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No one said it was genetic.
People always assume that acknowledgeing a trait in a person requires you to have an explanation for it. And then they note that all possible explanations are politically controverisal, so they conclude that the trait does not actually exist. This is bad logic, as far as I can tell.
The fact is, race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence, violence, etc. I offer no explanations.
Eh? What is this thing you call "race," Earth Monkey?
We used to think the answer was obvious. You know, it's obvious what "race" someone is, isn't it? Until you start to look at the details.
Race is a cultural convention. There is a science of population genetics, and it isn't about "race." Rather, people use population genetics to infer the social marker called "race."
I adopted an African girl. What "race" is she? What determines this? She has tribal markings on her eyes -- or the scars from tribal medicine for conjunctivitis, hard to tell -- but the markings are characteristic of her region and tribe, so someone who knows could tell where she comes from, as to the region.
I once had a friend tell me that my Chinese daughter was, of course, going to be more intelligent than the Ethiopian girl. The Chinese daughter is no slouch, intellectually, but her younger sister is definitely smart as hell. My friend was a racist. Lots of people are racist. That is, they believe that race is a biological or even a "spiritual" reality. He wasn't being mean, he was just being ignorant.
What determines it? Ancestry. Race is basically a way of asking "who were your ancestors?" and accepting a blurry answer because, well, each person has a lot of ancestors! That version of race is obviously a biological reality, because people have different ancestries, even going back long distances, and the ancestry distribution can be geographically plotted. If you go back thirty generations for me, I would need to have about a billion distinct ancestors for there to be no inbreeding; the entire world didn't have that many people! Europe, the probable source for most of my ancestry, only had about 50 million people thirty generations ago, and even then it's unlikely that all of them are my ancestors- for one, many of them didn't have any children! I'd estimate somewhere less than 10% of the total world population at any point since 1000 AD is in my ancestry, and the distribution of their contribution to my ancestry is pretty localized. It's probable there's many people out there who share none of my ancestry for a full thirty generations back, and there's one who (probably) shares it completely.
Knowing she was adopted from Africa, odds are good that she's mostly African. That's only one step more informative than "human," since it only gives you the archaic racial category- Negroid- which tells you as much as "Caucasoid" or "Mongoloid." Ethnicity would give a much narrower picture- about one person in six is African, but only about one person in four thousand is Gurage.
Adding on the data that she's Ethiopian muddies the picture- due to its northeastern position, Ethiopia has been the site of significant mixing, and there's quite a bit of ethnic diversity: the primary ethnicity, Oromo, is only a third of the population- your Chinese daughter, though, most likely has significant Han ancestry (92% of the population of mainland China).
So, using the archaic terms and assuming she's from one of the more prevalent ethnicities, your daughter probably has about 60% Caucasoid ancestry and 40% Negroid ancestry.
So, good IQ estimates in Africa are generally hard to come by, but Ethiopia supposedly has the world's lowest average IQ, at 63 (administered in 1991, sample size of 250), and China is estimated to have an average IQ of 100. Working off that data (and assuming both groups have a standard deviation of 15), that gives a 96% chance that the Chinese daughter is smarter. Now, the Ethiopian data is spotty, especially the normality assumption- one of the pitfalls of historic IQ testing is that 0 scores are treated as 0s, dragging down the average, instead of an separate number of "people who didn't understand the concept of the test." It's also not clear what selection effects adoption has; children that get adopted out are likely to not be representative of the country as a whole, and it's hard to say if that would be a positive or negative effect. If we use the African American average IQ of 85 instead of the estimated Ethiopian averaged IQ, and still assume that we should use the Chinese average, we get a 76% chance that the Chinese daughter is cleverer.
Of course, given that they're your daughters, there's not much reason to guess; you could just get them both tested, which would be way cheaper and more informative than sponsoring another test of Ethiopian national IQ.
