist. It just means
| we're going to argue a lot about where and how to draw the
| lines.
|
| Race as a 'Social Construct' relates to all of the other
| attributes that we associate with race, and individual lived
| experiences due to how they are perceived etc..
|
| To your point, Aliens wouldn't immediately pick up on the
| 'Social Construct' bit, at least not right away and so they
| wouldn't have the prejudices that we do, but if they could
| only observe from afar, they would see exactly what we see,
| and visual distinctions would be the 'first order of
| separation' even if it was, after further understanding (i.e.
| genetics) a less important distinction as you hint.
|
| Edit: someone provided this like I'd like to also include it
| [1] which illustrates some of the current debate over the
| notion of race, and that it's clearly politicized.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
| Retric wrote:
| It's a social construct because the lines aren't drawn
| along genetic lines. For example Americans call someone
| that's 3/4th white and 1/4th black a black person.
|
| Further features that seem very important to us like the
| shape of our eyes or skin tone may seem irrelevant to a
| creature which doesn't have a face and sees the world in a
| different color spectrum than we do. They might group based
| on smell or habitat marking groups of urban, suburban, and
| country dwellers.
| mc32 wrote:
| Part of it is social and part of it is genetic.
|
| From a social PoV, in Cuba, someone as you describe 3/4
| one and 1/4 the other would be likely be put in the
| category of the 3/4. In some places an albino is just
| someone with different genetic characteristic, in other
| places they are a creature that brings bad luck and
| suffer violence.
|
| Dog and cat breeds are distinguished throughout the
| world. It's genetic and socially constructed as well.
| jollybean wrote:
| "the lines aren't drawn along genetic lines. "
|
| Race is definitely drawn along genetics lines - you've
| just demonstrated that in your example.
|
| The 1/4 black - 3/4 white person was not identified as
| 'Asian' in your example, but rather, in the mixed
| physical scenario was crudely categorized as one or the
| other, in the example you gave, Black.
|
| (FYI I tend to disagree a bit about the category though:
| I believe people will be categorized mostly for how they
| actually look, not so much the 'ratio' of anything.
| There's a lot of 1/2 Filipino 1/2 White people on TikTok
| who 'look' 100% White and make funny videos about the
| fact nobody believes them about their heritage).
|
| Your example shows that race is definitely a social
| construct, but that it also has underlying genetic
| realities.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us
| into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use
| today
|
| I wonder about that... I can't tell the difference between,
| say, a male octopus and a female octopus, but octopi can.
| Maybe the differences that seem so obvious to us are
| actually almost imperceptible outside of our species.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us
| into groups very crudely resembling the grouping we use
| today, because our visible characteristics are the most
| immediately obvious artifacts of our existence.
|
| An alien taxonomist, perhaps.
|
| We humans go "bug! whale! snake! cow!" most of the time
| even for species found here on our own planet.
| jollybean wrote:
| Yes, and if we were to most crudely distinguish between
| sub-groups of 'bugs whales and cows' we would do it first
| and foremost based on immediate appearance.
|
| We would even name the sub-groups firstly the artifacts
| that differentiate them physically.
|
| Blue Whale, Grey Whale
|
| Black Bear, Brown Bear.
|
| As we develop a better understanding, we'd also probably
| later determine that the genetic differences may not map
| very well to the physical attributes ... but due to
| historical groupings based on visual cues, we'd continue
| to overstate/understate the differences in the textbooks
| and in pop culture.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'd tend to hope a species capable of interstellar travel
| would have learned the same lessons already about not
| classifying based on mere outward appearance.
|
| They'll presumably have had things like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation happen on
| their own world.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| > 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us
| into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use
| today, because our visible characteristics are the most
| immediately obvious artifacts of our existence.
|
| Whatever categorization they came up with would most
| certainly not resemble what we consider racial categories
| today.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| "I tried to classify your species and I realized that
| you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet
| instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the
| surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move
| to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every
| natural resource is consumed. The only way you can
| survive is to spread to another area. There is another
| organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A
| virus." -- Agent Smith
| phkahler wrote:
| >> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if
| race is some discrete set of features common to a whole
| population.
|
| Clearly people _are_ biologically different based on race and
| the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even
| told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian
| arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about
| this because an engineer I worked with had a father in
| dentistry and told me my kid had "German teeth in an Irish
| mouth" which matched her ancestry, which he didn't know -
| just said that in response to my description of the crowding.
|
| So YES, races have biological differences. If not, we
| wouldn't be able to tell where people are from. I get that
| it's not cool to discriminate based on race, but it's not OK
| or even practical to deny that it exists (see dentistry
| example above).
| packetlost wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to
| put people with different biological traits into 'buckets'
| but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines
| that make any sort of classification a social approximation
| at best.
|
| No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your
| ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due
| to shared ancestry, it's the _classification_ itself that
| doesn 't match up well with reality.
| esyir wrote:
| I strongly dislike (almost despise) this argument. Race
| is a surrogate variable for genetic history. The
| classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it
| is generally made on ancestry.
|
| Approximation it may be, imperfect it may be, construct
| it may be, but its utility is very much real. Attempts to
| handwave it away do not change the fact that race and
| genetics are very much linked as it is used today.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| What's the "genetic history" behind being black? If it
| means basically anything other than that your ancestors
| came from Africa in the past 100k years, you're missing
| many groups commonly considered "black" like Australian
| aborigines and Negritos. If that _is_ your definition,
| then basically everyone is black.
|
| Where's the utility in that?
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| > its utility is very much real
|
| What's the utility of the concept of race?
| screye wrote:
| > The classification itself indeed matches with reality,
| as it is generally made on ancestry.
|
| I would dispute that claim.
|
| Due to population bottlenecks among the first
| 'out_of_africa' groups, a black passing south indian is
| genetically a lot closer to a white as milk finnish
| person than various african subpopulations are to each
| other. (Africans are orders of magntitude more diverse
| than the rest of the world, in a genetically quantifiable
| way)
|
| Race markers like latin american and hispanic betray the
| fact that some countries (argentina, chile) are almost
| entirely white, others are have denisovan dna (natives)
| or are racial frankenstien's monsters due to slave trade
| (Brazil). It makes no sense to use these umbrella race
| denominations.
|
| Race as an overloaded term for sociological,
| antropological, genetic and medical use is stupid. It
| just becomes a terrible tool for each. Genetics has
| smartly stopped using race much, but the others still
| continue to do so, despite the inconveniences it brings.
|
| There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut
| the middle man and identify clusters directly from
| genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up,
| when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing
| this comment has just made me want to invest in these
| 23nme-like companies.
| esyir wrote:
| >There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut
| the middle man and identify clusters directly from
| genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up,
| when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing
| this comment has just made me want to invest in these
| 23nme-like companies.
|
| There's a reason for this, and that reason is cost. Even
| the relatively cheap microarray based tests that 23 & me
| uses are expensive at scale. Race, imperfect as it is,
| serves as a low-cost, reasonably effective proxy in many
| (but not all) cases.
|
| Remember, for medical logistics, it's not about getting
| perfect care (are you sequenced yet?). It's about getting
| cost effective care, lest you bloat costs to high heaven.
| mcguire wrote:
| Does anyone really believe that medical logistics is the
| most common or most impactful use of "race"?
| soldehierro wrote:
| "Latin American" and "Hispanic" aren't race markers.
