I never said race wasn't a useful concept. I specifically said in my earlier post: .

I'm not saying that "heap" and "race" are not useful terms. They do correlate with actual differences,

I think my initial post that started this discussion may have been a source of misunderstanding. When I called race a social construct, I wasn't trying to say that race is a useless concept, but instead indicate that it could be useful as a cultural/identity concept. Initially when I talked about "mixed race" and "Hispanic" not technically being races, I was defining race according to the mainstream definition that treats race as a genetically distinct group of people, since that is my default. However, during the part where I talked about how Hispanics are often treated as if they were a race, I was undergoing a shift toward thinking about race as a cultural identity regardless of genetics, which then led me to the statement that race is a social construct. I meant it in a similar way to what people mean when they say that gender is a social construct. When people say that, they're not implying that gender is a useless concept, but that it is a personal subjective choice of identity. Significantly, I then spent the rest of my post talking about race as a personal choice of identity.

The idea that gender is a social construct is a pretty uncontroversial one, as far as I can tell. People seem to be somewhat less likely to say the same thing about race though, probably because "race" as a cultural term doesn't have a satisfactory parallel term to refer to biology the way "gender" has "sex". It didn't matter for me in practice though. I thought of race as a social construct regardless of whether it was approached from a biological or cultural perspective, which is why I didn't feel a need to distinguish between the two in my statement. However, subsequent comments drawing attention to its biological validity (e.g. would doctors agree?) pushed me to address my point underlying my passive implication that the biological aspect is also a social construct, which then skews the discussion in a way that buries much of my original meaning. The social construction of race as a biological concept is not itself adequate to explain why I would support including non-genetic race answers to a race question, but the social construction of race as a subjective personal identity is.

Earlier I was wondering why my comments were getting downvoted. What could possibly be so controversial about the idea that human genetic variation is a continuum, or that linguistic terms are socially constructed? Now I can see that if these are interpreted as if they are supposed to be arguments in support of including non-genetic answers to a race question or a lack of average differences between races, they might seem like bad arguments, but I wasn’t intending them to support those premises, and I didn’t think that people would think I was intending them to.

If "heap" is a social construct, so is all language, basically, and then everything is a social construct. Sigh.

It is true that all language is socially constructed, but I was trying to draw attention to how "race" is especially subjective. Many linguistic terms are much more precise. A "species" for example refers to related individuals who reproduce among themselves, producing viable offspring. There is still some room for ambiguity, but it is less than what you get with "race". Besides, what's wrong with the idea that all language is socially constructed? It is possible to believe that without falling prey to the fallacy of grey.

Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a great big nuclear furnace.

I would personally prefer to use the term "better informed" rather than "more real". Hypothetically, if both theories turned out to be completely false, and supposing we learned of that but still had no idea what the actual truth was, it wouldn't be certain which of them is more "real", but it would be relatively clearer which one had stronger evidence supporting it at the time. To give a different example, if we knew that one of the two theories is 100% true but aren't told which one it is, it would be reasonable for us to think it is far more likely to be the theory based on scientific evidence (i.e. the theory that actually aligns with the scientific definition of a theory as being a coherent group of tested general propositions, commonly regarded as correct, that can be used as principles of explanation and prediction for a class of phenomena:).

I could still call certain things heaps even if I had a sharp definition of a heap.

Sorry, what I meant was, "Heaps as they are currently defined can be said to exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap." They can also be said to not exist because of vagueness in the definition of what precisely makes something a heap. However, it is extremely difficult if not impossible for any definition to have absolutely no ambiguity at all, and even if that was possible, language can still be considered a social construct in the sense that linguistic terms are constructed socially. Vague terms have an extra layer of social construction though, because rather than just giving a term to a phenomenon, they also introduce a simplification. This makes the constructed aspect more obvious. I guess I didn't word my above quote very well, since I didn't mention that the social construction of all language itself is also enough to make "heaps" a social construct.

There's definitely a political correctness problem concerning topics like income differences (they're pretty much the lowest anywhere in the first world), third-world immigrants and islam but YMMV. I'm not an expert on history or politics and tend to interact with the world from my comfortable bubble of a strict information diet especially as of late, but as far as I've gathered people are quite patriotic because of our short history as an independent nation. Both Sweden and Russia have historically been an obstacle in that regard and the more nationalist oriented people hold grudges on one level or another because of this reason.

