Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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Studies that show the genetic diversity of the continent of Africa are in fact "anti-racist".

They truthfully reveal that the psuedoscientific 19th century ideas we refer to as race had no scientific basis. Some people really haven't taken this "truth" well though.

They still try to fit every new fact into their old model.

Like "West African Scorpios" are much more open to emotion, while "East African Scorpios" are open to new experience. So should we stop all research into Astrology?

Yes, because it's psuedoscientific nonsense that only distracts from the actual truth.

This current controversy includes the attempts to stop exactly this, with rules saying if you do medical research, and classify people by "race" then you need to explain who made this classification and why. Because a Brazilian looking a photos might put people into different races than an American or Japanese researcher, which might differ from the subjects chosen race, which definately differs from their genetic race, because genetic races don't exist.

i mean, i agree they're imperfect but there's also not "0 basis". if nothing else they may continue to associate with stuff because society often sees them as coherent groupings.

but cool, now suppose some study has a result i can't spin as "anti-racist". what do?

also you seem well-intentioned but your definition seems wildly different from kendi's defining anti-racism to include support for present discrimination to "remedy" past.

It's clear you haven't read what they are asking people to do.

You've read Haidt's take on it and have been misled, as intended.

yeah, i've read it. they're requiring people to write statements on whether/how their research advances the stated goals of the society in this area. next year, they will make it part of the scoring rubric for submissions.

here's the thing: "anti-racism" is being used as a motte-and-bailey argument. it's basically dogwhistling an intent to promote present discrimination (c.f. kendi) even if they're using a different definition that doesn't explicitly state that, because it's how that term has been widely used and understood. but when people take issue with it, they can be like "oh our definition doesn't say that." and ngl i find it pretty disingenuous.

I don't understand the argument that genetics isn't correlated with race. I would imagine a better argument is that it's a spectrum - but the fact is that when plotting the principle components of any large scale set of human genetic data from around the world, self reported race actually clusters (PC isn't even a clustering technique) quite well. So the fact that the axes of tbe largest explained variance of the data (PC_0 and PC_1) correlates with self reported race is hard to mend with the idea that is loudly exclaimed in academia that race isn't genetic. Am I missing some important subtlety here? While I agree that we need to do as much as possible to eradicate the awful racism we see in far too many places today, this idea to turn a blind eye to the largest explained variance in large scale genetic studies by saying it doesn't exist is perplexing.

It's not a subtlety you're missing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

It's correct to say that: there is a genetic history to all humans, and that history roughly correlates with pre-scientific clustering of humans by visible attributes.

The academic claim that "Race is not scientific" is really an overstatement of the case being made by people who are very optimistic but also fairly good at overlooking some fairly well understood science. It's not a universally held opinion but most people who disagree with it are fairly circumspect because it's very easy to get cancelled by talking about race and science in public.

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