About diversity
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(How long can we keep this outside the Garage?)
And yes, this article completely ignores the fact that people can't just up and move wherever they want.
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Was aware of the original paper by Schelling (they link to it at the bottom of the page). We looked at it in complex systems simulations back when I was a student.
From what I remember, the point was to explore how slight the selected preferences can be but still influence the structure majorly over time. (The experiments on the page only consider the eight nearest neighbours, so the granularity of the selection is ~12%, adjusting the settings inside one of those intervals shouldn't change anything.)
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I for one refuse to live under the tyranny of the triangle heterodox. Long live the hexagon hierarchy.
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I've already seen that, but I never actually noticed that the original paper is from 1971. Basically one full half of a century. And yet, the public discourse is still (actually, now more than ever) completely different.
Problem is in this part:
When someone says a culture is shapist, they're not saying the individuals in it are shapist. They're not attacking you personally.
That won't work. The very concept that bad things can happen just "because" is very hard to believe and goes strictly against something that everyone is raised with: bad things happen because of bad people (or, at best, because of bad supernatural entity aided by people of insufficient goodness)!
Also, there are always good guys and bad guys. And I am the good one. If we somehow get rid of that bad ones, all problems will go away!
Basically it's the same thing I tried (probably very badly) to say in the "police brutality" topic.
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I think it's dumb because he's assuming his argument.
The argument only makes sense if you accept the premise that people should only be comfortable in a group that meets a diversity quota that's diverse by whatever attribute you're looking at. (This guy is clearly talking about race, but the theory should work for other attributes it's possible to be bigoted against, right?)
The people who believe in his quota system are the ones who already agree with him.
The people who disagree with him are the ones who argue that squares and triangles should be able to live and work together and it shouldn't be a big deal if there are a few extra triangles over here or a few extra squares over there.
Also, the guy is wrong about what "a shapist group" is. The KKK is a racist group, right? They're a group of racists that plan and execute activities to further their explicitly racist ends.
If we want to be worried patterns at the group level caused by individuals making non-animus based decisions, we need a different world for that than racist so we don't confuse it with real racism.
Also, this is the kind of topic that belongs in the garage. I give it until 10 PM before the posts in the thread make this effectively a garage topic.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
I give it until 10 PM before the posts in the thread make this effectively a garage topic.
It was going fine until people got serious about it. Up until then it was thinly veiled reference to the extermination of the Irish.
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@marczellm The one I'm in, obviously.
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"Everyday, you're not shuffling."
LOL.
Seriously, though, emergent phenomena like this are underappreciated. And fascinating.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
I think it's dumb because he's assuming his argument.
It's over simplified if you're trying to directly apply it to real world neighborhoods, where there are a zillion other factors influencing things. Still, I think it makes the point that effects that a lot of people see as nefarious...may not be at all.
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@boomzilla said in About diversity:
Still, I think it makes the point that effects that a lot of people see as nefarious...may not be at all.
It reads the opposite way to me. The subheading of the post is
how harmless choices can make a harmful world.
so he's arguing the opposite point.
See also his explanation that
When someone says a culture is shapist, they're not saying the individuals in it are shapist.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear OK, fair enough on that assumption. It's a commonly held belief, though, and I think there's probably at least some truth to it.
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@Zecc said in About diversity:
(How long can we keep this outside the Garage?)
And yes, this article completely ignores the fact that people can't just up and move wherever they want.
It also ignores that you can't force diversity. Let's say you have a neighborhood that's predominantly white or black or ... whatever. The point is the neighborhood is predominantly one race (or maybe even one ethnicity). You can't force people to move. Nor can you tell landlords that new tenants must increase diversity (same for homeowners regarding who they sell to).
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@boomzilla said in About diversity:
It's a commonly held belief, though, and I think there's probably at least some truth to it.
Is it, though? I think it's confusing cause and effect.
I'm a big fan of equality of opportunity. There are people in this country that are actively having their opportunities restricted by the problems that come along with poverty. In the inner cities, those people tend to be minorities. (Note that in the impoverished parts of Appalachia, these same problems occur among the mostly white people population. And the same solutions will help.)
The biggest problem in these areas is that children who grow up there don't get a good education and don't grow up to be successful adults. At the individual level, to break this cycle, you kind of have to leave. Bring your children to a community where everyone grows up to be successful and it's easier for them to grow up to be successful too.
At the societal level, though, there are changes that can be made to fix a neighborhood. Improve the schooling. Encourage better parenting. That kind of stuff.
Instead of worrying that too many white people and not enough black people are fleeing poorly run inner cities, we should focus on having the inner cities be run better.
Then nobody will have to flee.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@boomzilla said in About diversity:
It's a commonly held belief, though, and I think there's probably at least some truth to it.
Is it, though? I think it's confusing cause and effect.
I think causes and effects are sometimes difficult to untangle here but, yes, I think it is generally accepted as conventional wisdom. "Diversity makes us strong," etc.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
At the societal level, though, there are changes that can be made to fix a neighborhood. Improve the schooling. Encourage better parenting. That kind of stuff.
