"That doesn't mean race doesn't exist"

Exactly, although not in the traditional sense. There are many many overlapping genetic aspects in humans; We subdivide for political or social reasons, not strictly biological ones. To make the height comparison more fair, it would be as if we divided people into "bigs" or "littles" arbitrarily and formed political parties around it, etc. Height is one biological aspect and even then what is "tall" is subjective.

For example, the US viewpoint of white or black(~=african) is a relatively recent way of looking at race. People don't slot neatly into X or Y buckets.

I recommend reading the wikipedia article on Race [0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

But I've think you've gotten looped around here to a stance that fails to account for the original context. It wouldn't be that surprising if an AI could categorize people into "tall" vs "short" from pixelated medical images; certainly nobody would say, as the parent comment did, that the AI must be cheating because there's no such thing as being biologically tall.

But no one would argue that the definitions of "tall" and "short" weren't social constructs, even as the fact of human length from heel to crown clearly is not a social construct.

Funny, I read this immediately after leaving a comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525122) using height categories as an example of a social construct.

Race is socially constructed, just like the idea of who is short and tall is. The objective things in each case are genes and height, which are not socially constructed.

This is an error on two counts: it conflates a spectrum on a single qualiry with spectra across multiple qualities, and it presumes the existence of people who are the “most” of their race (the way that there is a tallest and a shortest person). The first isn’t what race is, and the second is absurd.

Does it? I'm 6'5" (196cm in Roman Catholic[1]); in Amsterdam I'm at the upper range of normal while in many other places I am Godzilla and have to watch my step to avoid crushing things.

[1] A humorous reference. Sorry.