That is not what "race" means when people use the word. Race is a division of humanity into categories. Who determines the categories? Do those categories naturally occur? On what does the "race" category depend? Can "race" be identified visually? Can it be genetically determined?
Yes, if you divide people up into "races," or into geographical population groups, and study their genetics, you can find statistical significance, but the two divisions will produce differing evaluations for individuals.
The classic way to identify someone's "race" involves identifying one's own group visually (and sometimes behaviorally, perhaps through dialect or language), and then lumping together those who don't seem to match "my race" into other groups. That is why someone who is "mixed race" will be lumped into the "other group," until the mixture becomes small enough to not be visible. How people perceive themselves is irrelevant to this process.
"Race" is a racist concept, naturally. The word "racist" is hot, and gets mixed up with racial chauvinism, but that's distracting. I use "racism" to refer to the belief in race as an objective reality.
I wrote that population genetics was a reality. Race is not. It's arbitrary, and race is not scientifically defined. The conclusion is a non sequitur. Race has been totally discredited academically, and that's not just political correctness.
Odds are entirely that she is African, i.e., she was born in Africa. I know that her grandparents were born in Africa, in her tribal region. Beyond that, I don't know. Probably it goes back further, but there are always strays.
If her ancestry plot maintains "African" location, say entirely, back, say, 20 generations, does that mean that she is racially "African"? I hope you'd know that this could give results that might seem preposterous to those who depend on visual identification of "race."
The basic question is being ignored. How is "race" identified? As used, my "race" does not depend on where I was born. It depends on ... what? Where someone else was born? Who, specifically? What lumps all these people together? And separates them from others, who might look quite the same?
"Archaic racial category." So race is being used to define race? Those are just as you stated, "racial" categories, which assumes some identity based on ... what?
Lucky guess about my Chinese daughter. The one-child policy impacts Han Chinese the most.
However, "Ethiopian" tells you almost nothing about "race." Let's start with this: Each tribal grouping in Ethiopia, by default, considers itself to be very different from the others. There are over seventy such groupings in Ethiopia, if we mark them by language.
Unlikely, in fact. She's from the Kambata-Timbaro Tribal Region, her native language was Kambatigna. It's a minor ethnicity, there are maybe a few hundred thousand Kambata.
In the U.S., she is readily identified by people as "Black." She doesn't look "Ethiopian" (which is popularly known through high-Arab ancestry general appearance). Is "Black" a race? What defines it?
Was that a test administered racially, or was it according to how and where the child was raised and tested?
What kind of intelligence was measured? Intelligence generally confers survival value, but the form of intelligence selected shifts with environment.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Ethiopian "national IQ" is totally irrelevant. Somehow, Ethiopia, with that supposedly low IQ, managed, almost uniquely in Africa, to avoid extended outside control, with an ancient and literate culture.
What I personally know is that, possibly contrary to stereotypes, the Ethiopian girl is highly competitive, she stars at whatever she does, the Chinese girl -- raised here since she was under a year old -- is shyer and suffers from the shadow of her younger sister. Both girls have no difficulty figuring out how to do what they want on computers. I have no confidence that IQ tests would tell me much of value, though at some point both girls will be tested to determine if they belong in "gifted" programs.
My racist friend knew nothing about my daughter's ethnicity, he was judging entirely on "African," based on his early experience with "Blacks" on the street in America (are they "African"?) , which wasn't, shall we say, "positive."
Sorry I ddin't read all of your wall of text yet, but I find it fishy that you're allowed to redefine "racism" to mean "non-hating acknowledgement of differences due to ancestry" but Vaniver isn't allowed to use race in the normal sense of "what's ur ancestry?".
Yep. The most recent common ancestor of living humans lived at least a couple millennia (i.e. about seventy generations) ago. (EDIT: I'm not fully convinced that that implies that for any time t later than that, there's at least one with you no ancestry at time t. I'm too tired to trust my cognitive abilities right now.)