Instead of worrying that too many white people and not enough black people are fleeing poorly run inner cities, we should focus on having the inner cities be run better.
Then nobody will have to flee.
There's a chicken/egg problem here. Societal/cultural change has to happen before the external influences will be effective (politics is downstream of culture everywhere) and those societies and cultures are extremely resistant to the kinds of change that are needed. Doing it externally has been tried by well-meaning activists for generations and has generally made things worse. The schools aren't bad by choice, they're bad as part of this crab-pot cycle.
Education isn't a panacea. Especially with a strong culture that says that learning is for <others>. This is true both in Appalachia and in the inner cities, just with different values of <others>. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
My point is that there might not be anything anyone outside can do except tinker around the edges. Certainly some of the bad incentives can be changed (the War on Poverty exacerbated a lot of it), but path dependence is huge in cultural issues. It's like the old joke about psychiatrists:
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.
In the same way, those cultures have to want to change. And that's something I don't see happening, barring some sort of catastrophe that makes their current way of life impossible. And then that will be exceedingly traumatic for all concerned.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in About diversity:
The very concept that bad things can happen just "because" is very hard to believe and goes strictly against something that everyone is raised with: bad things happen because of bad people (or, at best, because of bad supernatural entity aided by people of insufficient goodness)!
The silly thing is that we, people who work with building and programming these complex yet definitely man-made systems called computers, can know that we can have systems where every single little bit is right but the overall system is still wrong. (One of the simplest possible examples of this is the classic Dining Philosophers concurrency problem.) Understanding the failure modes of a complex system can require global knowledge of that system, and the enormous majority of people find that very difficult: it's my belief that we're not adapted as a species to think that way. (Evolutionarily, we can see why: solving the immediate problem of the panther sneaking up on you was far more important to surviving on ancient savannah than working out the mean panther-predation rate for the species.)
Given that we know that bad things can come about without bad parts in at least some complex systems, it's reasonable to assume that this is also possible in other such systems, like bureaucracies or societies that are often of similar or greater complexity than the programs we deal with. But that doesn't mean we should either throw our hands and say things are unfixable, or join in some sort of witch hunt for bad people. No! We should instead understand that we're some of the time observing system-level bugs and trying to figure out how we could actually fix those (without making other stuff worse, if possible).
And yes, that's difficult. If it was easy, it would probably have been done already.
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@abarker said in About diversity:
You can't force people to move. Nor can you tell landlords that new tenants must increase diversity (same for homeowners regarding who they sell to).
I disagree with the word “can't” there. It's most definitely possible. It might not be a good idea. It might not be civilised. It might not be legal. But can it be done? Yes. History contains plenty of examples where it was actually done, and it was often among the nastiest episodes too.
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@boomzilla said in About diversity:
I think it is generally accepted as conventional wisdom. "Diversity makes us strong," etc.
That's the argument that he's assuming.
Strength is the only thing that makes you strong. Put another way, the only way, personnel-wise, that an engineering enterprise can get stronger is to hire more competent engineers.
None of this is an argument against hiring people from minority groups. (Or being unwelcoming or shitty towards them.)
But if you're trying to say that targeting to hire one racial mix of people on your team is better than some other racial mix, there's at least a fairly large minority that disagrees with you.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@boomzilla said in About diversity:
I think it is generally accepted as conventional wisdom. "Diversity makes us strong," etc.
That's the argument that he's assuming.
Yes. I was just pointing out that a lot of people seem to agree with that without much critical thought about it.
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Good luck keeping this one out of the Garage.
This article suffers a bit from making the big (yet implicit) axiomatic starting statement that diversity in itself is a good thing, and therefore outcomes which don't result in mixing are bad.
I think we'd all agree that enforced segregation is bad, and that discrimination of things like service provision by who is in a district is also bad. But is it actually bad that people like to live with people similar to themselves and cluster?
Personally, I don't think it is, when those clusters are on a sub-town level (which, from observation, they tend to be). That means you still meet people from the other groups, so you don't lose the cultural benefits, and services will be shared, but people still get to keep hold of their culture and history without feeling under pressure to modify it for people who don't share it.
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@dkf said in About diversity:
@abarker said in About diversity:
You can't force people to move. Nor can you tell landlords that new tenants must increase diversity (same for homeowners regarding who they sell to).
I disagree with the word “can't” there. It's most definitely possible. It might not be a good idea. It might not be civilised. It might not be legal. But can it be done? Yes. History contains plenty of examples where it was actually done, and it was often among the nastiest episodes too.
Yeah, yeah, have your
.Still, if you do force diversity, you tend to have side effects. At least one of those side effects would likely be resentment toward those who were let in primarily because of their ethnicity. That's going to make those let in to feel unwelcome, and they might even view it as racism. In the end, forcing diversity is likely to increase the underlying racist urges that were talked about in the article.
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@dkf said in About diversity:
@abarker said in About diversity:
You can't force people to move. Nor can you tell landlords that new tenants must increase diversity (same for homeowners regarding who they sell to).
I disagree with the word “can't” there. It's most definitely possible. It might not be a good idea. It might not be civilised. It might not be legal. But can it be done? Yes. History contains plenty of examples where it was actually done, and it was often among the nastiest episodes too.
