
Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?  - trustfundbaby
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14679657
======
TomOfTTB
This seems to confuse two different issues and in doing so leads to the wrong
conclusion.

The author seems to conclude it's wrong to think race is responsible for so
many 100m winners being black because the assumption is erroneous. But only
through making and testing that erroneous assumption (as the author did) are
we able to determine it has nothing to do with skin color and more to do with
a specific geographical heritage. So I disagree with the author on that point.

He then tries to tie that to a study that shows "black names" on resumes are
50% less likely to get call backs from potential employers. But those
employers who discriminate are making an assumption they've clearly not tested
(that people are worse employees based on their skin color)

So the real issue here is people who don't test their conclusions and there's
nothing wrong with drawing an initial conclusion as long as you test it
against actual facts.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I'm trying to understand the relevance of the point you're making. While your
point is true, it seems largely technical and irrelevant to real world
actions. It's not like your average person will out and do a test to see if
their biases have a real world basis. The more practical takeaway is that we
should attempt to not form these biases in the first place.

~~~
TomOfTTB
A bias is defined as a conclusion that is held unfairly. The only way to
determine if a conclusion is held unfairly is to evaluate it and evaluating a
conclusion requires drawing that conclusion in the first place.

The relevance is the author is saying "Don't draw race based conclusions
because they are unfair by definition". But if you prevent yourself from
drawing the conclusion you can't evaluate it.

Put in more human terms: People who are afraid of being called racist can't be
intellectually honest.

Also, just to make the point, racism tends to flourish when people who aren't
racist avoid such questions. Right now the most potent rallying point for
racists is "The government doesn't want you to know white people are
superior". This claim seems to hold weight to people because most scientists
are afraid to do race based studies. So by not disproving the racists
assumption we actually strengthen it.

~~~
hackinthebochs
There's a distinction between drawing a conclusion (and thus acting on it) and
noticing a possible trend that can be investigated further. One is asking a
question, one is answering it. If you draw the conclusion you've already
assumed an answer. This is where the danger is. People who form biases are
assuming the answer without the supporting evidence.

To address your second point: As a natural scientist (as in endlessly curious)
I often wonder about genetic differences in racist and how they effect outward
traits. From a public policy perspective, I totally understand why most
scientists and government officials wouldn't touch those questions with a 10
foot pole. There is just far more potential for negative consequences than
positives.

------
dredmorbius
That's a poorly written/reasoned article.

Draw a set of circles. The big one is all humans. The little one is 100m
finalists.

Outside the finalists, you're drawing two concentric circles. The smaller of
the two is Nandi. The larger is sub-Saharan Africans, or what much of the
world refers to as "black".

First: yes, all 100m winners are "black". More specifically, they're among the
better Nandi runners. But as we're noting, Nandis are a proper subset of sub-
Saharan Africans, or blacks. So ... yes, the first inference ("100m winners
are black") is accurate, just not complete.

The other interesting thing to note is this: humanity originated in Africa,
and migrated from there to the rest of the planet in successive waves.
_Genetic diversity within Africa is greater than in the rest of the planet._
For the most part / as a general rule. You'll find this is typically true of
origin / diaspora populations, human, animal, vegetable, or even
technological.

So: yes, there's considerable genetic variation among various populations.
There's more in Africa. And, at least based on empirical evidence, if you want
to be a good sprint runner, it's a considerable benefit to have ancestry that
traces to a specific valley in Kenya.

As to considering all "Blacks" to be genetically uniform or similar: no,
that's not valid.

The other discussions of the article are largely red herrings.

~~~
onan_barbarian
A quibble: Nandi runners from Kenya are distance runners, not 100m sprinters.

~~~
dredmorbius
Fair point. I didn't fact-check the article, but was thinking earlier "hrm ...
aren't Kenyans known more for distance running than sprinting?".

Despite specific characteristics, my point about genetic diversity within
African populations as a whole should stand.

------
cperciva
The author draws the wrong conclusions from the CV experiment. He claims that
it shows a bias against black candidates; in reality, what it shows is a bias
against "black" _names_.

