What does this mean in terms of race being a social construct/concept?
Frankly, even a freshly arrived alien from Mars or Titan could easily tell Icelanders, Mongols and Xhosa apart, without knowing anything about our culture. The fact that there has been a lot of interbreeding/admixture since the Age of Sail began, does not mean that there aren't meaningful biological differences between the original groups, which still obviously exist.
An analogy: much like the existence of twilight does not render the concept of night and day a 'social construct' either. We attach certain social meanings to those natural phenomena, and a 'working day' can easily stretch into 'astronomical night' (all too often!), but that does not mean that 'night' and 'day' do not exist outside of our cultural reference framework.
There is a social concept of 'race' which corresponds to the 'working day' concept in this analogy, e.g. 'BIPOC', claiming Asians as 'white adjacent' or classifying North Africans or Jews as 'white', even though they may not necessarily look white. But this is almost certainly not what the AI identified. This social concept of race would confuse a Martian alien unless he started to study the social and racial history of the U.S., and possibly even afterwards. It definitely confuses me, a random observer from Central Europe.
The social definition is used because that's a most scientifically meaningful and useful definition that avoids many of the issues with biological race realism.
Nations are uncontroversially recognized as a social constructs. However I'm certain that AI could also detect images taken outdoors in Mexico vs those in Finland. Additionally I, a US citizen, cannot simply declare that I am now a citizen of France and expect to get a French passport.
However it also means that what a nation is, is not set in stone for eternity. It means that different people can debate about the precise definitions of about what defines a particular nation. It means that Czechoslovakia can become the Czech republic and Slovakia. It means that not everyone agrees if Transnistria is an independent nation. It means that the EU can decide that a German citizen can have the same passport as a French citizen.
As a more controversial example, this is also the case when people talk about gender being a "social construct". It doesn't mean that we can simply pretend like the ideas "men" and "women" doesn't exist (as people both declare and fear). But it does mean there is some flexibility in these terms and we as a society can choose how we want these ideas to evolve.
Society is a complex and powerful part of our reality, arguably more impactful on us from day to day than most of physics (after all we did survive for hundreds of thousands of years without even understanding the basics of physics). Therefore something being classified as a "social construct" doesn't mean it "isn't real". Even more important is that individuals cannot choose who social construct evolve. I cannot, for example, declare that since taxes are a social construct, I'm not paying them anymore. We can however, as a society, change what and how these constructs are interpreted.
Race picks specific and arbitrary differences , for example hispanic is a different race in US society but black and white based on skin color are as well, indians and east asians are also one "race".
Ethnicities are not social constructs but race is. The AI finds ethnic differences and correlates them with self-percievied social/racial classification.
"Race" as the evil social construct it is, takes ethnic differences and intrprets them to mean some ethnicities are different races of humans than others as in not just different ancestors but differently created or evolved despite all evidence and major religion saying all humans are one species (homosapiens) that have a common homosapien ancestor.
I thought all this was obvious but the social climate recently is very weird.
Let the social "culture war" rage on. The only war I see going on in the west (U.S. mostly) is a _lack_ of culture.
Similar to prejudice and stereotyping or the worst of lies there is some truth in its reasoning but the untrue part, the lazy part allows people to commit evil and be unjust. A reason to harm others with minimal conscious discomfort.
From national geographic: “Race” is usually associated with biology and linked with physical characteristics such as skin color or hair texture. “Ethnicity” is linked with cultural expression and identification.
The deceptively evil part of the concept of race is, it does not simply differentiate biological features but it goes on to impose a fork at the root of the ancestoral tree where people of that race share the same origin and same differences. In reality biological differences are a result if what a culture considers attractive multiplied by mutations that help people adopt to different environments (e.g.: skin color being a result of adaptation to sun light and vitamin d levels instead of a being a feature that shows ancestoral forks in creation or evolution).
It is simply inaccurate to label people by race but it is useful to impose social evils. But biological differences due to mating and cultural choices are very real and can be examined at a granular level that takes the actual factors for the differences into account instead of the lazy+evil correlation that is the concept of race.
Ethnicity is not what culture you identify with. You don't become ethnically african american because you like african american culture and grew in a specific neighborhood. It is the marriage of culture and ancestry.
https://www.healthit.gov/isa/taxonomy/term/741/uscdi-v2
https://www.healthit.gov/isa/taxonomy/term/746/uscdi-v2
(I'm not claiming that this is an optimal approach, just pointing out how it works in most software today.)
In fact it can be medically harmful to think this way.
A better discussion is around sickle cell anaemia[0] which is exclusively carried by people of African or Afro-Caribbean descent.
They discourage using race as a source of any physiological signal. They do allow using genetics, but the relevant situations are the many many ones where genetic testing isn't possible or doesn't yet provide useful signal.
Unaccountable institutions get captured very easily, and the race cult that's swept through our educated class has been a very powerful one.
[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/new-ama...
An interesting question in the U.S. is "who is considered white?" There was a Supreme Court case in which someone who was literally from the Caucasus was ruled not white. This is why it's sociological, not scientific.
https://www.sceneonradio.org/episode-40-citizen-thind-seeing...
To give a contrived example; if I say people with ring fingers over 3 inches long are Longfings and people wkth ring fingers 3 inches or less are Shortfings, and then out society treats people differently based on being Longfing or Shortfing, this is a social construct that is causing problems for people based on a contrived criteria that has no real meaning. The same is true of race.
What does it mean for shortfings to be dramatically taller? Are you saying that shortfings must transmit height along with finger length; some sort of race invariance? Or are you saying that most shortfings you meet are also tall?
If a black person is a pale as a white person, they're still considered black (and may share many other characteristics that many black people have.) If some of your shortfings have long fingers, does the distinction still make sense as a scientific category?
> the longfings are complaining that they're overrepresented in jumpball?
Is admission to jumpball determined by finger measuring, or through social factors?
Sure, it’s possible that bias due to the radiographer is the culprit, but this seems unlikely.
This is a very contrived way to say that people share characteristics with other people. The real question is why people don't say that I belong to the six-foot tall bad-knees race.
I'm not here to tell you what to do. Use race then. I offered up why I think this article is only generating interest is because race is a loaded word, and if it weren't used, it'd be passed over.
> The real question is why people don't say that I belong to the six-foot tall bad-knees race
This is an article about ML accurately predicting self-identified race. This is not even on the spectrum of real questions.