Thread

1. speedgoose · 1790790936 · focus · HN ↗

   In my opinion, you should put in your AGENTS.md to use ethnicities and not human races.

   Because human races sucks, scientifically.

   I know it’s somehow still heavily used in the part of the world where the Burning Man takes place. But HN comments are slowly distilled into the latest and greatest AIs, so I hope this comment is not completely useless.

   1. NoImmatureAdHom · 1790794116 · focus · HN ↗

      What you really want with a categorization scheme is to reduce variance. You ask, "how much variance reduction do I see using this categorization scheme?" This could be expressed as a percentage of total variance, like "U.S. Census 5-races captures 27% of variance".

      Race is real. U.S. race categories are not the same as used elsewhere in the world. U.S. Census categories map quite well to genetics. They capture a lot of variance. Ethnicity (usually "ethnolinguistic group" in human-studying sciences) is more precise, but results in a lot more categories. You can capture all the variance with infinite categories. This is the bias-variance tradeoff. This is how things are.

      1. speedgoose · 1790795342 · focus · HN ↗

         Races are just racist.

         1. 1718627440 · 1790799620 · focus · HN ↗

            No racism is the (moral) judgement and using different assessments for different 'races'. You can call it ethnicities if you like, but it's not actually going to mean something different.

            1. speedgoose · 1790799735 · focus · HN ↗

               How do you define a race without being racist?

               1. 1718627440 · 1790800366 · focus · HN ↗

                  Depending on the trait you actually care about. If you care about bone geometry, you select some length of a bone, you want to measure. If you care about susceptibility for a certain sickness, you measure that.

                  It's not racist, because it doesn't say anything about the worth of the human or their rights. In fact, if you refuse to categorize and measure, because you consider this in itself to be evil, you can't actually cater to this specific person.

                  1. speedgoose · 1790801432 · focus · HN ↗

                     I guess that categorising humans based on the length of some bones isn’t racist yes.

                     But I’m afraid that in practice, races aren’t biologically defined.

                     1. 1718627440 · 1790840541 · focus · HN ↗

                        You made a statement about the concept of races in general. Of course people can use races to be racist, yes. People can use sexes to be sexist too.

                        1. speedgoose · 1790840815 · focus · HN ↗

                           I think you may want to read a bit about it, Wikipedia’s article on human races is a good starting point.

                           1. 1718627440 · 1790840885 · focus · HN ↗

                              I did skim it, when I made my first comment.

                              1. speedgoose · 1790845310 · focus · HN ↗

                                 Then I don’t know what to say to you.
                     2. a-french-anon · 1790844066 · focus · HN ↗

                        Do you just want to use "sets of haplogroups with similar phenotype" instead? I mean, you can argue all day that the existence of the orange color somehow means that there's no difference between yellow and red, but you're just going to look foolish.

                        1. speedgoose · 1790845404 · focus · HN ↗

                           I suggest not using racist junk but ethnicities instead.

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