[emddudley]

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.

https://www.sceneonradio.org/episode-40-citizen-thind-seeing...

[orangepurple]

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.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17349058/

[pessimizer]

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?

[daenz]

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.