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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there.

> But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian...

It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit?

> If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be racists?

Yes. If we were all precisely the same skin color they'd find other ways to put people down. Your "Jewish" nose. Your "nappy" hair. Color's just the tip of the ice-berg.

Some people are perceived as being inferior because that's what some elements in society need them to be in order to advance their own social standing.

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>Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17342877

>It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit?

First of all, I don't think it is appropriate to classify "Japanese" or "Inuit" as races. Race is a more general concept.

Anyway, Japanese and Inuit are easy to distinguish. Middle Eastern and European are better examples. If you take one European person and one Middle Eastern person it would be hard to differentiate them, if you take two groups of one hundred people it would be easy.

Really depends on the European though... Europe is an extremely diverse continent despite its relatively small size.

It's still pretty big: https://twitter.com/mariachong/status/918553777031954432

That link about vocal characteristics is only relevant when talking about huge populations. On an individual basis it's meaningless, there's just too much variation. You need samples of a thousand or more to develop a picture. Where biological differences do exist that might affect intonation in a particular dialect, but not when soemeone was raised with a different dialect or intonation.

Now if "Japanese" isn't a race then nothing is. The vast majority of Japanese are identifiable on a genetic level due to the relative isolation of the country. Same goes for Inuit who were geographically and culturally isolated.

> Middle Eastern and European are better examples.

If you're talking some stereotypically Polish person compared to some stereotypically Arabic person from Egypt, obviously, but there's cases where ordinary Turkish people look more "European" than some groups of Europeans do.

The bell curve on these things is just too wide, there's nothing but overlap in all but the most extreme fringes.

>That link about vocal characteristics is only relevant when talking about huge populations. On an individual basis it's meaningless, there's just too much variation.

If we are talking about white/black voice difference, then it is meaningful.

>Now if "Japanese" isn't a race then nothing is. The vast majority of Japanese are identifiable on a genetic level due to the relative isolation of the country.

Race is just a more broad concept than an ethnic group, that's what I mean.

>If you're talking some stereotypically Polish person compared to some stereotypically Arabic person from Egypt, obviously, but there's cases where ordinary Turkish people look more "European" than some groups of Europeans do.

That's what I meant when I said that it would be easier if you take groups 100 hundred people, it averages out. And yeah, Europeans and Arabs are white, so there is little difference between them.

>The bell curve on these things is just too wide, there's nothing but overlap in all but the most extreme fringes.

Yes, "cline" is a better description than "race" but it is not as useful in daily life as "race" is.

Uh, voice? That seems dubious.

No, that's not dubious.

Rick Astley, most famous for the internet meme of Rick Rolling, had trouble getting taken seriously at first because everyone thought his (first?) song "Never gonna give you up" was sung by a black guy. They could not believe it was really the voice of some skinny, pasty white guy. It sounds black to most people.

I participated in a poorly designed pysch study in college in which they played a tape of a discussion and told us the white speaker was black and the black speaker was white. Participants in the study were not fooled by this. The black guy sounded like Rick Astley, for lack of a better explanation. We all knew we were being lied to. Switching the labels fooled no one.

It isn't a perfect indicator of race. But, yes, there are voice differences that have nothing to do with vernacular speech habits.

Can you provide a link to any? I'm drawing a blank; the (high level pop science writing) consensus appears to be that while there are obviously powerful ethnolinguistic features, what limited evidence there is for inter-racial physiological voice features is swamped by the evidence for intra-racial vocal differences.

It might be tricky to de-confound the ethnolinguistic stuff from the physiological stuff, because some of the ethnolinguistic markers are subtle.

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-an-African-American-persons-v...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_profiling

https://io9.gizmodo.com/5928125/do-people-of-different-races...

Of course, it is a bit like differences in height for the genders: while men are, on average, taller than women, there is overlap in height as well as statistical outliers (so, no, you cannot definitively say "They are x height, so I can confidently assert their gender"). But there is some evidence that a) average or typical physiological differences between ethnicities influence voice sound and b) people who have zero training can pick up on these differences.

Granted that race, itself, is a somewhat nebulous human construct or mental model that often groups people together somewhat arbitrarily for sociocultural reasons having little or nothing to do with DNA.

Differences in averages of 5-10% are pretty marginal when you consider the standard deviation on this sort of thing is going to be 50% or more.

You'd be better able to predict someone's physical size from their voice than anything else, but even then it's a guess. I've known very big people with unusually high-pitched voices, plus small women with surprisingly deep voices. It's all over the place.

And, yet, most of the time, most people can fairly readily infer gender based on voice alone.

I know it isn't politically correct to talk about any differences at all between ethnicities or even genders. The PC thing at the moment seems to be that "all such differences are social construct." So, it would probably be wise for me to just walk away here as a lot of people will assume I am a racist trying to justify racism. And this isn't some kind of hill I care to die on.

Those links all demonstrate that you can make an educated guess about ethnicity from the sound of someone else speaking, but don't establish that you can use physiologically-determined elements of someone's voice as a cue to infer their race.

This is the original statement being dismissed that I am agreeing with:

But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian based on facial features or voice.

Put another way, you could describe that in your words: you can make an educated guess about ethnicity from the sound of someone else speaking.

I have already allowed that race is a nebulous social construct at best. I don't know what your point is. You stating that we can't yet prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these differences are purely physiological in origin is not really a rebuttal.

There is no real way to readily separate something like voice from things like lifestyle and socioeconomic class. Similarly, on average, men are taller than women. We could argue about how much of that is actually genetic and whether or not there is some culturally determined stunting of women going on globally, but it doesn't change the measurable average height difference between the genders as a group.

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