| They're a regional identity and an ethnicity,
| respectively, which exist alongside race.
| naasking wrote:
| > "Race" is an attempt to put people with different
| biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's
| variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort
| of classification a social approximation at best.
|
| The same is true of "species". Last I checked, there were
| at least 24 different definitions of "species", all of
| which have some overlap and none of which are perfectly
| precise. You don't see people going around saying
| "species is a social construct". Then again, maybe they
| will soon, I suppose anything is possible these days.
|
| That said, you are correct that "race" is merely a rough
| statistical correlation for some cohort, not some precise
| measure. If we can categorize more precisely, then we
| should, and we only fall back to "race" as a last resort
| (if it's applicable).
| wwalexander wrote:
| The second sentence of the Wikipedia article for
| "species" reads:
|
| > A species is often defined as the largest group of
| organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate
| sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring,
| typically by sexual reproduction.
|
| This is the definition I've always heard, and it's
| certainly more rigorous than any definition of "race"
| that I've encountered, and makes no reference to any
| arbitrary social constructs.
|
| Conversely, the definition for "race" is explicitly
| arbitrary and social:
|
| > A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical
| or social qualities into categories generally viewed as
| distinct by society.
| naasking wrote:
| > This is the definition I've always heard
|
| It's not as precise as you think, because fertility isn't
| transitive. Consider members of a species, M1, M2, F1,
| F2. M1 might be fertile with F1, M2 with F2, but M1 may
| not be fertile with F2. Are they all really members of
| the same species?
|
| Read up on the species problem for more information
| (there are now 26, not 24):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept
| mcguire wrote:
| IIRC, there are two species of birds, A and B, in the
| North Atlantic that cannot interbreed. But A can breed
| with C which has a range to the east, and C can breed
| with D again further east. And so on, around the arctic
| circle, until you get to Q which can breed with B.
| wwalexander wrote:
| I can't admit I have any qualifications to speak about
| biology, and I know HN is known for proposing reductive
| "solutions" based on oversimplified models of reality.
|
| That being said, it seems to me that it makes sense that
| a species would include the entire connected graph whose
| nodes are members and whose edges represent the ability
| to have fertile offspring.
|
| I found [1] which is an interesting example of a very
| large graph, but nevertheless, all the examples seem to
| be within altogether very similar groups.
|
| I think a reasonable definition for casual use doesn't
| need to require the graph of a species to be fully
| connected, only fully reachable.
|
| There are certainly leaks to any abstraction of species,
| but they are empirical cases of exceptions. They don't
| inject arbitrary social categories into the definition.
| Definitions of "race" have no empirical basis on which to
| be proved or disproved in the first place.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
| exporectomy wrote:
| That doesn't work because the graph for humans would go
| all the way back to those ancient apes by many connected
| edges and back down to modern apes, making us all the
| same species.
|
| This is another problem with species - where is the
| transition where one species evolves into another?
| naasking wrote:
| > They don't inject arbitrary social categories into the
| definition. Definitions of "race" have no empirical basis
| on which to be proved or disproved in the first place.
|
| That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with
| all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for
| sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies,
| susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences.
| These are just as empirically justified as any
| classification of species, and just as with species, not
| all of those properties need apply to every single member
| in that category.
|
| So to the extent that we find "species" a meaningful
| category when applied correctly, then we should also find
| "race" a meaningful category when applied correctly. The
| key in both scenarios is to apply them correctly, and we
| should abandon them when we find more precise metrics.
|
| That said, you are correct that there are _also_ numerous
| cultural and social properties that are sometimes lumped
| in with race in a manner that we don 't see with species,
| mainly because "species" hasn't been politicized. That
| doesn't imply that there's nothing "there" once you tune
| out that baggage.
| scarby2 wrote:
| > That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with
| all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for
| sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies,
| susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences.
| These are just as empirically justified as any
| classification of species, and just as with species, not
| all of those properties need apply to every single member
| in that category
|
| I think this is the thing people misunderstand about race
| being a social construct, is that race is a bucket, by
| nature there need to be correlations between people in
| that bucket in order to actually place people into that
| bucket in the first place.
|
| There will likely be other correlations between people in
| said bucket, who are in this cause usually more closely
| related and share more recent common ancestors.
|
| The size of that bucket and how we put people in it is
| arbitrary, but the fact that correlations exist when you
| put people in buckets isn't.
| fao_ wrote:
| You're so, so close to getting it. And then you decide to
| just hop over the point :(
| naasking wrote:
| See my other reply:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28527329
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| I admire the confidence of someone who can say in the
| same paragraph that there are 24 different definitions
| (constructions) of "species," then deny that they are a
| social construct at all.
| naasking wrote:
| I fundamentally disagree with a definition of "social
| construct" that would have to exclude species as a
| meaningful category.
|
| Edit: but even if I did agree with the definition, if
| "race" is as useful a category as "species" despite being
| socially constructed, all of the people calling race a
| social construct have utterly failed to make the case
| that we should stop using it.
| burkaman wrote:
| A modern definition of "species" generally gives a set of
| objective criteria that you can use to determine if two
| organisms are the same species (such as "can they produce
| fertile offspring"). Is there any definition of race like
| this? Genuine question, I don't think I've ever seen a
| definition of race more specific than "a collection of
| people with similar physical characteristics" or
| something like that, and I can't find one now. There's
| lots of definitions of what all the different races are,
| but none of what a "race" actually is.
|
| Is there any definition of race where, given two people,
| you can apply some criteria to determine whether or not
| they are the same race? The criteria can't be "look at
| the definitions of each race and categorize the two
| people" because that's circular, how were those
| particular categories chosen? With species, you can
| determine that a bird and a fish are different species
| without knowing what birds and fish are.
| naasking wrote:
| The imprecise definition of "species" is exactly what I
| was describing. See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of
| race amounts to labeling different clusters in an
| N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely
| biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always
| entails some amount of approximation (clusters are
| inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because
| it's useful. For example, the boundaries between
| languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label them
| because it's useful to do so--is it roughly the same with
| race? Or is race categorically different for some reason
| that I'm not understanding?
| foldr wrote:
| Racial categories are based on a very small number of
| superficial traits (such as skin tone and eye shape) and
| a host of cultural considerations (such as region of
| birth, language spoken, etc. etc.) You can group people
| this way, but it's not really an approximation to
| anything. Nor is it useful in a non-circular way. The
| only real reason to keep track of people's race is to
| ensure that...they're not being discriminated against on
| the basis of their race.
| caeril wrote:
| > Racial categories are based on a very small number of
| superficial traits
|
| Right, but genetic correlates are real. These superficial
| characteristics evolved along with a thousand other non-
| superficial characteristics, in mostly (with the
| exceptions of conquest, trade, and border settlements)
| isolated regions.
|
| Your skin tone and eye shape are indeed cosmetic
| trivialities, but they correlate strongly with muscle
| fiber density, susceptibility to certain diseases,
| endocrine profiles, and a host of other things that very
| much do matter.
| foldr wrote:
| Yes, no-one is denying that racial categories _correlate_
| to various degrees with genetic characteristics. This is
| blindingly obvious - unless there are some people who
| think that ethnically Chinese people learn to have
| epithantic folds from their environment?
|
| Where people err is in assuming that these sorts of
| trivial observations are sufficient to show that race has
| a biological _basis_. Racial groupings are not
| biologically natural. They are completely arbitrary from
| a genetic point of view. That is, there are no sensible
| biological criteria according to which humans can be
| grouped neatly into a handful of 'races'.
