The mainstream-ness of the linked statement is heavily disputed. A person in 1996 could have reasonably been unaware of this ofc. (You may have intended to link to the 1996 APA report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns instead?)
Accuracy about genetics and race is unusually important in charged conversations like this, and your 1st paragraph seems to miss an important point: categories like “black”, “white” and “Asian” are poor choices of genetic clusters. This is part of why population geneticists will call race a social construct: if you set out to find “racial” clusters of alleles (which is generally asserted to be low-value), you will find far better fits than society’s standard racial groupings.
You’re correct that “race” in the social sense has nonzero genetic meaning. However this doesn’t mean that members of the same “race” are particularly related. For example, my understanding is that a Korean, a Scotsman, an indigenous Australian, and a Meru would all likely share more alleles than any would with a Tuu. Yet the last two or three would be categorized as “black”. You could make a computer program that correctly predicts someone’s “race”, but it would be doing something equivalent to saying “this person is probably Meru, and Meru are labelled ‘black’”.
I meant to link to Gottfredson’s statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don’t. My point is that there was a good number of people who had this belief and if Bostrom formulated a true belief, it seems odd that he should face criticism for this. If you think it is false, we can discuss more.
I don’t know whether exactly it is a “poor choice” but the reason people talk about genetics and race is because they believe that the social categories have different gene variant frequencies resulting in phenotypic differences on socially relevant traits.
The Tuu are an unusual case. I fully grant that many would see a Tuu and not recognize that they are genetically much more distant. But most Americans have probably never even met a Bushman (I think this is the more respectful term than San).I do not think that these categories are perfectly defined and unambiguous, and yet I think they can have genetic differences.
This may not apply to you in particular, but I feel there is often isolated demands for semantic precision. People don’t object as often to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, “black people are abused by the police more” doesn’t get the response of “what do you mean by black? Is a mixed race person black? What if they look mostly white? What is a police? Does that include security guards? What if a police officer abused a black person but it turned out it was actually a rather dark skinned Sri Lankan? Do Bushmen count as black?” I understand what progressives are talking about when they say Black people even if there is not a platonic ideal definition. And although you can find some counter examples, I think it is generally true that black people tend to be more related to eachother than white people.
|I meant to link to Gottfredson’s statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don’t.
My disagreement was with the characterization of Gottfredson’s statement as mainstream when this is disputed by mainstream sources.
It is true that there was a difference in IQ scores, so I suggested a less disputed source saying so.
|People don’t object as often to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, “black people are abused by the police more” doesn’t get the response of “what do you mean by black?...”
Perhaps I was overly harsh in my initial reply. However, I do endorse being very rigorous when talking about the overlap of race and genetics. Whereas in the example of police, we generally assume that any influence of race on a given interaction involves the social labels.
|I do not think that these categories are perfectly defined and unambiguous, and yet I think they can have genetic differences.
The issue I find relevant isn’t vagueness, it’s that the standard ways to subdivide humans into 3-10 races don’t cleave reality at the joints.
If I understand correctly, ignoring recent intermixing, humans can be divided into the highly genetically diverse “Khoisan”, and the much more populous and less diverse non-Khoisan. Descendants of the out-of-Africa migration group (ie people who aren’t of sub-Saharan ancestry) are effectively one branch of non-Khoisan.
|And although you can find some counter examples, I think it is generally true that black people tend to be more related to each other than white people.
Ignoring recent intermixing, I think this is actually false, and may remain false if we ignore the Khoisan peoples. On average, a randomly selected black person may be more closely related to a randomly selected white (or Asian) person than to another randomly selected black person. (Whereas white or Asian people would be more closely related to their own group). This can happen if multiple clusters are grouped together under one label.
Whereas a couple weakened versions of your claim are true:
“Socially defined labels contain nonzero information about genetics, such that you can predict someone’s racial label with very good accuracy by looking at their genome, much more so than if people had been randomly assigned to racial groups.”
And, “You can decompose racial groups into a reasonably small number of subgroups, such that a randomly chosen member of a subgroup is on average closer to another random member than to a random member of another group” is probably true as well.
