[dslkfjg]

>>Race is a socially constructed category.

This is Mao telling me I'm reactionary. It's Freud telling me I am going after his theories because I am projecting and have an Oedipal Complex.

You missed the point I was making. When 23andMe tells me I'm Jewish and I share 99% of my profile with fellow Jews whether or not "race is a social construct" used by some people for nefarious ends, the facts remain where they are.

Some ethnicities suffer from certain diseases at a rate far exceeding other ethnicities. That's genetic. That's the action of, in some cases a defect on a single gene. If you want to say those people are not a race, then fine, I'm not inclined to argue with you.

The point is that the possibility that shared genetic profiles are responsible for abilities and disabilities- which is something in the neighborhood of what bad racists are leveraging for effect, is not completely impossible.

I appreciate the anti-racist ethos. All humans are equal in my eyes merely for the fact of being human, full stop, no exceptions. It is still possible that genes control abilities and deficits and that shared genes result in shared outcomes. That is still a reasonable hypothesis and in the cse of outright maladies, more than a hypothesis.

If you want to have good outcomes, including societal outcomes, you need to know what is causing the outcomes you have. You cannot dictate causality; it needs to be discovered. Dictating causality looks like this:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/trofim-lysenko

https://theconversation.com/the-tragic-story-of-soviet-genet...

[gotostatement]

I understand what you're saying, but I'm just telling you it's a scientific fact that race is a social construct in the sense that on all the relevant metrics that are usually talked about, like intelligence, ability, etc, there is more intragroup variation than intergroup variation.

[dTal]

That's not a particularly useful sense. There's more variation in height amongst men and women than between them too, but we're still perfectly happy to say that men are taller than women.

[gotostatement]

bad analogy. the height variance (not absolute bounds) in each sex is probably smaller than the difference in mean height. whereas this is not true of other metrics like intelligence

[dTal]

And why should that mark the Authoritative Threshold on whether a statistical skew counts as a "social construct"?

And if we crunched the numbers and falsified your assertion? Would you really turn on a dime and accept that okay, it's a social construct that men are taller?

[gotostatement]

I don't understand your argument. if you look at two bell curves for IQ and they look almost identical except for a slightly different mean, you're really going to go "okay that group is obviously smarter"? height is a different story - the curves are going to look much different. if you really don't want to get that then there's no point in continuing

[dslkfjg]

That's true. There is more intra-group variation because within any group you have geniuses and you have morons, which is the widest spread you can have either intra-group or inter-group.

[gotostatement]

If every group is a bell curve, then the curves have similar variance and similar mean as well, and the variance within each group is larger than the difference between the means, and the differences are not big enough to say in a meaningful way that one group is smarter than another.

[curryst]

"Race is a socially constructed category" is a semantic argument, not a real debate point. An ethnicity indicates you are descended from some set of people, and share genetics and/or culture with them. A race is a group of people whose membership is almost entirely arbitrary. Just as an example, many (maybe most?) people who are Hispanic have some amount of Spanish heritage (the country, not the language). Spanish people are white in terms of race, though. It's an arbitrary boundary we've drawn. Ethnicities are actually tied to geneology, so they could potentially be useful.

I still get your point, though.

I think you're right in that abilities and disabilities can be genetic. It would make sense that groups that share genes could share abilities and disabilities. There are 2 things to note, however.

The first is that at this point in humanity's progress, I doubt that there are very many people who only belong to a single ethnicity. And each time people of different ethnicities procreate, each gene is effectively randomly taken from one of the two ethnicities. The chances of inheriting an entire multi-gene sequence from one parent is fairly low. That's why many of these genetic disorders are only common in communities that practice endogamy. For the wider population, unless you're descended fairly recently from someone that was a part of those communities, your chances are extremely low. I would expect that same here. If some ethnicity has an ability/disability, it would be common among an endogamous group of that ethnicity, but the chances for someone who split from that group several generations ago to have it is going to rapidly approach 0. One would expect that given random interbreeding between ethnicities, everyone would approach an average.

The second is that human behavior is extremely complex. Finding the causality for a delta in some ability is very hard to do. Most of the things we have traced back to genetics are binary. You have a disease, or you don't. There is no standard deviation on whether you have the disease or not, you either do or don't. Genetic diseases are also effectively immune to social factors. It doesn't matter how rich or poor, or white collar or blue collar you are; you can't get Tay-Sachs because you were discriminated against. Those add up to make it very hard to find the causality behind much of what we consider an ability. If one group ranks 10% higher in IQ tests, it might be because they're wealthy and everyone else is experiencing food shortages. Or they can afford better schools. Likewise, if another group can run 10% faster on average, it might be because they tend to work blue collar jobs and are in better shape than those of us that sit at a desk all day.

There are tons of factors that can affect physical and mental abilities. Genetics are likely one of those. If we can't even establish the causality, we certainly aren't going to be able to gauge the magnitude. Is it a drastic increase/decrease in ability, or is it a small change that is exacerbated by everyone overestimating it? It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we demonstrate some ethnicity can run faster, they'll start getting picked more to be professional athletes. Then more members of the ethnicity will attempt to become professional athletes, thus raising the average running speed and making the delta look more significant than it is.

Overall, I agree that genetics probably plays a role. I just think tracing it to an ethnicity is a) too difficult to be realistic, and b) not targeted enough to be useful. The cost of genetic testing will eventually fall enough to where we don't have to look at ethnicity to guess at what genes you have, we can just test everyone. Then ethnicity is irrelevant, it's entirely about whether you have the gene or not.

[gotostatement]

The point in saying "race is a socially constructed category" is to counter the ideology that says that "race is a meaningful categorization of people" and, in particular, "it says meaningful things about people's nature and abilities." While ethnicity does pass along, the traits that it carries with it are so scattered and superficial that it's not meaningful in most contexts to categorize people as such, genetically speaking (though of course they can become unified by how they are treated in society).

Analogy: having brown hair is a genetic trait. But it wouldn't make sense if we categorized people as "brown-hairs" because it's just not a meaningful category that says anything much about anything except the color of their hair.

[dslkfjg]

I agree with your post overall. Especially wrt to intelligence I think that it's composed of thousands of microtasks some of which are specific enough, likely coming complete with dedicated brain functions, to be helped or hurt by genetics. If we knew what they were, we could develop compensatory strategies for each distribution of abilities / deficits.

That is one of the (many) reasons I always argue for fearlessly understanding the full measure of reality as opposed to practicing a new form of Lysenkoism called "we're all equivalent and interchangeable, so the problem lies elsewhere...".

In a sense, all pro-social behavior is a kind of learned compensation which counters an innate desire to just club that other fellow over the head. Compensating for a "lack" in your genes is the stuff civilization is founded on.

That said, this is just wrong:

> If we demonstrate some ethnicity can run faster, they'll start getting picked more to be professional athletes.

You aren't picked to excel; you're born to it and other peple observe that fact. If people were picked to excel then just anyone could be in the NBA. We have all run the 100 yd dash. We've all had opportunities to distinguish oureslves there. Not many of us did. Even fewer did and failed to notice this in themselves.

You can't socially engineer raw talent but you can impose conditions which overwhelm it. That is always a tragedy.