This. Same for education not working.
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@DogsB said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
I give it until 10 PM before the posts in the thread make this effectively a garage topic.
It was going fine until people got serious about it. Up until then it was thinly veiled reference to the extermination of the Irish.
You say that as though it would be a bad thing.....
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
If we want to be worried patterns at the group level caused by individuals making non-animus based decisions, we need a different world for that than racist so we don't confuse it with real racism.
Well, as a fixed expression and therefore a compound noun, "institutional racism" technically is another word.
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I've been aware of this little simulation for a while now and I must count myself amongst those that reach a completely different conclusion than the authors: if the polygons are happy - or at the very least: not unhappy - living in somewhat segregated communities, why is this a problem to be solved?
People (and polygons) aren't objects for us to arrange in neat little rows. We can strive to make it so they don't fight too often and that no one group gains a decisive advantage over another, but I believe respecting personal autonomy (within the bounds necessary to peaceably co-exist with others) is the absolute minimum of consideration we owe others.
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@dfdub said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
If we want to be worried patterns at the group level caused by individuals making non-animus based decisions, we need a different world for that than racist so we don't confuse it with real racism.
Well, as a fixed expression and therefore a compound noun, "institutional racism" technically is another word.
Like social justice!
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@GOG said in About diversity:
I've been aware of this little simulation for a while now and I must count myself amongst those that reach a completely different conclusion than the authors: if the polygons are happy - or at the very least: not unhappy - living in somewhat segregated communities, why is this a problem to be solved?
From social engineering point of view, segregated communities - even naturally segregated - create a very real problem in that it's far easier to develop the "us vs. them" mentality and information bubbles that make people not notice, and in consequence actively dispute the existence, of problems that other communities face. A non-racist example would be people who live in countries where guns are virtually prohibited being unable to imagine any benefit of widespread gun ownership, because they never met anyone who knows anyone who ever benefited from owning a gun. When you have large groups of people living next to each other in completely different realities but voting in the same elections and referendii - let's just say it's the perfect environment for breeding social unrest.
The current riots in USA are basically a direct result of that.
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@Gąska said in About diversity:
From social engineering point of view, segregated communities - even naturally segregated - create a very real problem in that it's far easier to develop the "us vs. them" mentality and information bubbles that make people not notice, and in consequence actively dispute the existence, of problems that other communities face.
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The current riots in USA are basically a direct result of that.I think I found the problem.
The current riots aren't caused by white people not noticing or actively disputing problems that black people have. (If you disagree, find me a Derek Chauvin supporter. Because I haven't heard ANY.)
The riots are occuring because there is a group that wants to to seize power and is willing to resort to violence, terrorism, and iconoclastic destruction of culture in order to get it.
There is a second group that is unwilling to commit violence themselves, but is willing to publicly make excuses for the violence in hopes that they can gain power from the violence and the destroyed culture.
These two groups are using George Floyd's murder as an excuse to do what they've wanted to do for at least a decade.
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@Gąska said in About diversity:
@dfdub said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
If we want to be worried patterns at the group level caused by individuals making non-animus based decisions, we need a different world for that than racist so we don't confuse it with real racism.
Well, as a fixed expression and therefore a compound noun, "institutional racism" technically is another word.
Like social justice!
And like many fixed phrases and terms of art, it generally doesn't mean what the words would mean if read separately.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
From social engineering point of view, segregated communities - even naturally segregated - create a very real problem in that it's far easier to develop the "us vs. them" mentality and information bubbles that make people not notice, and in consequence actively dispute the existence, of problems that other communities face.
...
The current riots in USA are basically a direct result of that.I think I found the problem.
That people go apeshit as soon as you suggest treating society problems like engineering problems, with certain inputs and desired outputs? I agree - that's a big problem that prevents other problems from getting fixed.
The current riots aren't caused by white people not noticing or actively disputing problems that black people have. (If you disagree, find me a Derek Chauvin supporter. Because I haven't heard ANY.)
If that was true, you'd have police reform AGES ago. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because certain voters - and thus certain politicians - refuse to believe that there's a major problem with police brutality.
The riots are occuring because there is a group that wants to to seize power and is willing to resort to violence, terrorism, and iconoclastic destruction of culture in order to get it.
Do you know there are about 100 million Americans who wouldn't believe even a single word of this?
There is a second group that is unwilling to commit violence themselves, but is willing to publicly make excuses for the violence in hopes that they can gain power from the violence and the destroyed culture.
And they do that because they don't see how big damage the riots causes. It's not that they're ignorant - it's that nobody in their reality has been hurt, and they refuse to believe there's some other reality where people do get hurt. It's the exact same thing as from the beginning of this post, just the other way around. Isolation goes both ways.
These two groups are using George Floyd's murder as an excuse to do what they've wanted to do for at least a decade.
Not just George Floyd but also thousands of others who have been murdered like that over the years. And I already know you're going to say this is false. Your response is itself a proof of the drastic isolation between US communities that leads to blind hatred.
