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Lumifer comments on Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December - Less Wrong
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When the relevant experts, Anthropologists, say that the concept of race is a social construct with no basis in biological fact they aren't just bowing to some ivory tower overlord of political correctness. We would do well to consider their expertise as a starting point in any such inquiry.
Start anywhere on a map of the Eastern Hemisphere and trace what the people look like in any geographic area relative to the regions beside them and then consider why the term "race" has any meaning. sami, swede, finn, rus, tatar, khazak, turk, kurd, arab, berber, ethiopian, tutu. Or Han, mongol, uiger, kyrgir, uzbek, khazak, pashtun, persian, punjabi, hindi, bangali, burmese, thai, javanese, dayak. Where exactly do you parse the line of Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid? And why?
Historically, in the cultures from which our culture was derived, skin color, and later eyelid morphology, has been used to define three races (conveniently ignoring the pacific ocean and western hemisphere), for no reason other than the biases of the people in those cultures. If you actually look at facial structure (and why not, no less arbitrary) you'll find the people of the horn of africa have more in common with central european populations in terms of nose and lip shape than they do with more inland African populations. It is our bias to see skin color as more relevant than nose morphology that causes us to group Ethiopians with Hottentots and Biafrans as a single race. We could just as easily group them with Arabs, Berbers, and Kurds. An albino from the Indian subcontinent could claim without fear of contradiction to be an albino of just about any heritage in south asia or europe. Burmese and Japanese have vastly different average skin color but we arbitrarily group them together because of eyelid morphology.
So your question becomes "If different people..." to which the answer is: Of course.
The question you think you are asking, I think, is best rendered "Are those morphological features our modern society arbitrarily associates with membership in three arbitrary sets of humanity also associated with specific brain variations?" Which is exactly as arbitrary a question as "Is foot length/ back hair/ bilateral kidney symmetry associated with specific brain variations."
And how do you know that? Social science academics are very skewed politically.
I don't think AmagicalFishy specified the number of races. In common usage "race" is a fuzzy term and the number of races has historically varied from two (us and barbarians) to the traditional European four (white, black, yellow, and red) to many.
It might be useful to taboo "race" in this discussion. The question then becomes "Do genetically similar large groups of people have different distributions/frequencies/averages of certain qualities of interest?" and the answer is, of course, "Depends on what you're interested in, but often yes".
For example, IQ tests have been administered to a lot of people of different genetic backgrounds and of different cultures. The picture is diverse, but there are clear patterns.
"Social science academics are very skewed politically." So shall we discount any concept of expertise based solely on our biases towards the suspected biases of others based on their reported political affiliations? I don't have the time to get my own PhD in every subject. I don't claim they have the gospel truth, but, as I said, it's a good place to start, from which a cursory examination of geographic population variations pretty much puts the the idea of race to bed with very short work.
Tabooing race, I think your paraphrasing doesn't quite capture his question, because inherent in the use of "race" is not simply "genetically similar" but rather the specific arbitrary morphological features traditionally used to define race. Greenland Inuits are further removed genetically from Siberians than Somalis are from Yemenis, yet a photo line-up would be greatly skewed in favor of the former being of the same race and the latter being of different races.
As to the entirely separate question of validity of IQ testing (leaving aside whether IQ captures a genetically-mediated aspect of intelligence), I am not an expert in the field of cognitive science or psychology but I am aware of significant expert-level controversy over the reliability and validity of their application cross-culturally in the past and present, and would therefore be even more hesitant, selective, and dependent upon expert review of study methodology than I generally am before I wholeheartedly accepted a published finding as established fact.
I don't know about concept of expertise, but yes, I will certainly discount (which is different from discard) politically charged conclusions by those biased others. Incentives matter and publishing politically incorrect results is usually a career-damaging move. Especially if you don't have tenure when it could easily be a career-ending move.
I disagree, but in the sphere of rights I generally favour colour-blind solutions. So, sure, lets' put the idea of race to bed and start with killing affirmative action. You're good with that?
They are not "arbitrary", of course, but who are you arguing against? If your point is that popular usage of the word "race" is fuzzy and not rigorous, sure, but no one contests that. I think that the real point of this conversation is about useful classifications of people and, in particular, about the real underlying differences between large genetically similar groups of people.
I am not so sure of that. Have you actually seem Somalis? They do not look like the stereotypical African blacks at all.
One of the big ideas underlying the culture of this site is that truth is not necessarily binary and that you can change your beliefs in whether something is true by degrees instead of oscillating between "this is a complete nonsense" and "this is obviously correct".
You don't need to "wholeheartedly accept", but you should update, to use a local expression.
You say this as if someone who thinks common notions of "race" don't correspond to any biological reality ought to be happy to "start with killing affirmative action", and are convicted of inconsistency if not. It seems to me that that's wrong for at least two reasons.
First: "start with". Someone might very reasonably hold that all forms of racial discrimination are bad but that it would be a terrible idea to start by killing affirmative action. (E.g., because the people that would help are, on the whole, less in need of help than the people who would be helped by addressing other kinds of racial discrimination. Same principle as donating to malaria-net charities rather than saving cute puppies with unpleasant diseases in rich countries.)