Names are really powerful. The same is true of email addresses; how many
people here can honestly say that they would treat an email from
purpledinosaur28@aol.com the same way as they treat an email from
john.smith@gmail.com?

~~~
alister
There's something about the CV experiment that makes _no_ sense to me:

    
    
      The researchers also found that although high-quality
      "white" candidates were preferred to low-quality "white"
      candidates, the relative quality of "black" CVs made no
      difference whatsoever. It was as if employers saw three
      categories - high-quality white, low-quality white and
      black candidates.
    

We know that the "black" candidates got some responses, and we know that the
"black" CVs did have differences in quality.

So on what basis were the employers choosing the black candidates on the
occasions that they did choose a black candidate? Randomly?

It's a big anomaly in the experiment I think, and should be explained somehow.

~~~
doctoboggan
I am sure each employer thought they were choosing the best person for the
job, not weighing the benefits of a black person vs a white person. The point
is that when all these decisions are summed up a bias emerges. The author of
this argument is arguing that our tendency to incorrectly clump people into
groups is the reason for this bias.

~~~
alister
I think you misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about blacks vs whites. I
asking why this experiment doesn't show any difference between high-quality
and low-quality _black_ candidates.

Using the names suggested by the article, suppose Tyrone is a high-quality
black candidate and Latoya is a low-quality black candidate. The experiment
shows that employers--when they do choose a "black" candidate--will choose
Tyrone and Latoya equally often.

The employer supposedly has no preference for the better CV among the black
applicants.

Does that make any sense to you?

It makes me suspicious of the whole experiment.

~~~
doctoboggan
Yes, they were saying the employers classified all black applicants as the
same and didn't notice the difference in their actual quality.

Because they had a black name that is the first and _only_ label they get.

~~~
alister
That explanation doesn't make sense to me.

The employers were not merely classifying people into groups, they wanted to
actually hire someone.

If in the employer's mind, all black applicants were bad, the employer would
hire a white applicant, or wouldn't hire anyone, or would keep looking.

But that's not what happened. Sometimes the employer called one of the black
applicants for an interview. Even if the employer thought that all the black
applicants were bad, the logical thing to do would be to go through the CVs
again to try to discern some differences in the pool of black applicants
before you waste time on an interview.

But the experiment says that the employers found all black applicants to be
_equally_ bad.

Then my question is: On what basis did the employer pick the black applicant
to call for an interview?

It's as if the employer is saying, "We prefer to interview the best white
applicants. Sometimes we interview a black applicant, but in those cases good
or bad doesn't matter -- we'll interview a _random_ black applicant."

It doesn't add up. Either the experiment is flawed or there is a subtle
explanation for this anomaly.

------
nkurz
It's a fine and thoughtful article, but I'm not sure that I see the logical
fallacy.

 _Assuming that this success is driven by genes rather than environment, there
is a rather obvious inference to make - black people are naturally better
sprinters than white people._

 _But here's the thing. This inference is not merely false - it is logically
flawed._

If we assume that sprinting performance is genetic (and realizing that there
are lots of other factors), and we assume that the best 100m sprinters are
consistently black (realizing that "black" may or may not be a clearly defined
genetic category), is it really a fallacy to say that black people are better
sprinters?

Logically, so long as the prevalence of winners is greater than the percentage
of the population defined as black, I would think it has to follow. The
winning sprinters are also strong, lean, and young. Would it be a fallacy to
say that "strong, lean and young runners make better sprinters"?

The obvious fallacy is to conclude that _all_ blacks are better sprinters. But
it feels like the article goes far beyond this, and wants to redefine "better"
as incompatible with "more likely to excel". And pointing out that Americans
and Jamaicans tend to excel seems to run counter to the part where he asks us
to assume that the success is driven by genes.

Hmm. His book "Bounce" sounds interesting, though. I've requested it from the
library. And oddly, I found 4 year old version of essentially the same article
(minus the reference to resumes, adding reference to "yellow" domination at
table tennis, and advertising a different book) here:
[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_co...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2189194.ece)

~~~
yummyfajitas
_...is it really a fallacy to say that black people are better sprinters?_

Yes. Data on the Olympics gives very little information on whether the average
black person is a better sprinter than the average white person.