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@Gąska said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
From social engineering point of view, segregated communities - even naturally segregated - create a very real problem in that it's far easier to develop the "us vs. them" mentality and information bubbles that make people not notice, and in consequence actively dispute the existence, of problems that other communities face.
...
The current riots in USA are basically a direct result of that.I think I found the problem.
That people go apeshit as soon as you suggest treating society problems like engineering problems, with certain inputs and desired outputs?
I think we disagree on the available inputs AND the desired outputs, which is why we shouldn't try to use "engineering principles" to force people to make the morally neutral choice we prefer over the morally neutral choice they prefer.
The current riots aren't caused by white people not noticing or actively disputing problems that black people have. (If you disagree, find me a Derek Chauvin supporter. Because I haven't heard ANY.)
If that was true, you'd have police reform AGES ago. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because certain voters - and thus certain politicians - refuse to believe that there's a major problem with police brutality.
:jerking off hand motion:
Tim Scott hammers 'despicable' Democrats for blocking JUSTICE Act: 'They're not serious about police reform'
Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., slammed Senate Democrats on "Hannity" Wednesday for blocking a police reform bill introduced by Scott, who called Democrats' actions "despicable."
The Democratic party wants this to be a live issue in the campaign so they can call Republicans racist over it.
The riots are occuring because there is a group that wants to to seize power and is willing to resort to violence, terrorism, and iconoclastic destruction of culture in order to get it.
Do you know there are about 100 million Americans who wouldn't believe even a single word of this?
Cartman: Guys, I'm just saying. There's a lot of unanswered questions about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Kyle: Cartman, that's retarded.
Cartman: Oh really? 33 percent of people have some question about the government's official story. Do you think one in three Americans is retarded?
Kyle: Yes. Absolutely. One in three Americans is retarded.
Stan: I'd be surprised if it was that low.There is a second group that is unwilling to commit violence themselves, but is willing to publicly make excuses for the violence in hopes that they can gain power from the violence and the destroyed culture.
And they do that because they don't see how big damage the riots causes. It's not that they're ignorant - it's that nobody in their reality has been hurt, and they refuse to believe there's some other reality where people do get hurt. It's the exact same thing as from the beginning of this post, just the other way around. Isolation goes both ways.
This one, I'll sort of give you. The only caveat is that people in group 2 think the riots are hurting "their enemies", who they don't see as people. They're actually mostly hurting people who are nominally on their side.
These two groups are using George Floyd's murder as an excuse to do what they've wanted to do for at least a decade.
Not just George Floyd but also thousands of others who have been murdered like that over the years. And I already know you're going to say this is false. Your response is itself a proof of the drastic isolation between US communities that leads to blind hatred.
"Thousands" is probably pushing it if we're constraining ourselves to a reasonable timeframe, but I'd bet that there were "hundreds" of black men wrongly shot by police in the 60 years since the Civil Rights Act. "Scores" would obviously be too low. (There were between 9 and 15 unarmed black men shot by police last year, most of whom were in the act of committing a crime. Do a little extrapolation and it's hard to get to 2000 over 60 years.)
But that's hundreds too many. You and I agree on the problem, where it exists. Yet you're still at my throat. Why is that?
It's because the people who are picking which shootings there are riots over tend to pick really shitty examples. Floyd is an exception, but Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Rayshard Brooks were in the act of attacking the people that shot them.
But if I point that out, you're going to accuse me of not seeing police brutality as a problem, just like you will if I object to the phrase "Black Lives Matter" because there's a malevolent group that uses that name.
One last note, I predicted that this topic would be garage material by 10:00 PM. The post I'm responding to was written at 8:45 PM. Just saying.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
From social engineering point of view, segregated communities - even naturally segregated - create a very real problem in that it's far easier to develop the "us vs. them" mentality and information bubbles that make people not notice, and in consequence actively dispute the existence, of problems that other communities face.
...
The current riots in USA are basically a direct result of that.I think I found the problem.
That people go apeshit as soon as you suggest treating society problems like engineering problems, with certain inputs and desired outputs?
I think we disagree on the available inputs AND the desired outputs, which is why we shouldn't try to use "engineering principles" to force people to make the morally neutral choice we prefer over the morally neutral choice they prefer.
Okay. Next question: should we try to use "engineering principles" to make less people die?
The current riots aren't caused by white people not noticing or actively disputing problems that black people have. (If you disagree, find me a Derek Chauvin supporter. Because I haven't heard ANY.)
If that was true, you'd have police reform AGES ago. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because certain voters - and thus certain politicians - refuse to believe that there's a major problem with police brutality.
:jerking off hand motion:
Tim Scott hammers 'despicable' Democrats for blocking JUSTICE Act: 'They're not serious about police reform'
Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., slammed Senate Democrats on "Hannity" Wednesday for blocking a police reform bill introduced by Scott, who called Democrats' actions "despicable."
Look! I can link to biased journalism too!
Senate Democrats: GOP policing bill isn’t ‘salvageable’ | CNN Politics
Senate Democrats are on track block a GOP-led policing reform bill later this week when Republicans are slated to hold a procedural vote, the latest sign of an impasse on Capitol Hill over the issue.
