CharonY

! Moderator Note The common language on this board is English, so please provide a translation so that others can participate. That being said: most mutations are are assumed to be neutral are not under strong selection see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_theory_of_molecular_evolution for an intro. Even if under positive selection, it is well known that no all alleles will become fixed, as there are obviously stochastic effects at play. And finally with regard to time, there are is a lot of work (Kimura being probably one of the best known) that model the time dimension. The concept of molecular clocks derives from these approaches. So yes, the work is mostly quantitative.

The issue is that if you simplify things too much, they do not make sense anymore. We know that to be true in natural sciences, where at certain points these simplifications just do not allow an accurate description of nature. Just repeating that racism is the issue, but not the system in which racism creates injustice is simply omitting the very factor that can and needs to be tweaked. Thinking up analogies that similarly omit this issue are not helpful. It is like having folks getting sick, but instead of identifying the pathogens involved and prescribing treatments, we talk about how a healthy lifestyle might have prevented it in the first place. Yes not having racism would be great, but not mentioning race anymore is not the same as ending racism (it is like hoping infections go away if we do not focus on bacteria or viruses anymore). We can deal with the actual factors leading to disease (or injustice) but it is way harder to envision a system where racism (or diseases) magically disappear. As I said repeatedly, the issue is context. If we can create a system where racial biases cannot (or at least have a harder time) to result in injustice, that is the first and most realistic step to take. If over time, the idea of racism vanishes, so much the better. But as the joke goes, in order to get to that point we would likely need the population to mix so much so that we all just become a similar shade of brown. And just to emphasize the same point over and over again over dozens of threads, the issue is the context in which racism could create injustice. And it can also include unintentional harm that is not based on racist ideology. This can be lawmakers who are inexperienced with specific situations of racial groups, because the folks they are talking to have a very homogenous background. No one in this scenario is necessarily a racist, but this lack of knowledge can create racial injustice. And there are plenty of examples of why certain folks have less access or input into these types of decisions. Conversely, individuals with no access to power can be as racist as they want, they will have a hard time (even if they wanted to) to create a system that is similarly harmful.

You are decoupling the effect (fire) with the cause and create a strawman scenario where folks are fighting about semantics. While it is very on-brand about how we often talk about racism and its ongoing impact, it is not very helpful. Essentially the argument appears to be that talking about racism is the real issue, as it causes all the problems, therefore the only reasonable thing is to do what we do nothing and obfuscate matters.

Is your argument that the issue is one of semantics without real life impact? If so, I feel you may have missed the point of the discussion. We have the discussion because the house is on fire/flooded (i.e. we see the impact) and it is about figuring out what to do about. Whatever we want to call the issue is mostly secondary.

I feel the analogy does not really capture the systemic issue and it conflates fundamental with the proximate causes. Racism does not cause the leak, it is at least once (or more removed). To work with you analogy, racism would be more something ephemeral, like for example architectural thoughts on how houses are supposed to be built. Then derived from those more nebulous thoughts are specific building codes. For most those are fine. However, let's assume that due to water quality for a particular subset of homes the code facilitates or allows installations that are prone to leaking. So having a better building philosophy that ensures that everything works out would be great, but may not be very actionable. Fixing the building code would be a more obvious longer-term solution. But in the short term, providing folks with means to fix the leak rather than waiting for the code to be fixed would be the immediate band-aid.

Also, it is interesting to note that redlining lawsuits were successful by looking things from a racialized view. I.e. if one tried to omit race from the whole thing, there were no issues. Most mortgages were granted based on the financial situation. Only if you investigate it based on racial outcomes, then there was a case. I.e. it is not that folks had a simple way to get compensated and much of it went into a fund that subsidizes general funds that are specific for residents of black and Hispanic neighborhoods (though one could argue that it is a racialized distribution that some folks here migth again object to). That is a key mechanism of redlining. The government not only supported it, but created specific mechanisms that would encourage targeted lending by the banks. I.e. it is not just banks doing shady things. It was policy and part of the governmental system. As folks in this thread has mentioned, it is not just a single act of sorts. It is a systemic issue on many, often interacting levels. I am sure there are easily digestible articles out there, but I can dig one out when I got a couple of minutes.