Second: I don't in fact see any way to get from "race is biologically unreal" to "there should be no discrimination on the basis of race". What it does get you to is something like "there should be no discrimination on the basis of alleged racial superiorities or inferiorities". But it leaves entirely alone possibilities like these: (1) Membership of race X is basically equivalent to membership of culture X, which has traditions that make its members much better or much worse prospective employees; so when you have to make a hiring decision on limited information you should take account of (non-)membership of race X. (2) There has for years been discrimination in favour of / against members of race Y on the basis of that race's alleged superiority or inferiority, and you now want to correct this injustice; so you institute preferential treatment that goes the other way. (3) Members of race Z are systematically mistreated in ways that make them perform worse in school and university, which means that if treated well by an employer they are likely to outperform members of other races whose examination results are similar.
I think there is in fact no reason why thinking that "the idea of race" is all wrong should lead to wanting to kill affirmative action.
Affirmative action is racial discrimination, in a very blatant way.
If you believe that race is just an arbitrary label, there is no particular reason to provide affirmative action to people with the label "black", but not, say, to people with the label "inbred redneck from the boondocks".
I don't quite understand you here.
Your possibilities, by the way, are all testable.
To quote Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court John Roberts, "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Nothing I said either explicitly denies nor implicitly contradicts that. If you think otherwise, I've failed to communicate; could you let me know what gives you that impression, so that I can clarify?
I'll make a first attempt at clarifying right now, just in case it helps. Suppose you're arguing that Saudi Arabia should improve its religious tolerance, and someone points to an obscure case where someone in Saudi Arabia somehow managed to discriminate against Muslims and says "yeah, let's improve religious tolerance; we'll start by fighting discrimination against Muslims". Discrimination against Muslims is religious intolerance, but making it a priority in Saudi Arabia would be nuts because most religious intolerance in Saudi Arabia is of a very different sort.
I am suggesting that someone might reasonably think that "yeah, let's reduce racial discrimination in the US; we'll start by getting rid of affirmative action" is a bit like "yeah, let's reduce religious intolerance in Saudi Arabia; we'll start by getting rid of discrimination against Muslims".
(Would they be right? I don't know. Perhaps they underestimate the scope of affirmative action or overestimate the amount and impact of other racial discrimination in the US. But I don't think they'd be crazy.)
Your argument (in so far as you made one) appears to rely on the idea that if someone holds that "race" as generally understood is a biological unreality, then they should think there should be no discrimination on the basis of "race" as generally understood. I think that idea is incorrect; someone might hold the first of those positions but not the second, because discrimination on the basis of "race" as generally understood doesn't need to be based on (real or imagined) biological differences between "races". I gave some examples of kinds of discrimination with other bases.
Good.
First: thinking that "the idea of race" is all wrong is not the same thing as wanting to stop discrimination on the basis of race.
(In two ways. 1: one of those things is an opinion about matters of fact, or possibly definition; the second is a preference about what happens; the two obviously can't be the same. 2: someone opposed to racial discrimination may none the less prefer a combination of two opposed discriminations that kinda-sorta cancels out a bit, to just one of the two, even if their ideal would be to have neither.)
Second: although "the way to stop X is to stop X" sounds obviously right, if it's meant as more than a tautology -- if it means "the most effective way to make X go away is always to find instances of X that we are perpetrating and stop them" -- then I think it's incorrect. Suppose most X, or the worst X, is being done by other people; then your most effective way of addressing it may be to go after those other people.
Let me lay out my line of thinking.
I am assuming that since you... um, that's going to be confusing so let's invoke Alice instead -- so, I'm assuming that Alice believes that race is a social construct with no underlying biological reality and would like this construct to go away -- the ideal is an entirely colour-blind world.
Given that racial discrimination is bad, Alice would want to get rid of all forms of it, including affirmative action. What makes affirmative action special? The fact that the full force of the state is behind it. That's a rather important point: the government explicitly discriminates by race and if you get in its way, you're are likely to be steamrolled.
Wouldn't you want to start by eliminating the discrimination which the state imposes?
Another issue is values (= optimisation criteria). If Alice's goal is to end racial discrimination, Alice probably just want to eliminate it wherever you find it. But if Alice's goals are more diverse and she is predominantly concerned about other things like, say, electability, or social justice, or money, or cultural domination, etc. etc. then she'll be guided by these goals and ending racial discrimination becomes mostly instrumental. And in such a case it becomes just another social mechanism to tinker with and I start to suspect that Alice will tolerate racial discrimination if it furthers her other overarching goals.
I don't hold that position, for race can clearly be a proxy for culture and people love to discriminate on the basis of culture.
My position is that if race has no biological underpinnings and is an arbitrary label, then it's just one in a long line of such labels and I'm not sure what makes it special. Social labels are also amenable to change with the implication that proper social-engineering efforts can (and some people will say that they should) mold the race concept into whatever shape the engineers desire.
