Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December

Bound_up

The most recent post in December's Stupid Questions article is from the 11th.

I suppose as the article's been pushed further down the list of new articles, it's had less exposure, so here's another one for the rest of December.

Plus I have a few questions, so I'll get it kicked off.

It was said in the last one, and it's good advice, I think:

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

The most recent post in December's Stupid Questions article is from the 11th.

I suppose as the article's been pushed further down the list of new articles, it's had less exposure, so here's another one for the rest of December.

Plus I have a few questions, so I'll get it kicked off.

It was said in the last one, and it's good advice, I think:

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

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 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.

pretty much puts the the idea of race to bed with very short work

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?

inherent in the use of "race" is not simply "genetically similar" but rather the specific arbitrary morphological features

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.

...Somalis are from Yemenis, yet a photo line-up...

I am not so sure of that. Have you actually seem Somalis? They do not look like the stereotypical African blacks at all.

before I wholeheartedly accepted

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.

let's put the idea of race to bed and start with killing affirmative action

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... (read more)

0Usul10y

"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.

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Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December

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Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December

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