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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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was unmistakably influenced by Western biases.

True! But are we not all sinners? There are tiny dust specks in my eye, yet I still see. What hasn't been influenced by biases? Our conception of "color" is biased by our photoreceptors, in turn biased by the distribution of light in our ancestral environment, but we still find color useful. The question should be - how biased is it? I think you should "put a number on it". How much, precisely, were race/ancestry groups influenced by Western biases? If the number is say, 80%, then yes we should probably abandon current categories of race. If the number is 4% ... then maybe they're good enough.

Of course not! I am pointing out this is just one mode of thinking that has dominated the way we perceive and categorize race. Racial categorizations are more complicated in different cultures was my point. Regardless, I am not disputing usefulness of these categorizations. Acknowledging biases when approaching and building conceptual frameworks is essential in science. It's not even because of political correctedness, but more for understanding limitations and accuracy.

An analogy is that when studying other religions, there is a tendency to interpret different religions from a Christian perspective (most likely because it is the dominant religion in the western sphere and most researchers who approached different religions were mainly Western). It's why early cultural studies has been updated to reflect a more accurate understanding.

If pursuing the truth and accurate information is the goal of any research field, then there should be no issues in acknowledging some limitations and biases of racial categorizations. I am not really concerned about political correctedness even, but more so it's a pretty big discussion amongst professional geneticists that there are issues with this classification.

If pursuing the truth and accurate information is the goal of any research field, then there should be no issues in acknowledging some limitations and biases of racial categorizations.

Okay, so, obviously if you're, like, writing a paper on the impact of race and IQ, you should more complicated measures of ancestry than self-reported race if you can. I don't disagree with that. However, I think "race" is close enough to "ancestry" in casual conversation.

also e.g. biobanks don't allow people to use their data for race and iq research, which is both unfortunate and ... potentially indicative of the kind of bias that would systematically affect science on the topic!

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