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New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

m.timesofindia.com

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Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#31

Post by bayesianhorse »

sgt101 wrote: post #19

I think that humans are extremely homogenous http://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf That is to say that the differences between me and the most different human (with not chromosomal disaster like Downs) are so small as to make arranging humans into groups according to their genetics meaningless.

One interesting issue the article raises is putting children into different schools based on their genetics. As far as I understood it, the genetics of intelligence wasn't this well understood...

I couldn't find anything on the matter. For me their is still no evidence for practical use of genetics in Education....

Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#32

Post by dhfjgkrgjg »

Some people have massive, powerful shoulders. And they need them. To carry that chip on their shoulder for so long.

Whether their personal chip is racism, sexism, or any other -ism, their chip is the real problem. So, how do we stop them foisting their chips onto the rest of civilised society?

Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#33

Post by Einstalbert »

dhfjgkrgjg wrote: post #32

Some people have massive, powerful shoulders. And they need them. To carry that chip on their shoulder for so long. Whether their personal chip is racism, sexism, or any other -ism, their chip is the real problem. So, how do we stop them foisting their chips onto the rest of civilised society?

Focus on how they got the chip on their shoulder and then make sure it doesn't happen to anyone without one.

Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#34

Post by _delirium »

sgt101 wrote: post #19

I think that humans are extremely homogenous http://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf That is to say that the differences between me and the most different human (with not chromosomal disaster like Downs) are so small as to make arranging humans into groups according to their genetics meaningless.

One issue (this also applies to some discussion of gender differences) is that people often organize discussion of group differences around comparing population means on some trait, and trying to come up with studies that have large enough statistical power to show a difference in means. What often gives a clearer picture, though, is to estimate the full distribution of some trait in different groups, not only a point estimate of the mean. In that case, the result often ends up much less impressive: you end up with two bell curves that almost exactly coincide. If they don't exactly coincide, a study with large enough statistical power can show a difference in means. But people often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X than women, with p < 0.05", the result is two disjoint bell curves, rather than two nearly-coincident bell curves.

Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#35

Post by dhfjgkrgjg »

Einstalbert wrote: post #33
dhfjgkrgjg wrote: post #32

Some people have massive, powerful shoulders. And they need them. To carry that chip on their shoulder for so long. Whether their personal chip is racism, sexism, or any other -ism, their chip is the real problem. So, how do we stop them foisting their chips onto the rest of civilised society?

Focus on how they got the chip on their shoulder and then make sure it doesn't happen to anyone without one.

Sounds far too simplistic. Some people are born arseholes, some blame the world for their bad lot in life, others still take pleasure in causing problems and generally trolling. Finally a small honest few may derive their chip from personal experience, the most honest experience. I agree we should review what happened in their respective situations, and work to avoid that in the future. But the rest? Not worth the attention they so desperately seek.

Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#36

Post by ef4 »

_delirium wrote: post #34
sgt101 wrote: post #19

I think that humans are extremely homogenous http://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf That is to say that the differences between me and the most different human (with not chromosomal disaster like Downs) are so small as to make arranging humans into groups according to their genetics meaningless.

One issue (this also applies to some discussion of gender differences) is that people often organize discussion of group differences around comparing population means on some trait, and trying to come up with studies that have large enough statistical power to show a difference in means. What often gives a clearer picture, though, is to estimate the full distribution of some trait in different groups, not only a poin…

> But people often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X than women, with p Which just means people are bad at understanding statistics. They have a folk understanding of "mean" that doesn't allow for differences in distribution.

Which is an endless source of unjustified outrage whenever you try to make demonstrably true statements about population means.

The whole educational fad to teach everyone to code is fine and all, but I want to see a fad for statistics...

Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#37

Post by _delirium »

ef4 wrote: post #36
_delirium wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One issue (this also applies to some discussion of gender differences) is that people often organize discussion of group differences around comparing population means on some trait, and trying to come up with studies that have large enough statistical power to show a difference in means. What often gives a clearer picture, though, is to estimate the full distribution of some trait in different groups, not only a poin…

> But people often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X than women, with p Which just means people are bad at understanding statistics. They have a folk understanding of "mean" that doesn't allow for differences in distribution. Which is an endless source of unjustified outrage whenever you try to make demonstrably true statements about population means. The whole educational fad to teach everyone…

I think the people attempting to make technically true but scientifically uninteresting statements about population means often have ulterior political motives (which is why they don't do analyses that are actually scientifically interesting), so I don't think the outrage is always unjustified. This can be seen in their paper titles and abstracts, and particularly their press releases, which make typically claims about differences between groups unsupported by the data. There's a whole cottage industry of "men are like X, women are like Y" folks who are rather tendentiously misrepresenting data to sell their books.

In particular, that two populations have differing means is trivially true for nearly any two population groups and choice of traits, even randomly split ones, so simply demonstrating a population mean difference is nearly never interesting. If you choose any trait that can vary between people, and you manage to find every person in two finite population groups and compute a mean (so at this point you have zero sampling error, since you have a complete population count), the two means will very rarely be literally identical. There is some exact rational number that is "the average height of HN posters who registered on a January 2" and a rational number that is "the average height of HN posters who registered on a January 3", and these numbers are almost certainly different. Therefore demonstrating a difference in means is simply an exercise in getting a large enough sample size to prove something that is nearly always true. But going through the effort to collect the sample to "prove" that Jan-2nders are taller than Jan-3rders or vice-versa is not scientifically interesting, even though one of the two is almost certainly true. And it would certainly not be justified to hang much interpretation off my result, in which I speculated wildly about how evolutionary differences resulted in the Jan-3rders having (slightly) shorter height.

Now if you could show unexpectedly large differences, like many Jan-2nders are > 6ft while very few Jan-3rders are < 6ft, such that the population curves differ by more than a trivial amount, that could be an interesting result that merits further study. But then you need to be talking about distribution estimates and comparing curves and error bands, not talking about population means and quoting p-values.

Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#38

Post by XorNot »

adamnemecek wrote: post #16
bradyd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined."[1] From a genetic perspective there is basically no basis for the traditional categorization of race. Two people of the same skin color, from the same country, who would be considered by traditional definitions to be the same race, can have completel…

> basically no basis what's "basically no basis"? > can have completely different genetic lineages yeah so what? that does not really prove that the concept of race does not exist.

Is it really important to you that race be traced back to genetics?

I mean, is it really important we have this concept?

You realize that your brain is not your skin right? The whole concept of race not existing is that if you look at genetic diversity for markers we can correlate to function, there is no difference between the "races" greater then the difference we find within each population - i.e. the population does not exist, beyond visual cues.

But you know, it's probably really important we be utterly pedantic on this point. Because heaven help us if we don't acknowledge people's skin color can be different in a consistent way. That seems really important and we must mention it a lot. For some reason.

Re: New forms of 'racism' arise in science research

#39

Post by b3tta »

I think ignoring the differences between races (e.g. hypertension medicine targeted at african americans) is as wrong as ignoring the fact, that genetic differences between 2 people, which might be considered as being from the same "race", might be much greater.

Furthermore "white knighting" for races (i.e. probably non-caucasian ones) is very likely not much better than racism itself (same as the people fighting "for" women and against the jerks at conferences etc.).

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