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Cheshire90 t1_j4oknx1 wrote

Reply to comment by kungfoojesus in New study shows: Black Adults Experienced Early Signs of Brain Aging Faster Than Other Ethnic Minority Groups by PaulHasselbaink

It's amazing how quickly we slid away from trying to improve things by following evidence and back into hand waving toward essentially religious explanations that are certain to go nowhere ("it's bad because all of society is bad").

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_PM_ME_YOUR_FORESKIN t1_j4ozcj4 wrote

This assumes that social disparities can’t be studied empirically, which is not true. Divorcing science from the social contexts it finds itself is rarely wise. And your comment seems to be exactly why science that speaks to structural inequality is so needed. The average person already downplays racism and believes it’s just people complaining about nothing. We don’t need people with flimsy scientific literacy to then use it as a “racism can’t exist because how do you prove it scientifically” argument to uphold their own racist views.

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SirThatsCuba t1_j4p0r3r wrote

If I had a nickel for every time I've been told by "friends" that I had been asking for the abuse people heaped on me (just by existing, but they don't understand that part of the equation) i wouldn't have financial worries.

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Cheshire90 t1_j4p1roo wrote

My comment does not assume that.

Neither the study of social disparities nor of disease are helped when saying popular things that you already know is more important than taking a critical and open minded approach to figuring out what is going on. Worrying about what the average person downplays is something politicians and social activists should do; scientists should worry about what the evidence in front of them says.

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moonfox1000 t1_j4s7tgs wrote

>This assumes that social disparities can’t be studied empirically, which is not true.

I agree with this, but the explanation that racism did this is the scientific equivalent of god did it. It's a solution that gets you nowhere. A much better study would attempt to pinpoint the exact causes (air pollution, smoking rates, higher risk jobs, etc) which actually gets us somewhere. You can recognize that all these might be second order effects of racism, but we still need to know the exact cause and effect relationships in order to be able to translate that into real world actions. For example, segmenting people by both race and city/rural groups lets us study the effect of air pollution on outcomes...if that turns out to be relevant then that changes the way we think about the relationship between highway construction and high-density housing which can actually lead to an improvement.

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neoliberalismIdpol t1_j4uwavz wrote

Reduce brain aging by solving the philosophical problems inherent to social organization that the Greeks wrestled with

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