The Finnish-Swedish minority tend to be privileged both in heritage and education and both learning the Swedish language and using it in service professions have been compulsory in Finland for quite some time. For example the Finnish-Swedish have their own quota in med school with easier entrance requirements because of less competition. Naturally this makes less well off people envious. There's significantly more racism against the Russians than the Swedish since Russia is still viewed as a military threat, and polls show this fear is increasing because of late developments in Ukraine and other flexing of Russia's military muscles.

The worst political correctness problems concern third world immigrants and refugees in my opinion, and anyone who brings up problems raised by some of them is very easily labeled a racist and politically crucified. There are problems like letting people in without being able to check their real age i.e. adults pretending to be children, not being able to drive them away when they commit multiple serious crimes, people living on government subsidies with no intention to work ever in their lives etc.

Well, Finland is next to Sweden which is notorious for taking political correctness to totalitarian levels.

Note that if it is a site for doctors from Finland then the 'N-word' use is still shocking but far less shocking than if it were in the United States.

You're probably right. In Finland the word can't be used in casual conversations with people you don't know well unless you want to be pigeonholed forever and using it publicly could definitely end a career. Many of our social norms seem to be borrowed from other cultures because of our desperate need to fit in to ensure survival.

The issue is whether there are genetically similar populations with some phenotype features which are important and significantly different from other populations. IQ is the classic example. We are talking here in purely biological terms.

There are certainly populations with higher within-population genetic similarity than between-population genetic similarity, and which differ significantly in IQ and other important phenotypic features. It presumably follows because of reductionism that most of those phenotypic differences, including those in IQ, are mostly biological; big differences in IQ are probably manifestations of differences in brains, and brains are biology. (I'm assuming the referents of "We are talking here in purely biological terms" are differences in IQ and other phenotypic features...?)

(Seems to me this issue too is pretty distant from the remark that kicked things off. It's hard for me to avoid the impression that "cut to the chase" really means "ride a personal hobby-horse" here.)

"No one" literally means exactly that.

"No one" doesn't literally mean "a number of people which is equal to zero".

Actually, it does. Literally.

It's no longer common (hence my surprise when someone does it) but it's not an utterly unfamiliar usage, either.

"No one" doesn't literally mean "a number of people which is equal to zero".

I reflected on that before I posted my comment. Here are my thoughts.

Even if I read "no one" as "a nonzero but negligible number of people", Azathoth123 is probably still wrong. I can name only one person who's said "black" to me with the meaning "South Asian" in mind, but then I've only met a tiny fraction of all Brits; chances are there are thousands of other people out there using the term in a similar way whom I just haven't met. That this was a relatively frequent usage before 1990 or so makes it all the more likely. (See also "Moslem", which has been almost wholly displaced by "Muslim" in everyday speech here, but which I hear (albeit not that often) from middle-aged and old people, quite often see in old books, and occasionally encounter in more recent texts by non-native writers of English, like this book.)

Moreover, it's a bit of a bad habit to write claims which are false when read straightforwardly & literally. It's better to avoid writing things which are only true if read generously, to minimize the risk of planting falsities in people's heads. Qualifiers are not expensive. (If you've ever wondered why I lean on adverbs like "relatively", "occasionally", "rarely", "mostly", "likely", "probably", "almost", "nearly", "hardly", and "presumably" as much as I do, you now know why.)

Moreover moreover, asserting not-quite-true things makes room for mischief. If you're arguing for some conclusion C which gets more convincing if your premise P is less qualified, there's a temptation to grab illicit rhetorical power by asserting P too strongly in a plausibly deniable way, gambling on no one noticing; and if someone does flag it, you can just say you weren't really asserting P in its bluntest form, even if that's literally what you did. (I am not saying Azathoth123 consciously did that here, not least because their conclusion — the social meaning of "race" isn't just about appearance — still mostly goes through if you appropriately weaken their premise. I just think this general phenomenon's another reason to take notice of false-as-literally-stated assertions.)