"We will not meet this moment by holding a floor vote on the JUSTICE Act, nor can we simply amend this bill, which is so threadbare and lacking in substance that it does not even provide a proper baseline for negotiations. This bill is not salvageable and we need bipartisan talks to get to a constructive starting point."
The Democratic party wants this to be a live issue in the campaign so they can call Republicans racist over it.
While Republicans want to take credit for fixing the problem without actually fixing anything.
The riots are occuring because there is a group that wants to to seize power and is willing to resort to violence, terrorism, and iconoclastic destruction of culture in order to get it.
Do you know there are about 100 million Americans who wouldn't believe even a single word of this?
Cartman: Guys, I'm just saying. There's a lot of unanswered questions about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Kyle: Cartman, that's retarded.
Cartman: Oh really? 33 percent of people have some question about the government's official story. Do you think one in three Americans is retarded?
Kyle: Yes. Absolutely. One in three Americans is retarded.
Stan: I'd be surprised if it was that low.And of course it's never your 100 million that's retarded. It's always the other 100 million. I mean, just listen to them - they spend so much time talking about problems that don't exist!
These two groups are using George Floyd's murder as an excuse to do what they've wanted to do for at least a decade.
Not just George Floyd but also thousands of others who have been murdered like that over the years. And I already know you're going to say this is false. Your response is itself a proof of the drastic isolation between US communities that leads to blind hatred.
"Thousands" is probably pushing it if we're constraining ourselves to a reasonable timeframe
Called it.
You and I agree on the problem, where it exists. Yet you're still at my throat. Why is that?
Because you pretend that saying "there have been at most hundreds people unjustly killed by the police in total over the last 60 years" isn't at all the same as disagreeing that there is a widespread problem with unjustified police killings, when the only reason you made that claim was to highlight that there is no widespread problem with unjustified police killings. You're exactly like those people who say "all men are rapists" and then say that they didn't mean all men so you shouldn't get angry because it wasn't about you.
Simply admit it - you don't believe that widespread police brutality is a widespread problem, and you especially don't believe that black people are targeted by the police more than others. Just be honest and then I'll stop calling out your dishonesty.
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@Gąska said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
From social engineering point of view, segregated communities - even naturally segregated - create a very real problem in that it's far easier to develop the "us vs. them" mentality and information bubbles that make people not notice, and in consequence actively dispute the existence, of problems that other communities face.
...
The current riots in USA are basically a direct result of that.I think I found the problem.
That people go apeshit as soon as you suggest treating society problems like engineering problems, with certain inputs and desired outputs?
I think we disagree on the available inputs AND the desired outputs, which is why we shouldn't try to use "engineering principles" to force people to make the morally neutral choice we prefer over the morally neutral choice they prefer.
Okay. Next question: should we try to use "engineering principles" to make less people die?
I think you are straying away from the point and towards some kind of moral choice. It's completely unnecessary, you should IMHO stick to the thing you've already said: This always leads to situation that is violently unstable. Problem is not that it's bad in the sense of evil; problem is that if left unchecked, it will eventually destroy the whole system. In this particular case, USA in its current form.
I, personally, would also add that this happened over and over again, everywhere (and in most cases, without any race involved). Of course, this can be dismissed by American Exceptionalism and Democrat power grab. I don't think there is any counterargument for that.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
From social engineering point of view, segregated communities - even naturally segregated - create a very real problem in that it's far easier to develop the "us vs. them" mentality and information bubbles that make people not notice, and in consequence actively dispute the existence, of problems that other communities face.
...
The current riots in USA are basically a direct result of that.I think I found the problem.
That people go apeshit as soon as you suggest treating society problems like engineering problems, with certain inputs and desired outputs?
I think we disagree on the available inputs AND the desired outputs, which is why we shouldn't try to use "engineering principles" to force people to make the morally neutral choice we prefer over the morally neutral choice they prefer.
Okay. Next question: should we try to use "engineering principles" to make less people die?
I think you are straying away from the point and towards some kind of moral choice.
I'm not talking about morality at all. You can talk about people dying without talking about morality. And segregation of communities - no matter by which criterion and how it happened - over a long time causes people to become uninformed and desensitized to the issues plaguing others but not them, which in democratic system results in preventing those issues from being fixed, which in turn leads to all kinds of tragedies, in extreme cases even deaths. It's not an opinion, it's just a truth of life, much like that All Saints Day is always the deadliest day of the year on Polish roads. And with enough radicalism and disregard of personal freedom, it could be solved.
Whether we want to have it solved that way is another matter entirely.
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@Polygeekery said in About diversity:
@DogsB said in About diversity:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in About diversity:
I give it until 10 PM before the posts in the thread make this effectively a garage topic.
It was going fine until people got serious about it. Up until then it was thinly veiled reference to the extermination of the Irish.
You say that as though it would be a bad thing.....
To fair its an easy problem to solve. They're on an island. Maybe we could just stop importing and exporting and the problem should solve itself. Almost worked 200 years ago. Might be worth another shot.
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@Gąska said in About diversity:
I'm not talking about morality at all.
Yes, that's why I wanted to warn you that you are actually going to end up in that territory (despite not wanting to).