It is not, however, a fallacy to say that it is highly likely that the next
_top_ sprinter will be black. (If anyone disagrees with this claim, I'm
willing to offer good odds on the race of the next Olympic sprinter
medalists.)

Honestly, I'm finding the author's exposition to be rather confused. He seems
to conflate two logically distinct propositions ("the best $x come from group
$Y" and "a random $y in $Y has a higher probability of outperforming a random
$z in $Z") for reasons I can't fathom.

~~~
nkurz
I agree with you on "very little information", but I wouldn't want to make the
jump to "fallacy". It would be a fallacy to presume that the between-group
difference is anything approaching the within-group difference, but I'd guess
that the effect is there. Instinctively, I wouldn't be surprised if genetics
played at least a 1% role. Would you? What if instead of "black", you pointed
to a particular gene?

The alternative would be to presume that the variance of sprinting ability
with the black population is greater than that of the white. I'd want to see
some reason that this is true before presuming it. This also gets us back to
the furor regarding Lawrence Summers dismissal from Harvard, which does imply
that there some things that are simply "wrong to note".

~~~
yummyfajitas
It would not surprise me at all if genetics plays a large role. The only point
I'm making is about inferring information about the mean/median of a
distribution by observing only it's far tails.

In fact, I'd speculate that across the US population, black sprinting ability
is probably lower than that of whites. Black women are disproportionately
overweight/obese and are likely to lower the average for blacks. Looking
solely at olympic level data points would never reveal this.

(As far as I'm aware, this latter effect is minimally related to genetics.)

~~~
nkurz
_The only point I'm making is about inferring information about the
mean/median of a distribution by observing only it's far tails._

That's the same point I'm making, but I come to the opposite conclusion. I
think that in the absence of contradictory information one should prefer
simple inferences to complex ones (Occam rephrased). Thus I'd look first to
the mean, then to the variance, and only then consider that only one of the
groups has a multi-modal distribution.

I do think our "overcompensation" for race affects our conclusions here (mine
included). If one were to find that the winners shared some other trait other
than skin color, I don't think there would be nearly the same desire to find
alternative explanations. But this doesn't mean that these alternatives are
not useful to consider, and quite possibly correct.

------
monkeypizza
"The truth is rather different. There is far more genetic variation within
racial groups (around 85%) than there is between racial groups (just 15%).
Indeed, surface appearance is often a highly misleading way of assessing the
genetic distance between populations."

This doesn't prove what he thinks it proves.

This is the exact same argument: There is more variation within male heights
than there is between the male & female average height. This is true - the
difference between the average male height and female height is only a few
inches, and it is quite a bit smaller than an interval which covers 90% of
men. But, this has nothing to do with his point. The height difference between
males and females is still relevant to us, even though the in-group variation
for males & females is also high.

tl;dr: male height variation is much bigger than the gap between male & female
heights, yet we still think the male-female height gap is a real & meaningful
phenomenon.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_diversity:_Lewont...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_diversity:_Lewontins_fallacy_\(scientific_paper\))

------
tokenadult
It appears, based on the interesting submitted article, that it would be more
informative to report about 100 meter dash winners where they trained, and who
their coaches were. Much the same could be said about marathon winners, who
tend to train in a different part of the world.

After edit: the kind first reply to my comment here mentions a possible study
design for looking at what might influence athletic success among athletes
from one place or another. A "genetically sensitive" design for such a study
would have to consider quite a few other issues, not least actual individual
genes, which have been surprisingly neglected in genetic research over the
years. (Rather than actually looking at genes of each individual in a study,
which continues to be a generally expensive and occasionally error-prone
enterprise, most previous genetic studies of human behavioral characteristics
have been based on proxy assemblages of genes, by studying closely related
family members, or in the best cases monozygotic twins.)

Readers who haven't seen this pair of links before, which I share fairly often
here on HN because they are by world famous human behavioral geneticists, may
be surprised by what they learn from reading about what twin studies can and
cannot say about genetic influences on human behavior.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20\(2008\).pdf)

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20\(2009\).pdf)

Meanwhile other readers have commented, and tying in what I've written (and
linked to) above to what several comments here say, a common fallacy comes
from assuming that "race" (as socially defined in one place or another) has
anything much at all to do with what genes one would find in a particular
individual. Serious geneticists are actually some of the leading scientists in
suggesting that in medicine, law, and education we should pay less attention
to "race" than formerly, to avoid inherent cognitive biases in explaining
individual differences.

