Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black? | Hacker News Reader

Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?

bbc.co.uk

120 pointstrustfundbaby88 comments

This seems to confuse two different issues and in doing so leads to the wrong conclusion.

The author seems to conclude it's wrong to think race is responsible for so many 100m winners being black because the assumption is erroneous. But only through making and testing that erroneous assumption (as the author did) are we able to determine it has nothing to do with skin color and more to do with a specific geographical heritage. So I disagree with the author on that point.

He then tries to tie that to a study that shows "black names" on resumes are 50% less likely to get call backs from potential employers. But those employers who discriminate are making an assumption they've clearly not tested (that people are worse employees based on their skin color)

So the real issue here is people who don't test their conclusions and there's nothing wrong with drawing an initial conclusion as long as you test it against actual facts.

I'm trying to understand the relevance of the point you're making. While your point is true, it seems largely technical and irrelevant to real world actions. It's not like your average person will out and do a test to see if their biases have a real world basis. The more practical takeaway is that we should attempt to not form these biases in the first place.

>While your point is true, it seems largely technical and irrelevant to real world actions.

Hah! I think you're describing about 80% of content of sites like HN ;).

A bias is defined as a conclusion that is held unfairly. The only way to determine if a conclusion is held unfairly is to evaluate it and evaluating a conclusion requires drawing that conclusion in the first place.

The relevance is the author is saying "Don't draw race based conclusions because they are unfair by definition". But if you prevent yourself from drawing the conclusion you can't evaluate it.

Put in more human terms: People who are afraid of being called racist can't be intellectually honest.

Also, just to make the point, racism tends to flourish when people who aren't racist avoid such questions. Right now the most potent rallying point for racists is "The government doesn't want you to know white people are superior". This claim seems to hold weight to people because most scientists are afraid to do race based studies. So by not disproving the racists assumption we actually strengthen it.

There's a distinction between drawing a conclusion (and thus acting on it) and noticing a possible trend that can be investigated further. One is asking a question, one is answering it. If you draw the conclusion you've already assumed an answer. This is where the danger is. People who form biases are assuming the answer without the supporting evidence.

To address your second point: As a natural scientist (as in endlessly curious) I often wonder about genetic differences in racist and how they effect outward traits. From a public policy perspective, I totally understand why most scientists and government officials wouldn't touch those questions with a 10 foot pole. There is just far more potential for negative consequences than positives.

The author's main point is that racism manifests not just as the (probably unconcious) belief that black people are inferior, but also in the (definitely unconcious) assumption that they are all the same. I'd heard about the CV study before, but not its most interesting finding (which supports the author's point): that the rate of responses for "high quality" CVs with "black names" was just as low as for "low quality" CVs with such names.

This is the thing missing in the violent debate about studies showing that black people have a lower average IQ: even if it's true, any specific individual (or even specific sub-group) may still have a very high IQ and deserve respect and success just as much as a non-black person with such a high IQ.

That's a poorly written/reasoned article.

Draw a set of circles. The big one is all humans. The little one is 100m finalists.

Outside the finalists, you're drawing two concentric circles. The smaller of the two is Nandi. The larger is sub-Saharan Africans, or what much of the world refers to as "black".

First: yes, all 100m winners are "black". More specifically, they're among the better Nandi runners. But as we're noting, Nandis are a proper subset of sub-Saharan Africans, or blacks. So ... yes, the first inference ("100m winners are black") is accurate, just not complete.

The other interesting thing to note is this: humanity originated in Africa, and migrated from there to the rest of the planet in successive waves. Genetic diversity within Africa is greater than in the rest of the planet. For the most part / as a general rule. You'll find this is typically true of origin / diaspora populations, human, animal, vegetable, or even technological.

So: yes, there's considerable genetic variation among various populations. There's more in Africa. And, at least based on empirical evidence, if you want to be a good sprint runner, it's a considerable benefit to have ancestry that traces to a specific valley in Kenya.

As to considering all "Blacks" to be genetically uniform or similar: no, that's not valid.

The other discussions of the article are largely red herrings.

A quibble: Nandi runners from Kenya are distance runners, not 100m sprinters.

Fair point. I didn't fact-check the article, but was thinking earlier "hrm ... aren't Kenyans known more for distance running than sprinting?".

Despite specific characteristics, my point about genetic diversity within African populations as a whole should stand.

