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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

Hard boundaries are not required for categories to exist. It is really surprising that smart educated adults don't see this.

Will you suggest I'm sexist because I think male and female gender exists?

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I make no claim to be smart and calling a high school diploma an education is a stretch. That said, human sex overwhelmingly clusters around two categories, albeit with some intersex outliers. Additionally, Bimodal sex has endured for as long as recorded history, so it appears to be an immutable trait insofar as the species is a stable species and not taking into account that somewhere along the timeline we share a lineage with single-celled organisms.

Race on the other hand, does not neatly cluster into discreet categories that any responsible person would define, draw boundaries around and count. Furthermore, race has not remained stable over recorded history. Populations mix, join and split. Which race were the Old Kingdom Egyptians? Our modern notions of Asian, Caucasian, etc. probably did not even exist during their era.

Using "Race" like this is really bad in Germany and Sweden. As is pointed out in this thread [1] how we use words differs. TIL race has a different meaning in English and Swedish. I use it in both but I've never thought about the difference in how I use it in different languages.

Categories are not fixed between cultures, even colours and numbers are hard to get right. So when you hear a word you can not be clear it is used in your broad meaning, or the narrow meaning.

This was actually my favourite way of nerd sniping back when I was young.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816222

Colors are a a continuous spectrum, yet we put them in a bunch of categories.

It sounds like this is an analogy in support of the parent - is that the intent?

Organising people by the colour of their skin makes exactly as much ontological sense as organising library books by the colour of their cover.

Can you see the fallacy you are doing here? The parent tried to suggest this: simply because a thing can be in a spectrum doesn't make it unworthy of being a category. You've twisted that analogy into this nonsensical book example.

It’s not a fallacy, it’s a bitter, dark joke.

The implication of what you say — that white and black are races — is that indigenous Australians and African Americans are the same "race", because they both have black skin?

There's no need to torture semantics. We all understand how the terms "black" and "white" are used in the English-speaking world. They are umbrella terms with varying usage depending on what superset/subset of people you are talking about in the moment. E.g. in the US, "black" usually refers to dark-skinned people of African descent (I assume you know this), but other dark-skinned people might be included depending on context. Yes, biological/genetic "race" is a many-dimensional spectrum, in which context it's fine to argue that "race" doesn't exist, but that doesn't make the colloquial words used to describe "race" meaningless. It just makes their borders fuzzy when mapped onto a biological context.

Biological race does not, indeed, exist. Really at all. Defining it as a many-dimensional spectrum just so you can to continue to use the word "race", now that is torturing semantics.

The semantics I am referring to are the suggestion that "white" and "black" exist as races on a genetic level.

The example I am introducing is to test the understanding behind that suggestion.

> Biological race does not, indeed, exist. Really at all

Self identified race/ethnicity correlates highly with ancestry. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1196372/

It is therefore correct to suggest that race does have a biological basis.

Correct based on a correlation? Novel idea.

You should consider answering my question though.

The genders have always been bi-modal, but the well has been poisoned by people calling it "a binary" (hence "non-binary" people). A sad state of affairs.

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