241–250 of 357 posts
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"the definitional distinction".. ?
I don’t know what point you’re making, but my “definitional distinction” remark meant that “sex” is more or less defined by the ability of one group to bear children (fertility issues aside, of course). Not sure if that addresses your concern.
This is probably a great time to remind everyone that the reason the blood types are A, B, AB, and O (as opposed to, say, A, B, C, D or another nomenclature) is that when the first blood type experiments were run, only people with A and B protein configurations were available for testing in the lab where the tests were executed. I'd be very cautious drawing sweeping conclusions from research like this. The researcher…
Blood types are categorized as A/B/AB/O because of the presence (or for O, absence) of protein markers on the surface of blood cells. A/B/C/D would be a much less descriptive system.
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As someone with a scientific bent who is of the left, I always find it incredibly frustrating when people say “x is a social construct”, because it’s technically true, but also utterly elides the dual nature of the category. Race is a social construct that can be used to infer true things (probabilities) about the real world! Other social constructs that have this property: sociology, economics, physics… This isn’t t…
Agreed on both fronts. There's a lot of attempts here to use "race is a social construct" to indirectly claim that race is meaningless, or at least imply that. People need to realise the following: - Race is a social construct - It's also a proxy for ancestry - Ancestry is a proxy for genetic history - None of the above contradict each other. It is possible that we could sufficiently redefine race and ethnicity such…
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>> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. 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…
I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best. 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…
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.
This is probably a great time to remind everyone that the reason the blood types are A, B, AB, and O (as opposed to, say, A, B, C, D or another nomenclature) is that when the first blood type experiments were run, only people with A and B protein configurations were available for testing in the lab where the tests were executed. I'd be very cautious drawing sweeping conclusions from research like this. The researcher…
I thought this was some expert-level trolling at first, but your post history suggests you’re acting in good faith, so: Blood types are categorized as A/B/AB/O because of the presence (or for O, absence) of protein markers on the surface of blood cells. A/B/C/D would be a much less descriptive system.
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As someone with a scientific bent who is of the left, I always find it incredibly frustrating when people say “x is a social construct”, because it’s technically true, but also utterly elides the dual nature of the category. Race is a social construct that can be used to infer true things (probabilities) about the real world! Other social constructs that have this property: sociology, economics, physics… This isn’t t…
You can't say anything about someone's bone density by deciding that they are black. Averaging the bone density of everyone that you've defined as black might be predictive of distributions of the bone densities of large numbers of people you've defined as black. But it's just because of the metrics you've chosen. If you started defining race by bone density, and ignored ahistorical half-biblical half-mystical 19th-c…
Huh? If the distributions of bone densities among “people you would visually identify as ‘race X’ ” and “people you would visually identify as ‘race Y’ ” differ, then knowing that an individual would be someone you would visually identify as ‘race X’, gives you some amount of statistical information about their bone density.
I guess you just mean that you can’t make any high-confidence statements that are substantially different than if you didn’t have that information?
Small note on second paragraph: I don’t think the racial categories in question are even half-biblical? I mean, I know in the Old Testament there are lots of things referring to e.g. edomites, or Amalekites, etc. , but I don’t think these are really like, “races”, and I can’t think of anything that really supports the idea of a fixed set of racial categories. But perhaps I’m forgetting/missing something.
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So if you were going to create a test for "Is this a social construct?" What would it be? It seems like the definition from your comment would be "Could we take this labeling system, and define different labels or the labels differently?" I watched some of the youtube, and in the thought experiment she proposes she take a continuous trait(height) and arbitrarily splits it into two buckets. And talks about how this is…
> Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct. That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical…
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The second sentence of the Wikipedia article for “species” reads: > 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 an…
> This is the definition I’ve always heard It's not as precise as you think, because fertility isn't transitive. Consider members of a species, M1, M2, F1, F2. M1 might be fertile with F1, M2 with F2, but M1 may not be fertile with F2. Are they all really members of the same species? Read up on the species problem for more information (there are now 26, not 24): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept
That being said, it seems to me that it makes sense that a species would include the entire connected graph whose nodes are members and whose edges represent the ability to have fertile offspring.
I found [1] which is an interesting example of a very large graph, but nevertheless, all the examples seem to be within altogether very similar groups.
I think a reasonable definition for casual use doesn’t need to require the graph of a species to be fully connected, only fully reachable.
There are certainly leaks to any abstraction of species, but they are empirical cases of exceptions. They don’t inject arbitrary social categories into the definition. Definitions of “race” have no empirical basis on which to be proved or disproved in the first place.
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> Maybe these things are social constructs, but if they are then we surely must come to the conclusion that almost everything we care about in the world is a social construct. That's the point really. And it's not inherently a value judgement to say something is a social construct. Using it as a value judgment usually is meant to convey that some secondary attributes are not inherent, or even more so, just historical…
I guess another way to put this when someone says "race is a social construct". What are they trying to communicate about race?
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>the AI might have found some other indicator, like filenames in the data set The paper quite explicitly goes into testing and disseminating what exactly the AI detects. Two observations: - the classification clearly was primarily based on the visual content rather than spurious metadata, because various transformations of the visual content had the expected impact on classification correctness - the classification c…
In principle yes, but did you read the paper? They do a lot of completely crazy things like blurring the image until it's just fuzzy blobs, or doing a high-pass filter on it until it just looks like noise (they comment that a human could not even guess that it's an x-ray picture), and they still get very high accuracy. Basically no matter what they try they can still get the race out, with slightly lower percentage n…
Seeing as this would be easy to do, I imagine that if it is at all plausible from what they know that it is getting information from anything other than the x-ray scan, that they would have already tried this?
I do wonder how good of a predictor something would be if it just went off the average brightness of the image. Probably very bad, but maybe better than chance? Well, better than chance on the training set is to be expected, the question I guess is whether it would be better than chance on the test or validation set (I’m not confident in my understanding of the distinction between testing set and validation set. Is the idea that if you are using the score on the testing set to decide when to stop training, and maybe what hyper parameters to use or something, and other things to determine which model, you only try the model on the validation set once you have decided on your final version of the model?)