>The dark-skinned people of southern India, Australia and New Guinea, for example, did not independently evolve their color simply because evolution favored it.
>They inherited the ancestral dark variants Dr. Tishkoff’s team found in Africans. “They had to be introduced from an African population,” said Dr. Tishkoff.
I don't really understand the point of the article.
How does this research “dispels a biological concept of race”?
>“If you ask somebody on the street, ‘What are the main differences between races?,’ they’re going to say skin color,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yep, that's true. Skin color is the most prominent and easily identifiable feature. But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian based on facial features or voice. Forensic anthropologists can identify a race based on skull, they can even make a pretty good prediction based solely on a jaw.
The idea that race is just a skin color is not a dated notion of race, it is a modern interpretation that is pushed by leftists. If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be racists?
Now, if we could dispel the idea that race is just a skin color and the idea that some races are inferior, if we could stop treating it as a dichotomy, that would be good.
>it is a modern interpretation that is pushed by leftists
It may be reinforced by virtue of their giving time to use it in their rebuttals, but the issue lies deeper in the reason these rebuttals come up in the first place--people in general use this marker more than most when discriminating. Since when has "broad nose" or "high cheekbones" been something that is so highly correlated to being the victim of discrimination?
We didn't win the civil rights war, though the major battle that took down institutional discrimination was won. People still discriminate today, and they do it by relatively few high-profile indicators, e.g. skin color and name.
Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there.
> But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian...
It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit?
> If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be racists?
Yes. If we were all precisely the same skin color they'd find other ways to put people down. Your "Jewish" nose. Your "nappy" hair. Color's just the tip of the ice-berg.
Some people are perceived as being inferior because that's what some elements in society need them to be in order to advance their own social standing.
>It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit?
First of all, I don't think it is appropriate to classify "Japanese" or "Inuit" as races. Race is a more general concept.
Anyway, Japanese and Inuit are easy to distinguish. Middle Eastern and European are better examples. If you take one European person and one Middle Eastern person it would be hard to differentiate them, if you take two groups of one hundred people it would be easy.
That link about vocal characteristics is only relevant when talking about huge populations. On an individual basis it's meaningless, there's just too much variation. You need samples of a thousand or more to develop a picture. Where biological differences do exist that might affect intonation in a particular dialect, but not when soemeone was raised with a different dialect or intonation.
Now if "Japanese" isn't a race then nothing is. The vast majority of Japanese are identifiable on a genetic level due to the relative isolation of the country. Same goes for Inuit who were geographically and culturally isolated.
> Middle Eastern and European are better examples.
If you're talking some stereotypically Polish person compared to some stereotypically Arabic person from Egypt, obviously, but there's cases where ordinary Turkish people look more "European" than some groups of Europeans do.
The bell curve on these things is just too wide, there's nothing but overlap in all but the most extreme fringes.
>That link about vocal characteristics is only relevant when talking about huge populations. On an individual basis it's meaningless, there's just too much variation.
If we are talking about white/black voice difference, then it is meaningful.
>Now if "Japanese" isn't a race then nothing is. The vast majority of Japanese are identifiable on a genetic level due to the relative isolation of the country.
Race is just a more broad concept than an ethnic group, that's what I mean.
>If you're talking some stereotypically Polish person compared to some stereotypically Arabic person from Egypt, obviously, but there's cases where ordinary Turkish people look more "European" than some groups of Europeans do.
That's what I meant when I said that it would be easier if you take groups 100 hundred people, it averages out. And yeah, Europeans and Arabs are white, so there is little difference between them.
>The bell curve on these things is just too wide, there's nothing but overlap in all but the most extreme fringes.
Yes, "cline" is a better description than "race" but it is not as useful in daily life as "race" is.
Rick Astley, most famous for the internet meme of Rick Rolling, had trouble getting taken seriously at first because everyone thought his (first?) song "Never gonna give you up" was sung by a black guy. They could not believe it was really the voice of some skinny, pasty white guy. It sounds black to most people.