|
| See for example the following comment regarding sickle
| cell anemia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2852569
| 7#:~:text=azalem... Yes, 'black' people are statistically
| more susceptible, but that's not because of any property
| of 'black' people as a group. It's just because regions
| with Malaria happen to have dark skinned populations.
| herbstein wrote:
| I recently read a (non-fiction) book where exactly that
| kind of clustering was talked about. It's correct that
| you'll find clusters in each major continent, but with
| just 6 clusters one of them will be entirely devoted to a
| small, insular community in the north of Iran. To your
| eyes and our social consciousness this community would be
| considered "middle-eastern" when in reality they're about
| as genetically as different as "Black people" and "Asian
| people" are.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Since they're a small population, they don't matter for
| making generalizations about middle-easterners or
| whatever other larger classification you use.
| mcguire wrote:
| So which "race" is the child mentioned above, German or
| Irish? Sure, they have aspects of both, but they can be
| in only one cluster.
|
| The utility of clusters is nebulous, too.
| nomel wrote:
| > but they can be in only one cluster
|
| I don't think this is true, logically or socially. We
| have dense clusters that are slowly merging as the world
| enjoys this extremely new concept of travel and
| intermingling world populations. I've seen many people
| describe themselves as "mixed race", directly or
| indirectly by describing their ancestry. Of course, the
| number of basis vectors required to _accurately_ describe
| a person is increasing with time, but it seems that
| medical science has chosen to ignore this "easy" way to
| describe and treat people for some reason. But, is it all
| that surprising, considering not even women were
| represented fairly in medical trials, even 15 years ago?
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Our concept of race is way too course-grained to make it
| useful in this sense. And those clusters of features you
| mention would not correlate to what we consider a race.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Indeed. I heard one of the PIs on the 100,000 genomes
| project [1] giving a talk in which they flat-out said
| that anyone whose four grandparents were white and irish
| is basically a clone compared to anyone whose four
| grandparents were from sub-saharan africa. The whole
| point is that there's so much variability within each
| societal clustering that it tends to make not that much
| sense to talk about it -- and the degree of homogeneity
| is different, too, mostly depending on ancient geography
| (hello Iceland, as an example).
|
| There are lots of "exceptions" to this, like sickle cell
| anaemia, for example [2], which is used as a teaching
| example of an Mendelian autosomal recessive disease. But
| note that it goes hand-in-hand with a historical pattern
| of malaria, covering a fairly large and inhomogeneous
| blob of africa, the middle east, italy/turkey/greece and
| india. Our social construct of race varies quite
| substantially over those places.
|
| [1] https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-
| england/the...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease
| packetlost wrote:
| I didn't make any comments on the utility of racial
| classification, just that the classification isn't
| perfect, leaves groups out, and where you decide to draw
| the lines between them is often arbitrary. Race is an
| oversimplification of a complex system, but even an
| oversimplification has value.
|
| Seems like you have a pretty good grasp on my assertion
| here.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| random side note: glasses for example, bought RayBans my
| nose bridge isn't the right shape for it sucks
|
| could be genetic I suppose but I wasn't aware of this as
| a thing eg. Asian fit sunglasses
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| > is an attempt to put people with different biological
| traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation
|
| But this is true for everything. For example "night and
| day" - these are just buckets, but nobody would argue
| that there are no differences between night and day
| because of that.
| padastra wrote:
| Blue is a color. Yellow is a color. The fact that green
| exists doesn't mean those colors aren't real.
| mcguire wrote:
| The differences between blue, yellow, and green are
| pretty minor compared to radio or gamma radiation.
|
| No, I don't know what the point of this comment is. But
| I'm not sure I understand the point of the parent comment
| either.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Clearly people are biologically different based on race
| and the AI here is picking up on that
|
| I think the parent is saying that it's possible (likely
| even) that the AI _isn 't_ picking up on biological
| features, but some other artifact. For example, perhaps the
| quality of x-ray machines or technicians correlate with
| race (race and "access to higher quality radiology" both
| correlate with wealth) and the AI is really picking up on
| the quality of the imaging. The fact that the AI still
| worked when the imaging quality was reduced across the
| board (pixelated into 8x8 squares) suggests that this
| particular hypothesis is unlikely, but this is the kind of
| error we're discussing.
| janderson215 wrote:
| >> an engineer I worked with had a father in dentistry and
| told me my kid had "German teeth in an Irish mouth"
|
| Off topic, but this sounds very engineery, indeed. Was the
| conversation polite?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Don't forget Sinodonty.
| goatlover wrote:
| So you're saying there is an Asian race spanning 4.5
| billion people from China to India to Iran and there are
| also German and Irish races. I guess the question is how
| can Germans and Irish be different races, but Chinese,
| Indians and Iranians are the same race?
|
| Africa is going to be similarly diverse as Asia.
| neaden wrote:
| More diverse, there is more genetic diversity within
| Africa than outside of it.
| nomel wrote:
| I would say this is an observation that the labeling
| isn't nearly granular enough in those very large regions.
| From my experience, people from those regions will use
| much finer labels, to describe people, than the "this
| side of the planet" labels of "Asia" and "Africa".
| herbstein wrote:
| > People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if
| race is some discrete set of features common to a whole
| population. Every individual has a set of biological features
| inherited from their ancestors which, theoretically, could
| include any or all so-called 'races'. Human beings have a
| continuum of features that is heavily interlaced amongst all
| the 'races'.
|
| Exactly. One of the people I'll always point to as evidence
| that race is a social construct is Barack Obama. He was the
| "first black president". In reality he is, genetically, as
| "white" as he is "black". We still call him black because of
| the color of his skin.
|
| If people insist for long enough that racial categories are
| inherently biological you'll eventually end up in one-drop
| judgement territory. Not a great place to have a discussion.
| mcguire wrote:
| One does wonder how the AI would do by the 1/16th legal
| definition.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon
| as the colour of our skin, but let's not pretend that such an
| obvious visual variation as skin tone would be overlooked.
|
| White cat, tabby cat, grey cat, etc? We don't try to say one
| sort of cat is better than other, but we can tell them apart
| very well.
|
| Maybe what you're saying is that the aliens would not have
| the same prejudices associated with that marker as we have.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| No, I am saying that skin tone would not be as important a
| feature.
|
| For example, lining up those dead bodies by skin tone alone
| would have Central Africans mixed in with South Americans,
| Austronesians, and South Asians, Northern Europeans mixed
| in with East Asians and Inuit, Southern Europeans mixed in
| with Indians,Central Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs,
| etc etc.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| But it's not limited to skin tone. Have you never been
| able to identify an albino African as African?
| pessimizer wrote:
| But you're moving away from the premise of the GP.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| I don't see how.
| kiliancs wrote:
| > Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as
| soon as the colour of our skin
|
| This made me chuckle. But it is a good example. I bet there
| is a lot we can infer from people based on their common go-
| to colors for clothing.
| nomel wrote:
| I never realized how odd the concept of "blue jeans" were
| until I travelled outside the US.
| benjaminjackman wrote:
| Supposing there are Aliens FWIW I don't know that they
| would perceive the same visible spectrum that we do, which
| might effect their ability to differentiate by color. And
| they might not even perceive colors at all perhaps focusing
| on patterns or perhaps use some sort acoustical sonar
| system of high pitched shrieks or an electrocapacitive
| perception captured by elongated dactyltennae hands with
| which they can sense the world around them.
| michaelscott wrote:
| The alien is hypothetical, a proxy point of view that's
| theoretically unbiased and has no awareness of human
| social context, history, etc.
| drdeca wrote:
| Sure, but aren't they just extending that to remove the
| "bias" of human-sensory-organs ? :P
| mcguire wrote:
| " _But I take higher ground. I hold that, in the present
| state of civilization, where two races of different
| origin, and distinguished by colour, and other physical
| differences, as well as intellectual, are brought
| together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding
| states between the two is, instead of an evil, a good --
| a positive good,_ " John c. Calhoun said.
|
| "Nonsense," replied the thistleglorb. "You both have
| exactly the same capacitance."
