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dookiehat t1_j30ncba wrote

Reply to comment by Due-Wall-915 in [D] ML in non-tech fields by fr4nl4u

This is my guess. It is useful because many countries do not track statistics according to race or ethnicity. Knowing which names belong to which ethnicity could allow for more comprehensive public records dataset interpretation. A country not tracking race or ethnicity may sound nice at first, but it is a form of colorblind racism. That is because it hides systemic injustices that happen to specific groups of people. It is like when the last president guy said covid numbers shouldn’t be recorded too keep cases down.

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xoranous t1_j313wwt wrote

What if i told you you can track any such injustices by tracking such injustices themselves. Dimensionality reduction to pre-scientific concepts of race do more harm than good i'm glad more and more people are recognising. The amount of causal factors such downsampling obscures (which may then be adressed) is enormous. You can call me an old-school leftist but i think a social-economical-cultural perspective makes a lot more sense than the pseudo-biological sexuality/race perspective some of the new kids are pushing. It has brought some new ideas but also a lot of regression, 'colorblind racism' being one of them. You might call it color-lens racism - reducing people to immutable medieval categories is the real harm assuming this is something we don't want to happen (which i don't). We are all mixed race. Peace.

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dookiehat t1_j31m90y wrote

I’m not advocating for one position over any other, I’m open to ideas. I was merely guessing what the use for that dataset could be.

That out of the way my first major question is how exactly do you propose tracking “said injustices” when the crimes are related to a subjective and human perception of race itself? Like hate speech, or redlining? Objective measurements of race related crimes do not make sense when said injustices come from flawed human judgments themselves. I still feel like this is the illusion of if you don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.

The folliow up to that is, so what are you suggesting as an alternative exactly? Tracking DNA? I personally am all for knowing my genome, but considering how many people think mrna vaccines are evil, how will that work? You would have to demonstrate great medical capabilities that are blindingly obvious to the layperson and affordable to get everyone on board. Alternatively you could track facial features, odor, whatever and get an approximation, but again, consent is an issue. Instead you can track nothing about race or ethnicity. How exactly do you pull meaningful information from nothing? In my mind this approach presupposes a naive idealism about the good nature of people, their intelligence, self-awareness, compassion, empathy, and selflessness. It also ignores tribalistic tendencies of humans. More importantly though it ignores the biological root of racism which is based in disgust.

If you think about disgust, it makes sense. The reason when you see and smell dog crap and you feel disgusted is because it prevents you from catching diseases. If it smelled like fresh cookies…. Disgust is a preventive mechanism for disease, which is why in evolutionary sociological terms, ingroups and outgroups form. If you see a person that looks different from you they are likely to be from far away, and people from far away can bring you new diseases and kill you. Outgroup violence happens as a secondary effect to this initial disgust which is sensed as a threat, this bubbles to the surface of consciousness as racism. Fascism is effective because of disgust for the outgroup and loyalty to the ingroup.

I just wanna mention here, I’m talking about the phenomenon of racism on the level of human perception, because that is where it happens. It does not happen in analysis, it is only recorded as a weak signal of the original phenomenon, maybe a downsampling type of reductionism.

Secondly, i think you have a bit of spotlight bias (i’m not claiming i don’t have it too). I’m not good at the bayesian thing, but i would guess the amount of people believing that “pre-scientific “ judgments about race are invalid assessments is really low. Partially because people like me assert that they literally social constructs. You cannot reinterpret race as a biological construct because it is partially judgment and subjective based. That is why a light skinned puerto rican might pass as white, act white, or even identify as white — because others identify her that way.

3rd question is

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