Well, I guess you just don't know much about this part US history, which is fine. But the US government has a long history of providing funds for housing and education- but often only white folks were eligible. Also an important part of redlining was to refusal to insure mortgages in and near black neighborhoods, plus subsidizing home-building, but again only for white folks. This is potentially a bigger reason why whole areas in the US are underdeveloped and folks living are not only of a certain skin color, but also suffer worse overall outcomes in many measures. So that particular premise is demonstrably wrong.

That won't ever happen. Look, polls going back well into the Jim Crow era have shown that the majority of folks on all side of the issue are against racism or have at least a negative attitude towards it. Yet those laws were enacted. Why? Because folks did not consider their own attitude as racist or harmful. This is the whole issue with racism. It is not the attitude itself that does the harm per se, but the creation (and insufficient dismantling) of a system that creates harm. We we right now everyone on Earth decides to be non-racist and eliminates all racial references in all laws on the book, we still will have racial sorting of outcomes. It is not because that mentioning of race being the issue, it is because laws, even if not specific with racial discrimination in mind (though again, there are still examples of those, such as the voter suppression tactics that specifically target minorities without mentioning them) won't be equitable (i.e. affect or benefit racial groups similarly), because the system already have them in different boxes. By simply not ignoring them, we will have the same system as we have before and the same inequity that is going with all the demonstrable harm it has (including life expectancy). And realistically, this is the same argument that has been made by the public against the civil rights act and to some degree why Martin Luther King was disappointed with what he called the white moderate. It has been much said here that folks are in general agreement that people should have the same opportunities. Yet the assumptions seems to be that we are already there and can now proceed in a color-blind fashion. Yet, data clearly shows that outcomes are heavily racialized. Now, there is also the discussion about equal opportunity vs. equal outcome. But here I want to ask something: What do you think leads to these different racialized outcome if opportunities are actually the same? Even 20 years back there were rather clear opinions on why this is the case, I am curious to see what explanations folks have now.

Also, Chat GPT is a language model, it is not source for data or information, especially as it is prone to make things up (aka hallucinations). But in other words, folks not only consider it possible but also acceptable to have companies and governments pay up for past regressions. And if so, it then means that we can continue to examine what other elements have led to systematically disadvantage folks and compensate them, right?

Ack, well perhaps that works, too. Considering that much of it appears to be a huge dick-waving contest in the first place...

And this again suggests that the issues are those of the past and not ongoing (which is where I took my queue that racism is fixed). Unless you are for laws that repays families that fell victim to redlining and predatory mortgages? As well as municipalities to pay for underserved communities and schools and keeping them from getting higher degrees? Punishing health systems that create worse outcomes for certain folks? I am sure there won't be any pushback for that.

I think the most realistic scenario pointed out by various analysts is a blockade, rather than outright invasion of Taiwan. However, right now with worldwide reliance on Taiwanese production, they would be shooting themselves in the foot. I think I have heard it referred to as "silicone shield". There are reports that Xi wants to have military ramped out to be ready for an invasion in a few year's time, suggesting that they do not consider themselves fully operational for that purpose yet.

Sure, let's again ignore all the measures in place to suppress black voters and blame it on their lazyness. I mean, it is funny how this post kind of validates the assumptions of the paper better than the paper itself.

When it comes to things where all humans are socially characterized in the modern world, there is no neutral as such. Typically majority folks consider themselves the most neutral in any given context as their opinion is most commonly reflected by those around them. This is a bit what the paper describe as the invisibility of whiteness, when applied to a majority white community. But even on a more philosophical level, there is no true neutrality on matters that involve some sort of opinion (and there is an argument to be made that it might even extend to so some degree to seemingly "objective" measures) personal bias will play a role. This is the essence of what implicit bias is about, but I suspect it can be easily expanded to other issues.

