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Comment by ciropantera | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these aren't "strange or scientifically unsound ideas" but downright racism. Whether Nobel prize recipients are less or more racist than their contemporaries is debatable but I'm not sure they fit the same category as "believed in ghosts" or "claims to have talked to a fluorescent racoon".

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The key point is it’s not just ethically wrong, but it’s not scientific because it’s subjective and has no basis in reality. For instance, you cannot use genetic studies to define a race because for instance, in Africa, you could have massive genetic diversity in people that are 200 miles apart. That doesn’t make them different races. If you did attempt to classify people into races based on something scientific like genetics, you would end up with hundreds of thousands of “races”. With even more fine tooth classification, you could subdivide those people into further sub groups that becomes indistinguishable from just classifying extended families.

> If you did attempt to classify people into races based on something scientific like genetics, you would end up with hundreds of thousands of “races”. With even more fine tooth classification, you could subdivide those people into further sub groups that becomes indistinguishable from just classifying extended families.

'Biologically speaking', wouldn't that 'just' be something like breeds?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dog_breeds

Yeah, but at the end of the day, all of this classification is very arbitrary. Until you can come up with a measurable system like “8% genetic differences are defined as a different species” or “can successfully interbreed with viable non-sterile offspring” or something it’s all just a useful pneumonic to understand the world, but it’s not really objective science. Dog breeds are notoriously subjective and just depends on what the registry in the place wanted to do.

I think your argument starting with

> For instance, you cannot use genetic studies to define a race

is weak. For millennia we had phenomena that science couldn't describe. For many different reasons. One can now say that due to this the phenomena simply don't exists, since they didn't had a sound scientific understanding base. But that was obviously wrong.

To give you one of thousands example, think of how long it took science e.g. to understand lightnings. You could analyze the lightnings by form, and you ended up with thousands of forms. And then you could just say "Oh, this is so unscientific (because by some arbitrary limit reached), in reality lightning doesn't exist".

If some phenomena 1) isn't yet 100% scientifically described, then this is perhaps just a sign that science isn't far enough, hasn't used the proper methodology?

This is BTW a reason why I like the german word for science better than the english one. In german, it's "Wissenschaft" -> "knowledge creation". It's not "Wissenhab" -> "knowledge having". The word itself, unlike the english one, transports the idea that our knowledge is still limited. And that science is a process, not some achieved state.

1) "race" isn't just some old-white-man western concept. If you go to China, then you see that they also has such a concept --- and a quite strong one about "Han chinese". Or some african tribes, they even thought wars (Tuts & Hutu in Ruanda). Maybe race isn't a genetic concept, but a sociology one, e.g. because humans for whatever reason want to have an "us and they" thingy. In such a case searching for race genetics is simply the wrong methodology. Rendering the approach invalid, but nothing else.

That just means you can't call Africans one "race" because they hold all the genetic diversity on the planet. But it doesn't mean there's not some meaningful genetic grouping of populations that splintered out of Africa. Or, concretely, I'm struggling to square what you're saying with the fact that I tell my doctor I'm Hispanic because that means a higher genetic predisposition to things like diabetes.

Hispanic is probably the perfect example for this. A blonde Argentinian is probably not predisposed to diabetes. What I’m trying to say is racial categorizations don’t follow any rules based in our biology or genetics. For it to be scientific you would need to be able to categorize any given individual 100% based on some unchanging rule that is based on underlying biology. We cannot currently do that and what I’m saying is I don’t think you can come up with a rule like that without the result being hundreds of thousands of different categories of “races”.

I was under the impression doctors do this exact categorization all the time?

Given an individual's race (looking at them and asking) and the medical literature they change their treatments if need be.

Skin color and place of origin is a pretty rough but decent way to do this?

If need be they could just sequence your genes, afterall isn't that exactly how they connect and learn about hereditary diseases or know that certain races of people are predisposed to certain diseases?

"This man looks x and is from y and is complaining about z" I thought this was like basic medicine?

You're acting like gentics is a failed research field or something kinda confused on your point here.

> a pretty rough but decent way

How, exactly, would we know it's a decent way?

I suspect it's not really about "race" which is full of wrong meanings; it's just that "race" in the US mostly also means genetically close populations, like black people originally coming through slave trade from one of a few places in Africa and therefore sharing some similar traits. But if you scaled research to a representative sample of all "black" or "asian" (etc) people, any advantage this gives you would evaporate

I mean a black looking person complains about a problem and you instantly can guess that because he's black and something is more common you can come to a conculsion faster.

It's not "science" but don't doctors do this stuff like every single day?

What exactly is black though? Is it just dark skin or is it specifically those with African genetics? Because you have dark skinned people in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Southeast Asia, India, etc. Those people are very genetically dissimilar from Africans. In fact, in many cases, more dissimilar than someone from Africa and someone from Europe.

> he's black and something is more common you can come to a conculsion faster

Certainly very fast, but is that conclusion correct? Is it really more common for "black" people, and even if so does that apply in this case? I have my doubts, having a bit of an experience with how doctors operate.

Far from it, I’m saying genetics is the only true science in all of this. What I’m saying is the way we do races is subjective, arbitrary and not scientific.

Ohhhh well that explains my confusion I thought you were saying we had nothing to tell.

That still belongs to strange or scientifically unsound.

Yes, reality is racist. Statistics is racist. Nobel prize laureates are racist.

Whole science is racist ... it's totally inaccessible to people with IQ 2 standard deviations below average.

Only thing stupid people are really good at is being butthurt.

Keep downvoting my comment because reality offends you. I really love the "level of thinking" that this will somehow hurt me.

Thank you for proving my point.

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