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 to say a lot of people who are into race science don’t wildly overstate their claims, but there isn’t literally nothing to it.

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 that the above isn't true, but as it is right now, race is at least moderately coupled to a biological signature.

What should also be emphasized is that race isn't an end-all. The within race variation is far greater than the between-race variation.

Are you positing a close ancestral link between Africans and Australian natives, say closer than between either and northwestern Europeans?

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-century human taxonomies, you might find that their classifications aren't interesting or useful for most things. If you controlled for effects that are affected by differential social treatment (like diet and upbringing), you might find most of your metrics are ghosts.

The process of sorting people into boxes for differential treatment based on their qualities affects their qualities.

I happily grant much of what you’re saying; I think the difference here in my view is that you can define groups in one way, and find that _other things_ can be predicted. No one said, “we will define African Americans by whether or not they have problems with high sodium causing heart issues” and then determined that African Americans have this medical problem. Race is certainly a suboptimal way to predict this medical problem; much better to have statistically determined genetic markers, or better yet, a complete rendering of the mechanisms of action. But we don’t.

I’m all for “variation with groups is larger than variation between groups”, both as a literal reality and also as a practical answer to the question of how do I go through the world without being a jerk to people.

Racial categories are squishy and permeable. So are ideas of species, sub species. They’re useful tools with sharp limitations. Again, some people certainly oversell the utility of the tools, often for malign ends. But it doesn’t mean it’s an entirely bankrupt view

The following is a response to only your first paragraph:

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.

> 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.

Only if they differ substantially. If they look like https://evergreenleadership.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/B..., you can't conclude much from an individual's bone density measurement, even if "people of race X have 3% more bone density than people of race Y".

I took the word "anything" too literally.

I interpreted "conclude anything from" as "have a different posterior probability distribution" rather than "have a significantly different posterior probability distribution". This was an error on my part.

Thanks for the elaboration.

It's a deepity, ie. a statement with two interpretations, one true but trivial, and one enormously impactful but false.

that is a wonderful word, thanks

also, i miss reading your comments on SSC, are you on ASX?

Yeah, just not much to contribute lately.