It's a trap!I'm not talking about morality at all. You can talk about people dying without talking about morality.
Well, yes, in theory.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in About diversity:
I'm not talking about morality at all. You can talk about people dying without talking about morality.
Well, yes, in theory.
And in practice? Like, do you disagree that at no point did I base my argument on anything related to morality?
I'd really like to hear an honest answer. I want to be aware of my own biases, misconceptions and blind spots. And I'd really love to have a solid, technical discussion on diversity and its effects (like people have technical discussions about effects of various forms of taxation).
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I have three chief problems with this sim.
- 'Segregation' is one of those hate-words. You see it, you think Bad, because you've learnt in school to associate it with Bad. Scratch the surface a bit, though, and you remember that the specific thing that was Bad about Jim Crow laws was that they were laws, and forced on people. You went to the school for people like you whether you liked it or not, and then the people who were in charge of the whole thing could with surgical precision screw over the half of the populace they didn't like. Self-imposed segregation does not come with the same inherent Bad. You might be missing out on some great brain expanding, but to each their own. In particular, to quote Scott Alexander:
I think white separatists have exactly the right position about where the sort of white people who want to be white separatists should be relative to everyone else – separate. I am not sure what you think you are gaining by demanding that white separatists live in communities with a lot of black people in them, but I bet the black people in those communities aren’t thanking you. Why would they want a white separatist as a neighbor? Why should they have to have one?
- One must also appreciate the value of diversity in the first place, for this to be meaningful. The value comes from being able to put your own experiences and values and beliefs in context with the experiences and values and beliefs of people very different from you, and being able to create truly rounded ideas and opinions from this. So, then, the most important kind of diversity to actually gain this value is obviously diversity of viewpoint and opinion, because those are the ones that always have different experiences and values and beliefs. Coincidentally, it's also the one with the most bias involved, and so in a model about how we must all try to not just overcome bias but actively try to get the opposite, I would expect the links at the bottom to have something about political diversity. But no, they are your standard calls for racial diversity, diversity of sexual orientation, etc., things that can cause different experiences, but different experiences that everyone has already mostly absorbed and folded into their own beliefs, and so typically do not add jack shit in the way of different values and beliefs. As usual, the call to overcoming bias is to be tolerant of people that your enemies hate, rather than being tolerant of the people that you hate, i.e. said enemies.
- Housing is a great example of what the author is talking about, but it falls apart for anything but housing, including all the stuff they link to at the bottom for overcoming other people's bias. A key point of the simulation is that people do not move unless they are unhappy with their environment, and that's true of where you live, but it isn't true for things like jobs or speaker panels or etc because of their high throughput. Some more than others, small companies do not typically end up cycling their entire staff unless they get acquired, but still, in all things but living situation, if there is a lack of bias change will naturally happen.
- 'Segregation' is one of those hate-words. You see it, you think Bad, because you've learnt in school to associate it with Bad. Scratch the surface a bit, though, and you remember that the specific thing that was Bad about Jim Crow laws was that they were laws, and forced on people. You went to the school for people like you whether you liked it or not, and then the people who were in charge of the whole thing could with surgical precision screw over the half of the populace they didn't like. Self-imposed segregation does not come with the same inherent Bad. You might be missing out on some great brain expanding, but to each their own. In particular, to quote Scott Alexander:
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@Gąska said in About diversity:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in About diversity:
I'm not talking about morality at all. You can talk about people dying without talking about morality.
Well, yes, in theory.
And in practice? Like, do you disagree that at no point did I base my argument on anything related to morality?
I agree that you did not intend, but... it's tricky, because people are emotional and morality is a big thing when thinking emotionally.
For example, you've made this statement:
which in turn leads to all kinds of tragedies, in extreme cases even deaths
So, deaths are bad, and we should feel sad about them (because that's what the work tragedy implies). Any number of deaths... actually, the word "even" imply that even small number of deaths is something very bad and sad. That, by itself, is not directly moral in
sense, but...
What if I think (playing "Stalin's advocate") that it's not sad, it's not tragedy, it's just statistics? By moral standards of 99% of people (at least in our, "western" or "christian" culture), this is morally wrong - I am supposed to feel bad and sad about people dying (unless they deserve it, but that is kinda grey area). If I counter this by stating "whatever, some people die, that is not important", I am in danger of being accused of evil ("you insensitive prick!"). Also, I might feel bad myself, because of the lifelong conditioning. In any case, I don't want to feel bad about myself.I'd really like to hear an honest answer. I want to be aware of my own biases, misconceptions and blind spots. And I'd really love to have a solid, technical discussion on diversity and its effects (like people have technical discussions about effects of various forms of taxation).
Technical discussions about forms of taxation are very limited and have strictly defined measurement criteria (typically, how much money you manage to obtain, plus some global measurement of economy). Arguments can be expressed by mathematics (arithmetics even).
To have similar discussions about diversity, you need to propose what is the goal and how to measure it.
Note that taxation policy is not morality free unless you severely restrict the discussion, either! There is important moral aspect of justice and directly opposite evaluations of what actually is just and injust (in simplified form, "poor people are too burdened" and "taxes are just daylight robbery").