The author draws the wrong conclusions from the CV experiment. He claims that it shows a bias against black candidates; in reality, what it shows is a bias against "black" names.

Names are really powerful. The same is true of email addresses; how many people here can honestly say that they would treat an email from purpledinosaur28@aol.com the same way as they treat an email from john.smith@gmail.com?

Please explain your point further, because it seems to me you are equating "black" names with cheesy email addresses.

Names say something about the people who pick them. Yes, race; but also education, socioeconomic level, and community. The black population of the US is heavily weighted towards poor education and poverty, so when people think of "typical black names" they're often thinking of typical poor uneducated black names.

Key difference . . . names are chosen by a person's parents, while email addresses are chosen by a person for themselves.

Focusing on the name, which the person can't control, instead of on the person's accomplishments (resume), which the person can absolutely control, would seem to be an indicator of bias.

I don't think your point holds up.

You don't think that your parents' income or education level has an effect on your later success?

And sure, it would be better to ignore names and focus on a resume -- but people rely on subconscious cues all the time. If your only goal is to find good candidates as quickly as possible, a subconscious cue which is usually correct works to your advantage -- whether it's "people with degrees from Harvard are stuck-up snobs", "people who write their resumes in LaTex are good coders", or "people with weird names like 'jewyl' are useless".

Making important decisions based on stereotypes rather than facts tends to be frowned upon these days. And (at least in the US) it opens yourself up to huge discrimination suits if you base your discrimination on protected classes like gender or race.

I'm not saying that people should do this. Only that they do, and (barring legal consequences) it's advantageous to do so.

This just seems odd given that you have a page of information which is probably a lot more informative. But that's kind of the definition of racism -- even in the face of evidence that would contradict your stereotype you'll cling to your stereotype.

Sure, you have a page of information which is more informative. And you have Google, which is probably even more informative. And you could start phoning college professors and get even more information.

There's a point where the cost of gathering information exceeds its value. Unfortunately, that point sometimes comes halfway through reading a resume.

When you're comparing the candidate against someone else with the exact same resume that differs only by name, the rest of that information is not useful, because it doesn't help you distinguish between the choices.

But isn't that the point of the statement. It would be like saying that if you saw the candidate in person and they did the job equally well, but one had dark skin and the other light skin, so we used their skin color to distinguish -- but then trying to argue that skin color isn't really a proxy for race, since some black people could be lighter than a white person.

To me it just sounds like racism covered up.

Thanks for this. I swear the mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves their biases aren't about race are amazing (note I'm not calling anyone racist here).

First thing we all need to do is be willing to flat out admit our own faults without any rationalizations. That's the only way we'll ever be able to overcome it.

I would only consider racism a fault if it leads you to make bad decisions. In the hypothetical situation where two candidates differ only by their race, that won't happen.

Interesting logic. Of course people's resumes don't reflect the entirety of the candidate, so it is likely that basing decisions to move further based on race will eventually cause you to pass up the better candidate. Sounds like a fault to me.

The alternative of ignoring race gives you two identical candidates. If choosing a particular race consistently gives you worse results than choosing randomly would have, that's still evidence supporting racism as a general rule - you're just being racist in the wrong direction.

I just don't buy that it does. We're not picking two random people off the street here. These are people who have passed all the filters needed to have their resumes sitting in front of you. From education, to experience, to HR, to phone screen, etc. If, at this point, the two candidates still look identical, I don't think race gives you any meaningful signal. The black candidate has already proven that he has risen above any disadvantages he might have statistically faced. In fact, this should even be a plus in his column because he had the determination (or raw intelligence) to overcome his disadvantaged lot in life and be sitting in front of you, on equal footing with a white candidate who (statistically) had many advantages given to him.

Which statement? That wasn't the point of your statement that the resume provided more information than the candidates' races. It actually provides no useful information if the other guy has the exact same qualifications. Your example is the same. They do the job exactly the same, so you decide based on the skin color. What would you think about someone who tells you "you should have just decided based on their performance?"

In response to cperciva's comment . . . Statistically? Sure . . . on an individual basis? Should be irrelevant . . . that's why we base employment decisions upon the resume of the individual and not based upon the resume of the parents.

This is not completely true. Of the 10 or so people I have hired, 3 had resume names different from their legal names. One had a Pakistani name, another was chinese, and one had a ghetto name.

It is well known that you can put whatever name on your resume you want. It is not until after you are hired that you have to submit documentation.

