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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

I first read that post several years ago and re-read it now, and I found that what bothered me back then is still bothering me today:

The article goes to great lengths, with amazing visual presentation, to demonstrate how a diverse society can be achieved.

It doesn't say a single word about why society should strive to be diverse.

Instead, the article (ironically) appears to be written from the biased standpoint that it "ought to be" so. We hear claims like "harmful world", "shapist" (as a derogatory term for the natural human desire to be surrounded by like-minded individuals), "society cracks and splits", and a rather distasteful analogy between supposed biases and dirt. None of these assertions are ever justified by the authors. They are simply assumed to be correct, and presented to the reader as moral axioms.

But of course, such claims are amenable to empirical analysis. One obvious approach is to compare rural and urban environments. Rural, isolated societies tend to be much less diverse than those found in modern "world cities". If the moral valuation implied by this article is correct, it should be possible to demonstrate that the society in a typical metropolis is, in some obvious way, "better" than that in a typical village.

It certainly isn't obvious to me that this is indeed the case. I've lived in places where a dozen languages could be heard spoken on the street, and I've lived in villages that looked like they were frozen in time. I've been part of the majority, and I've been a one-in-a-thousand outsider, catching stares from random people who passed me by. I can't say I ever felt that diversity itself was the problem, or the solution for anything.

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It has been shown many times that integration reduces bias, see studies on the contact hypothesis. Racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and other examples of bias have been shown by many studies to be dramatically reduced in an integrated context. So long as many of these groups are subject to bias, discrimination, and worse, it is important to engender empathy and understanding among the majority class (white, heterosexual, etc), and move towards equity and justice as a society -- and integrated communities are one of the best ways to achieve this.

You can say, "I'm not 'shapeist', but I do live in a community with a strong majority 'square' population", which I'll readily believe -- but there's no substitute for actually talking and living and working with the "triangles" to achieve a deep level of understanding and empathy for their worldview, experiences, and needs.

Moreover, your arguments taken to the logical conclusion have been the basis of some of history's worst atrocities, and I would advise you to do more research before seeding this particular thought pool.

> It has been shown many times that integration reduces bias

Strawman. Integration isn't the same thing as diversity, and doesn't automatically follow from it either. Different kinds of people living in the same locality doesn't mean they form an "integrated society". Almost every large city is a testament to that. The idea that city people are more empathetic and understanding than villagers because they live in a more diverse environment flies in the face of everyday experience.

> Moreover, your arguments taken to the logical conclusion have been the basis of some of history's worst atrocities

Appeal to consequences, and thus irrelevant to whether my arguments are correct or not. Not that I accept the ridiculous assertion that my arguments are in any way comparable to the ones you are linking them to.

> and I would advise you to do more research before seeding this particular thought pool.

Sorry, but I'm not swayed by such pretentious moralizing. In fact, the suppression of inquiry that you are attempting here seems much more in line with "this particular thought pool" than what I wrote.

> Strawman. Integration isn't the same thing as diversity, and doesn't automatically follow from it either. Different kinds of people living in the same locality doesn't mean they form an "integrated society". Almost every large city is a testament to that. The idea that city people are more empathetic and understanding than villagers because they live in a more diverse environment flies in the face of everyday experience.

You are calling for empiricism but mixing your arguments with anecdotes and "everyday experience". The empirical argument looks at questions like integrated communities as a form of diversity, and finds that it has socially beneficial consequences -- exactly what kind of diversity are you referring to which is distinguishable from integration? Do elaborate so that we can examine that in an empirical lens.

> Appeal to consequences, and thus irrelevant to whether my arguments are correct or not. Not that I accept the ridiculous assertion that my arguments are in any way comparable to the ones you are linking them to.

Let me draw the connection for you: do you agree or disagree that your initial line of reasoning would support the conclusion that ethnostates are morally neutral? When this reasoning is placed in a historical context, are you blind to the means by which ethnostates have historically arisen?

> You are calling for empiricism but mixing your arguments with anecdotes and "everyday experience"

Well… duh? It would have been distinctly anti-empirical to ignore those.

> exactly what kind of diversity are you referring to which is distinguishable from integration?

The kind you can find in most cities today. Where your neighbors come from many cultural backgrounds, but you don't even know their names, and they don't know yours.

Such societies are diverse statistically, but they are not integrated. In fact, it can reasonably be questioned whether they are "societies" at all.