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavily
| interlaced amongst all the 'races'.
|
| That doesn't mean race doesn't exist any more than the fact
| that height is a continuum doesn't mean that short people and
| tall people don't exist.
| andrewzah wrote:
| "That doesn't mean race doesn't exist"
|
| Exactly, although not in the traditional sense. There are
| many many overlapping genetic aspects in humans; We
| subdivide for political or social reasons, not strictly
| biological ones. To make the height comparison more fair,
| it would be as if we divided people into "bigs" or
| "littles" arbitrarily and formed political parties around
| it, etc. Height is one biological aspect and even then what
| is "tall" is subjective.
|
| For example, the US viewpoint of white or black(~=african)
| is a relatively recent way of looking at race. People don't
| slot neatly into X or Y buckets.
|
| I recommend reading the wikipedia article on Race [0].
|
| 0:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| But I've think you've gotten looped around here to a
| stance that fails to account for the original context. It
| wouldn't be that surprising if an AI could categorize
| people into "tall" vs "short" from pixelated medical
| images; certainly nobody would say, as the parent comment
| did, that the AI must be cheating because there's no such
| thing as being biologically tall.
| pessimizer wrote:
| But no one would argue that the definitions of "tall" and
| "short" weren't social constructs, even as the fact of
| human length from heel to crown clearly is not a social
| construct.
| [deleted]
| uniqueid wrote:
| Funny, I read this immediately after leaving a comment
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525122) using
| height categories as an example of a social construct.
| makeworld wrote:
| Race is socially constructed, just like the idea of who is
| short and tall is. The objective things in each case are
| genes and height, which are not socially constructed.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is an error on two counts: it conflates a spectrum on
| a _single_ qualiry with spectra across multiple qualities,
| and it presumes the existence of people who are the "most"
| of their race (the way that there is a tallest and a
| shortest person). The first isn't what race is, and the
| second is absurd.
| mcguire wrote:
| Does it? I'm 6'5" (196cm in Roman Catholic[1]); in
| Amsterdam I'm at the upper range of normal while in many
| other places I am Godzilla and have to watch my step to
| avoid crushing things.
|
| [1] A humorous reference. Sorry.
| [deleted]
| HWR_14 wrote:
| From what I understand, race is a social construct doesn't mean
| that there can be no physical differences. After all, humans
| have been able to tell* what race someone is with their stupid
| human eyes. It's making a claim the _important_ aspects of race
| are a social construct.
|
| If the defining physical differences between races is both
| melanin _and_ sternum width, that doesn 't seem to be more
| relevant than just skin melanin.
|
| * In many cases. It's more error prone than most people want to
| admit.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > humans have been able to tell* what race someone is with
| their stupid human eyes.
|
| It's more that humans have been able to _define_ , with
| significant disagreements, what race someone is with their
| stupid human eyes. Race is nothing but a collection of these
| judgments. I'm not brown because I'm black, I'm black because
| I'm brown.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| >It's more that humans have been able to define, with
| significant disagreements, what race someone is with their
| stupid human eyes.
|
| Sorry, that's also true.
|
| My asterisk was talking more about the inability to
| visually tell the difference in many cases. The black
| people in America who could pass as white in the 1950's (or
| now). Or how Latino and Middle-Eastern people often get
| confused. There are numerous cases, both specific and
| general.
|
| But yes, it's not an objective truth being measured, and
| I'm sorry if I implied otherwise.
| tomp wrote:
| It's biologically defined the same way as _height_ is
| biologically defined, and socially defined the same way as
| _"tall"_ (180cm+) is defined.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Everything is a social construct depending on how you look at
| it. Some people say that biological sex is a social construct.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Came here, wanting to, but afraid to, ask just this question.
| Glad you asked. Glad some were willing to give thoughtful
| answers.
| goto11 wrote:
| "Race is a social construct" does _not_ mean that inheritable
| biological differences between groups people does not exist. It
| means that the categories we use to classify people into races
| are cultural. For example the "black" and "white" categories
| in the US.
| maininformer wrote:
| Isn't that ethnicity? Race: biological category Ethnicity:
| Cultural category
| goto11 wrote:
| Both race and ethnicity are cultural categories. Example:
| Barack Obama is considered black in the US even though he
| has a white mother. This is a consequence of American
| culture, the historical "one drop" rule.
| [deleted]
| mcguire wrote:
| As someone pointed out in another reply, "races" are buckets
| people are distributed into, frequently based on physical
| aspects. The point of saying "race is a social construct" is
| the nature of those buckets.
|
| Northern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and Eastern Europeans
| (or rather people descending from those areas) differ in a
| number of physical aspects. Are they different races? For those
| who think race matters today, it seems not---they are all
| "white". Back in the heyday of scientific racism in the first
| half of the 20th century, they absolutely were---that is why
| the US had different immigration limits for different parts of
| Europe. Are native Australian people the same race as Africans?
| ---there's no especially close genetic relationship as far as I
| know.
|
| Physical differences exist. How you use those differences to
| divide people into groups and, more importantly, how you treat
| people of those groups is a social construct.
| bordercases wrote:
| Or by haplogroups.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It can be both real physiological differences _and_ a social
| construct, as "what level of bone density tips you from x to
| y" becomes a question, as does "is an x person with calcium
| deficiency actually a y person" sort of things that are
| obviously not the case.
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| As someone with a scientific bent who is of the left, I
| always find it incredibly frustrating when people say "x is a
| social construct", because it's technically true, but also
| utterly elides the dual nature of the category. Race is a
| social construct that can be used to infer true things
| (probabilities) about the real world! Other social constructs
| that have this property: sociology, economics, physics...
|
| This isn't to say a lot of people who are into race science
| don't wildly overstate their claims, but there isn't
| literally nothing to it.
| esyir wrote:
| Agreed on both fronts. There's a lot of attempts here to
| use "race is a social construct" to indirectly claim that
| race is meaningless, or at least imply that.
|
| People need to realise the following: - Race is a social
| construct - It's also a proxy for ancestry - Ancestry is a
| proxy for genetic history - None of the above contradict
| each other.
|
| It is possible that we could sufficiently redefine race and
| ethnicity such that the above isn't true, but as it is
| right now, race is at least moderately coupled to a
| biological signature.
|
| What should also be emphasized is that race isn't an end-
| all. The within race variation is far greater than the
| between-race variation.
| mcguire wrote:
| Are you positing a close ancestral link between Africans
| and Australian natives, say closer than between either
| and northwestern Europeans?
