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To sum up another comment: it's cultural, not biological.

Race is not a useful scientific guideline for any kind of scientific study. For example: there is as much biological diversity in sub Saharan Africa as the rest of the world, but racially, the best we can do is "Black", or "African". It's a useless, dated concept that we, as species, find it difficult to work past because our brains are categorical engines.

I'm as politically "leftist" as anyone you'll ever meet, but we have to be able to do better than "Asians are good at math" to make effective decisions about education, amongst other problems. This is of course impossible with the current world and thinking. Even though I know race isn't real, I still see it. It still has an impact on my day to day actions, because my stupid brain is all too happy to categorize people on how they appear.

Taking another route: to say that Asians are good at math is categorical error. The word "Asians" represents something abstract, and abstract things cannot take action. Categorical error is basically the starting point for the various "isms" like misogyny, misandry, racism, etc.

This isn't a problem we have as a species. It's not biological, it is cultural. The racial categories we use today were created in the 17th century to justify the white supremacist apparatus of slavery and colonialism - prior to that, people tended to categorize humanity by tribe, ethnicity or religion rather than superficial physical traits. Asian people, for instance, didn't see each other as the same "race" until white people came along and assigned them that categorization.

You, I and everyone else are stuck in this way of thinking because we've been so thoroughly indoctrinated into a system of white supremacy which permeates the entirety of Western culture, it isn't even noticeable, like we're in the Matrix. It persists because it's useful for keeping the power centers that benefit from it entrenched, and everyone else divided.

We can move on from it, but I think the first thing we need to do is recognize that it isn't inevitable.

Please keep your CRT style racism and conspiracy theory out of the discussion.

Exhibit A, your honor.

> Asian people, for instance, didn't see each other as the same "race" until white people came along and assigned them that categorization.

Do you think Asian people would have not come to the same conclusion, even if white peoples hadn’t said so first? I tend to think it was somewhat inevitable that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people think of themselves as having more in common with each other than with French or Mexican people.

Sure, but the racial categories do vary considerably around the world.

And even in a single location, if you look back in time, you can see how people got categorized shifting. People used to insist Italians weren't white here in the US.

>Race is not a useful scientific guideline for any kind of scientific study.

Tell that to prostate cancer researchers.

To say race "isn't important" is completely ignorant.

Hi. I did my master's in computational biology focusing on androgen independent prostate cancer. After that I worked in an autoimmunology lab. My projects included rheumatoid arthritis GWAS and b-cell phylogeny. To demonstrate that we did case-control matching correctly, I looked at how well self-reported ancestry corresponds to hapmap populations. The mapping is very noisy. "Race" is a social classification, sure it's correlated with biological markers but there are better measures. So, yeah, "race" as such isn't important.

I don't follow the conclusion that you're trying to draw. It sounds like you're saying that people do not self-report their own ancestry accurately better than chance.

On the surface of it this sounds absurd, because (unless adopted) people do not determine their ancestry by looking at photos of themselves. I can see getting proximal affiliations wrong, confusing or missidentifying oneself as being half Italian when they're actually half Iberian, or or confusing turkic ancestry with Persian. But I don't think people are going to not know whether they are primarily of say East asian, african, or european ancestry.

>I looked at how well self-reported ancestry corresponds to hapmap populations.

>The mapping is very noisy.

>"race" as such isn't important

Sounds like quite the leap to reach the conclusion that you're trying to make.

Sounds like you're moving the goalposts after your phrenology ran headlong into expertise.

Sure thing chief.

"Race" is a social construct. We assign "race" based on physical and cultural traits, not genetic. We back into the relationship of "race" and "genetics".

You could easily have a genetic predisposition to prostate cancer without being a certain race, even though that "race" may have a higher propensity for that genetic trait.

>We assign "race" based on physical and cultural traits, not genetic.

Not really, everyone knows that an albino African is still an African. Physical traits are just the most visible aspect of genetics. And your second point is just explaining outliers, it doesn't say anything.

You skipped my comment on "cultural".

Race is entirely a social construct. You can't do a genetic test and with certainty determine someone's race. Certain genetic traits are common among what we call races, but not exclusive.

Take a look at services like 23andMe or other services, the genetic components of race are entirely based on self-reporting, that is, we call certain genes "Asian" because people who identify as Asian had those.

It's entirely tautological.

Suppose you are looking at a 52 card deck, and members of each of the four “shapes” self-identify (with some random noise, and maybe even systematic deviations — like sevens and aces are identified differently from just their shape, etc) as different “suits”.

The pairing between shapes & suits will of course be tautological because the names of the suits are cultural artifacts, but the shapes would still be distinct regardless.

> Race is entirely a social construct. You can't do a genetic test and with certainty determine someone's race. Certain genetic traits are common among what we call races, but not exclusive.

This seems confusing and contradictory. If traits are common in certain groups and not in others (needn’t be exclusive), then by Bayes rule these traits should identify groups with high probability (especially when combining multiple traits)

But genetic testing doesn't identify groups with high probability, because the overlap is so high. And it often misidentifies racial groups because of that.

I don't believe it's cultural only, the same way I don't believe ethiopians or kenyans excelling at marathons and long distance runs to be a cultural thing. Genetics play a factor, why can't math skills be influenced by genetics as well?