Do you have any reason in particular to suspect that you and your sibling may have different biological fathers, or is the “probably” a 1-is-not-a-probability self-nitpick?
It's not "1-is-not-a-probability" so much as it is "the base rate of this is not 0"; there's also the chance that I was switched at birth (hospitals are much better at avoiding this now than they have been in the past). If my family signs up for 23andMe, then the probability will either shoot up towards 1 or drop down to negligible, but until then I'm going with the base rate.
Really during your life you haven't encountered much net evidence towards either direction shifting your probability assignment away from the base rate, e.g. how much you look like your parents, whether you share some uncommon medical condition with either of them, blood type, etc.?
I have very little expertise in quantifying the effect of that evidence, and in the aggregate it doesn't seem strong enough to make the probability negligible or large.
The strategic concerns here are also amusing to ponder. (There's several reasons that 23andMe shows you 2nd and higher cousins with no prompting, but wants your approval before they show you first cousins.) The more one suspects being swapped at birth, the more important it is to find one's birth family for health prediction. But, I've had my SNPs read, which I imagine screens off much of the benefit of knowing family history for medical conditions. It's also less damaging to the existing family structure: most people who learn they were swapped at birth maintain their relationship with the parents that raised them, and also gain some sort of relationship with their genetic parents.
If you suspect infidelity, though, then the picture is very different. Again, learning your birth father tells you something about health, and may be a valuable social relationship (for one, they may not have any other children; in the swap case, there's someone else in the mirror of your situation); it's probably tremendously destructive to your current family arrangement, though.
Also, probably the effects of nurture contribute to keeping their average IQ that low; it seems unlikely to me that the fact that the average IQ of African Americans is 22 points higher is entirely due to the European genetic admixture in the latter. (EDIT: And I hadn't even noticed you mentioned Ethiopians have lots of Caucasoid ancestry too!)
Genetically differentiated human populations defined by phenotype.
A quote from wikipedia:
"Forensic physical anthropologist and professor George W. Gill has said that the idea that race is only skin deep "is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm" and "Many morphological features tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.)" While he can see good arguments for both sides, the complete denial of the opposing evidence "seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all". He also states that many biological anthropologists see races as real yet "not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship".
The input is the claim 'Race is a cultural convention.' You output the interpretation: 'None of the phenotypic variations associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments.' Given how transparently ridiculous the assertion is, one must at least take a moment to pause and reconsider whether the anthropologists' claim is really what you take it to be.
Perhaps what is being denied is not the existence of morphological variation between human populations, but rather the conceptualization of these differences under the traditional concept of Race, with its assumptions of discreteness and of other markers of cultural and bio-diversity strictly mapping on to a small set of physiognomic markers. Perhaps what is also being asserted is that the precise boundaries between races, and how large or small a 'race' gets to be, is culturally constructed and varies across different groups possessing 'race'-like categories. Is it more likely that anthropologists are speaking somewhat loosely and infelicitously, or that they think the existence of darker and lighter skins in different parts of the world is a Grand Alien Conspiracy?
Given how I might have said/believed something similar myself just a couple years back, I think I know what is meant. You get a photo of Colin Powell and he was about light-skinned as Bush -- so since different people of the same skin-hue are one called 'white' and the other 'black', one thinks it might the division may be entirely a cultural artifact.
Also there's no single characteristic which doesn't fluctuate gradually across populations -- so any grouping seems again entirely arbitrary.
But a visual that got me to understand the above view was too-simplistic was this graph here at Lewontin's argument and criticism. Though any one characteristic wouldn't suffice to divide humanity meaningfully into races, several characterics taken together in can form clusters...
So such groupings are in fact meaningful.
If you used to believe this yourself, then maybe you can explain to me what you mean(t) by 'entirely a cultural artifact.' Did you think that the people in question didn't have different skin tones? That skin tone isn't a genetic trait? That there was no correlation between a racial grouping and any phenotypic or genetic marker, like skin color? That genetic relatedness is confabulated in a grand game of make-believe?