~~~
eleusive
This series of articles[1] goes into some depth in explaining why certain
countries (and ethnicities) dominate various sports - this includes an in-
depth discussion of why Kenyans are so good at distance running. The author
focuses on genetics, location, support, training, incentives, culture, etc. of
various combinations of these sports and the countries that seem to dominate
them.

It's not yet complete and is quite lengthy, but it's one of the most
fascinating things I've read in some time. While the title seems to make the
article focuses solely on Olympic Weightlifting, but the main focus is much
more general, and is about uncovering recurring patterns between countries who
dominate various sports.

[1] [http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/why-the-us-
sucks-a...](http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/training/why-the-us-sucks-at-
olympic-lifting-part-1.html)

~~~
jacques_chester
Olympic Weightlifting is an interesting case. Some of the qualities that
predict weightlifting success -- high fast-twitch fibre ratio, for example --
predict success in plenty of other sports.

Whether a country excels at Weightlifting seems in large part to be a function
of whether there is a more popular sport in that country. So in the Carribean
potential lifters become sprinters, in the USA they become NFL players, in
Australia rugby and AFL players and so on.

------
olegious
The author mentions that most successful sprinters have been Jamaican or
American rather than African. Many American professional sports leagues have a
greater percentage of black players than white players. Both of these facts
lead me to believe that the black people in the Americas have a genetic
advantage due to filtering out of weaker individuals through the trials
brought on by slavery.

Consider- many modern American and Jamaican blacks are descendants of slaves.
To arrive in the Americas those slaves had to survive a horrendous journey
across the Atlantic in a slave ship (a far more physically challenging
experience than the one experienced by the average European colonist on his
trip across the ocean). They then had to survive the physical challenges
associated with being a slave. The net result is that descendants of these
slaves have a genetic profile that was passed down from the strongest
survivors, making them physically stronger than either African blacks or non-
black Americans.

------
waffle_ss
I don't disagree with his conclusion, but the article is just a puff piece
with a link to his book at the end, in which he "...debunks many cherished
myths" including "that we are restricted by our genetic make-up".

"Our tendency to generalise rests on a deeper fallacy - the idea that 'black'
refers to a genetic type. We put people of dark skin in a box labelled black
and assume that a trait shared by some is shared by all." I'm no geneticist,
but I wonder then how the author would explain the seemingly racist drug
BiDil, which is more effective for African Americans?

A more difficult question to answer - that can't be explained away with
extreme examples - would be why the regular professional sports (e.g. NFL,
NBA) have a disproportionate number (compared to population) of black players.
May have nothing to do with genetics at all, but would be much more
interesting to read about than this article.

~~~
brazzy
Re BiDil - note that African Americans are a small, not very genetically
diverse, subpopulation of black people.

------
latch
I used to be curious about why it seemed like most baseball pitchers and
quarterbacks (though certainly not all!) are white. What could it be,
genetically, socially or culturally that would make white people have better
arms?

