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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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You're not getting my point (also, I'm european, so no, this isn't about america for me). As humans have a rather high inter-individual variance, you can do this game on any level. If I say mediterranean is a good group, you can point out well-known differences between, say, north and south italy. If I say fine, then surely south italian is a good category? Then you can point out differences between more local groups, then between families and finally, individuals. And you will always get more precise this way, despite ending up with a nonsensical "grouping" of one each.

So the imo correct way is to see this as a precision-practicality tradeoff. In any given population, the largest ~2-5 groups that have consistent differences between them are the most practical while still retaining a comparatively good precision (this is incidentally the way people instinctively group other people everywhere in the world). So if you're looking worldwide, that is black vs white vs asian. If you're in africa, it's something like bantu/bantoid vs hausa/hamitic/semitic vs others. If you're specifically in India, it's Indo-Aryan vs Dravidian vs Tibeto-Burman (btw, looking this up it's very unfortunate how consistently wikipedia is trying to reduce everything to culture/language and steadfastly ignores the biological dimension of ethnicities, but that's the general modern biases at work).