"there's no single characteristic which doesn't fluctuate gradually across populations" - No, some traits have reached fixation in a population, or are totally absent. But I take your point. It's still understandable that categories predating our modern, sophisticated notions of genetic variation would be controversial in their attempted modern reimaginings.
Colin Powell did not have a different skin tone than George W. Bush; yes -- no categorization based on skin-color would actually put Colin Powell in a different category than Bush, while putting him in the same category with Condoleeza Rice: Relevant photo.
And whole groups that Americans called non-white (like Middle-easterners) looked likewise pretty white to me.
There was correlation with physical characterics obviously -- much like you could say that Swedes are more often blonde, but that the actual lines drawn around the category didn't really have anything to do with physical characteristics -- same way that Swedish citizenship correlates with blondness but isn't defined by blondness.
I've seen the photo. So your claim is that anthropologists, like yesteryou, once believed that 100% of 'black' people had darker skin than 100% of 'white' people, with zero overlap? This seems very implausible.
That's no coincidence. American authorities typically group most Middle Easterners with Europeans as 'Caucasians.'
But being of Swedish descent does have biological meaning and significance, albeit to a lesser degree than being of African descent. So what can be meant by the claim that race is 'merely' like being Swedish? Is it merely a fuzzy quantitative shift, not a categorical disagreement about what 'race' is or how it fits into the natural world?
Allow me to attempt to rationally reconstruct what the younger you and the straw-anthropologist believed. Based on the evidence that changed your mind, I gather that your old view was not that racial distinctions were nonexistent, but that they were biologically superficial. The obvious phenotypic variations very nearly exhausted the distinctness of each racial group. So when you advocate racialism, what you're really trying to draw attention to is that race is more than skin deep, that there are many many genetic traits, some very significant, that break down along racial lines of various sorts. And this is indeed an important point, though framing it as a dispute over whether 'races' are 'real' is, to put it mildly, misleading.
I don't know about anthropologists. I thought I explained that my yesterme saw the opposite of what you just said: saw that some people labelled 'black' had skins as light (or almost as light) as 'white' people. So I saw the dividing line between 'black' and 'white' to be utterly arbitrary, a line arbitrarily drawn in some continuum, and which best seemed to identify cultural not biological differences.
Keep in mind that my yesterme was a Greek boy, and had no occasion to have known about e.g. Afro-textured hair or different nose structures, etc. or any other collection of physical characteristics that together could form a cluster.
No, I'm not talking about mere superficiality, nor about how insignificant or significant the traits were. I'm talking about an utterly arbitrary line drawn between populations of people. As if someone had arbitrarily said that the numbers >72 are the "orange" numbers and the numbers <72 are the "purple" numbers.
With only one trait in question to divide the races, this judgement of mine would have remained valid -- no matter if it's something as insignificant as skin-color or as significant as IQ.
It's the combination of more than one trait (e.g. skin-color AND hair-texture AND nose-shape) that makes racial visual identification a classification of actual observed clusters in the human species -- again REGARDLESS of whether the traits are "significant" or "superficial" or "important" or whatever.
Middle Easterners' skins do look noticeably darker than those of typical native English speakers of European ancestry, to me. But then again, so do those of certain (but not all)¹ Italians, whom I don't think any sizeable number of Americans would call non-white.
...and seven hours after I post this, I see a friend of mine whose skin is almost as pale as that of a typical Irishwoman and I remember that her parents are from the Middle East. God, I am full of crap certain times.
The problem is that when asked to justify that statement 'Race is a cultural convention' anthropologists in interpret it in the way you describe in your second paragraph, but they than proceed to use it in arguments as if it means 'None of the phenotypic variations (except possibly skin color) associated with any racial schema are physically real; they are hallucinations or figments'.
That's extremely strange and surprising, if true. Can you provide an example of this?
Better than, say, poverty? Source please.
