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by centimeter 2202 days ago
It's not my job to provide detailed proof on every HN post I make; I'm just pointing out something relevant, and if it interests you, you can go ahead and find where people have already done this. I think I've been specific enough that you can find this stuff on your own. This took me about 1 minute to find: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/to-classify-humanity...

> many of who you describe as East Asians consider themselves racially distinct

That's why I specifically mentioned the number of racial categories involved. Obviously as the number increases you can have different clustering results.

> Also, what major categories do mixed race people fall inside?

Obviously not into any of them, if we're talking about a simple mechanical classifier with high separation.

1 comments

The number of racial categories would itself be an arbitrary limit not corresponding to actual genetic variance, nor would classification under such limit capture said variance, and none of it would match up to the folk biology of racial categorization. This is the general problem with reasoning backwards from 19th century gobbledygook about human genetic variation instead of beginning with the genetics themselves.

It may not be “your job” to provide such evidence, but you’ve made a series of specific claims about things like the rate of phenotypic variance among different racial groups. If you don’t want to defend them, that’s your prerogative, but you also can’t expect them to be received as authoritative or remain free of challenge.