"... Names say something about the people who pick them. ..."

There is a freakonomics discussion about the power of name choice in "Super Freakonomics", CH6, "Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?" which hints at this ~ http://freakonomicsbook.com/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/ch... and http://www.slate.com/id/2116449/ though the message I got was the signaling the name gave to others & the recipient of the name mattered more.

I think you're trying too hard to explain how a bias against black names isn't a bias against the racial group. The article said they used archetypal black names such as "Latoya" or "Tyrone". Taking this at face value, there is no indication of lower socioeconomic level unless you're taking being black itself as the indication. We're not talking about made up ghetto names that we all love to disparage these days. Being biased against standard <racial group> names is in fact a bias against <racial group>.

You don't see a lot of black guys named "Tyrone" walking around Harvard.

Latoya and Tyrone are common black names, and they're also strongly associated with lower socioeconomic level because lots of blacks are in a lower socioeconomic level. The sorts of professional, educated black families that send their kids to good schools and from there to good jobs don't name them these lower-class names.

Tyrone is just not a common name at all anymore. You're not likely to meet someone named Tyrone at a Crip hangout.

So you're saying that any black name is automatically associated with lower class. I would contend that this proof that bias against names is bias against the race.

Edit: just to explain a bit more: my point is that Tyrone and Latoya are not indicative of lower class, any more than simply being black is. Thus a bias against those names is a bias against black in general.

If I recall correctly, names that are considered distinctively black but not actually African do tend to be associated with lower-class blacks. It's unfortunate but AFAIK that's the way the world is, largely because blacks historically have felt pressure to seem more "white" as they've moved up in society. So it's hard to disambiguate the two factors.

I'd bet you'd see a similar bias against lower-class white names like Bubba or Leroy or most of the names here: http://babynamesworld.parentsconnect.com/forum/topic88623.ht...

If it is purely economic, you probably also wouldn't see as much bias against black-sounding names that don't have negative connotations such as Michael Jackson (it might get a smirk, but if it is indeed about economic bias, the name of a prestigious black man should be a good demonstration).

Supporting data: a while ago, a German study showed a heavy bias amongst teachers against children with certain names, among them Dennis, Chantal, Jaqueline and (evoking the most extreme bias) Kevin. While these may be completely neutral in the USA or France, they're not traditional German names and typically chosen after movie or sports stars (Kevin allegedly first appeared in Germany after a certain movie came out, while at the same time British football player Kevin Keegan played in the Bundesliga). And that is something typically done by uneducated parents, while educated people prefer biblical or historical namesakes.

a bias against the names Cletus or Billy Bob says nothing of the white racial group at large.

A bias against Cletus or Billy Bob is a bias against a subset of a racial group. When the name you're biased against is represented by the entire group, it the only conclusion is that it is a bias against the racial group itself.

Lets take this a bit further. For your resume to not be biased against from the start, you have to not have a "typical" black name; essentially erasing any indication of your race from your resume. How is that not a bias against the race?

You guys are seriously straining logic here.

"Names say something about the people who pick them. Yes, race; but also education, socioeconomic level, and community...."

You are forgetting one not-so-minor fact that the resumes were _identical_ to the white ones'. Are you saying that the recipients just looked at the names and didn't even bother to read the resumes??

I'm saying that having seen the names people didn't read the resumes as closely, yes.

It could also mean that they read them differently. Say they took two years more than normal for high school. On the one hand, that can trigger thoughts about laziness or lack of intelligence. On the other, it can trigger thoughts about perseverence (many others would have given up), or about how the recruiter 'lost' two years in high school, too, because his father died in a house fire.

Fighting one's prejudices is really hard.

i think i got the parent comment's point.

it's not about race in this case, but assuming --even if with the back of the mind, how the candidate would fit into the cultural aspect of the organization.

Imagine a guy in a organization that has a heavy crunch time every friday until late if needed. in the several interviews when he mention that, he noticed that the group of people that turn down the position because of this is of some cultural group. The next time he is hiring, even if only on the back of his mind, he will go past the candidates that have names indicating that said cultural group, because his brain will fast forward to all the time wasted interviewing and then being turned down. it's not like the guy has anything against that group.

In the article, the point made is far worse than this example. From a moral point of view. as it hints to a macro-social preconception on race.