Make sure you're distinguishing between the claim that P(intelligence = x|income = i) = P(intelligence = x|race = r,income = i), which would be that poverty screens off the effects of race, and the claim that P(intelligence = x|race = r) = P(intelligence = x), which is the claim that intelligence and race are unconditionally independent. The first claim is only relevant to nyan_sandwich's claim if by "good" you mean "better than income" rather than "worth knowing."
As it stands, both of those claims are pretty obviously false if you take a look an unbiased look at the data. Life is not fair.
The left-hand side of the first equation was supposed to be P(intelligence = x|income = i)?
Yes, it was. Thanks for the correction!
By poverty, I meant background, not income (which is determined by background to an extent, along with talent and so on.). Just a point of clarification there. And yes, I was claiming both that poverty screens off race. However, note that it was not merely intelligence - a much more plausible claim - but violent tendencies and "civilization".
I've retracted the civilization thing because it's not clear what it even means.
do you think violent tendency is less corellated with race than intelligence? (it depends where we are talking about. I would expect only a very weak link here in my hometown (vancouver), a strong link in US and european cities)
Well, historically, it meant the idea that they couldn't produce or participate in civilizations, due to poor impulse control or whatever. But fair enough, that was always your least defensible claim.
As has already been pointed out, if you expect the link to be weaker in different societies, than the link is caused by society. If you compare people of different races raised and living in the same conditions, and there's no difference, then racism is wrong. If there is a difference - for example, if black men are still just as likely to commit crimes - then, and only then, do you have a point. Consider slave-owners who refused to educate slaves because they were stupid - of course they were, when did you last meet a slave who could read or write?
Only then could propensity to crime be an inherent, genetic thing. And the inference that that was the case may still be wrong, for example if black people are bombarded by messages that they are supposed to be become criminals, or are otherwise influenced by the people around them. It would be very difficult to seperate the inherent genetic traits from those that are caused by percieved race.
I feel like we are talking past each other, so I am going to take this opportunity to state and steel-man the position of the modern "racist" in its entirety. (maybe this should be a discussion post).
Let's start with something simple that I hope we can agree on. Group people by genetic heritage, and by social class, and by intelligence, and by antisocial behaviour. "Genetic heritage" is clear enough, I hope. "Class" is rather slippery in this analysis unless we are careful with it. Let's pin it down right now to be talking about environment, not where a person ends up. We'll see why later. Anyways, if you make these groupings, you will find that there is a lot of mutual information between them. That is, they are not independent. If you don't believe this, assume it for now.
There are two ways we could take it from here, and I'm not sure which is right: We could note that race is conditionally independent of the others given social environment. Then we would conclude that race and class were caused by some other variable (who your parents were), and that only class causes intelligence and antisocial behavior. Note that we defined "class" in such a way that it cannot be caused by race, or cause race. As far as I can tell, this is the world as the non-racists see it. This could very well be the case.
Another way it could be is that race does impact intelligence and antisocial behaviour indpendently of class. This is what I'll call "strong racism". I would not be suprised if this were the case.
At this point, I hope I've said nothing controversial. The redefinition of "class" rubs me the wrong way, but I couldn't think of anything else to call that node. Ok, let's move on to the implications.
Let's boot up the racist and see what he says about all this. The racist says "I don't care which of the two it is, and here's why:". Uh oh, here we go.