> do you agree or disagree that your initial line of reasoning would support the conclusion that ethnostates are morally neutral?

"Ethnostates" are states dominated by a particular ethnic group. Which by definition includes states that are ethnically uniform. According to [1], many states existing today have essentially no ethnic diversity, including Japan, South Korea, Portugal, and Norway. Meanwhile, the most ethnically diverse countries include such luminaries as Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast.

In fact, if you look at the accompanying map[2], you will immediately notice a strong inverse correlation between diversity and living standard. Assuming the underlying analysis of diversity level is accurate, this map itself is a condemnation of the entire ideology surrounding diversity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:List_of_countries_ra...

I question your methodology, but let's take it at face value.

>In fact, if you look at the accompanying map[2], you will immediately notice a strong inverse correlation between diversity and living standard. Assuming the underlying analysis of diversity level is accurate, this map itself is a condemnation of the entire ideology surrounding diversity.

As a matter of fact, this correlation is much weaker than you portray it to be, and the number of outliers in this hypothesis call it deeply into question. Let's assume GDP (factoring in purchasing power parity) per capita as a proxy for standard of living. Consult this map and compare it to yours:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_countries_by_GDP_(...

You see many counter-examples to your thesis. Africa tends to have poor correlation between ethnic diversity and standard of living. Look also at East Asia: the more diverse Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are doing better economically than their homogeneous northern neighbor in the Philippines, in this region too is diversity poorly correlated with economic status. Also true of Europe -- just look around the map and you'll find counterexamples everywhere. Look at Switzerland -- it's at once one of the wealthiest and most diverse European countries according to your map.

Your example of Japan as an ethnostate is also an interesting case study. I agree that it resembles an ethnostate. However, it's also going through a demographic crisis which is in large part attributable to its status as an ethnostate: an increasingly wealthy and aging ethnically Japanese population is an impending disaster in the face of Japan's historical (and contemporary) strict policies on immigration and integration.

Speaking of demographic crisis, compare your map to this one:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/2017_wor...

I see some correlations there.

The standard metric to compare to would probably be the Human Development Index[1]. Which paints roughly, but not quite, the same picture as GDP.

But regardless of which development metric you choose, I'm sure you agree that the (inverse) correlation between development and diversity is obvious. Calculating the Spearman coefficient for the two datasets would be an interesting exercise, which I regret I don't have time for at the moment.

This leaves four possibilities:

1. High development reduces diversity (very unlikely).

2. High diversity impairs development.

3. High diversity and low development have a common underlying cause.

4. The correlation is coincidental.

Even in Africa, the correlation is apparent. The countries bordering the Mediterranean all have low diversity and high development, compared to almost all other African countries.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_by_Human_D...

>Even in Africa, the correlation is apparent. The countries bordering the Mediterranean all have low diversity and high development, compared to almost all other African countries.

Okay, let's examine this assumption, comparing your first map (diversity) with the map you reference in this comment (HDI). First, Africa:

Consider southern Africa. South Africa is the most ethnically diverse country in this region; it also has the highest HDI. The two more homogeneous countries north of it, Botswana and Zimbabwe, are not outliers in their neighborhood when it comes to the HDI score. Let's look to Western Africa: along the Ivory Coast we see a number of relatively high-diversity countries, but their diversity scores relative to each other are not well-correlated with their HDI scores. In the Arab World, Northern Africa through to the Middle East, we also see poor correlation between diversity and HDI: Algeria, Libya, and Egypt are relatively wealthy and homogeneous, but Saudi Arabia is wealthier than any of them and has higher diversity; Yemen is both one of the poorest countries and most homogeneous in the region.

In Middle Asia, compare China to Kazakhstan: both are high HDI (Kazakhstan scores higher), but China is more homogeneous and Kazakhstan is more diverse. In the Mediterranean, the correlation is somewhat stronger but still has numerous counterpoints; Bosnia and Herzegovina is the most diverse country in the region but it's HDI scores comparably to its neighbors to the south and east. And, again, moving slightly north, Switzerland is the highest scoring country on the HDI in Europe and is also among the most diverse.

Your methodology is very weak and your conclusions make no sense.

