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non_radical_centrist  8mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   2897 thread views

How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?

astralcodexten.com

I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.

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I mean everything is a social construct. Rape is a social construct. Property is a social construct. Google is a social construct. The Internet is a social construct. Love is a social construct. Anti-racism is a social construct. Yet we still have uses for all of these, they're in fact extremely important, and can debate the way we act on them in the exact same way Scott is doing. It's reasonable to say that I probably shouldn't consider the entirety of San Francisco to be "my property", even though it's a social construct, because it's not very useful and may have negative effects. It's similarly reasonable to say that maybe it's better to consider "race" to just mean "ancestry" than to jump between "group membership/identity social construct" and "ancestry" depending on the situation, leading to the plight of the professor in the OP.

I am just saying Scott makes the conflation that social construct means it doesn't exist.

I don't think he is?

I am pretty sure ethnic differences are larger within one race than between different races.

You mean genetic differences. There are a lot of technical arguments here but ... sure, why not. There are many white people with lower IQ than the average black person. This doesn't mean that the average black IQ isn't lower than the average white IQ, and it doesn't mean that doesn't have a genetic component to its cause.

I don't think he is?

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/how-should-we-think-about-race-and-list-share-cta&comments=true&commentId=51163221

You mean genetic differences. There are a lot of technical arguments here but ... sure, why not. There are many white people with lower IQ than the average black person. This doesn't mean that the average black IQ isn't lower than the average white IQ, and it doesn't mean that doesn't have a genetic component to its cause.

Do you have any strong evidence that controls different factors (socioeconomic, historical, cultural and even diet) for the claims of IQ? When I looked, most of these differences between IQ are overblown or if the data does show differences, it often is more complex and can't be taken by face value. This isn't exclusive to just IQ of course but even other traits like skeletal structure and even height.

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