Let's do a little thought experiment: group someone's genes by those that define who they are as a person, and those that define what they look like. Let's say there's no overlap between these, that is, that a given gene cannot both impact personhood and appearance. (there's reasons to suspect overlap, but this is a thought experiment). Let's further say that, for obvious reasons (subpopulations), having gene
A, which affects appearance, is quite strongly corellated with having genealpha, which affects personality. Extend this to most of the genes so that you can largely predict someones appearance genes from which cluster of personality genes they come from, and the other way around. Does it seem unreasonable to talk about which cluster you belong to without specifying which of appearance or personality you are refering to, given that you can say things like "people with visual trait X have personality trait Y", which I hope seems reasonable itself, in this case. Note that this is the imaginary world where "strong racism" is correct.Ok, given that, if you're still reading, let's draw a parallel to the weak racist world where genes affect appearance and such, and memes affect intelligence and personality and such, and these factors are both highly heritable and highly corellated. (This is our world). When asked to comment, the weak racist says "Why should it matter whether a highly heritable component of who someone is is genetic or memetic or on the 13th chromosome or the 14th? Can't we just point to the empirical clusters and say 'that there is a meaningful cluster', given that it does seem to cluster in a meaningful way?". At this point the lines are open and the objections are coming in fast:
"But you can't just hate someone because they belong to some disadvantaged empirical cluster". Correct, in fact, I would say that we should say "that fucking sucks and we should go kick God's ass for creating such an unfair world".
"But there are places (like Vancouver) where, for selection and social reasons, race is independent of other things, therefore race is not interesting." Yes, then no. In our imaginary strongly racist world, there are places where green eyes and black hair does not corellate with a ketchup fetish and kleptomania, but in most of the world it does, so "wiggin" is still a meaningful term. More generally, just because you can find a subset of your survey population that does not have the corellations you find in the whole, doesn't mean you can reject the corellations in the whole. Especially given that if you look at enough subpopulations, you'll find ones that go just about any way you like, so you might as well cherry-pick your data if you are going to do that. All such a non-corellation proves is that the variables of interest don't have a common atomic cause (or that you have selection effects in your data).
"What about a guy who wears a cardigan and goes to harvard? If you learn he is black, should you then conclude he is stupid and violent like the stereotype?" No, because no matter how things go, who you became screens off any possible cause.
I've run out of things to say. At this point though, we know how to react to all of the possible cases:
There. Now we have comprehensive lines of retreat. Now and only now are we prepared to go take an unbiased look at the data, because none of the possibilities are scary anymore. I haven't looked very hard, but I think it's the third case. Not that I really care; I've got plans however it happens to be.
That's modern compassionate steel-man racism. Sorry for the length.
I think childhood role models and so on is a part of one's upbringing and "society", don't you?
Perhaps we are talking past each other. I'm not claiming you can't get any information from someone's race, I'm saying that this is due to historical/memetic causes. It's the differenc between loaded dice and an opponent who regularly lies about the results, if you see what I mean.
"Upbringing"? "Background"? I'm OK with class, TBH, as long as we both know what we mean.
Here we go indeed. The racist is supposed to hold a belief abut how he world is, i.e. that intelligence and so on are as much racial characteristics as skin tone.
Fair enough. This is what our pet racist here believes is true, yes?
No no no no no.
Consider various brands of Wiggin.
Now, in all these situations Wiggins do, in fact, steal and eat ketchup. However, in the first case, once we know that this particular wiggin grew up in a well-to-do environment, we should no longer expext them to steal our ketchup. In addition, we should expect anyone who grew up in a disadvantaged home to act "wiggin-like", not just those with black hair and green eyes.
In the second case, there is no need to consider the upbringing of a particular Wiggin, since they all have similar odds of stealing our ketchup. In this case, however, we can perform genetic tests to identify whatever genes may be causing this problem; and of course there is a case to be made for sterilizing Wiggins to prevent their criminal genes from spreading - especially to non-wiggins, who would interfere with our ability to judge the likelihood of ketchup-theft by a particular individual.
In the third case, we have something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we need to protect our ketchup from thieving Wiggins. On the other hand, assuming any Wiggin will try and steal it will only encourage them. In this case, while we realize that a wiggin-like appearance is a risk factor for ketchup-theft, we must strive to treat them equally; only hiding our ketchup if we know they already steal (and we should do likewise to non-wiggins.)
What this proves is that you should take location into account when estimating the odds of a particular individual acting like a Wiggin.