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| Admitting reality and statistics into conversations about
| race is forbidden on the left for an obvious reason.
|
| It would require them to admit two faults they're unable to
| --
|
| 1. Blacks have been destroyed by the welfare state and it's
| the fault of the modern left that the black community is
| worse off than a few generations ago; and,
|
| 2. The reason they talk about things before 1980 is that
| because since then, the left has purposefully engaged in
| organized hate against Whites and Asians, in education and
| employment -- and further have encouraged racial privilege,
| such as avowed racist Nick Cannon being celebrated in
| Hollywood.
|
| The left can't talk facts about race because facts don't
| fit their narrative.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You can't say anything about someone's bone density by
| deciding that they are black. Averaging the bone density of
| everyone that you've defined as black might be predictive
| of distributions of the bone densities of large numbers of
| people you've defined as black.
|
| But it's just because of the metrics you've chosen. If you
| started defining race by bone density, and ignored
| ahistorical half-biblical half-mystical 19th-century human
| taxonomies, you might find that their classifications
| aren't interesting or useful for most things. If you
| controlled for effects that are affected by differential
| social treatment (like diet and upbringing), you might find
| most of your metrics are ghosts.
|
| The process of sorting people into boxes for differential
| treatment based on their qualities _affects their
| qualities._
| drdeca wrote:
| The following is a response to only your first paragraph:
|
| Huh? If the distributions of bone densities among "people
| you would visually identify as 'race X' " and "people you
| would visually identify as 'race Y' " differ, then
| knowing that an individual would be someone you would
| visually identify as 'race X', gives you some amount of
| statistical information about their bone density.
|
| I guess you just mean that you can't make any high-
| confidence statements that are substantially different
| than if you didn't have that information?
|
| Small note on second paragraph: I don't think the racial
| categories in question are even half-biblical? I mean, I
| know in the Old Testament there are lots of things
| referring to e.g. edomites, or Amalekites, etc. , but I
| don't think these are really like, "races", and I can't
| think of anything that really supports the idea of a
| fixed set of racial categories. But perhaps I'm
| forgetting/missing something.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If the distributions of bone densities among "people
| you would visually identify as 'race X' " and "people you
| would visually identify as 'race Y' " differ, then
| knowing that an individual would be someone you would
| visually identify as 'race X', gives you some amount of
| statistical information about their bone density.
|
| Only if they differ _substantially_. If they look like
| https://evergreenleadership.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/01/B..., you can't conclude much
| from an individual's bone density measurement, even if
| "people of race X have 3% more bone density than people
| of race Y".
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| It's a deepity, ie. a statement with two interpretations,
| one true but trivial, and one enormously impactful but
| false.
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| that is a wonderful word, thanks
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| also, i miss reading your comments on SSC, are you on
| ASX?
| ggggtez wrote:
| It's not a surprise that race effects how someone looks. It
| doesn't take a genius to see things like different colored
| skin, different nose, or height differences...
|
| The question is _what_ about the looks of a chest X-ray are
| connected to race. I agree with the research here, it 's non
| obvious what is being extracted by the AI.
|
| If I had to guess, maybe something about the quality of the
| scan itself. Perhaps one race was scanned at one particular
| hospital, vs a different hospital scanning a different race.
| Then it's just picking out the different scanner.
| soundnote wrote:
| Or: Race is a rough proxy for breeding populations that have
| been separated for long time, and subject to different
| environments' selection pressure. Over time, selection and
| blind luck build up all manner of small differences, which
| both observably exist at the surface (so why not inside the
| body) and that you'd expect to exist from basic evolutionary
| principles. You'd expect a Norwegian forest cat, a Saharan
| desert cat and a Burmese to be different in innumerable small
| ways because they grow up in totally different environments.
| You'd also expect there to be a lot of overlapping, well,
| catness to them all. Lions purr, after all. There's nothing
| complicated about any of it, humans just tie themselves into
| knots when it comes to humans in a way they don't when it
| comes to cats.
|
| With that said, the simple explanation is that the AI picks
| up on these small patterns in a way humans don't. The brain
| and neural networks are fundamentally pattern-recognition
| engines. The AI is just seeing something we don't either
| notice or can't see.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Lions purr, after all.
|
| They do not, actually. Incapable of it; cheetahs are the
| only big cats that can do it.
|
| https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-
| Wildlife/1995/Questio...
|
| > Purring ability, rather than size or behavior, is one of
| two chief distinctions between the two main genera of cat,
| Felis and Panthera.
| soundnote wrote:
| Huh, TIL.
| jollybean wrote:
| The way we interpret race is largely a social construct due to
| 'apparent' physical differentiation, less so underlying
| biological or genetic factors.
|
| We end up segregating ourselves for a variety of reasons, in
| which case groups that are physically very distinguished end up
| forming almost an ethnic basis.
|
| For example, two groups with varying genetic makeup and maybe a
| number of non-obvious biological differences, but who otherwise
| looked identical - would have the similar life experience in
| terms of their social treatment by other groups.
|
| But irrespective of how a person is socialized - if you're
| Black, people are going to treat you one way, and if you're
| White, people are going to treat you a little different. That
| 'lived experience' differential is a somewhat unavoidable.
|
| The degree of that variability is obviously debatable, but
| surely it exists to some degree.
|
| I suppose you could make a parallel in ethnicity: a century
| ago, the difference between a Scottish-American and an English-
| American would have been apparent by lineage, accent, Church
| affiliation, and that might have affected relationships, status
| etc..
|
| Whereas after a few generations of integration, there is
| definitely 'no' (or not much) difference between those two
| groups, and no vector for differentiation/discrimination. The
| historical ethnic situation was a 'social construct'.
|
| That said, some of the argumentation used to promote the idea
| that there is no genetic basis for race is a little odd, the
| 'Africans have more genetic variation than other groups
| combined' is often used, but frankly I do not understand how
| that doesn't mean there are material differences between them
| and other groups.
|
| And of course there is no 'hard line' between groups, but there
| is also no 'hard line' between the Scottish and English, there
| are many people who have attributes of both cultures, but that
| doesn't negate the existence of either group.
|
| I think we're a bit oversensitive these days to these issues.
| Systematic racism exists and we should think about it, but that
| doesn't mean there's a boogeyman behind every door.
|
| I think in this case it's also worth examining what exactly the
| AI is finding out, because it may not be just 'bone marrow'.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Racism - judging people by the colour of their skin - has been
| on life support for a long time [1] in most liberal
| republics/democracies but nefarious actors are attempting to
| revive it in the name of identity politics. It is this type of
| race which can be detected using X-rays. The same group tends
| to support the doctrine of cultural relativism [2]. Claiming
| all cultures are equally valid they call criticism of behaviour
| related to specific cultural traits "racism", mangling the
| definition of that term in the process. Cultures, by
| definition, are social constructs.
|
| Cultural relativism is not the norm and should not become such
| since there are differences between cultural traits where it is
| possible to state that some are objectively better than others.
| As an example, the cultural trait of genital mutilation is
| objectively worse than that of leaving girls' bits alone - and
| I'm open to stating the same about boys even though that would
| raise up a storm of protest. The cultural trait of parents
| marrying off their offspring without said offspring having a
| say in the matter is objectively worse than than that of having
| the offspring decide for themselves who they want to share
| their life with. The cultural trait of having people who
| achieved success within the bounds of the law - whether those
| be inventors, writers, athletes, successful farmers, builders
| or architects or anything else - is objectively better than
| that of having successful criminals and hoodlums as role models
| - yes, "street culture" with gang bangers as role models is
| objectively worse than whatever name can be given to cultures
| which have/had those inventors (etc) as role models.
