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Kawoomba comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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I was only responding to what you quoted, which is that "high levels of melanin in the skin lead to an immunity to sunburn". Immunity is - as could be expected - a poor choice of words and strictly speaking wrong, but "high degree of resilience / protection" would be valid.
That's the point of a fact-check - saying things that are strictly speaking true, rather than things that are strictly speaking wrong.
If you'll forgive me for quoting chapter and verse, "In argument strive for exact honesty, for the sake of others and also yourself: the part of yourself that distorts what you say to others also distorts your own thoughts."
One of life's crazy coincidences: I just at this very moment looked at that same page and took a quote from it for another comment I just now submitted, before reading yours.
That aside, my "strictly speaking wrong" was, unfortunately, also strictly speaking wrong. For example, the jargon "x gene variant confers a certain immunity versus y disease" is also in good use - otherwise the word "immunity" could never be used period. Vaccinations wouldn't be described by conferring immunity, when sometimes they just limit the extent of the infection to a subclinical level. So in some sense, "immunity to sunburn" isn't even wrong, strictly speaking, just an unfortunately chosen phrase in a forum such as this (which always checks for boundary cases and not for "true in a more general sense", a habit I myself indulge in too much).
I'd normally agree, but in this case CCC explicitly said “black people can't get sunburnt”.
OTOH, I only get sunburnt if I do something deliberate such as sunbathing for an hour around noon in July in Italy, and even then it's relatively mild, and I'm not quite black; I'd expect darker-skinned people to be even more resistant than that. So I'd say that whereas black people can get sunburnt in principle, for all practical purposes they can't. This is still a hell of an advantage compared to the pale northern Europeans I knew who got sunburned by walking around in November in Ireland.