Does anyone here believe race is a social construct?

> I haven't done the experiment
> If the experiment is to be done
> my guess is
> science
> guess
Discarded.

Either show me data or shut the fuck up.

He's an Oxford professor

What is race?

>if race exists it can explain inherent differences in behaviour and disease
>no one cares
you're retarded

>Not knowing you posit hypotheses before experiments are done
>Not knowing the scientific method

>Richard Dawkins, one of the best biologists in the world

>Does anyone here believe race is a social construct?

I do. I don't deny the existence of observable differences between different populations of man, but it's dishonest to claim that this is what is meant by "race". Race is a much more loaded term. For example, a common racial category is "black". This covers both east and west africans, who are very different genetically, the san people, and even dark skinned caucasoids, such as Berbers and Ethiopians. Americans consider "hispanic" to be a race, even though genetically we are talking about various mixes of european, amerindian, and african populations. The archetypical race label, "white", is an incredibly nebulous term that can stretch as far or as little as one's argument requires.

That is not to say that these categories are not "real". People very much identify as black, or hispanic, or white. Obama, being a mix of Kenyan and European DNA, is considered black, and on that basis believed to have some affinity to a typical African American, who is of West African extraction. But it's a social, rather than a genetic reality. This is what it means for race to be a social construct.

Well of course, if you arbitrarily redefine "race" from "any categorization of human biodiversity in principle which may exist and be somehow useful" to "the layman's one specific colloquial framework of race." But that's begging the question, since you're defining the term to imply your conclusion directly.

I'm not defining the term, I'm taking it as it is actually used, e.g. in the US census. Obama and Tyrone are both officially designated as black. This is a social rather than a biological categorisation.

>I'm not defining the term, I'm just choosing its meaning

The fact that there are several meanings to choose from only proves my point. A dog is a dog on both sides of the rio grande. However, a criollo magically transforms from a white into a hispanic travelling north.

Biology does not respect borders. Society does.

These arguments have become distorted due to semantics, political correctness and a whole bunch of mentally incompetent individuals. This entire rhetoric needs to be overhauled before even a decision conversation can be made on it.

Dawkins argues that there are human sub-species, not different human species. The discussion is also distorted by the fact taxonomy IS entirely based off semantics.

>The fact that there are several meanings to choose from only proves I'm correct to equate two or more of these meanings
kys senpai
we're interested in
>"any categorization of human biodiversity in principle which may exist and be somehow useful"
and not
>"the layman's one specific colloquial framework of race."

Yes, race exists. People from different ethnical origins have different genetic code. Who would have guessed?

Did it seriously take a biologist for you to realize that?

"real" and "social construct" aren't actually mutually exclusive.

The *borders* of races are socially constructed. That's what the humanities types are actually talking about. (Witness the constant /int/ debates on who exactly does and does not count as White, and the way its boundaries have shifted throughout history.)

But nobody's claiming there aren't obvious phenotypical and measurable genetic differences between some populations - although it is socially constructed over which differences we decide are important enough to count as distinct categories. But there *are* real, measurable differences between populations, and nobody claims there aren't, because that's not what "social construct" means.

Fuck, major chunks of *physics* are socially constructed - much of the reason we think the Standard Model is incomplete is because it doesn't meet physicist's *aesthetic standards*, like "it looks nicer if all the constants are around the same order of magnitude" or "too many dimensionless constants bother my autism" and that some theoretical structures are more "elegant". I'm not saying these standards are *wrong*, but they are rooted in the culture of physics research instead of actually emerging from some objective authority.

Many things are socially constructed. That's not the same as saying there's no such thing as drawing a difference between two things, and certainly not the same as claiming that all classifications are *equally* arbitrary. All models are wrong, but some are less wrong than others.

There is wisdom in some of the responses in this thread that I wish was more common.

>The *borders* of races are socially constructed. That's what the humanities types are actually talking about.
This is what they -demonstrate.- It's rather trivially true, absolutely every viewpoint or model we have on the functioning of the universe has been "socially constructed."
What they -conclude- thereafter, and use in further arguments, is that race does not objectively exist in this sense. It's a motte and bailey technique philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf

So someone can argue your rejection of geographical reductionism, for instance, is wrong because race does not exist, before they are later challenged on the matter and retreat into the other, trivially true meaning, "the concept of 'race' is indeed a concept."

I read nothing but stuff like "white" is literally a social construct and depends on the speaker, see the Irish not being considered white in the past.

You know, poltards, just because the orange buffoon and his white supremacist friends bullied their way into the White House does NOT suddenly legitimize all your wacko theories about what race is more prone to violence or crime or what diseases white women will SURELY contract by sleeping with black men.

>Fuck, major chunks of *physics* are socially constructed - much of the reason we think the Standard Model is incomplete is because it doesn't meet physicist's *aesthetic standards*, like "it looks nicer if all the constants are around the same order of magnitude" or "too many dimensionless constants bother my autism" and that some theoretical structures are more "elegant". I'm not saying these standards are *wrong*, but they are rooted in the culture of physics research instead of actually emerging from some objective authority.
That seems like a bold claim. Do you anything to back that up.

>the idea of "social construct" is a meme

>the idea of "meme" is a social construct

>the idea of "social construct" is a social construct

>the idea of "meme" is a meme

dude, your righting is impenetrable. i dont see how the second sentence follows from the first and you havent explained why it would or what a motte and bailey technique is and why that is good/bad/neutral.

your last sentence i dont understand either.

Race is a social construct. Plain and simple. A social construct is anything constructed intuitively by people. Race, being a classification system, is man made. I'm not sure why people deny this.

The question is whether it's useful.

Any two individuals on the planet has different genetic codes.