The issue I am seeing is the overly broad use of terms. Discrimination can range from not liking certain folks to, as in this example, outright slavery. The effects on people are not the same. It is also not only about past issues, but rather about what is happening right now. The focus on the past really again implies that somehow things were fixed, but if you look at a wide range of outcomes (socially, economically, health-wise) we see in many countries still a heavily racialized differential outcome. Meaning that there is something going on that still sorts people according to race, even if as a society folks have decided to not do that anymore. These mechanisms (or systems) are often invisible as they do not necessary name groups specifically. Now reparations are a different matter, as here we talk about direct compensation of governmental injustices. And I am not sure why this is so controversial as they are being done already. These are specific and directed, such as compensation of the German government for victims of the holocaust, Canada has paid descendants of Chinese workers who were charged head taxes (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/chinese-head-tax-in-canada). The US and Canadian Chinese exclusion act won't pay out any redress, mostly because while not lawful, there were not specific victims. Potential reparations for slavery could vary, depending on context. In the UK, slave owners were paid reparations to compensate for their loss of slaves during abolition. For the reverse, there are still discussions about the case, but there is apparently resistance in even investigating these in detail. One economic argument is that workforce and money was forcefully extracted from individuals under a governmental system. As such descendants of slaves might be owed compensation. But this is a rather specific issue. And then you start conflating the issues again (governmental acts). Italian and Irish immigrants were (to my knowledge) not target of specific laws and regulations but were victims of individual (or societal) bigotry. These would not fall under the reparation issue as such. But perhaps more importantly, they were not systematically (mechanistically) denied power, as evidenced by their rise in influence and subsequent control of important roles and positions and power in society. If we look at the very same outcomes they do not fare differently than white folks at this point. So the system is not sorting them out anymore, as opposed to others. This is in fact a good example why calling every discrimination equal is just not helpful. The point is that we need to identify the invisible parts and dismantle them in order to put everyone on the same start line, as you are in favour of. The issue is that the machine is complex and for some, historic events have been the main factor that their starting line is still drawn way back. The proposal is then to put them forward (as a band aid) so that despite all other existing issues, they at least start closer to the same line as others.

A couple of things that I am going to address later, but this here is quite important to highlight. Plus it created zones that are racially segregated with lack of all kinds of services especially in predominantly black areas. These include good schools, groceries, administrative services, medical access and so on. These has huge knock-on effects on a lot of aspects, ranging from health to financial success. Due to the past regulations, they do not have the funds to simply move away, too. Similar effects are seen in indigenous communities (though quite a few are slowly building their way out). There are also rules and regulations that are not laws, but which can impact individual success if they are not addressed by law. A long standing example are dress codes, which basically have banned natural hair of black people. Without laws counteracting this type of frequent discrimination, black folks would need to spend a lot of time, effort and the use of rather unhealthy chemicals or basically be clean shaven to be able to work in what is deemed a professional setting. There a lot of these things around and pointing them out and trying to address them invariably upsets folks as it goes against the status quo. What is annoying is that these types of band-aids are disproportionately criticized if there are, in any way imperfect. Yet, for some reasons keeping the rules that are known to be harmful (to some) on the books is somehow acceptable? One should also state that in principle these issues are not unique to the US. They have manifested in different ways in different countries and are perhaps not as much created by law (or as blatant as the Jim Crow laws). And again, being racist is not the same as having a system that discriminates in whatever form by race.

Not to mention that this is common distraction used since, well, probably ever. "Look there are folks doing silly things in the name of *thing*, therefore let's disregard *thing*". It is unfortunately an efficient way to handwave away structural issues. The interesting bit is that I am hearing the same thing since the 80s and at the same time folks are claiming every time that in the last decade or so the issues are fixed and a ton of progress has been made. However, if things were already fixed, how the heck did they perceive progress?

And ironically this is not what the original paper was about, suggesting that it is even easier to find articles complaining about non-existent complains of racism. I.e. saying that folks complain too much about racism apparently makes good click bait (not to mention that it has a l9ng tradition).

Isn't it just a visualization tool and isn't the DE calculations done by Limma and other tools? I would assume that the plot would then be based on whatever those are spitting out, unless you can set how you want to transform the data. But that should be in the original paper.

You are missing the point that the race is still ongoing and folks still deal with running from behind. Based on your argument of "equal outcome" it seems to me that you deem the situation being equalized but at the same time you dismiss outcomes as a measure. Perhaps to address the issue, the idea of equity is not that everyone achieves exactly the same outcome. Rather, the idea is that the distribution of outcomes is going to be at least comparable between groups. Now, if you say we should not distinguish based on racial features, yet racial groups have worse outcomes still, what would be the reason if not racialized issues with the system? This goes actually to the above, there is an assumption that unequal outcomes are not a caused by a bias in the system, but because something inherent to a particular group. And yes, age is a discriminator for organ donation, which implies that you are alright with certain forms of discrimination. So if you are alright with using such information to bias against folks, why not use the same to benefit certain folks? (I can follow up with examples of racial bias in medicine and the systemic issues there in a bit, if there is interest, but I think for this discussion TheVat's example is easier to follow.

