Ever more complicated attempts to bridge the gap by muddying the waters.
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.
One of the major issues with biological race realism is that common race classifications do not form monophyletic groupings. If you already have a set of definitions you need to fit, any sufficiently large set of features can trivially classify those categories. It doesn't matter if the groups are race or "people who like licorice". When the features and population sizes aren't uniformly distributed, you can even get very strong correlations, without there being a meaningful underlying basis.
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.
I've noticed people in all parts of the political spectrum have a hard time understanding the term "social construct". It doesn't mean the same as "completely made up".
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.
Still is? The AI is correlating biological features with self reported race. There are biological differences between people who have different ancestors. Finns are different from brits. The spanish are different from russians. Nigerians look different than somalians. The Japanese look differnet than filipinos.
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.
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.
I am not. Historically ethnicities and ancestoral lines aligned so ethnic differences and biological differences due to generational mating choices largely influenced by the culture that is a component of the ethnicity are aligned as well. Race is not a biological classification because it is appearance based but arbitrary. Appearance is not the same as biology. A husky appears similar to a small wolf but it might be correct to consider them (dogs) a race of wolves.
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.
Medical software used in the US classifies Hispanic as an ethnic group, not a race. Those are separate fields in a patient's chart. Here is the official federal government guideline.
Yes, but socially when you ask people their race they will say black or hispanic or white. And with little consitency. It is more of a way to justify and impose social classes.
So isn’t the “evil social construct” part actually the invalid extension of the theory that biological or phenotypic differences mean that someone is more or less human? You can remove that part and still acknowledge that there are biological differences between people based on their genetic lineage without invalidating their basic humanity.
Race as an entire concept to me has always been stupid at best. Sure, there are vast swaths of biological similarities (typically, though not necessarily) according to general geographic regions of the globe, but the real mistake was trying to give this vague concept a label. Can anybody give a definition of what "white" or "black" REALLY means? It's an impossible task. If we're talking just visually about skin color, congratulations, that represents citizens of some 100+ odd countries on the planet and just as many (if not many more!) cultures and languages. But leave it to humans to try and over optimize and try to denote evermore meaningless abstractions...
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.
To me it is the epitome of laziness. The ultimate expression of the banality of evil.
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.
Unfortunately, that's not quite true. Here's the AMA[1] with a press release entitled "New AMA policies recognize race as a social, not biological, construct".
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.
Sickle cell disease is exclusively caused by genetics, not race. The vast majority of people of African or Afro-Caribbean descent aren't carriers, so have the same likelihood as everyone else who is not a carrier to develop it.
There is no scientific, consistent way to define race. The groups we put people into is fairly arbitrary. They don't correlate to appearance, genetics, country of origin, etc.
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.
Alloco 2007 looked at random locations of single nucleotide polymorphisms(SNPs) and found that, using random SNPs, you still get very good correspondence between self-identification and best fit genetic cluster. Using as few as 100 randomly selected SNPs, they found a roughly 97% correspondence between self-reported ancestry and best-fit genetic cluster.
Were the formulations of genetic clusters created through marking samples with self-reported race? If so, why couldn't you create an entirely different rubric of race by choosing a few arbitrary features to define each of them and find exactly the same thing?
If there's no scientific, consistent way to define race, how is it that a machine learning model is able to pick the race that somebody self-identifies as consistently? The model is simply using rules based on math to deduce an accurate guess.
It still is. Just because it includes physical signifiers that can be measured doesn't mean it isn't still a social construct.
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 if shortfings tend to be drastically taller
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?
Perhaps there is some quality of the x rays themselves that is different? Maybe white people tend to visit hospitals with newer, better equipment or better trained radiographers and the model is picking up on differences in the exposures from that.
From the paper "Race prediction performance was also robust across models trained on single equipment and single hospital location on the chest x-ray and mammogram datasets"
They mostly accounted for this:
>Race prediction performance was also robust across models trained on single equipment and single hospital location on the chest x-ray and mammogram datasets
Sure, it’s possible that bias due to the radiographer is the culprit, but this seems unlikely.
I'm just going to abandon the term race because nothing constructive is going to come from it. It is not contentious that there are various physiological developments among groups of humans.
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.