Follow-up after an afternoon of reading: I dug into the source of the data you presented here in references [1] and [2], which is mainly from James Fearon "Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country" (2003). In this he actually explicitly cautions against making the kind of analysis and correlation that you posit here:

> First, it cannot be assumed, without argument, that ethnic distinctions are wholly exogenous to other political, economic, and social variables of interest. For example, poor economic performance could exacerbate distributional struggles, causing people to see and act along lines of ethnic division that were formerly considered unimportant. By contrast, robust economic growth might lead to the downplaying of ethnic divisions and a greater emphasis on national identity. If Botswana seems more ethnically homogeneous than Somalia does at this point, it may be that this is in part a result rather than a cause of economic growth.

The paper also goes into great detail on the problems inherent in trying to categorize ethnic groups; these two factors combined are why I object to your methodology here and I would recommend that you read the paper for yourself. In other words, any conclusions drawn or inferences made based on this data without controlling for innumerable complicating factors is likely to be a case of garbage in, garbage out.

Of course, ethnic diversity is just one of many forms of diversity, which further removes this data from your argument.

The passage you quoted is the standard "cover your ass" disclaimer that you can find in almost any social science publication today, where the authors basically state that their results become invalid the moment they are used to draw potentially controversial conclusions.

I've long learned to just ignore such statements. Either the data can be analyzed, or it's worthless. But which of the two is the case doesn't depend on the conclusion being drawn. In the Soviet Union, it was common for scientific articles to emphasize how the authors used "Marxist-Leninist science" to achieve their breakthroughs. I view those disclaimers as a modern equivalent to this phenomenon, unsurprising considering that scientific freedom during the past 20 years has been lower than at almost any point since the 18th century or so.

The passage I quoted is one paragraph out of seven pages spent addressing the challenges in defining and analyzing ethnic groups and drawing conclusions from that data, not to mention numerous caveats and counter-examples provided throughout the text intermixed with his methodology and data analyses, or the extra text re-enforcing these problems in the conclusion -- not some brief cover-your-ass passage but rather one quote from a lengthy and detailed academic analysis of the problems inherent in this data. It would be obvious had you read the paper -- but you selectively pick and choose whatever information and "data" that supports your racist conclusions and don't examine it any further in case it would turn out not to, a trend seen in every source you have cited in this discussion.

Affluence and opportunity are currently not evenly distributed amongst the human population (or, if you like, the American population). Certain groups, for historical reasons, have way ‘better’ lives than others. I don’t think this is at all arguable.

I would like to live in a world where every child has an equal opportunity to make their own way in life.

It doesn’t seem likely that this will (or can) happen without diversity increasing - in geographic as well as socioeconomic terms.

There's no reason every child has to have equal opportunity. A child to a successful couple must have a better hand at life, otherwise why even be trying. Every parent with half a brain wants their child to have the best opportunity. Every group with half a brain joins forces to give their group's children the best opportunity.

Also, modern world-city diversity mostly perpetuates the native group vs the uber driver groups, with some exceptions that are to the detriment of the native group.

The most revered/successful societies on earth are the complete opposite of diverse.

> The most revered/successful societies on earth are the complete opposite of diverse.

And "primitive" societies, which through evolution shaped how our social capacities operate, also have essentially zero diversity in the modern sense. They are almost by definition culturally uniform, and their members are often closely interrelated.

Hmm sounds like you think a two step process is ideal: evolve independent societies towards uniform, mix the societies and have them compete, reward successful traits with survival. Then rinse/repeat.

Though I think the point of evolution is to avoid uniformity. So perhaps a uniform culture is evolutionarily unfit.

So far in pure evolutionary terms Sub-Saharan Africa is way ahead of everyone else (also made up of quite uniform groups). What traits thereof do you reckon the rest of the world could pinch?

I've only ever visited Sub-Saharan Africa through the fiction of various countries, though admittedly that's self-selected by whatever imports are financially successful here. The only common themes I can identify are diversity, vivacity, gregariousness and corruption, and those are hardly what I would deem evolutionary traits. But there's always so much diversity - so many disparate languages and ethnic groups - it seems like urban Africa is quite the melting pot.

From this brief list of recently evolved traits [1] (which I can't narrow by geographic region), I honestly can't say that any characterize the zeitgeist of a modern improved homo sapiens.

What modern biological traits do you think were evolved in Africa?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

> There's no reason every child has to have equal opportunity.

No evolutionary reason, that is.