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in About diversity:
@Gąska said in About diversity:
@Kamil-Podlesak said in About diversity:
I'm not talking about morality at all. You can talk about people dying without talking about morality.
Well, yes, in theory.
And in practice? Like, do you disagree that at no point did I base my argument on anything related to morality?
I agree that you did not intend, but... it's tricky, because people are emotional and morality is a big thing when thinking emotionally.
For example, you've made this statement:
which in turn leads to all kinds of tragedies, in extreme cases even deaths
So, deaths are bad, and we should feel sad about them (because that's what the work tragedy implies). Any number of deaths... actually, the word "even" imply that even small number of deaths is something very bad and sad. That, by itself, is not directly moral in
sense, but...
What if I think (playing "Stalin's advocate") that it's not sad, it's not tragedy, it's just statistics? By moral standards of 99% of people (at least in our, "western" or "christian" culture), this is morally wrong - I am supposed to feel bad and sad about people dying (unless they deserve it, but that is kinda grey area). If I counter this by stating "whatever, some people die, that is not important", I am in danger of being accused of evil ("you insensitive prick!"). Also, I might feel bad myself, because of the lifelong conditioning. In any case, I don't want to feel bad about myself.Well, I can't say you're wrong. But what you say has a strong vibe of reductio ad absurdum (I know it's technically not it but still). When e.g. automotive engineers design cars to minimize deaths by being run over by it, it's not treated as a moral statement - it's just assumed to be a fact that less deaths is good and then everyone gets working on the engineering part of making that happen. Why can't we treat every danger to life like that? Why it's only sometimes okay to ignore philosophy and politics when trying to find ways to reduce deaths?
I'd really like to hear an honest answer. I want to be aware of my own biases, misconceptions and blind spots. And I'd really love to have a solid, technical discussion on diversity and its effects (like people have technical discussions about effects of various forms of taxation).
Technical discussions about forms of taxation are very limited and have strictly defined measurement criteria (typically, how much money you manage to obtain, plus some global measurement of economy). Arguments can be expressed by mathematics (arithmetics even).
There's also the debate over incentives the various taxation forms create and the resulting changes of in supply and demand of goods and services, as well as the economic overhead of calculating due tax (both in money and in people doing accounting instead of being productive in other jobs). This can be very technical and unemotional discussion too, if we just don't let people derail it with opinionated statements about fairness and other unmeasurable bullshit. And there's little to no arithmetics involved.
To have similar discussions about diversity, you need to propose what is the goal and how to measure it.
My proposal: let's treat diversity like we treat cars (see above).
Note that taxation policy is not morality free unless you severely restrict the discussion, either!
But I WANT the discussion to be restricted! If you don't stop the philosophers from constantly interrupting you with existential questions, you'll never get anything done.
I had a simple point to make. Someone asked why segregated neighborhoods are bad. I explained how it reduces the capability to solve important problems through democracy. Someone also said that even if it is bad, it cannot be fixed. And I pointed out that sure it can, but at a price. Why do I have to talk about Stalin now? I never wanted that.
There is important moral aspect of justice and directly opposite evaluations of what actually is just and injust (in simplified form, "poor people are too burdened" and "taxes are just daylight robbery").
And this is exactly why I hate talking about morality and want to stick to - in case of taxes - how VAT creates many more opportunities for tax evasion than simple sales tax, while its main benefit - splitting tax over everyone in production chain - isn't even all that important. Without having to answer the question which model is "fairer".
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@Gąska said in About diversity:
Well, I can't say you're wrong. But what you say has a strong vibe of reductio ad absurdum (I know it's technically not it but still). When e.g. automotive engineers design cars to minimize deaths by being run over by it, it's not treated as a moral statement - it's just assumed to be a fact that less deaths is good and then everyone gets working on the engineering part of making that happen. Why can't we treat every danger to life like that? Why it's only sometimes okay to ignore philosophy and politics when trying to find ways to reduce deaths?
That's actually very good question that deserve its own topic. Everything I've said is just my observation and I can only speculate about the causes...
Actually, even your example is not that clear-cut, by far. Did you really never seen anyone arguing that forcing safety requirements on automotive companies is just wrong? I have seen that a lot - from the extreme case ("the regulation is bad and it should be left to free market forces") to some kind of compromise ("ok, cars should not explode like in Hollywood movie, but stuff like ABS or tire pressure sensors, that's over the top maddness").
My guess is that the automotive engineering was never primarily political topic. It was always about a compromise between economical feasibility and economical incentives, with a little sparkling of state regulation. Companies did not start to really invest into safety until it become clear that it pays.
Also, it's probably important that the moral topic of automotive industry is not aligned with mainstream political divide. In other words: in USA, both "liberals" and "conservatives" are definitely on the side of "public safety is PARAMOUNT" and the only dissenting voice are libertarians (and they have more important topics; also, this one would rock the "right wing" boat).
To have similar discussions about diversity, you need to propose what is the goal and how to measure it.
My proposal: let's treat diversity like we treat cars (see above).Sadly, this is already highly political topic that is heavily aligned with current mainstream political debate.