Robert's specific meaning was, I think, that at this point in time you do not fix past racial discrimination (slavery and pre-Civil Rights era) by institutionalising a reverse form of racism. If you want to get to the point where race doesn't matter, you need to stop making the race matter because it literally prevents you from getting to your goal. I don't think he was making any claims about "the most effective way" or anything like that.
That seems to me to be assuming more than is actually called for here, but never mind.
If that means that Alice's ideal world would have no racial discrimination anywhere ever (and, in particular, no affirmative action) then yes, I agree, she would. If it means that given any hypothetical world she would consider removing affirmative action from it an improvement then no, I don't see any reason why that should be her position.
Affirmative action generally takes the form of preferential hiring or enrollment practices by employers and educators. It has "the full force of the state" behind it only in that it's generally government departments and state-run universities that do it. It's not like you're going to have the US military mounting a shock-and-awe campaign against your house if you speak out against it.
It seems to me that there are other things that distinguish affirmative action from most other forms of racial discrimination.
Do these really make a difference? Good question. But you can't possibly argue in good faith against affirmative action while pretending they aren't there, which is what you seem to be doing so far.
OK. It looked to me as if some position along those lines was the most likely justification for the inference you seemed to want to foist on Usul.
In regard to affirmative action? What makes it special is the fact that people have been discriminating on the basis of race for years and years, and often still do.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not myself claiming that race is an arbitrary label; I'm not sure Usul would either, but you'd have to ask him. But even if it were the fact of past and present discrimination on the basis of that arbitrary label would be a sufficient explanation (though not necessarily a justification) of the existence of affirmative action.
It's too late to fix anything that happened in the past. It might not be too late to fix some of its residual effects. And it's not as if racism (of the usual anti-black sort) stopped when the "Civil Rights era" began. The stuff affirmative action advocates hope to counterbalance isn't all decades ago -- some of it is still happening now.
It is clearly true that if there is a path to a world where race simply doesn't matter, then it needs to end up with race simply not mattering, and that will mean no affirmative action. But that doesn't mean that the best available path to such a world begins with ending affirmative action.
(Again, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that in fact there is any way to get such a world, nor that it would be a good world if we did. The question is: if someone wants a colour-blind world but doesn't agree that we should start by ending affirmative action, does that indicate hypocrisy?)
Oh, boy! Why in the world would anyone think this is a good justification for anything? And you see the problems, as you say
How intending to do something which is a bad idea is a good thing? Moreover, the whole concept of counterbalancing unfairness elsewhere by introducing new unfairness... let's say it has deficiencies :-/
So the Affirmative Actor is an idiot. I can agree with that, but I am not sure that you want to come to that conclusion.
In general, I'm not pretending that reasons to support affirmative action do not exist. But I shortcut to the balance and I find the balance wanting.
Yup. And the same is true about height. And conventional prettiness. And being disfigured in some way. And just being weird. And not coming from this village, but from that village over the ridge. So what's special about race, again?
As you know, I believe that blacks' average IQ is lower that that of whites by about a standard deviation. That is quite sufficient for many (probably most) people to call me a racist and point to me as exhibit A that racism still exists and needs programs like affirmative action to combat it.
Of course there is a slight problem in that if my belief is true, affirmative action (and similar attempts at forced equalisation of outcomes) can never reach its goals and so will remain in place forever.
"So, sure, lets' put the idea of race to bed and start with killing affirmative action. You're good with that?"
This is the point where I say "politics is the mind killer" and discount all of your politically charged conclusions, then?
"Have you actually seem Somalis? They do not look like the stereotypical African blacks at all."
My point exactly. Yet they are universally considered "black" by people in your and my culture because of the arbitrary (which word I do mean quite literally) choice to see skin color as one of the two supremely defining qualities by which we "know" race. If certain facial features were (just as arbitrarily) selected, Somalis would be in the same race as Samis.
Another example: By standards of race, Native Australians are morphologically black (show an unlabeled photo of a black haired Aboriginal to a North American- he will say "black" if asked to assign a race) as are Kalahari Bushmen. I can not think of two more genetically divergent populations. Yes, human genetic diversity exists. However, current ideas of race have so little genetic basis as to be useless, and are mired in bias and produce bias in our modern thinking (mine, too). It is foolish to cling to the primitive beliefs of your ancestors to address problems or inquiries in the modern world.
I use the term "wholehearted accept" in the context of isolated scientific findings. In other words: do I accept that this individual study proves or significantly suggests that it says what it's authors say it does? I have expertise in perhaps 5-6 highly specific areas of study to the extent that I can competently evaluate the merits of published research on my own. Outside of those areas I would be a fool to think I could do so without some recourse to expert analysis to explain the minutia that only years of experience can bring. Otherwise I might as well join the young earthers and anti-vaccinationists.
Not necessarily, but I'm curious whether you're willing to chomp down on bullets.
I am not particularly attached to the strawful "popular" ideas of race that you are so fond of skewering. But are you willing to admit that large groups of humans can be significantly different on the "genetic basis"?
The issue is bias, incentives, credibility, trust. "Some recourse" is different from "defer to the experts whatever they say". I am not a fan of high-priesthood treatment of science.