Systemic Racism is Diversity

MIT, Harvard scientists find AI can recognize race from X-rays — and nobody knows how

A doctor can’t tell if somebody is Black, Asian, or white, just by looking at their X-rays. But a computer can, according to a surprising new paper by an international team of scientists, including researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School.

The study found that an artificial intelligence program trained to read X-rays and CT scans could predict a person’s race with 90 percent accuracy. But the scientists who conducted the study say they have no idea how the computer figures it out.

“When my graduate students showed me some of the results that were in this paper, I actually thought it must be a mistake,” said Marzyeh Ghassemi, an MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and coauthor of the paper, which was published Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet Digital Health. “I honestly thought my students were crazy when they told me.”

Almost every discovery is in the direction of destroying the concept of the Blank Slate. Systemic racism is a lie. There's no pernicious system of hatred or discrimination. At worst, there is a natural sorting under liberty. Which comports with what is an increasingly authoritarian and totalitarian system when it comes to race. That is to say, what do we do if the public cannot handle diversity?

As genetic science and AI discovers more innate human differences that explain away most of the "racism" in the world, it looks more and more like the people who cannot handle diversity are the very people promoting it. That the best solution might be taking all the people who complain about diversity and racism and putting them into homogenous societies. Both the people who are racist and hate diversity and all the people who are anti-racist and promote diversity, would be better off in a homogenous polity. The people who can handle diversity are the ones who can see race/sex/ethnic disparities and, finding no clear evidence of discrimination, can accept that differences exist.

If people can't handle the differences, then they can't handle diversity and need to live in a homogenous society. That has been the solution for all of human history. My hunch is that if we sorted the population this way, the number of people who want to live in the diverse society would fit into a few cities and they would probably be very similar in other ways, such as being highly gifted in intelligence, wealth, athletics, and so on. Another form of tribe forming along a different human characteristic.

From seeing social media and public discussion, many supposedly intelligent people can't consistently separate groups from individuals. Practically speaking, I'm not sure that diversity is possible at scale. The USA seemed stable up until the white population fell below 80 percent. As it heads towards 60 percent, the accusations of racism are ramping up because the white majority, soon to be plurality (or not depending on if the Hispanic category survives) is losing power. Increased diversity isn't creating a utopia. Combined with institutionalized racism via affirmative action, civil rights laws and assumed white guilt, increased diversity is providing cover for anti-white racism. The only way out for the USA as it currently exists as a political union is a rebirth of Christianity. If the country doesn't turn back to God, then it will break apart formally or informally.