On the other hand, if your descendents are born into such deep disadvantage without hope of redemption, that's another evolutionary black hole. The best hope would be to band together with others of similar circumstances and burn it all down.

It's in everyone's best interest for this not to happen. Which leads me to wonder if there is some optimal equilibrium between advantage and disadvantage.

And interesting corollary is that society has basically trumped evolution. There are so many competing contradictory forces that only the most basic changes have a hope of surviving.

Edit:

In hindsight I somewhat disagree with this. Nearly all post-scarcity fictions depict societies in which all are given equal opportunity to realize their personal ambitions. Status and additional allocation of societal-level resources then depends on the outcomes. So for some definition of opportunity I think it is theoretically possible to afford everyone equal opportunity.

>No evolutionary reason, that is.

So, no reason that would stick a couple of generations down.

>The best hope would be to band together with others of similar circumstances and burn it all down.

They are trying, last seen on 7 Oct 2023. I'd say long odds.

>It's in everyone's best interest for this not to happen. Which leads me to wonder if there is some optimal equilibrium between advantage and disadvantage.

It's indeed undesirable that the evolutionary black hole is in your own group, therefore various safety nets. That's still just the lower bound, removing the higher bound is Harrison-Bergeron-style societal suicide.

>And interesting corollary is that society has basically trumped evolution. There are so many competing contradictory forces that only the most basic changes have a hope of surviving.

It's just the first time that we know of when the fittest don't want to breed. There's plenty of arguments out there to the effect that it sucks.

>In hindsight I somewhat disagree with this. Nearly all post-scarcity fictions depict societies in which all are given equal opportunity to realize their personal ambitions. Status and additional allocation of societal-level resources then depends on the outcomes. So for some definition of opportunity I think it is theoretically possible to afford everyone equal opportunity.

If the parents' success have no bearing on the children the best strategy is to push out as many kids as you can. Something of commons, can't put my finger on it.

> If the parents' success have no bearing on the children the best strategy is to push out as many kids as you can.

Hmm that's an interesting thought. You think that a post-scarcity society is impossible because the evolutionary urge to further one's genes will always outstrip the capacity to produce resources. That there can never be any equilibrium? Very Malthusian. Hopefully we can apply lessons from this article - that subtle social nudges can have outsized and hopefully beneficial effects.

Where is that post-scarcity society you're talking about?

The whole demographic catastrophe unfolding in the West is to do with how hard and expensive it is to raise even 1-2 kids to have good chances at life, and people largely choosing scarce commodities over having kids.

There are no lessons in this article other than that made-up preferences lead to silly outcomes.

Artificially scarce commodities, as any basic inquiry into social economics would illustrate. Naturally no one wants to have kids when they can't afford a home and need two jobs just to feed themselves and pay off their student debt.

Artificially my 50-hectar beachfront mansion ass.

Electronics and factory farm tomatoes are cheap, and near nobody lacks food or a phone.

Good teachers, black caviar, decent real estate away from poor people (lol) are inherently scarce. As for social economics enquiries, they always seem to require people to give up fruits of their labour for no compensation. As much as I like free stuff, I very much find this undersirable.

>Electronics and factory farm tomatoes are cheap, and near nobody lacks food or a phone.

The price of tomatoes has inflated at a rate of about 3.55% per year, up a total of 1,049% since 1953. In that same period, minimum wage rose from $0.75 to $7.25. In 1953, an hour's work would have bought you one tomato with a bit left over, today an hour's work leaves you short. Tomatoes have not become cheaper.

Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Tomatoes/price-inflation

The 50s were an anomaly (as was the Great Depression).

No they weren't? Look at the graph in my source. In any case, sure, start in 1965; tomatoes cost $0.85 and minimum wage was $1.25, so your purchasing power was even better by comparison to today.

Try 20s.

Or don't bother with canned tomatoes from your link - things like flour, butter, milk and meat all got cheaper relative to the minimum wage.

Fresh tomatoes went from 25-30 cents per pound to 1-2 dollars per pound, i.e. got cheaper too.

> Nearly all post-scarcity fictions depict societies in which all are given equal opportunity to realize their personal ambitions.

Which, as GP pointed out, is a social dead end.

If your opportunities don't depend on your parents' achievements, then your children's opportunities don't depend on your achievements. Even in a positive sense.

Which means that probably the most important motivation to achieve anything is gone.