|
| X-rays can not be used to detect whether you might mutilate
| your newborn's genitals, marry off your 5yo daughter to your
| 20yo nephew or leave your children to be raised by the local
| street gang leaders since these traits do not depend on the
| colour of your skin even though there is often a correlation;
| correlation does not imply causation [3]. Take for example
| Michael Skramo [4], a Swedish-Norwegian man who very much
| looked the part of such but ended up as a recruiter for islamic
| state in the Nordic countries. Contrast him to e.g. Luai Ahmed,
| a Yemeni refugee who lives in Sweden and is a vocal critic of
| everything Skramo stood for. It was not Skramo's white skin and
| blonde hair which made him ready to pick up a Kalashnikov, it
| is not Ahmed's brown skin and black hair which made him averse
| to the negative cultural traits related to islam.
|
| MLK was right when he longed for a society where people would
| be judged on the content of their character and we were well on
| our way of achieving that goal. Unfortunately there are those
| who derive their identity - and income - from their purported
| position as fighters against racism (without scare quotes), a
| fight which was nearing its conclusion. While most old soldiers
| fade away [5] some have taken it upon themselves to revive
| their old enemy so as to keep their purpose - and income -
| alive. Their culture is not mine and I consider it to be
| objectively worse than, e.g. MLK's. If you then consider that
| MLK was a "black" man while I am of north-west European descent
| and as such have "white" skin the truth becomes clear, it is
| not the colour of our skin which makes us alike - it is the
| content of our character.
|
| Race is not a social construct. Culture is. Nature is not a
| social constrict, Nurture is.
|
| [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/11/racism-america-
| histor...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Skr%C3%A5mo
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_soldiers_never_die
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| > Racism - judging people by the colour of their skin - has
| been on life support for a long time
|
| You would think so, but the proliferation of affirmative
| action among tech companies and prestigious universities says
| otherwise.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Affirmative action had a place just after desegregation.
| Now, it is just one of the examples of identity politics,
| pushed in a doomed attempt to placate the deconstruction
| crew. Given that deconstruction of societal institutes is a
| stated goal for these people they do not care whether it
| actually achieves anything productive for either those who
| are given positions based on identity categories, for the
| affected institutes of for society as a whole - as long as
| it creates strife the purpose has been fulfilled.
| echopurity wrote:
| The idea of detecting "race" from an 8x8 grayscale of someone's
| lungs is such obvious racist pseudo-science that of course it's
| repeatedly posted and top ranking at HN.
|
| Why would these narcissists even publish results this bad?
| mistermann wrote:
| If you consider it from the perspective that race and culture
| are typically conflated into just race, then "race is a social
| construct" is fairly logical.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >If you consider it from the perspective that race and
| culture are typically conflated into just race...
|
| I'd say that that only occurs in the odd case of 'Latino'.
| For some reason Spanish-speaking got amalgamated into a thing
| it didn't belong.
| goatlover wrote:
| It happens for Europeans too. White has come to mean
| everyone of European descent, even though there's tons of
| ethnic, historical and regional differences across the
| continent. Asia even more so. Africa is also very diverse
| when you take into account Northern Africa. The whole
| Mediterranean area had lots of groups moving around for
| thousands of years across three continents.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >White has come to mean everyone of European descent
|
| I'd be surprised if anyone in Europe even thought of
| themselves as 'white' until (perhaps) the post-WWII era.
| Wogs begin at Calais.
|
| >Africa is also very diverse when you take into account
| Northern Africa.
|
| I suppose that you could consider North Africa as a
| separate continent given the bordering desert. My
| understanding is that sub-Saharan Africa has more real-
| deal genetic diversity in human populations than the rest
| of the world put together (which makes sense given it's
| age).
|
| Obviously race is a real thing. Either a giant tree of
| relatedness with clusters of appearance + small
| construction differences or simply a way to form self-
| interested groups (go to any prison for 10 minutes). The
| fascination with it as of late is unfortunate, but I'm
| not sure if it's a reflection of resource
| depletion/overpopulation, a wave of quasi-religion, or
| people simply forming up teams for a big fight.
| mistermann wrote:
| I am thinking mostly with respect to African
| Americans...when people talk about "racism", rarely do I
| see anyone distinguish between biology and culture, on
| either "side" of the issue...which I suspect is a huge
| contributor to the lack of progress on the issue.
| pmarreck wrote:
| If the software is told of the existence of race via an
| attribute in its ML training, then it will see race in
| additional data. Otherwise, it won't, IMHO.
|
| Also, due to omission of many other variables (such as
| culture), those variables are being conflated with race. I
| personally think a lot of what is commonly accused of being
| racism, sexism etc. is really just "culturalism" or
| "preferentialism"... let me think of an example... Given two
| bars, one filled with rap music and the other filled with
| techno music, and I pick the techno one every time... am I
| racist (assuming the predominant race in these 2 bars differs)?
| Or just preferentialist, culturalist or (frankly) "techno-ist"
| (if that were a thing)?
|
| Because I think it's much harder to get angry about preferences
| than it is to get angry about racism, I think that given a
| choice, we need to consider the less-triggery inputs to a
| perceived problem
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Yes, some anatomical differences are certainly affected by
| environment, but the quoted phrase is typically used in the
| context of treating races differently based on behavior ("X
| people are immoral", "Y people are stupid"). It's meant to
| encourage people to treat each other with equity and consider
| that such observed differences may be distorted by news, your
| like-minded cohorts, sociological conditions, etc, which are
| all theoretically addressable. But maybe I'm misunderstanding
| your question, since clearly the idea that races have
| anatomical differences is not contested by anybody - after all,
| anatomical difference is the very thing we base the word "race"
| on, colloquially. You don't need non-obvious differences to see
| that, since we already have obvious differences.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > since clearly the idea that races have anatomical
| differences is not contested by anybody
|
| This is not true. I had a college professor explain the "race
| is a social construct" idea, and her position was staunchly
| that there was _no_ biological basis for race. See also this
| article by the scientific american[1]:
|
| > Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race
| is a social construct without biological meaning.
|
| This is the idea that GP is responding to - clearly there
| must be some biological basis for race, if an AI can
| determine race from an x-ray.
|
| [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-
| social-...
| notahacker wrote:
| There is a massive difference between there being a
| biological _basis_ to some of the phenotypes associated
| with racial categories and there being "biological
| meaning" to identifying races.
|
| "Black" represents a wide range of genotypes, many which
| differ more from each other than from "white" individuals
| and populations, even if there may be other tendencies like
| bone density and novel genetic features that appear more
| commonly or exclusively in some subsets of the "black"
| population. The skin colour phenotype being (usually)
| darker just happens to be very easy to notice and have
| acquired a lot of socially constructed meaning. Except in
| the narrow context of skin tones, it isn't biologically
| meaningful to consider "black" people as a particular group
| though, particularly not compared to more specific genetic
| markers that don't have the same socially constructed
| meaning...
| foldr wrote:
| The point of the article is that if you clustered people
| based on genetic or anatomical properties in a non-post-hoc
| way, you would not end up with the same system of racial
| categories that are commonly used in the USA (or indeed any
| other country). As another poster has pointed out, the most
| striking example of this is the category 'Latino', which
| while often treated as a 'racial' category obviously has no
| biological basis.
