This was a fascinating article. I recommend reading it all the way to the end. One of my favorite sections:
> Though many people clearly believe that racial and ethnic classifications are somehow linked to science, I observe that their relationship to genetics is a lot like astrology's link to astronomy. The analogy is imperfect, however; very few government officials are willing to publicly admit that they plan their lives around astrology (though some apparently do), but nearly all of them publicly plan their programs around ethnic classifications. Indeed, the government pours millions of dollars each year into reaffirmation of this belief and requires that private industry join in the massive delusion.
> The widespread delusion about racial and ethnic classification has not been confined to the nonscientific world, unfortunately. As Lancelot Hogben remarked 56 years ago [2]: “Geneticists believe that anthropologists have decided what a race is. Ethnologists assume that their classifications embody principles which genetic science has proved to be correct. Politicians believe that their prejudices have the sanction of genetic laws and the findings of physical anthropology to sustain them.”
> While there often are visible differences between people from areas that are widely separated, these differences are very small compared with the physical similarities of all humans
I've always found it interesting (as a Muslim from the Middle East) that Middle Eastern is almost always lumped under White. I have some Turkish blood and so am on the lighter side, but much of my friends and family back home are definitely not "white".
I did have some friends from back home who moved to the US, and would tick "African / American" since we're technically from the African continent, though being from the North we wouldn't fit that in the traditional sense either.
I guess we'd all be mongrels. I sometimes wonder what it will mean for my sons' sense of identity as they grow up seeing themselves grouped under the White group.. While still feeling like a minority due to the way they look/speak.
This isn't really a problem with computers so much as with taxonomy. You pretty much always end up with sorites-esque delineation paradoxes when imposing taxonomies onto nature. No matter how refined your system of categories is, it's never complete.
I love this as an exploration, but I think it doesn't go quite far enough. Are (socially defined) racial categories ridiculous from a biological lens? Sure. Does that mean they are not real? No.
Humans are primates for whom social power structures are deeply important. (And not the only ones; see de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics" for how it plays out in our nearest relatives.) As a species we are extremely good at building eusocial power systems, and we use that to get a lot done. But those can depend on a lot of effectively arbitrary markers to do that. Look at the British class system. What outsiders would call slight shifts in accent, clothing, and manners mark major division in social power.
The US wasn't nearly as classist, but it undeniably started out as a racialized and gendered power system. (E.g., 1700+ members of congress owned slaves [1], with slaveholders being in the majority for the first 30 years. It wasn't until 1870 we saw a black person in a federal elected seat, and the first woman was in 1917.) So it's not a shock that state and federal bureaucracies would be extremely interested in which box a person fits into.
These categories aren't biological, they're social, standing waves in our interactions. As a white man, there are many, many situations in the US where I get treated better just because of that. It's that lasting differential in social power that is what really defines racial categories. If we want to eliminate the categories, we first have to eliminate the power differential. Then the categories will go away on their own, the same way a lot of ancestry questions have become moot among white people (e.g., having ancestors of English vs German vs Irish vs Italian ancestry used to matter a fair bit). But as with the English class system, that power differential will not go away on its own; it has to be studied, recognized, and actively dismantled.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/cong...
In Australia, I've never seen a government form asking your race. They'll ask questions about country of birth, language spoken at home, indigenous status, etc – but none of those map exactly to "race" as that concept is understood in the US.
Here, the government, media, etc, generally prefer to refer to people using fine-grained ethnicity/nationality terms, not in terms of coarse racial categories.
In a word, no, mainly because humans cannot really cope with race.
> In trying to apply a computer to a task that humans do, we often discover that it doesn't work. One common problem is that humans are able to deal with fuzzy concepts but computers are not -- they need precise representations and it is hard to represent a fuzzy concept in a precise way. However, if we look closer at such tasks, we often discover that the weakness actually lies not in the computer but in ourselves -- we didn't understand what we were doing in the first place.
This was still published before the latest iteration to evade the insight that your question is ill-posed took hold: AI magic!
Why go through the trouble to ask yourself if your classification system makes sense if you can just draw up some random examples and train a classifier? And if the classifier happens to perform poorly, it's clearly the fault of the algorithm and not that your classifications are completely arbitrary.
Modern algorithms are even smart enough to find out what you're "really" looking for and will happily detect skin color as the most significant feature for racial classifications.
Race has no scientific/empirical basis. Asking about skin pigment is a different question, but race is BS
The observations here are astute, and I appreciate the novel computing angle. I mostly agree with the conclusion.
I would add though that it is possible to construct a taxonomical, biological account of race, given our understanding of population genetics and phenotypes. This is basically what 23andMe does. However, with the exception of understanding and treating very specific medical conditions, these correlations are mostly meaningless or superficial at best.
Obviously, this is not what anyone means by "race" in the ordinary sense, which is mostly incoherent and only serves as a shorthand to categorize people superficially.
Computers cannot cope with illogical concepts such as race. Race as applied in the US is a thousand contradictions trying to justify the emotions of a minority of the population who needs a visibly identifiable underclass to make themselves feel more secure in their position in life. Which is why race makes little sense — it changes over time to suit the needs of whatever political interests exist at any given point. It’s a purely emotional concept with no consistent definition in any physical reality.
As all scenarios that involve databases and "semantics" of the various fields, the actual meaning is heavily dependent on what the fields are supposed to be used for. In case of the US, the whole confusion seems to be that one would rather like not to talk about the use-cases as the whole topic is still politically sensitive.
Maybe a more honest question would be "Are you a descendant of colonial-era slaves? Yes/No? Are you a descendant of colonial-era settlers? Yes/No?"
The one question about race I've always had is this:
Why is the child of both black and white parents considered black?
This seems racist to me, fundamentally.
It's interesting that today, in the United States, many people from the "middle east" (depending on their religion) classify themselves under the BIPOC umbrella and not category "5" as described in this essay.
No, as race is a social construct. There is no agreed upon and objective definition of what black means or white means.
Speaking of not being able to cope with human races:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beli...
>Eric S. Raymond: Political beliefs and activism
>[...] Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist."[28][29] Progressive campaign The Great Slate was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, "I’ve been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." It is estimated that as of March 2018 over $30,000 has been raised in this way.[30]
[28] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26
[29] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7239
[30] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/8/17092684/great-slate-fundr...
http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=129
>"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S Raymond
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_armedndangero...
"A clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he [Steven den Beste] is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are." -Eric S Raymond
https://quotepark.com/quotes/1862991-eric-s-raymond-when-i-h...
>"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." -Eric S Raymond When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. "Geeks Win: A survey of the oddballs who write the codes that make the 21st-century world go round". The New York Times Book Review: p. BR18. 4 November 2001. ISSN 03624331.
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/780839196231630848
>"The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots." -Eric S Raymond
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833
>"... The minimum level of training required to make someone effective as a self defense shooter is not very high... unfortunately, this doesn't cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average IQ of 85 if it's statistically representative of American blacks as a whole. I've never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn't want to." -Eric S Raymond
(1989)
So giving an anti racist form answer = you're a commie as far as they're concerned. Nice.
Yes, we can.
Computers have successfully been used to time 5K and marathons for decades.
Race is what you define it to be, such as in this ambiguous title. Whether we should have a concept of "race" is another matter.
I grew up in Germany, but the first time I really learnt about the concept of race was when I went to the doctor in the US, where you need to fill in your "ethnicity". Same in the UK. I don't think anything can be more racist than being asked about your race or your ethnicity, because really, what exactly is that? Am I here for a medical appointment, or a psychological and philosophical introspection of myself? I usually just fill in Cosmopolitan there.