I hard-disagreed for two reasons:
The mainstream-ness of the linked statement is heavily disputed. A person in 1996 could have reasonably been unaware of this ofc. (You may have intended to link to the 1996 APA report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns instead?)
Accuracy about genetics and race is unusually important in charged conversations like this, and your 1st paragraph seems to miss an important point: categories like “black”, “white” and “Asian” are poor choices of genetic clusters. This is part of why population geneticists will call race a social construct: if you set out to find “racial” clusters of alleles (which is generally asserted to be low-value), you will find far better fits than society’s standard racial groupings.
You’re correct that “race” in the social sense has nonzero genetic meaning. However this doesn’t mean that members of the same “race” are particularly related. For example, my understanding is that a Korean, a Scotsman, an indigenous Australian, and a Meru would all likely share more alleles than any would with a Tuu. Yet the last two or three would be categorized as “black”. You could make a computer program that correctly predicts someone’s “race”, but it would be doing something equivalent to saying “this person is probably Meru, and Meru are labelled ‘black’”.
I meant to link to Gottfredson’s statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don’t. My point is that there was a good number of people who had this belief and if Bostrom formulated a true belief, it seems odd that he should face criticism for this. If you think it is false, we can discuss more.
I don’t know whether exactly it is a “poor choice” but the reason people talk about genetics and race is because they believe that the social categories have different gene variant frequencies resulting in phenotypic differences on socially relevant traits.
The Tuu are an unusual case. I fully grant that many would see a Tuu and not recognize that they are genetically much more distant. But most Americans have probably never even met a Bushman (I think this is the more respectful term than San).I do not think that these categories are perfectly defined and unambiguous, and yet I think they can have genetic differences.
This may not apply to you in particular, but I feel there is often isolated demands for semantic precision. People don’t object as often to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, “black people are abused by the police more” doesn’t get the response of “what do you mean by black? Is a mixed race person black? What if they look mostly white? What is a police? Does that include security guards? What if a police officer abused a black person but it turned out it was actually a rather dark skinned Sri Lankan? Do Bushmen count as black?” I understand what progressives are talking about when they say Black people even if there is not a platonic ideal definition. And although you can find some counter examples, I think it is generally true that black people tend to be more related to eachother than white people.
|I meant to link to Gottfredson’s statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don’t.
My disagreement was with the characterization of Gottfredson’s statement as mainstream when this is disputed by mainstream sources.
It is true that there was a difference in IQ scores, so I suggested a less disputed source saying so.
|People don’t object as often to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, “black people are abused by the police more” doesn’t get the response of “what do you mean by black?...”
Perhaps I was overly harsh in my initial reply. However, I do endorse being very rigorous when talking about the overlap of race and genetics. Whereas in the example of police, we generally assume that any influence of race on a given interaction involves the social labels.
|I do not think that these categories are perfectly defined and unambiguous, and yet I think they can have genetic differences.
The issue I find relevant isn’t vagueness, it’s that the standard ways to subdivide humans into 3-10 races don’t cleave reality at the joints.
If I understand correctly, ignoring recent intermixing, humans can be divided into the highly genetically diverse “Khoisan”, and the much more populous and less diverse non-Khoisan. Descendants of the out-of-Africa migration group (ie people who aren’t of sub-Saharan ancestry) are effectively one branch of non-Khoisan.
|And although you can find some counter examples, I think it is generally true that black people tend to be more related to each other than white people.
Ignoring recent intermixing, I think this is actually false, and may remain false if we ignore the Khoisan peoples. On average, a randomly selected black person may be more closely related to a randomly selected white (or Asian) person than to another randomly selected black person. (Whereas white or Asian people would be more closely related to their own group). This can happen if multiple clusters are grouped together under one label.
Whereas a couple weakened versions of your claim are true:
“Socially defined labels contain nonzero information about genetics, such that you can predict someone’s racial label with very good accuracy by looking at their genome, much more so than if people had been randomly assigned to racial groups.”
And, “You can decompose racial groups into a reasonably small number of subgroups, such that a randomly chosen member of a subgroup is on average closer to another random member than to a random member of another group” is probably true as well.