Discrimination is considered unethical when it is baseless.
When it has merit, it is accepted as ethical.
It is ethical to deny a loan to people with a terrible credit score, because there is very good reason to suspect people with a terrible credit score will default. It's still discrimination, but it is ethical because it is based in fact.
Discrimination can have useful purpose. You can't expect people to expose themselves to a 9 out of 10 risk of being exploited by corrupt authors "in the name of equality".
You basically stated a definition of racism and then asked if that was racism. It doesn't really matter if evidence is involved or not. Racism is just stereotyping based on ethnicity or culture; as soon as you've generalized for good or bad, it is racism (yes, racial profiling is racism also).
Ok, I'm not interested in arguing what is or isn't racism. So let's assume you're right. Ok, I'm a terrible racist of the worst kind.
But what's your alternative? Is racism such a Great Evil we are willing to risk corruption of the entire global scientific knowledge by not applying extra scrutiny to "high-risk" papers? We should allow fraudulent or corrupt papers to freely pollute the community, just to make sure everyone feels like they are being treated equally?
Frankly I care a lot more about good science than being politically correct. Besides, if your science is sound, why would you be upset if your paper undergoes extra scrutiny? Isn't that why you publish it, to be reviewed?
Please note that I'm not suggesting "all PRC scientists should be excommunicated from the scientific community" or anything like that. But trust has to be earned.
> But what's your alternative? Is racism such a Great Evil we are willing to risk corruption of the entire global scientific knowledge by not applying extra scrutiny to "high-risk" papers? We should allow fraudulent or corrupt papers to freely pollute the community, just to make sure everyone feels like they are being treated equally?
If you told me that "one out of three black American males will go to prison in their lifetime" and so, accordingly, you decided to be more suspicious of all of them, then you would receive a plethora of downvotes and would be (rightfully so) tagged as a racist. But since the generalization you made is about Chinese, so it is somehow more socially acceptable to say that you will treat their papers differently when you review them? Perhaps, but that is not objective and has more to do with the culture of the hackernews community.
> Frankly I care a lot more about good science than being politically correct. Besides, if your science is sound, why would you be upset if your paper undergoes extra scrutiny? Isn't that why you publish it, to be reviewed?
Paper reviewing is already very subjective, to add racism on top of that is just too much. Reviewers usually make up their minds about a paper in around 5 minutes, and then that bias clouds how they read the rest of the paper. My papers are usually immune to this because my name sounds "white," but my colleagues (who I often co-author with) receive no such benefit.
When it has merit, it is accepted as ethical.
It is ethical to deny a loan to people with a terrible credit score, because there is very good reason to suspect people with a terrible credit score will default. It's still discrimination, but it is ethical because it is based in fact.
Discrimination can have useful purpose. You can't expect people to expose themselves to a 9 out of 10 risk of being exploited by corrupt authors "in the name of equality".