I'm not harder to read than the philosophy literature, but fair enough. The basic idea here: slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/ with some good examples.

>Race is a social construct. Plain and simple. A social construct is anything constructed intuitively by people. Race, being a classification system, is man made. I'm not sure why people deny this.
It's a way to deny the reality of something, it has also become the language for engage in apologetics for anti-white violence and argue in favour of white dispossesion.

>The question is whether it's useful.
Race is used to develop some medicine and to diagnose people with various dieases. Example of the former is asthma medicine made for blacks (africans). Race is also used as a rethorical tool to further political goals. Marxists in the West use it to argue against white working class interests and to dismiss concerns with anti-white violence, galvenice non-whites etc. It has a lot of uses as non-existant and as an existing phenomena

>Aligning Marxism with identity politics crap
You're going to have to lurk /leftypol/ a hell of a lot more, buddy.

It's an empirical fact that mass immigration of unskilled workers depresses wages and increases unemployment for native unskilled workers. It's an empirical fact that moving jobs overseas, or the opportunity/threat to do so, does something similar. It's pretty clear even from first principles that members of the proletariat are in material competition with one another on the individual level. Naturally, this extends along nation-state lines in some sense, because the nation-state is a geographically restricted implementation of various laws. Marx himself identified this as one of the basic contradictions of capitalism, so where do you get off acting like this is some counterexample to the theory?

The important thing to realize is that this identity of interests based on shared nationality is not some fundamental object, but in turn derives from private ownership of the means of production. You can see this, too, when other white people sometimes stab you in the back for their own gain. That's because you aren't working toward the same objective (gasp!,) and that's because "racial unity" is not a fundamental shared material interest but derives, to the extent it exists, from more fundamental ones.

That's as hard for you guys to accept as it is for the SJWs. No, really you guys, the world doesn't operate on pursuit of rational economic self-interest but instead on some deep-seated, irrational, thoroughly counterproductive hatred the international jewry has for white people. Yeah fucking right. How does your theory explain the course of history and human development? And so on and so on...

I'm not well educated enough on the subject to make a decision on the matter.

You're shifting goalposts, that's irrelevant to this discussion.

>political tirade
The only thing there of substance is black asthma medication. I'd like to see a citation for that.

All the arguments against race "existing" also apply to culture but you will never hear someone say culture doesn't exist.

he at least used to be a biologist in the 70s.

if this isn't bait, why do you say taxonomy is pseudoscience?

You know, just because it's a social construct, doesn't mean it's not real.

>sufficiently educated
>sufficiently *socialized

social construct is a synonym for meme, you moron.

Get a load of this autist. He actually took a screenshot of an internet argument so he could use it in other internet arguments.

And the funny thing is the dems haven't pandered to the white working class since bill fucking "just another joe from arkansas" clinton.

ask an Md whether or not race exists and if it's useful as a concept. there are literally dozens of race specific medical tests.

It's pretty obvious to anyone who isn't a retard that race is real.
The more complex discussion is how much of a difference in DNA you need to the distinction to be meaningful/useful, which is also quite evident, but you get called a racist if you bring up any arbitrary disctinction despite how useful it may be.

There are genetic clusters that are observable and can be categorized as races, and also they make sense because the correlation between environment&geography and said clusterization (i.e. the people in a cluster are geographically close and share a range of climates that are also clustered).

This doesn't mean american layman definition of races isn't retarded as fuck. There are probably dozens of races just in Africa, and European populations have had racially mixed into a more homogeneous community due to Europe being mostly plain, with a good climate and the Roman empire building roads troughout all of it, making it easier for people to travel.

A set of individuals that share inheritable common properties distinguishable enough they can be discriminated from the rest of living beings.

Yeah, I think this is closest to the truth. You can split humans into many smaller clades but they don't line up with the typical /pol/tard's conception of race.

While that may be true, it isn't provable by using any sort of clustering algorithm. lrn2convex analysis

To use news articles as an analogy.

If we know that news articles can be categorized as stories then we may use clustering algorithms to attempt to do that. Then we would use some techniques to test how accurate our algorithm is and possibly compare it against others.

On the other hand, if we do not know that articles can be categorized into stories (say if they're written in an ayylmao language and we can't read them) then we may use clustering algorithms to attempt to find patterns that may help in studying them. However clustering algorithms alone aren't sufficient for concluding that a set of clusters actually exists. Moreover we can't test the accuracy of our algorithm or compare it to any others.

To elaborate on this, the claim that
>there exist clusters that are observable
is actually really non-trivial to rigorously provide an argument for. Arguably it may even be impossible.

So instead what you get is a bunch of appeals to intuition and claims that it's obvious so it doesn't need to be proven.

Occasionally one also finds bloggers who use the notion of self-identified race in sociology to justify the existence of race and then prepare a clustering algorithm with some seed data in order to get a clustering algorithm that finds them. Note that one could use this technique to find a clustering algorithm for nearly anything, the clustering algorithm's existence doesn't strengthen argument in any way. It is just slight of hand to sound legitimate. Such bloggers that try to legitimize social science are only taken seriously by the unscientific crowd who think social sciences aren't bullshit.

but my argument also used geographical positioning.

I know that a clustering algorithm alone can't prove it, but if your "ayy lmao articles" (genes) also had some little info that helped, like all articles that your cluster algorithm marked as "pertaining to cluster A" were published in ayy lmao journal XYZ, and you knew that those ayy lmaos had our own tendency to publish similar articles in thematic journals (environment), you would have a strong argument IMO.

You're right. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, the only way anyone has been able to reproduce clusters that in any way resemble traditional races is by cheating and tweaking the algorithm ahead of time with some "right answers for each cluster".

Race-deniers are the new flat-earthers.