There's something about the CV experiment that makes no sense to me:

  The researchers also found that although high-quality
  "white" candidates were preferred to low-quality "white"
  candidates, the relative quality of "black" CVs made no
  difference whatsoever. It was as if employers saw three
  categories - high-quality white, low-quality white and
  black candidates.

We know that the "black" candidates got some responses, and we know that the "black" CVs did have differences in quality.

So on what basis were the employers choosing the black candidates on the occasions that they did choose a black candidate? Randomly?

It's a big anomaly in the experiment I think, and should be explained somehow.

I am sure each employer thought they were choosing the best person for the job, not weighing the benefits of a black person vs a white person. The point is that when all these decisions are summed up a bias emerges. The author of this argument is arguing that our tendency to incorrectly clump people into groups is the reason for this bias.

I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about blacks vs whites. I asking why this experiment doesn't show any difference between high-quality and low-quality black candidates.

Using the names suggested by the article, suppose Tyrone is a high-quality black candidate and Latoya is a low-quality black candidate. The experiment shows that employers--when they do choose a "black" candidate--will choose Tyrone and Latoya equally often.

The employer supposedly has no preference for the better CV among the black applicants.

Does that make any sense to you?

It makes me suspicious of the whole experiment.

Yes, they were saying the employers classified all black applicants as the same and didn't notice the difference in their actual quality.

Because they had a black name that is the first and only label they get.

That explanation doesn't make sense to me.

The employers were not merely classifying people into groups, they wanted to actually hire someone.

If in the employer's mind, all black applicants were bad, the employer would hire a white applicant, or wouldn't hire anyone, or would keep looking.

But that's not what happened. Sometimes the employer called one of the black applicants for an interview. Even if the employer thought that all the black applicants were bad, the logical thing to do would be to go through the CVs again to try to discern some differences in the pool of black applicants before you waste time on an interview.

But the experiment says that the employers found all black applicants to be equally bad.

Then my question is: On what basis did the employer pick the black applicant to call for an interview?

It's as if the employer is saying, "We prefer to interview the best white applicants. Sometimes we interview a black applicant, but in those cases good or bad doesn't matter -- we'll interview a random black applicant."

It doesn't add up. Either the experiment is flawed or there is a subtle explanation for this anomaly.

It does seem very odd that there was no difference between high-quality and low-quality black candidates, but I'll guess at an explanation: employers are suspicious of black achievement because of affirmative action and similar programs. It's harder to know if a black applicant "earned" his accomplishments or not, because they're more likely to be given undeserved grades, accomplishments, opportunities, etc.

And I think all you need for evidence that this is true is ... this study! The failure of an employer to interview enough black candidates is considered by many to be prima facie evidence of racism. (Just look at the comments here. Likewise, giving more failing grades to black students is racist.) So-many people are desperate to avoid looking racist, and black students/employees/etc. get a lot of little advantages as a result. Some of these are harmless (well performing black guy gets first crack at a new position, rather than well performing white guy), but some of them aren't (now-poorly-performing black guy doesn't get fired/demoted from new position).

Or everybody's racist.

Exactly. A black candidate won't trigger any subconscious prejudices in me (half my family is black). Certain African-American names like "Tyrone" or "Latoya" however will trigger negative associations with social and cultural stereotypes. The same actually goes for certain "white" names.

'Tyrone' is Irish, not African-American.

The problem is, when there are no black names that won't trigger that bias, that is in fact a bias against the race. Whether that bias stems from socioeconomic level or from prejudice is beside the point.

It's a fine and thoughtful article, but I'm not sure that I see the logical fallacy.

Assuming that this success is driven by genes rather than environment, there is a rather obvious inference to make - black people are naturally better sprinters than white people.

But here's the thing. This inference is not merely false - it is logically flawed.

If we assume that sprinting performance is genetic (and realizing that there are lots of other factors), and we assume that the best 100m sprinters are consistently black (realizing that "black" may or may not be a clearly defined genetic category), is it really a fallacy to say that black people are better sprinters?

Logically, so long as the prevalence of winners is greater than the percentage of the population defined as black, I would think it has to follow. The winning sprinters are also strong, lean, and young. Would it be a fallacy to say that "strong, lean and young runners make better sprinters"?

The obvious fallacy is to conclude that all blacks are better sprinters. But it feels like the article goes far beyond this, and wants to redefine "better" as incompatible with "more likely to excel". And pointing out that Americans and Jamaicans tend to excel seems to run counter to the part where he asks us to assume that the success is driven by genes.