Such a society would crumble to dust really quickly.

And, of course, equal "opportunity" just means discrimination based on factors such as innate ability, rather than inherited wealth. Which means that talent takes the place that wealth has in our society, but the basic mechanisms of power (and the resulting inequalities) remain the same.

Why is everyone so nihilistic, but only in the short-term? To think success requires winning a zero-sum game, but forgetting that the winner is still a puny human in a meaningless universe.

Of course there are still achievements to strive towards. There are personal goals. There is the appreciation of your peers. There is social capital to convince others.

I think the countless grassroots movements stand as tribute to this. And not just open-source software, but countless online forums and communities dedicated to making the world a better place.

If your children have the best (as discussed above) opportunities thrust upon them, why must you spit in the face of good fortune, claiming your children would be better off if other children had fewer opportunities?

In such a theoretical and hopefully future society, I think power itself becomes much less consequential. What's the point of power if you have everything you want.

Or do you think if everyone's happy, they'll gladly follow some mad power-hungry lunatic into genocide just for shits and giggles?

> What's the point of power if you have everything you want.

To those that seek power, it is an end, not a means.

And there is no limit to what people want. Indeed, it expands faster than real possibilities do. By the standards of a thousand years ago, even today's "poor" people live like kings. But that doesn't mean anything.

A "post-scarcity" society would resemble the society of today far more closely than most people realize.

> To those that seek power, it is an end, not a means.

Perhaps that's just a psychological condition inculcated by modern society.

> today's "poor" people live like kings.

The actual standard of living doesn't matter as relatively poor people continue to make poor short-term economic decisions even after escaping poverty. That's why it's often called a disease.

This is an extremely reductionist take, to infer that all human progress is motivated by a better life for your children. Certainly some people are motivated by that, but human motivations are way, way more complex than this ridiculously simplified (and aggressively conservative) worldview suggests.

The assumption that society would "quickly crumble to dust" if children's opportunities were entirely independent of their parents' efforts and successes is quite possibly the most absurd take I have heard on this website in the 10 years I have been here.

> The assumption that society would "quickly crumble to dust" if we gave more children more opportunities

Another strawman. I wrote that society would crumble if children's opportunities were entirely independent of their parents' efforts and successes, in line with the comment I replied to. That's distinct from what you are claiming.

My reply remains the same with your clarification added, I have edited my comment accordingly. This is absurd.

For 1 Einstein that doesn't care to continue his bloodline the society requires millions who do. You can sure try and fight human instincts, many have tried and failed.

There's no reason every child has to have equal opportunity.

Wow, that’s bleak.

Perhaps it’s true if you’re operating in an amoral framework.

The society I was raised in has aphorisms such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “love thy neighbor” as pretty basic tenets (not that they’re often completely lived up to). Pretty much every human society has similar basic rules. I like to think they’re meaningful.

They are meaningful within a group where you can expect reciprocity. There is no expectation of that in a diverse society.

Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.

> There is no expectation of [reciprocity] in a diverse society.

[citation needed]

> Evolution doesn't know morality, unwarrantedly nice guys finish last.

Incorrect. Citation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperation_(evolution)

This is about the few cases where it's not unwarranted, i.e. kin selection and related matters.

It's not, a cursory review of the literature would tell you otherwise.

If you want narratives: the introduction of agriculture to human society is a cooperative effort which generalizes labor such that some can provide for the food supply and others can pursue other forms of labor, e.g. intellectual labor. The strictly competitive approach would not favor the establishment of agriculture. Human progress is measured in cooperation; in fact our cooperative nature it is one of the distinguishing traits of humanity and is largely responsible for the establishment of complex society, which was the greatest evolutionary achievement of humanity over the rest of the animal world.

Would the device you wrote your comment on have been possible without a nigh-incomprehensible level of human cooperation?

If you wish to build a society without cooperation, you are welcome to start your potato farm on a free plot of land out west. The potatoes you grow, by the way, were a product engineered by millennia of cooperative bioengineering on the part of indigenous farmers, but feel free to disregard that in your daydreaming.

Such human cooperation always had tight rules of tit for tat.

