When a race delivers quantitative metrics that beats other races out of the water, what does it mean? When black people dominate in basketball and athletics does it mean their race is genetically and physically superior to others? When asians dominate academically does it mean asians are genetically more intelligent?
I don't know the answer to these questions. It may be that asians just work harder... but I do know one thing: All races are NOT equal. Political correctness states that although races look different, all races are otherwise equal. Although this idea permeates the cultural reality of the United States, there is no logical universe where this makes sense. If races look different, then the possibility of other metrics being different is a logical induction.
What does this mean? The implications are scary. Historical mistreatment of black people have made this concept a very touchy issue in the united states.
While it is of my personal opinion that asians are academically successful mainly due to hard work, I do believe that the heart of the issue that articles like this discuss is this: We live in a culture where we are taught that all races are equal, this is not the logical reality and subconsciously we all know it. It's what causes the discrimination in the first place and it's what causes defensive comments like this to be posted.
If we want to be all philosophical about it we'd say that people of all races must be equal under the law or that they are all endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights or something like that.
So... the opposite of affirmative actions, right?
This doesn't follow. It becomes more clear why if you put it in more abstract terms. Take a bunch of balls, half red, half blue. Now assume some half of these balls are heavy (say 10lbs) and some half are light (say 2 lbs). Assume the balls have a bunch of other characteristics this way. Now what you're saying is that if we know a ball is e.g. Red, we can conclude something about the probability that it's e.g. heavy. Clearly that's not the case, why would it be? Unless you just assume a priori that the characteristics are distributed in a way that's correlated with ball color, there's no reason we should think there's an association between color and e.g. weight.
In the abstract universe I'm referring to, imagine a bunch of balls and cubes. The balls have no sides and the cubes have six. We live in a culture that says this is the only difference between balls and cubes, otherwise balls and cubes are completely equal. This statement is not true, because balls can roll down a hill faster than cubes.
Outside of the world of mathematics words are used to refer to a fuzzy category of traits. If one trait in this category is different from another category then the possibility exists that another trait is also different, inductively speaking.
Yeah but that's because ability to roll down is directly caused by the observable geometry. They are just different properties of the same trait. Skin tone or facial structure cannot cause someone to be intelligent. If you flattened the sides of the round balls, they'd be just as slow. But imagine there's some new way to painlessly crush people's faces into different racial-typical shapes and change the color of their skin to some racial-typical tone. Would this cause their intelligence to change? Obviously not. So how is this different than people with different physical characteristics from birth?
Race categorizations are made by humans according to how people look. From wikipedia's definition "Race, as a social construct, is a group of people who share similar and distinct physical characteristics." You're saying that these physical characteristics somehow also indicate how people behave (outside of social conditioning). There is really no reason to conclude that.
I think this wiki section on race along with the sources mentioned are useful here.
>There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined.[22][23][24][25][26][27] Nonetheless, some scholars argue that racial categories obviously correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree, and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason, there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)#Co...
That's because skin color and facial features are directly caused by the DNA. They are just different manifestations of the same trait. DNA is also known to correlate with intelligence. Just like flattening round balls will make them slower, picking embryos with gene combinations known to correlate with higher intelligence will cause the resulting humans to have higher intelligence on average. But imagine if genes responsible for genes correlated with higher intelligence occured million times as often among genotypes of white people than among genotypes of black people. Would then picking embryos based on skin color genes instead of intelligence genes themselves produced more (on average) intelligent people? Obviously yes.
I don't really know whether intelligence genes actually occur more often among white people. I just want to point out that if it's so, it's not skin color that causes people to be more or less intelligent. It's their DNA.
But not with race. You can't tell which race someone is by their DNA, because, and here's the key point I think people are missing, race is a social construct based on appearance, not a biological reality.
>picking embryos with gene combinations known to correlate with higher intelligence will cause the resulting humans to have higher intelligence on average. But imagine if genes correlated with higher intelligence occurred million times as often among genotypes of white people than among genotypes of black people. Would then picking embryos based on skin color genes instead of intelligence genes themselves produced more (on average) intelligent people? Obviously yes.
Sure, if you assume from the start that skin color genes are correlated with intelligence genes then it follows that skin color is correlated with intelligence. I'm saying there's no reason to make that assumption to begin with.
DNA obviously correlates with race. What do you think makes the skin color of black-skinned people black? Or are you claiming skin color doesn't correlate with self-identifying as black, or being identified as black by the rest of the society?
> You can't tell which race someone is by their DNA, because (...) race is a social construct based on appearance, not a biological reality.
So is gender. However, the biological reality is that you can tell which gender someone self-identfies with by their DNA correctly at least 99 times out of 100. How hard it is to believe you can do at least as well (success rate >0.99) with race self-identification? As a data point, some people claim they can do it, and would bet their lifes on results. http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-01/ps_dna
> Sure, if you assume from the start that skin color genes are correlated with intelligence genes then it follows that skin color is correlated with intelligence. I'm saying there's no reason to make that assumption to begin with.
Nobody makes this assumption, though (well, except for the sake of argument). There's no reason to assume the opposite either. Science works by formulating a hypothesis and testing it.
Black people will have darker skin AND frizzy hair. Asians have asian eyes AND black hair. This is proof that traits are inherited in collective groups.
You are stating by certain magic these collections of physical traits that describe an asian or a caucasian magically only correlate with other physical traits. So in a sense, for asians: Black hair correlates with asian eyes but these traits can absolutely never ever correlate with anything related to intelligence and behavior.