Hmm. His book "Bounce" sounds interesting, though. I've requested it from the library. And oddly, I found 4 year old version of essentially the same article (minus the reference to resumes, adding reference to "yellow" domination at table tennis, and advertising a different book) here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_co...

The problem is in the sample size. You can't draw any conclusions from testing a few dozen or hundred self-selected people out of 7 billion. The author does essentially say just that, just in many more words.

...is it really a fallacy to say that black people are better sprinters?

Yes. Data on the Olympics gives very little information on whether the average black person is a better sprinter than the average white person.

It is not, however, a fallacy to say that it is highly likely that the next top sprinter will be black. (If anyone disagrees with this claim, I'm willing to offer good odds on the race of the next Olympic sprinter medalists.)

Honestly, I'm finding the author's exposition to be rather confused. He seems to conflate two logically distinct propositions ("the best $x come from group $Y" and "a random $y in $Y has a higher probability of outperforming a random $z in $Z") for reasons I can't fathom.

...and in fact I believe that Freakonomics suggests that black athletic ability is more about variance than average.

I agree with you on "very little information", but I wouldn't want to make the jump to "fallacy". It would be a fallacy to presume that the between-group difference is anything approaching the within-group difference, but I'd guess that the effect is there. Instinctively, I wouldn't be surprised if genetics played at least a 1% role. Would you? What if instead of "black", you pointed to a particular gene?

The alternative would be to presume that the variance of sprinting ability with the black population is greater than that of the white. I'd want to see some reason that this is true before presuming it. This also gets us back to the furor regarding Lawrence Summers dismissal from Harvard, which does imply that there some things that are simply "wrong to note".

It would not surprise me at all if genetics plays a large role. The only point I'm making is about inferring information about the mean/median of a distribution by observing only it's far tails.

In fact, I'd speculate that across the US population, black sprinting ability is probably lower than that of whites. Black women are disproportionately overweight/obese and are likely to lower the average for blacks. Looking solely at olympic level data points would never reveal this.

(As far as I'm aware, this latter effect is minimally related to genetics.)

The only point I'm making is about inferring information about the mean/median of a distribution by observing only it's far tails.

That's the same point I'm making, but I come to the opposite conclusion. I think that in the absence of contradictory information one should prefer simple inferences to complex ones (Occam rephrased). Thus I'd look first to the mean, then to the variance, and only then consider that only one of the groups has a multi-modal distribution.

I do think our "overcompensation" for race affects our conclusions here (mine included). If one were to find that the winners shared some other trait other than skin color, I don't think there would be nearly the same desire to find alternative explanations. But this doesn't mean that these alternatives are not useful to consider, and quite possibly correct.

> The obvious fallacy is to conclude that all blacks are better sprinters.

It is a question of semantics here. The general and a vague inferred claim is that "Black people tend to be better sprinters than other races". If that means that "There exist black people that run better than any people of all other races", then this statement is verifiably true: just look at the Olympic charts. Now, if statement is that "If you pick up a random black person and put them in a race against a person of other race (no pun intended), black person is more likely to win" - it would be a logical fallacy to make that statement based just on the fact that Olympic winners in running are all black.

"The truth is rather different. There is far more genetic variation within racial groups (around 85%) than there is between racial groups (just 15%). Indeed, surface appearance is often a highly misleading way of assessing the genetic distance between populations."

This doesn't prove what he thinks it proves.

This is the exact same argument: There is more variation within male heights than there is between the male & female average height. This is true - the difference between the average male height and female height is only a few inches, and it is quite a bit smaller than an interval which covers 90% of men. But, this has nothing to do with his point. The height difference between males and females is still relevant to us, even though the in-group variation for males & females is also high.

tl;dr: male height variation is much bigger than the gap between male & female heights, yet we still think the male-female height gap is a real & meaningful phenomenon.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_diversity:_Lewont...

It appears, based on the interesting submitted article, that it would be more informative to report about 100 meter dash winners where they trained, and who their coaches were. Much the same could be said about marathon winners, who tend to train in a different part of the world.

After edit: the kind first reply to my comment here mentions a possible study design for looking at what might influence athletic success among athletes from one place or another. A "genetically sensitive" design for such a study would have to consider quite a few other issues, not least actual individual genes, which have been surprisingly neglected in genetic research over the years. (Rather than actually looking at genes of each individual in a study, which continues to be a generally expensive and occasionally error-prone enterprise, most previous genetic studies of human behavioral characteristics have been based on proxy assemblages of genes, by studying closely related family members, or in the best cases monozygotic twins.)

