Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about this because an engineer I worked with had a father in dentistry and told me my kid had "German teeth in an Irish mouth" which matched her ancestry, which he didn't know - just said that in response to my description of the crowding.
So YES, races have biological differences. If not, we wouldn't be able to tell where people are from. I get that it's not cool to discriminate based on race, but it's not OK or even practical to deny that it exists (see dentistry example above).
No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due to shared ancestry, it's the classification itself that doesn't match up well with reality.
Seems like you have a pretty good grasp on my assertion here.
The utility of clusters is nebulous, too.
The same is true of "species". Last I checked, there were at least 24 different definitions of "species", all of which have some overlap and none of which are perfectly precise. You don't see people going around saying "species is a social construct". Then again, maybe they will soon, I suppose anything is possible these days.
That said, you are correct that "race" is merely a rough statistical correlation for some cohort, not some precise measure. If we can categorize more precisely, then we should, and we only fall back to "race" as a last resort (if it's applicable).
> A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.
This is the definition I’ve always heard, and it’s certainly more rigorous than any definition of “race” that I’ve encountered, and makes no reference to any arbitrary social constructs.
Conversely, the definition for “race” is explicitly arbitrary and social:
> A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.
Is there any definition of race where, given two people, you can apply some criteria to determine whether or not they are the same race? The criteria can't be "look at the definitions of each race and categorize the two people" because that's circular, how were those particular categories chosen? With species, you can determine that a bird and a fish are different species without knowing what birds and fish are.
Approximation it may be, imperfect it may be, construct it may be, but its utility is very much real. Attempts to handwave it away do not change the fact that race and genetics are very much linked as it is used today.
I would dispute that claim.
Due to population bottlenecks among the first 'out_of_africa' groups, a black passing south indian is genetically a lot closer to a white as milk finnish person than various african subpopulations are to each other. (Africans are orders of magntitude more diverse than the rest of the world, in a genetically quantifiable way)
Race markers like latin american and hispanic betray the fact that some countries (argentina, chile) are almost entirely white, others are have denisovan dna (natives) or are racial frankenstien's monsters due to slave trade (Brazil). It makes no sense to use these umbrella race denominations.
Race as an overloaded term for sociological, antropological, genetic and medical use is stupid. It just becomes a terrible tool for each. Genetics has smartly stopped using race much, but the others still continue to do so, despite the inconveniences it brings.
There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies.
Where's the utility in that?
But this is true for everything. For example "night and day" - these are just buckets, but nobody would argue that there are no differences between night and day because of that.
could be genetic I suppose but I wasn't aware of this as a thing eg. Asian fit sunglasses
No, I don't know what the point of this comment is. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the parent comment either.
Africa is going to be similarly diverse as Asia.
I think the parent is saying that it's possible (likely even) that the AI isn't picking up on biological features, but some other artifact. For example, perhaps the quality of x-ray machines or technicians correlate with race (race and "access to higher quality radiology" both correlate with wealth) and the AI is really picking up on the quality of the imaging. The fact that the AI still worked when the imaging quality was reduced across the board (pixelated into 8x8 squares) suggests that this particular hypothesis is unlikely, but this is the kind of error we're discussing.
Off topic, but this sounds very engineery, indeed. Was the conversation polite?