I participated in a poorly designed pysch study in college in which they played a tape of a discussion and told us the white speaker was black and the black speaker was white. Participants in the study were not fooled by this. The black guy sounded like Rick Astley, for lack of a better explanation. We all knew we were being lied to. Switching the labels fooled no one.
It isn't a perfect indicator of race. But, yes, there are voice differences that have nothing to do with vernacular speech habits.
Can you provide a link to any? I'm drawing a blank; the (high level pop science writing) consensus appears to be that while there are obviously powerful ethnolinguistic features, what limited evidence there is for inter-racial physiological voice features is swamped by the evidence for intra-racial vocal differences.
It might be tricky to de-confound the ethnolinguistic stuff from the physiological stuff, because some of the ethnolinguistic markers are subtle.
Of course, it is a bit like differences in height for the genders: while men are, on average, taller than women, there is overlap in height as well as statistical outliers (so, no, you cannot definitively say "They are x height, so I can confidently assert their gender"). But there is some evidence that a) average or typical physiological differences between ethnicities influence voice sound and b) people who have zero training can pick up on these differences.
Granted that race, itself, is a somewhat nebulous human construct or mental model that often groups people together somewhat arbitrarily for sociocultural reasons having little or nothing to do with DNA.
Differences in averages of 5-10% are pretty marginal when you consider the standard deviation on this sort of thing is going to be 50% or more.
You'd be better able to predict someone's physical size from their voice than anything else, but even then it's a guess. I've known very big people with unusually high-pitched voices, plus small women with surprisingly deep voices. It's all over the place.
And, yet, most of the time, most people can fairly readily infer gender based on voice alone.
I know it isn't politically correct to talk about any differences at all between ethnicities or even genders. The PC thing at the moment seems to be that "all such differences are social construct." So, it would probably be wise for me to just walk away here as a lot of people will assume I am a racist trying to justify racism. And this isn't some kind of hill I care to die on.
Those links all demonstrate that you can make an educated guess about ethnicity from the sound of someone else speaking, but don't establish that you can use physiologically-determined elements of someone's voice as a cue to infer their race.
This is the original statement being dismissed that I am agreeing with:
But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian based on facial features or voice.
Put another way, you could describe that in your words: you can make an educated guess about ethnicity from the sound of someone else speaking.
I have already allowed that race is a nebulous social construct at best. I don't know what your point is. You stating that we can't yet prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these differences are purely physiological in origin is not really a rebuttal.
There is no real way to readily separate something like voice from things like lifestyle and socioeconomic class. Similarly, on average, men are taller than women. We could argue about how much of that is actually genetic and whether or not there is some culturally determined stunting of women going on globally, but it doesn't change the measurable average height difference between the genders as a group.
It's pretty ridiculous. I see a lot of articles like this, that all go along the lines of science supposedly disproving the existence of something you can easily observe on a day to day basis. If it was about skin color, why aren't albino Africans white?
I don't really understand significance of this insight easier. Floating point number is just stored in scientific notation base 2. That's it. And kids learn scientific notation in 7th grade? 8th tops. I mean, swap base 2 to base 10 in this image, and the effect changes from "woah" to "duh, obviously".
The EU is my last hope. Out of all governments and international entities, the EU is the only one I have a stretch of confidence in. The fact that Google and Amazon are located in the US means that the EU has nothing to lose if they want to regulate them. An additional fact that the EU consists of multiple countries that can bully each other to comply with their own laws makes it effective. I believe that if there is someone who can fix this shitty situation, it is the EU.
Never implied otherwise. My point was that the CEO's post announcing such a feature has multiple garbage comments from the same individual at the very top. That it's a parody account just makes it worse.
People should report crimes to police, they shouldn't report them to school or company. Everyone who tells the opposite enables sexual assault. Uber is not at fault in this situation and it doesn't enable anything.
If I understood the letter correctly, what Uber did was not illegal. And if I understand how police works in most countries, if you report a crime to police they are obliged to investigate it
So my point stands. If you think that people shouldn't report crimes, you enable crimes. "‘strongly under the impression’ that they would." is a laughable excuse. What did Uber do that would provide a strong impression, yet wasn't enough to be accused of being misleading in court?