Readers who haven't seen this pair of links before, which I share fairly often here on HN because they are by world famous human behavioral geneticists, may be surprised by what they learn from reading about what twin studies can and cannot say about genetic influences on human behavior.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

Meanwhile other readers have commented, and tying in what I've written (and linked to) above to what several comments here say, a common fallacy comes from assuming that "race" (as socially defined in one place or another) has anything much at all to do with what genes one would find in a particular individual. Serious geneticists are actually some of the leading scientists in suggesting that in medicine, law, and education we should pay less attention to "race" than formerly, to avoid inherent cognitive biases in explaining individual differences.

You're right, but that's only part of the extended question. If most 100m runners are from a tiny part of the world, it would be interesting to do biological studies to see if the people living there have different genetics that let them become better runners. Your control in this type of study would be to put non-locals under the same lifestyle and training as how the winners live and see how they perform.

This series of articles[1] goes into some depth in explaining why certain countries (and ethnicities) dominate various sports - this includes an in-depth discussion of why Kenyans are so good at distance running. The author focuses on genetics, location, support, training, incentives, culture, etc. of various combinations of these sports and the countries that seem to dominate them.

It's not yet complete and is quite lengthy, but it's one of the most fascinating things I've read in some time. While the title seems to make the article focuses solely on Olympic Weightlifting, but the main focus is much more general, and is about uncovering recurring patterns between countries who dominate various sports.

[1] http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/why-the-us-sucks-a...

Olympic Weightlifting is an interesting case. Some of the qualities that predict weightlifting success -- high fast-twitch fibre ratio, for example -- predict success in plenty of other sports.

Whether a country excels at Weightlifting seems in large part to be a function of whether there is a more popular sport in that country. So in the Carribean potential lifters become sprinters, in the USA they become NFL players, in Australia rugby and AFL players and so on.

The author mentions that most successful sprinters have been Jamaican or American rather than African. Many American professional sports leagues have a greater percentage of black players than white players. Both of these facts lead me to believe that the black people in the Americas have a genetic advantage due to filtering out of weaker individuals through the trials brought on by slavery.

Consider- many modern American and Jamaican blacks are descendants of slaves. To arrive in the Americas those slaves had to survive a horrendous journey across the Atlantic in a slave ship (a far more physically challenging experience than the one experienced by the average European colonist on his trip across the ocean). They then had to survive the physical challenges associated with being a slave. The net result is that descendants of these slaves have a genetic profile that was passed down from the strongest survivors, making them physically stronger than either African blacks or non-black Americans.

I don't disagree with his conclusion, but the article is just a puff piece with a link to his book at the end, in which he "...debunks many cherished myths" including "that we are restricted by our genetic make-up".

"Our tendency to generalise rests on a deeper fallacy - the idea that 'black' refers to a genetic type. We put people of dark skin in a box labelled black and assume that a trait shared by some is shared by all." I'm no geneticist, but I wonder then how the author would explain the seemingly racist drug BiDil, which is more effective for African Americans?

A more difficult question to answer - that can't be explained away with extreme examples - would be why the regular professional sports (e.g. NFL, NBA) have a disproportionate number (compared to population) of black players. May have nothing to do with genetics at all, but would be much more interesting to read about than this article.

Re BiDil - note that African Americans are a small, not very genetically diverse, subpopulation of black people.

I used to be curious about why it seemed like most baseball pitchers and quarterbacks (though certainly not all!) are white. What could it be, genetically, socially or culturally that would make white people have better arms?

I stopped asking because people thought it was racist. It always baffled me.

They probably thought it was racist because the thing that makes a great quarterback (for example) isn't just an incredible arm. There are many more factors that go into it, and I'd wager the reason so many black quarterbacks get weeded out at the collegiate level is because their superior physical prowess is better utilized in other positions that rely more on speed, power, explosiveness, etc.

I mean, you've got a guy like Peyton Manning for example. He's not an athletic guy relative to other NFL players, but historically he has this incredible hand-eye coordination and mind for the strategy of the game. No one was going to look at Manning and say, "Hey you know, you have a great arm and are frighteningly smart at this game, but we could use your slow clumsy ass at running back."