Historically the A was used for average intensity (MA-plot were originally used for microarrays back in the days). As they are also used for sequencing analyses, my assumptions that these are normalized read counts of sorts (unit free probably). But my suggestion is to track down the paper where the tool is being described.

I mentioned a couple of times before that racism is not a vacuum issue. If the system works the same for everyone, it would not matter that much if some folks for some reason dislike certain races or consider them inferior. It would be an issue akin to social status, accents or other identifiers. The real issue is if there is a system in place that in conjunction with these features leads to uneven outcomes. If folks don't get jobs because of their accents or skin color. And if you look at the system and measure outcomes, like for example life expectancy, lifelong income and so on, we still see that the system sorts according to race, gender and associated lines. I have mentioned the example a couple of times already, but there is a system that scores potential organ recipients according to a variety of factors including long-term benefit. If you look at the outcome, you see that black folks are much less likely to be recipients. So we have a (mostly) race-free system, but it is systematically biased against black folks. So what would you think is the right approach? Accept that the worse outcome is just the way it is, or would you change the system? What if the change requires adjustment for race? Do you think that in this system preferring a white person is the same as preferring a black person? If so, do how do you come to the conclusion? Would you just ignore the outcome and decide that the process is all that counts? One big issue with the arguments brought forward is that they seem to imply that all discriminatory barriers are gone and only of historic interest and that none of that has any bearings on the current situation, which is just ignoring the reality of things (not to mention that these things have been brought up again and again in various threads and even acknowledged before apparently being forgotten again).

I also wanted to add that these discussions often read like a failure of semantics and/or logic. Essentially the argument seems to be that racism caused issues, so anything that integrates race would be racist and therefore continue to cause issues. In my mind it is a bit like saying that poverty caused by redistributing wealth upward, cannot be solved by changing the redistribution of wealth, as this is what caused the issue in the first place. As such, it seems that the only solution is to keep the status quo, which seems counterintuitive.

While I cannot really comment on the physicist part, I would like to add that one should have realistic expectations regarding potential research positions, especially if one is interested in a particular field. There are not a lot of permanent research focused positions out there (and those that are are disproportionately competitive). So it is good to keep that in mind and look for career paths early on.

I am not entirely sure where the issue is. These types of compensation (e.g. victims of Nazis) have been successfully done in the past. One could squabble about the precise mechanism, but it does not seem like fundamental issue. And again, this is an issue of not looking at the big picture. What search committees are doing is not a blanket discrimination against overrepresented folks. Basically, the system is already set up to benefit certain folks (hence the overrepresentation) and if we just continue, there is no good reason to believe that this will revert itself. I.e. despite there not being an over discrimination, the system remains discriminatory. There are many reasons for that, ranging from bias to structural issues that won't be addressed if there are not enough participants form the affected groups. Also note, that as you mentioned, all decisions are discriminatory, as positions are limited. So you rank folks according to something. And as we all know, there is no clear objective ranking of folks (if we are really honest). Now what is not happening is that folks are hired just because of their ethnicity or gender. Rather, among a qualified pool of applicants, the committee might find that they lack representation of a given group which could support their mission and decide to hire accordingly (again, among a group of qualified candidates). Educationally this is really important, as in natural sciences, female authority persons are still underrepresented and you often see that in attitudes among the students (despite the fact that female students are overrepresented in some disciplines). If we state that all discrimination is bad, then obviously hiring procedures don't make sense, and we should just implement lotteries. If we state that only racial discrimination is bad then, (and it goes a bit to the paper in question in OP) then we first need to see what kind of racial discrimination is still baked into the system. Just because we do not perceive it as present, it does not mean it is not there. It just means we assume it to be the norm, which is what hurt folks. The loud supremacist racism is also bad, of course, but they are visible and can often be addressed directly. Implicit bias and systemic discrimination is a different, and arguably more urgent matter. It is like only focusing on furuncles, because they are ugly and visible, while ignoring chronic heart disease.