|
| This does not entail that no biological traits are
| correlated with race - biological traits are correlated to
| varying degrees with all kinds of subgroups of people. It
| does, however, mean that racial categories have no
| scientific basis.
|
| To expand on this, imagine a Martian scientist studying
| human biology in isolation from human culture. Such a
| scientist would _not_ subdivide humans into groups that
| match common racial categories, as these groupings are
| arbitrary from a biological point of view.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > This is the idea that GP is responding to - clearly there
| must be some biological basis for race, if an AI can
| determine race from an x-ray.
|
| Not _necessarily_ ; they could easily reflect societal
| differences. Bone density could be affected by diet, or
| medical care received, or environmental factors in poor
| neighborhoods, which might easily vary by race without
| there being a _genetic_ cause for that variance.
|
| If it were a simple "all black people have a bone density
| of 3; all white people have a bone density of 2" you could
| pretty solidly conclude a biological component, but we're
| in the realm of small variances and probabilities that
| confound things quite a bit.
|
| I think the most likely explanation for these results is
| something like https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-
| clever-ai-hid-data-fr..., personally. Especially with the
| 8x8 pixelation example.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I'm not sure how your link applies to this situation.
| That refers to an interesting way an AI encoded data in
| an image. The issue here is that this data _exists in the
| first place_. Whether the AI learned to compress the
| racial data into an 8x8 picture is besides the point.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The point is "the AI might not be doing what you think it
| is doing, because it doesn't actually understand the
| goal".
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| You're misunderstanding the context of the thread. At
| this point in the thread, we're talking about whether or
| not there is any biological basis for race, not about the
| AI example in particular. The premise here is that there
| is a biological basis--that race is a label applied to a
| cluster of genetic traits (various facial shape features,
| skin color, etc) which are almost certainly genetically
| constructed.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The comment I replied to stated "clearly there must be
| some biological basis for race, if an AI can determine
| race from an x-ray".
|
| I'm pointing out that's not necessarily true. First, we
| have to prove that the AI _is_ determining race from an
| x-ray. It 's effectiveness at doing it via 64 pixels
| makes me skeptical that it is.
|
| After that, we get into sticky territory determining
| whether any biological differences we can identify
| between races are caused by genetics, or
| environmental/societal factors like disparities in
| healthcare, diet, neighborhoods built over old SuperFund
| sites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal), etc.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Ah, my mistake.
| tpm wrote:
| The idea that races have anatomical differences is very much
| contested, and rightly so.
| zepto wrote:
| That's what the study calls into question.
| tpm wrote:
| More often than not, AI/ML finds some surprising
| shortcut. I am pretty sure this will be the case too,
| because "races" and their (hypothetical) biological or
| genetic foundations don't map at all.
| zepto wrote:
| I would like to agree with that, since I would like to
| believe race is a construct that we can dispense with at
| some point.
|
| That said, assuming the paper is just wrong is simply
| bias.
|
| If there is an identity associated with race, there is no
| reason to think it doesn't impact biology. There is no
| reason to assume it's genetic.
| tpm wrote:
| Well if race has biological basis and also if race is
| inherited, there is no way around a genetic basis. Also
| there is a more than hundred year history of scientific
| research and no genetic (or other) grounding for race has
| been found. So yes, that is the source of my bias.
| zepto wrote:
| > Well if race has biological basis and also if race is
| inherited, there is no way around a genetic basis.
|
| False. Diet and behavior affect biology amongst other
| things.
|
| > Also there is a more than hundred year history of
| scientific research and no genetic (or other) grounding
| for race has been found.
|
| We didn't have machine learning or big data 100 years
| ago.
| tpm wrote:
| > False. Diet and behavior affect biology amongst other
| things.
|
| Yeah, so if a South-Asian orphan is adopted into a
| Swedish family, he magically ceases to be of whatever
| race were his parents and becomes white. That's... not
| how the concept of human race works.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| You'd better hope your anesthetist doesn't believe that
| next time you need surgery: https://pubs.asahq.org/anesthes
| iology/article/107/1/4/8323/E...
| Kharvok wrote:
| Race is a proxy for clustering groups of biological traits
| ackfoobar wrote:
| > of biological traits
|
| or genes
|
| I saw a visualization of the clustering on twitter.
|
| https://twitter.com/rokomijic/status/1426614501856751620
| eptcyka wrote:
| The genetic differences between different people in Africa are
| far greater than the genetic differences between black and
| white people in North America. The term "race" as used to
| describe belonging to a different groups which generally
| experience their lives vastly differently to other groups is
| thus inherently social. The hypothesis goes as follows - if
| black and white people are so similar to each other
| biologically, why are their life experiences so different? It
| would seem that there's more to it than just the biochemical
| composition of our bodies that dictates what kind of a life
| you'll have.
| zepto wrote:
| > The genetic differences between different people in Africa
| are far greater than the genetic differences between black
| and white people in North America.
|
| This is often repeated, but the point of the question is that
| the OP calls this into question.
| soundnote wrote:
| Differences between African groups being bigger than between
| blacks and whites in NA don't make the rough categorization
| no longer work. For example, there's rather little genetic
| variety within dogs, or between dogs and wolves, but that
| doesn't say much about how impactful the variation is:
| Chihuahuas and Huskies are genetically really similar to each
| other, but no one in their right minds would disagree that
| you can comfortably put them in different, very real, very
| genetics-based buckets.
|
| In general, arguments of variation within a group are not
| arguments against considering between-group differences, or
| those between-group differences being real. The variation
| within a category cannot be dismissed, though, it's hugely
| important for understanding the world properly and for
| guiding personal conduct.
| foldr wrote:
| The following article has a detailed explanation of why the
| analogy with dog breeds is not a good one:
|
| https://evolution-
| outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.118...
| savrajsingh wrote:
| The differences exist on a spectrum and there's no hard line
| between one or the other. Yes, as you mention, there are
| biological correlations. But at the edge cases, it's quite
| subjective. How many races are there? Ask a different person
| and they'll have a different list. Is Asian a race or is that
| ridiculously general? etc etc
| [deleted]
| literallyaduck wrote:
| "Yeah, we are going to need your chest x-rays to approve you for
| a loan."
| Havoc wrote:
| Surprised that's possible given the usual refrain about it being
| basically just melanin
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Never mind the images; who was deciding what 'race' the training
| data matched against? In this modern age of globalism, they must
| have searched hard to find anyone with any kind of historically-
| categorized dna.
|
| I'm guessing, they just used folks' self-identification for race
| on some form. Which is largely a social construct.
| drocer88 wrote:
| From the preprint (
| https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2107/2107.10356.pdf ) : " In
| this work, we define racial identity as a social, political,
| and legal construct that relates to the interaction between
| external perceptions (i.e. "how do others see me?") and self-
| identification, and specifically make use of the self-reported
| race of patients in all of our experiments. "
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Thank you. Exactly as I feared. Its a social definition, and
| makes it even more weird that an AI could predict from
| physical attributes i.e. an x-ray.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| What percentage of dark skinned people of African descent
| do you think _wouldn 't_ self-identity as black? Same for
| percentage of light skinned European descent, Asian
| descent, Central/South American descent, etc.? I'm sure
| there are some out there who would identify as a different
| race, and there are people of mixed heritage that throw a
| wrench in the works too, but the vast majority of humans
| will self-identity as a race that matches with their skin
| color and heritage.