Not necessarily. If race determines violent tendencies and intelligence, then, while he may well be unusually intelligent, we should still be wary of him attacking us. Furthermore, we should increase our probability that he is unusually stupid for a cardigan-wearing harvard-goer, and achieved that status by some other means than intelligence.
I'm pretty sure that admitting that, if racists were right, genocide would be justifiable, is a line of retreat. But then I already admitted that, so whatever. The problem is that you can't get from "I update my probability of a harvard degree downward when I learn that he's black" to "racists are right". You have to check if the environment is causing all or most of the differences.
Not entirely, since the environment where a particular Wiggin grew up, is affected by his parents' genes.
This makes a lot of assumptions about psychology that are not at all obvious. For example, it might be that if Wiggins have less opportunity to steal ketchup, fewer of them will do it and eventually the strength of the expectation itself will decrease.
Well, yes. I was simplifying for clarity.
The entire point of the example is that the assumption that they want to steal ketchup is what causes it. If you assume they will try (as evidenced by hiding the ketchup when you see them,) then they will conform to expectations by trying. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy of the purest sort.
To be honest, I just made this one up to have a third example, and also to show the level of self-reference possible. It's much less grounded in reality.
It could also mean that the link is weakened by different social conditions to different extents. It could be a selection effect on the kind of people who move to Vancouver.
In any case, even this statement has politically incorrect implications, namely that we shouldn't be considering Black/Ebonics culture as equal in value to mainstream culture.
By "caused by society" I was referring more to a lack of role models, higher likelihood of a low-income upbringing, alienation due to societal discrimination etc.
However, I would indeed claim that any culture that is encouraging violent tendencies and discouraging academic success should be improved by any means possible.
In that case the argument of yours I quoted in the parent is almost a complete non-sequitor.
How so? You claimed I was dissing "Black culture".
If the link varies amongst persons of the same race in differnt places, then it's not that much to do with race, is it? Would you predict that an African-American offspring of two college professors living in New England was a violent imbecile?
What do you mean by "race?" I notice a lot of discussion below on this topic already, but the term is unclear to me, and I don't see how anyone can usefully disagree or agree without this information. Some people use "race" to indicate loose groupings based around skin color, whereas others mean much more strictly a specific genetic group.
Incidentally, there is no canonical "race," just generally-agreed upon loose labels that vary from person to person. Because of this, it is generally not useful for predicting anything, and should be avoided, I think. A "white person" from Sicily and a "white person" from Iceland do not have much more in common with each other than they might with a disparate other range of people, so it's not a meaningful grouping (except perhaps when speaking of historical things). It is wiser to be more exact.
There's the additional danger that you will be misunderstood, and that someone will (very reasonably) think that you are advocating simple-minded racism of a common sort. Saying "race is a good predictor of things like civilization, intelligence," etc. is a fairly specific sort of social code, and if you don't actually mean that "black people are dumb" or "Asians can't drive," (and I'm not saying that you necessarily do) then you should find another sort of phrasing.
yes, "race" as normally used is woefully underdefined.
Woah there. To the extent you can agree on a test for race, it will be useful for prediction. Obviously some tests (actual genetic heritage) will be more interesting that others "lol what's ur skin color". As you say:
Yes, agree. Let's be specific enough so that we all agree which set of people we are talking about, and agree that that is a meaningful grouping. Then I think we will find that membership in that set will predict many things.
Saying that race is a good predictor of such things is roughly equivalent to saying "black people are dumb" or whatever (with suitable disclaimers of probabilisticness that really should not be needed on this site). Call that simple minded if you like; I'd rather be right than high-minded.
(and just-so it's clear, racially-based (or anything-based, really) hatred is stupid and unproductive. compassion is so much nicer.)