To me quarterbacks and pitchers specialize into that position because oftentimes their other physical gifts don't even come close to their arms. In other words, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of black QBs out there in high school football teams who have the potential to be just as great as Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, etc., but coaches are going to want the speed and power elsewhere.

Thats's the first explanation for it that has actually made sense to me. good one.

> black quarterbacks get weeded out at the collegiate level is because their superior physical prowess

I thought this article was pointing out how racial prejudice around 'athleticism and blacks' was out right false. So then you justify a separate athletic ability using race again...

> I thought this article was pointing out how racial prejudice around 'athleticism and blacks' was out right false.

That's what the article wants to do, but it doesn't succeed. We know that elite "black" athletes are the best. Maybe the average black athlete is worse than the average white, but there's no evidence of that presented. It could be that blacks have a larger standard deviation, or it could be that blacks have a higher mean. The author couldn't be bothered to actually try and answer that question.

Your post implies that QB is a leftover position, which i think is far from the case. If there's a player that can be as great as [insert list of famous QBs], that player's going to be a QB...he isn't going to get promoted to a better position where he can have more impact (because there is no other position).

Anyone remember the NFL spoof video "We Are Kickers" that Saturday Night Live did in the 80's poking fun at kickers being of a certain ethnicity? I want to say middle-eastern, but I can't remember for sure. If I followed the sport at all, I'd probably know. I tried to find it on Youtube, but couldn't.

Anyway, it seems that certain ethnic groups have long been perceived to gravitate towards certain athletic functions.

What could it be, genetically, socially or culturally that would make white people have better arms?

In the American population there is actually a genetic difference: For any given height, the average black Americans has longer legs, while the average white American has a taller chest and longer arms.

The other sport where this has a significant influence is swimming.

Do you have proof for that statement?

With ~6 starting black NFL QBs they are actually over-represented (with respect to the population of the US). They're just under-represented compared to the population of football players.

The article makes a good point that yes, that idea is racist, because you explicitly chose to look first at the correlation between sports performance and race, rather than other, far more finegrained and predictive factors. If it weren't a visually obvious and culturally ingrained distinction, nobody would bother with such a poorly-defined coarse-grained factor.

As a young black boy, growing up, in the Caribbean, I always came dead last in my races. sigh

On a side note, this also shows how ineffective resumes are at connecting employees and employers. If you repeated the same experiment with github accounts, perhaps less bias would show up.

I wish I believed that geeks were above generalizing based on names, but I have no doubt if your github user name was "Tyrone" or "RapDaddy", you could run into similar issues.

I do think you would have less discrimination that way, though. I bet you could accomplish similar things if resumes focused less on names and more on accomplishments.

And also, with github, you are looking at actual code produced instead of making assumptions about the quality of code produced based on bullet points. Closer to facts.

This phenomenon has nothing to do with being black but everything to do with genetics. The defining characteristics of world class sprinters is not the fact that they're black but is rather attributed to either genes passed down from their ancestors or their own genetic mutations. My theory is that if we traced the family trees of top sprinters we'd find that many are descendants of slaves who were bred to be bigger, faster and stronger.

I think this is a stretch. I don't think there was enough selective pressure to really cause that much of a change in gene distribution in such a short period. Furthermore, unless the mutations for being "bigger, faster" were novel to the slave population, there is no reason to think that any breeding practices would have had any meaningful influence. What is more likely is that genes for excelling at sprinting probably came from the same area of Africa.

I certainly don't believe that any "bigger, faster" mutations are novel to the slave population as they can occur within any group of people. But through breeding these mutations are likely to be more prevalent in the target population. This explains why the 400m race can be dominated by blacks but Jeremy Wariner (white guy) can still be the fastest. If that were true you would see similar numbers of sprinters from West Africa.

If your last point were true we would see world class sprinters coming out of one of the West African nations. I can't think of any.

Putting labels on people or stereotyping is never an effective way to measure their skill or the importance of their accomplishment. It seems that either one of these gives us the ability to quickly make a "informed" decision about someone without having to dive deeply in the matter. This doesn't make it right, and in my experience leads you to make incorrect assumptions more often than not.

A relevant article:

http://www.newstatesman.com/200009180009

The following Malcolm Gladwell article from 1997 is exactly on this topic: http://www.gladwell.com/1997/1997_05_19_a_sports.htm

Not everyone loves Gladwell's writing, but I found the article interesting and thought-provoking.

irrespective of the article's content, that's a poor title: of course there's nothing wrong to simply note it.

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