| iandanforth wrote:
| I asked the authors if they had compared the results with the
| participant's skin color. They had not. The hypothesis would be
| that melanin is interacting with X-rays and would explain how the
| system can classify "race" even at extremely degraded
| resolutions.
| stuartbman wrote:
| I'm very aware that I'm a HN novice, but can I ask why my post
| title was edited? The new title is much less descriptive, and
| x-rays are different from medical images, after all.
| andai wrote:
| I don't know what the original title was, but in general the
| original title of the web page or paper is preferred (see the
| HN guidelines page).
|
| (Also, the paper covers other kinds of medical images, not just
| X-rays.)
| stuartbman wrote:
| That's fair enough, thanks. I'll bear that in mind for the
| future.
| andi999 wrote:
| AIs do not have magical abilities, I do not trust this result. AI
| can pick up though easily on technical artifacts. Something like
| a cofactor: Since they used different databases, maybe one
| dataset had a high number of people of one self declared race and
| the other the other self declared race; and each using a
| different intensity maximum or so.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| They accounted for specifically intensity maximum, but your
| overall concern is solid; I don't see anything in the paper
| suggesting they accounted for a full spectrum of risk factors
| (broad-image noise, rotation, individual "stuck pixels" that
| could create a hard-to-spot thumbprint in the image, for
| example).
| lostlogin wrote:
| We were marvelling at a surface shaded render made on a new
| Siemens MR from an T1 MPRage on a very still and compliant
| patient. It basically looked like a black and white photo (though
| with the tools at hand we could cut the image in half and look at
| the brain). You could see the facial hair and you could identify
| the patient if you knew them. Medical imaging is moving along at
| pace and it would be interesting to see what could be inferred
| from a dataset of images of this quality.
| lmilcin wrote:
| And... they found it looks at the name of the patient on the
| border of the image or something similar.
|
| Like the time some team tried to evolve an FPGA net to solve some
| problem efficiently with a genetic algorithm and it learned to
| use a bunch of FPGA transistors as an antenna to communicate with
| another part of FPGA chip through interference. Unfortunately, it
| would not work on other FPGA chips even from the same lot.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > they found it looks at the name of the patient on the border
| of the image or something similar.
|
| The images were anonymised. If they AI cheated, it's not
| obvious how. The paper is interesting.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10356
| abrichr wrote:
| Previous submission of the paper itself:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050699
|
| We know that various features visible in medical images correlate
| with race, eg breast density, bone density, etc. Most likely the
| network is just learning a classifier on top of these features.
|
| This is trivially verifiable but conspicuously absent from the
| paper.
| zepto wrote:
| The article covers this.
| hgial wrote:
| It's not "conspicuously absent from the paper". They have a
| whole group of experiments on this: "Experiments on anatomic
| and phenotype confounders" and conclude "Race detection is not
| due to obvious anatomic and phenotype confounder variables."
| abrichr wrote:
| They show correlation with individual features, not all
| together.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > We know that various features visible in medical images
| correlate with race, eg breast density, bone density, etc.
|
| That can still be picked out when pixellated down to 8x8 as
| illustrated in the article? That seems unlikely.
|
| I wonder if the AI is just cheating, as they sometimes
| inadvertently do. https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-
| clever-ai-hid-data-fr...
|
| > In some early results, the agent was doing well --
| suspiciously well. What tipped the team off was that, when the
| agent reconstructed aerial photographs from its street maps,
| there were lots of details that didn't seem to be on the latter
| at all. For instance, skylights on a roof that were eliminated
| in the process of creating the street map would magically
| reappear when they asked the agent to do the reverse process...
| ChrisLovejoy wrote:
| I suspect there must be some confounder here - like the
| positioning used for the CXRs correlating with race, based on
| the methodology used in a particular region / hospital.
|
| Seems the most likely explanation for it still working even
| when pixellated as 8x8?
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| That was exactly my thinking. I wouldn't publish anything
| until the pixellated versions were better understood.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Well, isn't the point of publishing to get help figuring
| it out from other researchers in the field? I agree it's
| very likely that there's some kind of explainable trick
| the AI is using, but there's no guarantee it's an _easy_
| trick that the authors could have figured out.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| I'd warm up to that concept if the article was: "We don't
| know what in the hell is going on here. Here's our source
| code and data set of x-rays and race. What do you think?"
|
| It could be that in the realm of machine learning, most
| of what is going on is people turning random knobs on a
| big machine and getting mysterious results. It's the
| birth of science without understanding.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| That's precisely what the researchers are saying. In the
| underlying paper, they conclude that "this capability is
| extremely difficult to isolate or mitigate", call for
| "further investigation and research into the human-hidden
| but model-decipherable information", and suggest medical
| imaging people should "consider the use of deep learning
| models with extreme caution" until future research
| produces a better understanding of what's happening.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| They always call for 'further investigation'.
|
| Looking at this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.10356.pdf
|
| My general impression (no more than that) is a whole
| bunch of people crowding into a paper. The paper is
| mostly applying trivial image processing functions and
| seeing how some software they don't understand is
| responding. The main aim is pearl-clutching about 'bias'
| rather than any kind of understanding. God knows what
| they're going to do when any medical exam includes some
| kind of deep dive into the patient's genetics.
|
| No surprises. It's the nature of the era.
| [deleted]
| abrichr wrote:
| That was my initial reaction as well but they validate on
| separate datasets from training which makes this unlikely.
|
| The performance despite degradation may be the same
| phenomenon that results in adversarial examples that are
| indistinguishable to human eyes, ie we know that neural nets
| are highly sensitive to visually imperceptible differences.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This is probably a great time to remind everyone that the reason
| the blood types are A, B, AB, and O (as opposed to, say, A, B, C,
| D or another nomenclature) is that when the first blood type
| experiments were run, only people with A and B protein
| configurations were available for testing in the lab where the
| tests were executed.
|
| I'd be _very_ cautious drawing sweeping conclusions from research
| like this. The researchers have a heavy burden to prove that what
| they don 't mean is "recognizes race _in this training dataset_.
| "
| wswope wrote:
| I thought this was some expert-level trolling at first, but
| your post history suggests you're acting in good faith, so:
|
| Blood types are categorized as A/B/AB/O because of the presence
| (or for O, absence) of protein markers on the surface of blood
| cells. A/B/C/D would be a much less descriptive system.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This is what I get for trying to tell that story from memory.
| What I intended to say was that the original blood groups
| _were_ A, B, and C, and only with later research into the
| antibodies and surface proteins was it discovered that 'C'
| was really an 'AB' group. 'O' wasn't in the original set
| because none of the original donors had type-O blood, nor was
| Rh-factor discovered for the same reason. The original
| clotting discoveries weren't wrong, but they were dangerously
| not-right, as in "Your blood turns to jelly in your veins"
| not-right.
|
| The relevant point is that early research (especially when
| there isn't a well-understood causality story, as is the case
| here) is more likely to be off due to small sample size than
| representative of the reality for the global population. I
| would treat a claim as broad as "AI Recognises Race in
| Medical Images" as the kind of thing that will end up with
| giant qualifiers on it as follow-up work is done.
| desktopninja wrote:
| Previous discussions:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=AI%20has%20the%20worst%20super...
|
| Personally think 'race' is nothing more than a fantastical vanity
| construct. Really its tribalism. Furthermore, I find it hard as
| well to comprehend how it holds weight in the medical industry.
| Race is not real science. Race is entertainment science. AI is
| mostly entertainment science.
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