I would suggest that most people do have a common test for race. It is something along the lines of, "To what extent does this person match a small set of specific physical characteristics?" For someone to be "black" in many places in modern America, it means that their skin tone is relatively dark, their lips are big, their nose is wide, and so on. But of course, this tends to fall apart under close scrutiny, and is complicated by a lot of cultural baggage, like the fact that "white" is the default, so those of mixed-race are often identified with (or themselves choose to identify with) their minority identity. A prominent example is President Obama, who has few of the physical characteristics of the stereotypical "black" person. This is why it is a very sloppy and pretty useless label, and even though most people agree on a "test," it remains so.
Of course, it's absolutely better to be right. But it's very difficult to determine whether you are right or wrong without rigorous definition of your terms and inquiry. You think that race correlates with other traits, and I agree - but only with strong caveats and reservations, particularly when it comes to questions of causation. That's why I began by asking: what do you mean by "race"?
EDIT: You appear to be engaged in several other discussions along these lines, so please just let me know if you consider this one is too parallel to the others to be useful. It can be difficult to explain yourself to several people all at the same time, I know.
See this for my full opinion on all of this. Anything I said that contradicts that is deprecated.
The quick version of what I mean by "race" is those things that are both heritable and clustered with visible and genetic markers. Not exactly the classic definition of "race" because it includes memetic heritage as well as genetic.
I will reply there. Thank you.
I thought genes had something to do with race, but feel free to clarify.
Across cultures?
Currently unknown, since they are strongly correlated anyway; race is also a good predictor of cultures.
Not really. There are people of just about every race in just about every culture.
I show you a picture of an asian person (if you're good at distinguishing them, you notice they're of Japanese ethnicity, specifically) that you do not know, and it is obvious that I've photoshopped clothing, background, and other environmental visual cues that could reveal that person's culture. You only have their body frame and their face to work with.
What is your probability assignment that this person is of generic asian (japanese) culture, as opposed to any other culture (e.g. that of amazon hunter-gatherer tribes)? Is this probability equal to that for any other culture, as per an even-distribution hypothesis?
Look at the context. Racism only predicts violence and civilsiation inasmuch as it predicts culture, and culture predicts those things better--hell, you couldn't get a razor blade between culture and civilsiation. So why does Nyan_Sandwich call himself a proto-racist?
The primary observation is one of race. You can visually see that someone is of asian race. You cannot immediately ascertain a specific culture without first learning and recognizing in practice behaviors strongly associated with that culture.
e.g. If you don't know anything about japanese culture at all, you will not know that a person of japanese race who does not get upset when a stranger who is also japanese calls them by first name without honorifics is most likely not of typical japanese culture, nor will you understand why another does get upset in the same situation. Thus you cannot use their culture as a predictor, since you don't have any signals that tell you which culture they're part of. Race is much easier to use as a data point.
This is not obvious, nor does it follow trivially from any logical assertions I've seen yet. I've never seen claims either way backed by sufficient evidence to move my prior significantly in either direction.
Come on, man. Do you even probability?
If culture comes form acculturation , it doens't come from genes, and therefore has nothing significant to do with race. The statistical correlations you make so much of aren't worth making anything of unless they indicate mechanisms.
tell it to the statistics establishment. Methinks I can make better predictions using not-causally-explained statistics than I can without. For example, If I learn of a person who is black and american, I can predict that he is 5x (or whatever it is) more likely to be in prison. I can predict that he is more likely to be a part of that awful antisocial gansta culture.
Of course, if I then learn that at this very moment, he is wearing a cardigan, a lot of that goes away.
If you restrict yourself to causal models, you do very poorly. I might even be tempted to say "I guess you're fucked then"
I don't like this. Not sure why.
Could you clarify what you mean, here?
If you throw out information you have reason to believe is true but can't explain the mechanism for your model is more coherent but less powerful. Does that make sense?
No. How exactly are you defining a causal vs a statistical model? What I find confusing is in the Newtonian physics limit of what you can know, I don't think you can do better than a causal model, in some sense. I understand that it can happen that non-causal models can predict better if knowledge is not complete, I am just trying to find a way to state that formally.