The difference in marathon times between Ethiopians or Kenyans and people from other countries is very very small, in the order of ~2%. How do you know it's not cultural? For example, in running, no one thought you could run a four minute mile, then as soon as one person did thousands did as as well. It could easily be explained that too athletic talent is far more likely to go into marathon running instead of other disciplines in those sports, as is the case for regional dominance in many other sports, so in reality the actual advantage is even slimmer if it isn't null at all.

I'll end with a question - competitive cycling requires the same abilities as marathon running, that is, optimal oxygen intake and usage, and great endurance in the buttock, leg, and foot muscles. Why are Ethiopians not dominant there?

They’re doping, so no need for a cultural explanation.

You realize cycling is one of the sports that is most under scrutiny when it comes to doping, right? Unless the advancements in doping have produced a method that is undetectable chemically or through a rider's bio-passport, doping is much less of an issue now than it was any time in the past 5 decades.

I’m talking about the recent doping scandals amongst competitive runners in Ethiopia and Kenya.

I am pretty sure the effort characteristic of endurance running and endurance cycling are very different. You use your legs for both, but the muscle groups are different and they way the muscles are used is different.

Also, to present a possible answer to your rhetorical question: cycling is a sport for rich people. A good bicycle, that a kid that wants to pursue the sport must get early in their life, is very expensive.

Not as much as you'd think, many of the muscles are in common when you use clipped pedals.

The most important factor in either sport in any case isn't the muscles, it's oxygen intake and use efficiency.

As far as your argument, by effect of selection, doesn't that meant that top runners are more likely to come from poorer countries? You also don't really need a good bicycle to train, just to compete, but even that's pretty expensive so I take your point.

Question: if race isn’t real, are you fine with medical research continuing to being dominated by studies on “whites”, and ignoring whether it applies just as appropriately to other (not real) races?

If race isn’t real, then as a white person, my bone marrow should be just as compatible for transplant at the same probability for blacks, asians, and “mixed race” people as it is for other whites, right?

I totally agree that monitoring every single human being on the planet, and recording and analyzing their individual DNA and second by second logs of their biomarkers and external environment from womb to death would definitely be “ideal”. But we aren’t there. Yet.

In the context of trying to manage finite resources and time, broad messy abstractions have been and will continue to be crucially important, despite not being pure. Trying to erase things like race with an ideological handwave is harmful.

I have no idea if its cultural or genetic, but the difference is there in the classroom. Its pretty clear that various programs run by the state aren't making much of a difference. If you need to change the culture of kids to make them better at math, then we should do that. Although I have no idea how to quantify what that culture is and how to apply that change across a school.

edit: also, note, you've said a lot of stuff about categories. But categories can blend into each other and cause ambiguity at the margins. But that doesn't remove the validity of there being categories. When I look at the kids who come in to competitive math programs, and these are kids who are more than a standard deviations above the mean in performance, I see a lot of uniformity. One can try to construct various explanations for this, but you can't tell me that there were NO kids from underrepresented ethnicities that had two professional parents and good exposure to mathematics early. We have plenty of racial diversity in the early math programs. And in the Bay Area there are plenty of professionals sending their kids to these programs from all ethnicities. And still, ten years later its the Chinese and Taiwanese American kids that are in the Olympiad team. And even at a lower level, say SAT math, we see the performance skewed by race in the same way. I am ethnically Indian. And Indians are as interested in math as Chinese. We all send our kids to math tutoring. We are mostly engineers in the Bay Area. And even so, at the very top of the distribution, there are some Indian kids ... but far more Chinese American and Taiwanese kids. These are just facts. I don't take it as a slam against my ethnicity that we don't do as well in math as the Chinese. There's more to life than math after all.

> One of the weird things about America is that we all know Asian kids are better at math than other kids on average. Its pretty obvious to anyone that's been in a class with Asians or taught Asians. I've done both.

> But nobody can actually say this.

“Asian kids in the US are, on average, better at math and, furthermore, this effect is stronger the fewer generations removed from immigration they are, and is in large part due to well-established general familial impacts on performance and the selective filter of immigration.”

> we all know Asian kids are better at math than other kids on average.

Mostly because of who immigrates to the US. Those Asian and Russian kids you mention probably have software engineers as parents. The Hispanic kids probably do not.

If we got the poorest and least educated immigrants from the same places, we'd be seeing rather different results.

That wouldn't change the end result though ... which is that for kids in America, we aren't going to get everyone at the same level of performance as Asian kids by money alone.

Sure, but that doesn't mean you can't do anything either. The inability to achieve a perfect result doesn't matter.

This is absurd cable news pundit-level commentary. It doesn’t sound like you’ve actually looked into this. More that you’ve taken some snippets of your life experience and explained it using your preconceived worldview. Nothing empirical about it. Nothing scientific. And the cherry on top is the implication that you’re “saying what we are all thinking”. Your experience teaching engineering or maths courses doesn’t qualify your baseless intuition as to causality, especially when the stakes are so high as to typecast such large groups of people.

This is a classic case of a misplaced assumption of transferable expertise.

I think the problem is more about skill floors than skill ceilings. I never really cared that much about Asian's positive stereotypes, but the same arguments have been used to propose arguments that hispanic/black students are inherently inferior. Despite the face that much of that, was and is environmental issues.

Once you hit a certain point, sure. There will simply be people who's brains work differently and efficiently, similar to runners who have different pique physiques for their respective category (I don't think we even tap into half of that in classical public teaching but I digress). But it's a much bigger sale to say that some people simply can't pass high school level acedemics and use that against them.