You couldn't just rock up to an ancient village and expect to be fed for you intellectual labour. That's the whole point - outsiders are not part of the village until proven otherwise.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_fitness_in_humans

Quoting your own source:

> However, independently of the emergence of inclusive fitness theory, from 1960s onwards many anthropologists themselves had reexamined the balance of findings in their own ethnographic data and had begun to reject the notion that human kinship is 'caused by' blood ties (see Kinship). Anthropologists have gathered very extensive ethnographic data on human social patterns and behaviour over a century or more, from a wide spectrum of different cultural groups. The data demonstrates that many cultures do not consider 'blood ties' (in the genealogical sense) to underlie their close social relationships and kinship bonds. Instead social bonds are often considered to be based on location-based shared circumstances including living together (co-residence), sleeping close together, working together, sharing food (commensality) and other forms of shared life together. Comparative anthropologists have shown[6] that these aspects of shared circumstances are a significant component of what influences kinship in most human cultures, notwithstanding whether or not 'blood ties' are necessarily present (see Nurture kinship, below).

I like how easy you and p-e-w are making it to debunk your argument by citing a bunch of sources that don't support you. I think you're just racist conservatives making up facts from whole cloth to support some narrative of deintegration.

I think you're just racist conservatives making up facts from whole cloth to support some narrative of deintegration.

I’ve been trying to discuss with them on the merits of their argument, but having thought on this overnight I agree with you.

All their big argumentation and lofty words are, at their base, seemingly trying to defend a basic position that it’s okay - perhaps even desirable - to base desire to associate with someone solely on their ‘shape’ (obviously, skin color).

Trying to fight innate behaviours doesn't get you far, and this is certainly an innate behaviour. What becomes in-group and out-group depends on nurture, the concept of in-group itself is older than trees.

Ok, unrelated dissimilar people can sometimes become in-group to each other. The fact is they don't more often than they do. People from different cultures rarely find each other suited enough for friendship, naturally stay apart and normally only form this sort of bonds under external circumstances.

Hell, even French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgians consider each other "other".

I don't really care that you call me racist (that term has long ago ceased to mean anything other than "I don't like what you say"), and your use of conservative as a slur will be familiar to anyone following political discussions on Reddit or Mastodon. But everything I wrote can be summarized thus: I'm unconvinced by the dogmatic assumption that diversity itself is a positive thing.

It's rather disappointing that on HN, where members regularly congratulate themselves on being able to examine viewpoints on their merits alone, you have chosen to drag this conversation into the mud with personal attacks. I will not engage in such behavior myself, and this pretty much concludes the matter for me.

> The most revered/successful societies on earth are the complete opposite of diverse.

[citation needed]

Which societies? Revered by whom? Successful by what metric?

> It doesn’t seem likely that this will (or can) happen without diversity increasing

That sounds like a complete non sequitur to me. Can you explain how Triangles will become richer by living near Squares? Or, to turn it around, how Squares will become poorer by living among Triangles?

More importantly, how does this claim relate to the example I gave? There are societies that are much more diverse than others (urban vs. rural). If diversity itself is a positive, cities should be, in some obvious sense, better societies than villages. Are they?

Wait, I thought the triangles were the wealthy ones? /s

(Seriously though, was it implied that there was any material difference between the shapes? I thought they just looked different.)

Affluence would not equalize _because_ they’re living near each other. Living near each other, though, seems to me to be something that would have to evolve alongside a more equal society.

If we go by your assumption that the squares are richer or happier, it seems obvious to me that if they are biased to only want shapes like them to live near them it’s likely they also don’t want them to associate with them at work. Associating together is surely necessary if the triangles are to better their lot in life?

I suppose you might argue that if squares and triangles are equal in talents, they could eventually form separate but equal societies, even if they did not want to associate. If they’re starting off from different baselines that seems unlikely to me though.

It also seems to me to carry an assumption that not wanting to associate is at best a morally neutral position, which I don’t believe - but I think you may?

To your more specific example: there are so many differences between urban and rural societies that I don’t believe that looking as diversity as the attribute that explains their current states is particularly illuminating, especially if you’re trying to decide which one is ‘better’.

I do believe, though, that historical bias has a hand in explaining why even diverse societies like cities are still so stratified on racial lines (so, _not_ diverse).

> Living near each other, though, seems to me to be something that would have to evolve alongside a more equal society.

That sounds like you agree that diversity isn't the cause of anything. In other words, actively seeking out diversity itself (which is what the authors of the article are arguing for) is worthless.