I stopped asking because people thought it was racist. It always baffled me.

~~~
mattdeboard
They probably thought it was racist because the thing that makes a great
quarterback (for example) isn't just an incredible arm. There are many more
factors that go into it, and I'd wager the reason so many black quarterbacks
get weeded out at the collegiate level is because their superior physical
prowess is better utilized in other positions that rely more on speed, power,
explosiveness, etc.

I mean, you've got a guy like Peyton Manning for example. He's not an athletic
guy relative to other NFL players, but historically he has this incredible
hand-eye coordination and mind for the strategy of the game. No one was going
to look at Manning and say, "Hey you know, you have a great arm and are
frighteningly smart at this game, but we could use your slow clumsy ass at
running back."

To me quarterbacks and pitchers specialize into that position because
oftentimes their other physical gifts don't even come close to their arms. In
other words, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of black QBs out there in high
school football teams who have the potential to be just as great as Tom Brady,
Peyton Manning, etc., but coaches are going to want the speed and power
elsewhere.

~~~
Volpe
> black quarterbacks get weeded out at the collegiate level is because their
> superior physical prowess

I thought this article was pointing out how racial prejudice around
'athleticism and blacks' was out right false. So then you justify a separate
athletic ability using race again...

~~~
thecabinet
> I thought this article was pointing out how racial prejudice around
> 'athleticism and blacks' was out right false.

That's what the article wants to do, but it doesn't succeed. We know that
elite "black" athletes are the best. Maybe the average black athlete is worse
than the average white, but there's no evidence of that presented. It could be
that blacks have a larger standard deviation, or it could be that blacks have
a higher mean. The author couldn't be bothered to actually try and answer that
question.

------
taariqlewis
As a young black boy, growing up, in the Caribbean, I always came dead last in
my races. _sigh_

------
techiferous
On a side note, this also shows how ineffective resumes are at connecting
employees and employers. If you repeated the same experiment with github
accounts, perhaps less bias would show up.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I wish I believed that geeks were above generalizing based on names, but I
have no doubt if your github user name was "Tyrone" or "RapDaddy", you could
run into similar issues.

I do think you would have less discrimination that way, though. I bet you
could accomplish similar things if resumes focused less on names and more on
accomplishments.

~~~
techiferous
And also, with github, you are looking at actual code produced instead of
making assumptions about the quality of code produced based on bullet points.
Closer to facts.

------
Lukeas14
This phenomenon has nothing to do with being black but everything to do with
genetics. The defining characteristics of world class sprinters is not the
fact that they're black but is rather attributed to either genes passed down
from their ancestors or their own genetic mutations. My theory is that if we
traced the family trees of top sprinters we'd find that many are descendants
of slaves who were bred to be bigger, faster and stronger.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I think this is a stretch. I don't think there was enough selective pressure
to really cause that much of a change in gene distribution in such a short
period. Furthermore, unless the mutations for being "bigger, faster" were
novel to the slave population, there is no reason to think that any breeding
practices would have had any meaningful influence. What is more likely is that
genes for excelling at sprinting probably came from the same area of Africa.

~~~
Lukeas14
I certainly don't believe that any "bigger, faster" mutations are novel to the
slave population as they can occur within any group of people. But through
breeding these mutations are likely to be more prevalent in the target
population. This explains why the 400m race can be dominated by blacks but
Jeremy Wariner (white guy) can still be the fastest. If that were true you
would see similar numbers of sprinters from West Africa.

If your last point were true we would see world class sprinters coming out of
one of the West African nations. I can't think of any.

------
freshrap6
Putting labels on people or stereotyping is never an effective way to measure
their skill or the importance of their accomplishment. It seems that either
one of these gives us the ability to quickly make a "informed" decision about
someone without having to dive deeply in the matter. This doesn't make it
right, and in my experience leads you to make incorrect assumptions more often
than not.

------
dbrannan
A relevant article:

<http://www.newstatesman.com/200009180009>

------
hncommenter13
The following Malcolm Gladwell article from 1997 is exactly on this topic:
<http://www.gladwell.com/1997/1997_05_19_a_sports.htm>

Not everyone loves Gladwell's writing, but I found the article interesting and
thought-provoking.

------
jamesrcole
irrespective of the article's content, that's a poor title: of course there's
nothing wrong to simply note it.