What is the mechanism in genetics that deliberately demarcates physical traits from behavioral traits? What causes social traits to be totally random while physical traits come correlated with one another? I think it is more logical to conclude that there is no mechanism that does this.
Please note that I am well versed in the theory you present. It is often used as a scientific basis for racial equality. I agree with the intent of the theory but I disagree with it as a practical truth. Life is just unfair. Anyway, the theory does address a valid point but here's why I think it's wrong:
I think searching for genetic markers at the molecular level doesn't yield results because behavioral and physical traits are abstractions on top of DNA.
Imagine two programs, one written in C++, the other in Haskell. Both programs have the same behavior... let's say they both return the derivative of an expression. If you analyze the source code for correlations without completely understanding it (largely the way we analyze DNA today) you will find that the languages are completely uncorrelated. Both are totally different in style, structure and syntax. This occurs even though the surface behavior (finding the derivative of an expression) is exactly identical. This is what I believe is happening with the DNA. You cannot find correlations with race because the correlations only occur at a higher level of abstraction not in the source code.
No one thinks all races are equal in a genetic sense, it is obvious they are different.
They should be 'treated' equally is the thing we are taught. We all have our unique genetic advantages and disadvantages, but there shouldn't be social disadvantage based on genetics. It is good we are taught this, because it requires social change.
Also to answer your points directly, they do not at all suggest races are not equal. "Asian" isn't a race, and "Working harder" is a cultural/social quality not a genetic quality. Same with black people dominating basketball, could just as easily be explained with social qualities rather than genetic. Really you have presented weak hypothesises in the form of rhetorical questions.
Otherwise, by your same reasoning: White men people are genetically superior at leading, running companies, space travel, research, etc... Where as the truth, I suspect, lies in the context of their social situation, not their race.
I don't find that at all obvious.
But I also think that's probably less of a fact than you think, depending on what you mean by it. There are certainly some people identified as being 'Caucasian' who have darker skin than some people identified as 'African', for instance.
That is literally off the top of my head. There's much more in The Ten Thousand Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending. I regret I haven't read it but the reviews were good. If you're interested in this any good human genetics textbook will do.
As a reality check on human diversity just remember the only species with more diversity in size and morphology are dogs.
By my line of reasoning superior skill in leading is a genetic possibility. You suspect the truth lies in the context of the social situation but can you prove it? Can you prove it either way? Without more evidence and from a neutral perspective both situations have roughly equal probability of being true.
My argument is that it is this cultural attitude of equality that makes us point to the social context rather than the genetic context when empirically speaking we don't know either way.
>"Working harder" is a cultural/social quality not a genetic quality. Same with black people dominating basketball, could just as easily be explained with social qualities rather than genetic. Really you have presented weak hypothesises in the form of rhetorical questions.
You really think black people dominating in the olympics and basketball and athletics in general isn't genetic? I can't prove it but this is something that's kind of intuitively obvious.
Here's an example of how genetics can influence how hard an organism works: Compare the busy bee with the sloth. Which one works harder? If genetics can influence how hard animals work, what magic makes it not touch how hard human races work or how intelligent they are? Can you prove it either way?
>They should be 'treated' equally is the thing we are taught. We all have our unique genetic advantages and disadvantages, but there shouldn't be social disadvantage based on genetics. It is good we are taught this, because it requires social change.
What makes this "hypotheses" true? You're saying all races magically have genetic strengths and weakness perfectly balanced the same way zergs, terran and protoss are balanced in starcraft? Tell me, what magical hand is enforcing this balance? Blizzard? Keep in mind, genetics is intrinsically linked with social behavior, it is not exclusively tied to just physical traits.
I agree with you, that there may be genetic dispositions to things, I don't know what they are, but it seems logical. The problem is such a public notion isn't pragmatic.
Reality or not, humans can't handle it. So we're equal. Maybe you can handle it, I think I can handle it, I think my friends can handle it. I don't think the human race can handle it. We're equal.
That being said, posting a topic on genetic or racial superiority tends trigger extreme reactive responses in people. Under normal circumstances I would have been voted down and attacked by multiple negative comments remarking about my character. Nobody would have tried to understand my logical view point and they usually automatically dismiss me as racist.
You'll note that none of that is happening in this thread. A lot of people are quite accepting of this idea or addressing the issue in a friendly way despite the controversial nature.
It is because I had to spend deliberate effort to craft the language and structure of the post to present truths in a way that is self evident and extremely unhostile. So while I believe there is really no need to pull humanity out of this delusion of total racial equality... in a sense this thread is proof that the world can probably handle the truth... you just need to present the view in the right light.
I think this article is showing that Asians are tired of unfairly paying the cost of that affirmative action, with college being a zero sum game.
The 1 billion global number is not relevant because both the titles of the article and the post submission are about "U.S. minority" and not "global minority". The asian population at 4.8% of the USA is mathematically a minority.
>Trying to micro-categorize who is a minority in what context has to qualify as some sort of vanity.
The minority classification isn't about vanity in this case. The article isn't about Asians not represented as masculine leading actors in Western films or paraded as a prized husband-to-be for girls in The Bachelor. It's about admissions to Ivy League schools which has economic consequences. Minorities are complaining about unfairness (real and/or perceived).
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise...
Technical discrimination and preference heuristics (Racism) is the default function of the mind. That this crosses over from thought to action in the form of policy is a function of our social systems, like everything else.
It can't be solved with the wetware we have, it's a feature not a bug.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?_...