> It also seems to me to carry an assumption that not wanting to associate is at best a morally neutral position, which I don’t believe - but I think you may?

I do indeed believe that. Can you provide an argument for why it is not morally neutral?

I think I agree with your first point about actively seeking diversity being worthless in the abstract.

In a world of biased people, though, it can be a way to act against unfair bias. Biased people tend to lose their bias when they become friends with people from the groups they are biased against.

Actively _avoiding_ diversity, though, which it seems you find to be morally neutral, I find to be morally negative.

The shape (or in the real world, e.g. race) of an individual is a superficial attribute. It is extremely unfair to judge someone by it.

Diverse living conditions help equalize access to opportunity. The suburban schools being richer and having better teachers doesn't matter as much if those benefits aren't going almost exclusively to certain demographics, for instance.

The same applies to access to voting booths[1][2], access to healthy grocery stores[3], and so much more.

[1]: https://civilrights.org/democracy-diverted/

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924527679/why-do-nonwhite-geo...

[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3482049/

These things are highly specific to certain places, namely the US.

Waiting in line to vote is unthinkable in much of Europe. And private schools with "better teachers" are a fringe phenomenon elsewhere. "Healthy" grocery stores are usually much more expensive, and people can't afford to buy from them just because they live nearby.

Of course, if you are ready to suffix the claim "diversity is good" with "...in the United States of America", that's fine. But my impression has been that people are trying to establish that diversity is good in principle. And I simply fail to see what theoretical argument supports that belief.

I think the situation in America is that in denser areas we do in fact have a diverse population. But we don’t have as diverse social and professional circles. Other parts of the world might not have any present diversity, so asking for more doesn’t really mean the same thing.

This is not unique to the United States. In my home country (the Netherlands), we have an issue with refugees being placed into dedicated camps, encouraging an approach of non-integration. Integrated refugees have better metrics of success, however, and the segregated approach exacerbates numerous problems with the Dutch approach to refugees.

>> I would like to live in a world where every child has an equal opportunity to make their own way in life.

Your wording is very specific, so I'm quoting it here. I see some of the replies missed the subtlety though, so I'd like to emphasise that.

You are specifically pointing out the opportunity to "make their own way". You are not implying that every child has the same opportunities.

Every child is born different. To different parents. In different communities. In different countries. Those differences are material, and will shape both opportunities and abilities.

Genetics means I'll never be a pro athlete. I play sports but no one has (or ever will) give me spotting 'opportunities'. My sporty friend can't draw, and no one us offering her the opportunity of a gallery show.

This is probably a good thing as I have no desire to he an athlete and she has no desire to be an artist.

That does not negate the opportunity we both have to live in a country, and time, when we can both pursue the life we (realistically) want. 100 years ago, her, not so much.

Life is not fair. I was blessed with a good education, a brain to get value from it, and some luck to turn it into a living. In turn we give opportunities to others.

Of course all children everywhere do not have the right to choose their own path. Indeed that's a -very- recent development, and is still not universal. External factors still collide all too often.

No child wants to be born into poverty, or famine, or war. Or be told their sexuality is offensive. Or be economically excluded because they're not white enough, or too white.

Life is not fair. It never will be. And I can't fix most of that. I'm ahead of fair, only because of accidents in genetics, heritage and timing. All I can strive to do is create opportunities for others, and try and play fair, overcoming some of the prejudices that got me here.

I am encouraged by the progress of the last 100 years. I hope that progress continues for the next 100.

> That does not negate the opportunity we both have to live in a country, and time, when we can both pursue the life we (realistically) want.

This is a very narrow and simplistic view of opportunity, both in the present and historical contexts.

I assume that you (a man) and your friend, a sporty woman, live in a country and time (the US?) where she enjoys some of the wins of early feminist movements in the US, namely the right to vote, to have a bank account without her husband's permission, etc etc. Life is in perfect harmony and institutional bias has been solved, hooray!

It's possibly true that women in the US have it better now than they have at any other time in history. However, the opportunities of women are still not equal to that of men. Perhaps your friend has opportunities to pursue passions in women's sports, but what if she wanted to enter the corporate world and work her way up to management, C-level, etc? She will find it more difficult to pursue this opportunity than you would. Even in women's sports she will have a different (and subjectively worse) experience than a man would have in his sporting career: to this day women in sports earn less than men and are often treated not as athletes but as sexual objects that compete for the attention of male viewers -- for example, in 2021 the European Handball Federation imposed a fine on the Norwegian women's team because they wore shorts instead of bikinis during their match, like the men's uniform.

