Elund comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (724)
Well, speaking empirically, the phrase "race is a social construct" is pretty often followed by "therefore all races are the same in all important ways". "Social construct" implies an arbitrary choice -- our society decided to split humanity into races this way, but another society might do it in an entirely different way and all such ways are equally valid, which is to say, there are no underlying "real" differences.
It's not that it is a personal hobby-horse, it's just that I have some experience in watching similar conversations develop.
Supposing someone wanted to split humanity into arbitrary races based on actual genetics (which is not how the concept of race originally started because genetics wasn't known at the time), it would make sense for most races to be African, since Africa has far more human genetic diversity than all the other continents combined do. The reason races are delineated the way they are now is due to social reasons. (It could possibly make sense when you consider the phenotype though, but due to the outgroup homogeneity bias, I have some doubts.)
Still, regardless of where you set the boundaries between races, there will be average biological differences between them (provided you don't do something biologically ridiculous like classifying whites and Asians as the same race but then classifying their half-white/half-Asian children as a different race).
You're using a definition of "social construct" under which the word "heaps" is a social construct. Sure, given this definition race is a social construct, too, along with a rather long list of most everything. However I think your interpretation of "social construct" is atypical.