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Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

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Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.…

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.

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.

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#22
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#23
post #6

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The fundamental problem with automated moderation. (Who watches the watchers?)

It makes sense to have watchers to watch the watchers because their respective job descriptions are different. One's task is to watch for "bad actors" and the other's job it to watch for bias within rendered judgments. Those are two different tasks requiring two different microskill sets and bodies of experience. Exemplars at each task may also represent two different personality types.

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#24
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.…

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.

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.

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#25
post #15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I am not a racist. Let me just affirm that. Here is my question- what if the tenets of racism - that race is tied in some fundamental way to a profile of abilities and deficits- is right? It's a possible world. Ethnically Jewish people could just be born with more verbal ability than whites. That is not impossible. My point is this. By demanding a world in which some things cannot even be spoken of (except by crit…

> By demanding a world in which some things cannot even be spoken of Excuse me, I demanded no such thing. I thought it was fairly clear that I was advocating against censorship, which invariably forces people into deeper and less accessible echo chambers. How are we supposed to convince the racists that they're wrong if we can't even see them being racist, or talk to them about it? I'm genuinely baffled as to how "le…

I may have replied to the wrong person here. My mistake for which I apologize.

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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?

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#28
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race is a socially constructed category. The idea that someone is a different "race" just because they look different is not supported by biology. In all metrics there is more variation within a group than between groups. So the "tenets of racism" have been decisively disproven many times over. The problem with defeating these in the marketplace of ideas, so to speak, is that their propagation has nothing to do with…

>>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.…

"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.

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

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

Re: Nextdoor will alert users if it thinks they’re about to post something racist

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is the way we should go if we want to have moderation of content that also respects freedom of speech. However, I don't think what most people people want is just to not see racist comment online, they want to prevent/forbid racist comment online, even if they don't see it. Otherwise Parler would never have been shut down like it was, people would simply ignore it. But instead, people go out of thei…

> Otherwise Parler would never have been shut down like it was, people would simply ignore it. Even with the "inciting and encouraging violence"? Why should people ignore platforms with calls to violence?

I don't think we should ignore platforms that call for violence, but is that what Parler did? AFAIK, only people using Parler was inciting any violence, not the people actually running and maintaining the service Parler.
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