Like the 'only a small amount of desire to live near similar people leads to self-segregation' thing.
You know what else leads to segregation? Actual laws that enforce it at the point of a gun with legal and extra-legal terrorism.
If only there was some way to tell which of these occurred in real history.
> You know what else leads to segregation? Actual laws that enforce it at the point of a gun with legal and extra-legal terrorism.
"Tell me you don't understand social science, without telling me you don't understand social science." The point of these models is not usually to argue for the status quo. Often they're made as a simple sanity check. For instance, if even small incentives towards aggregation can lead to self-segregation, this changes the policies we would choose to try and create a different outcome.
Which apparently was considered a 'mild' preference by the person who made the model, in the middle of the civil rights era.
It basically renders any immigration inpossible for example, is that really a mild preference?
People will move for one reason only, when they are in a 1/3 minority or smaller, and when they move they will only move to a place where they are not in such a minority, which alters the balance for the other people living there causing the chain reaction.
It's a neat mathmatical toy, but when you spell out what it's doing it's tautological and obvious, which is cool for maths, less so for social policy.
The thing about self-segregation behaviour you mention is a basic fact of life, you can see it everywhere, all the time, chances are you've done it to yourself if you've ever been embedded in a different culture for any amount of time. It's interesting and potentially useful to build a scientific model out of it for analysis or other purposes. There's no problem at all with it until some politician thinks it allows them to be bigoted and oppressive.
If the actual 'science' implied in any way that people should be oppressed based on the models, it was obviously bad science and would not have stood the test of time in any case.
The validity of a mathematical model is dependent solely upon it's internal (and,depending on the extent of the research,external) consistency.Whether it possess any form of 'accuracy to the real world' only comes into play when people who don't understand this attempt to use it to justify their preconceptions.
Individual agents have a mild preference for publishing only models I agree with. They will never publish anything that I 2/3 disagree with (I rank all published papers in order of preference and the bottom 1/3 fail this test) and will immediately retract anything they have published that I disagree with to that extent and replace it with something I do agree with a random amount that places it in the top 66%. We start with them having published things that I randomly agree or disagree with.
No other factor than my agreement will have any impact on their decision to publish or retract.
Surprisingly, with only this mild preference people will automatically self censor and not publish any models I disagree with.
In reality, it's a series of laws that stops them, but we've just proved it's natural so really do those laws even matter?
The point I think the parent is trying to make is that the problem is not scientists creating models, the problem is people not understanding the models and using it as an excuse to be vicious; or politicians using an untrue view of models to further their own agendas.