If what Uber did is illegal in UK, they should face punishment. But as far as I can tell, they did nothing illegal in this situation.
I see lots of folks trying out an argument along the lines of, "if Uber managers aren't being marched in front of magistrates, then everything's peachy and Leave Uber Alloooone!" I can't wait for the ads "Uber - not officially a criminal enterprise yet!"
Unfortunately, this argument ignores the fact that requirements for unusual privileges - like running massive fleets of vehicles on public streets - are a bit higher than the requirements for staying out of jail.
Reporting sexual assault is not exactly difficult. Whether it is a cynical PR issue, some weird philosophical thing, or simply bizarre institutional/emotional damage around sexual assault[1], Uber has a problem that they are apparently incapable of handling, even with years, warnings and a near complete change of management.
It really is freakish.
[1] Given so many different incidents handled over multiple years in multiple countries, that their competitors don't seem to have the same problem with, I'm starting to wonder, frankly.
Businesses should also report crimes to the police. A business who does the opposite enables sexual assault. Uber is at fault in this situation and directly enables sexual assault.
The only difference between what I'm saying and what you're saying is that I imply Uber is run by people and you imply they are a force of nature (or something.)
If you've been a victim of a crime, you should report it. If you've witnessed a crime, you should report it too. Otherwise you enable criminals. If you were told that there were a crime by a random person, you don't have to report it. I think it is as simple as that. I don't think or imply that Uber is a force of nature, I don't know where you got this idea from.
Oh come on there's way more nuance to this issue than you're letting on. Taking away a person's livelihood can be just as bad as a jail sentence and you're acting like companies should act as judge and executioner in the court of public opinion. What's the point of even having a justice system when we can dispatch a lifetime of suffering by blacklisting suspected criminals from employment?
This whole things seems just like "But her emails!" where people are latching onto anything they can to justify their dislike for something they already hate.
Is there really that much more nuance? Uber received a complaint of sexual assault by a driver. The victim was under the impression that Uber would contact the police. Uber did not contact the police and continued to employ the driver. Uber then received a second complaint of sexual assault by the same driver. The second victim was "strongly under the impression" that the police would be contacted. The police were not contacted.
In this situation, Uber are complicit in the second sexual assault to at least some degree. (Perhaps they carried out a thorough investigation which presented nothing. Perhaps they did not carry out an investigation again). They are complicit in any further sexual assaults this driver carries out.
With regards to "Taking away a person's livelihood", that's precisely what a police investigation and CRB/DBS checks are for. The driver simply should not be allowed in such a position if they have a history of sexual assault. No-one is asking for the company to "act as judge and executioner" (in fact, in this case the company is doing exactly that except ruling not-guilty), merely to alert the appropriate authorities so that a legitimate investigation can be carried out according to the established judicial system.
If Uber is complicit, where are the charges? Where are the fines? Where are managers getting jailed for concealment of a crime? Is there even a prosecution?
Uber is not having license, which is a big punishment I would say, is fine on top also needed? Concealment of a crime and failure to report one are two different things with two different punishments. And while I believe companies crimes should be personalized to managers who lead employees to commit them, where such thing can be proven, jail time for this one would be probably too much of a punishment.
We dont need to jail for everything, really. It is expensive and ineffective overall.
It is the job of the justice system to understand whether he is guilty or not. I think that if a company fires a person for a claim of sexual assault that wasn't proved, this person is justified to sue the fuck out of the company for false pretense.
Innocent until proven guilty.Uber respected due process expecting that if the allegation are true the police would have arrested the man.
Uber is not a court, it does not and in my opinion should not have the right to play judge.
Is "furthermore" scientific jargon? I thought it is just a professional version of "moreover". Like, I would say "moreover" to a friend, but write "furthermore" in a letter.
Systematic investment to education provides new enrollees for MIT and Stanford and, subsequently, workforce for Apple and Google. Brain drain is a real problem for developing countries.
Or a right-wing solution if you like direct democracy and societal cohesion.