And this is exactly why I hate talking about morality and want to stick to - in case of taxes - how VAT creates many more opportunities for tax evasion than simple sales tax, while its main benefit - splitting tax over everyone in production chain - isn't even all that important. Without having to answer the question which model is "fairer".
Yeah, I'd love that, but it's not gonna happen.
I could write more, but I have more important work to do. Maybe later.
PS: Actually, I have one constructive solution: let's wipe all humans and let the nature try again. Maybe the next intelligent species will be better?
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@pie_flavor said in About diversity:
Housing is a great example of what the author is talking about, but it falls apart for anything but housing, including all the stuff they link to at the bottom for overcoming other people's bias. A key point of the simulation is that people do not move unless they are unhappy with their environment, and that's true of where you live, but it isn't true for things like jobs or speaker panels or etc because of their high throughput. Some more than others, small companies do not typically end up cycling their entire staff unless they get acquired, but still, in all things but living situation, if there is a lack of bias change will naturally happen.
Well, most people have a strong bias against moving themselves. It's been long noted as being very very disruptive.
But the degree of change on the other things that are listed is highly variable. Some organisations have very little staff turnover, others have masses. (I suspect that the latter are more dysfunctional, but that might be my biases speaking.) There are some areas where diversity is very important, and others where it is less critical. For example, if you're trying to sell something, it helps a lot if you have people on staff who understand the different groups of customers (indeed, that's where some diversity actually acts to boost relevant competence), whereas most of the effort spent on looking after the databases that power the services that support the product is about outright technical competence and diversity doesn't bring anything to the table there per se. (It's not that a candidate for a DBA post should be rejected for being a non-WASP, but rather that one's social background should be zero-scored for relevance there and so can be neither positive or negative.)
At the larger scale, a sufficiently large organisation (probably not worthwhile when there's less than a thousand employees or so) can look at the overall profile of people applying for its posts and ask questions like “Are we advertising our posts to people fairly?” and “Do we have a problem with systematic exclusion in our employment processes?” without saying that any particular person was actually disadvantaged. Small businesses don't have the scale to be worrying about that stuff in the first place, and any statistics there would be dominated by noise so it really would be worthless to look at. (It'd be more interesting to look across many such businesses, but that's not those individual businesses' problem.)
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@Kamil-Podlesak Security in automotive is an interesting example where you can directly show how lack of diversity actively hurt people.
Silicon Valley is bad at making products that suit women. That is a missed opportunity
Alienating half your customers is hardly good for business
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@Gąska said in About diversity:
Technical discussions about forms of taxation are very limited and have strictly defined measurement criteria (typically, how much money you manage to obtain, plus some global measurement of economy). Arguments can be expressed by mathematics (arithmetics even).
There's also the debate over incentives the various taxation forms create and the resulting changes of in supply and demand of goods and services, as well as the economic overhead of calculating due tax (both in money and in people doing accounting instead of being productive in other jobs). This can be very technical and unemotional discussion too, if we just don't let people derail it with opinionated statements about fairness and other unmeasurable bullshit. And there's little to no arithmetics involved.
Yes, it can be technical and unemotional discussion, but often it's not. Especially online.
Basically, you need to assemble people who agree with some basic premises (taxes are necessary, incentives work, economy can be measured and modeled with our current knowledge) and the way the result is measured (economy should grow, but it is also important that the growth is stable, etc). These premises are actually results of very long (literally centuries) discussion about morality and political theory.
Also, it helps a lot that it has been repeatedly shown in practice, that some formerly controversial political/moral topics actually strongly correlates with economic results. Equality and freedom actually were very controversial things in the past. In 18th century, most of HRE quite a shithole where serfs had to provide labor for their lords (corvée). This was abolished by "bleeding heart liberal" emperor Joseph II for moral reasons. Yet, the result was unprecedented rise of productivity and economic prosperity (barring the destruction of few decades of war). Of course, it was already know at that time that corvée is extraordinarily ineffective - it was very common that two-hour work took one full week. The economic miracle even accelerated when the feudalism was officially abolished several decades later and all men suddenly become equal. This effect is also undeniable dues to existence of control group, which looked more and more as a destitute shithole. Only in the face of this undeniable evidence did political pundits acknowledge that this "economy" is a real thing and not just a power-grab of godless liberals.
Can you show anything like this for diversity? Do you have any good argument showing that this "diversity" thing is not just a power-grab of liberals? Good luck.
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@Kamil-Podlesak I do not understand how any of this can be construed as a "power grab". Sounds like a Garage term.
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@Rhywden said in About diversity:
@Kamil-Podlesak I do not understand how any of this can be construed as a "power grab". Sounds like a Garage term.
Read the whole topic, search for "seize power". Yes, the term is Garage, but this is inherent in this discussion and was acknowledged by several people already.
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@Kamil-Podlesak Yeah, I read that but there is a clear logical disconnect getting from point A (more diversity) to B (this is a power grab). As in: It is not explained at all how this is supposed to happen. Or what this "power grab" would actually result in which actually makes it such.
Parable of the Polygons