> Of course all children everywhere do not have the right to choose their own path. Indeed that's a -very- recent development, and is still not universal. External factors still collide all too often.

Children not having the right to choose their own path is not a recent development, it is a fact which has long been historically true and in the context of this history draws a throughline to reduced opportunities to this day. To give one oft-cited example, consider generational wealth disparities between white and black Americans. White families have had generations to accumulate relative wealth, comfort, and security, dating back to the founding of the United States, wealth in many cases built from slave labor, in other cases from discriminatory laws such as the Homestead Act and redlining. This wealth gives them access to opportunities, such as economic access to higher education, but also access to better (more expensive) neighborhoods with better schools and so on. Black families in the US have been historically unable to build generational wealth due specifically to this history of racism, and today a black child has significantly reduced opportunities for these reasons among others (institutional racism in other forms is still a big deal in the US). A black family has never been able to choose the same paths as a white family in the United States, now and throughout the history of the country.

> I am encouraged by the progress of the last 100 years. I hope that progress continues for the next 100.

We don't really live in a progressive moment, in the US but also generally. Women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and others, are regressing right now.

I think we are in agreement.

You elaborated on my point about women well. Certainly there are still issues to be solved - I focused on the progress made, but your point on equality stands. However I hold up feminism (small f) as an example of how far we've come in a short time.

This progress gives me hope that we can progress across other spaces as well. LGB rights have become mainstream. TQ have a ways to go. As we add more marginalised communities there will be more fights to win.

Re-reading my example on children- my original post was unclear - I was trying to say that children choosing their own path at all is a very recent change. It's not so long ago that sons did what their fathers did (and daughters were married off.)

I concur that in this moment in history there is a revival of nationalism, barely-disguised racism, and so on. It evokes a time from 1930-1945. Regressions though are inevitable, but don't let that detract us from continuing to push forward.

I mainly agree with what you’re saying - though I do think we should strive, at a societal level, to better raise opportunity for the less fortunately born. And despite much nihilism, we’ve actually been doing that for a long time now (universal education, public access to roads, electricity etc., less gender discrimination - the list is almost endless). We just have further to go.

I do want to pick this out. I’m of the belief that a lot of political arguments are because people simply don’t understand each other. I think this highlights something.

I don’t (and I don’t think this is unusual) mean by ‘equal opportunity’ that everyone should be just e.g. allowed to be a pro athlete or artist simply because they decide to do so. I mean that they should have the same opportunities to do it if their innate talents mean that they could do it.

I don’t think that anyone means, by ‘equal opportunity’, that we should e.g. abolish qualification requirements (or entry requirements) for med schools - just that kids should all be able to become a doctor if they have the talent and do the work. Now, many people have the talent but don’t even have the opportunity to do the work.

Again, we’ve come a long way on this over the past few hundred years. To use the med school example, there are obviously thousands of good doctors nowadays that would never have even been allowed to try to be a doctor in centuries past. On the other side, I pretty much agree that differences in the circumstances of someone’s birth, family etc. probably mean we’ll never achieve equal opportunity fully. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still strive for it though.

> I don’t (and I don’t think this is unusual) mean by ‘equal opportunity’ that everyone should be just e.g. allowed to be a pro athlete or artist simply because they decide to do so. I mean that they should have the same opportunities to do it if their innate talents mean that they could do it.

If so, then the term "equal opportunity" is a lie. One could also claim that our world already provides equal opportunity, as long as your parents are rich enough, and it would be just as accurate.

You're using a different definition of what ‘equal opportunity’ means than the vast majority of people then. If you don’t change what you think it means (or, if you want to be intransigent, at least what you think others mean by it) you’re just going to misunderstand people and probably cause needless conflict.

If you hear someone say ‘every American child should have the opportunity to become a doctor,’ do you really believe they’re likely to mean regardless of capability or study?

To me the answer is obvious if you are someone who stands in the middle.

Maybe you are queer. Maybe you are mixed ethnicities. Migrant. Expat. 3rd-culture kid.

If you live in a shapist world, you need to either be lucky enough that there is a shape for you, or that you are able to shape-shift in ways that don't hurt you.

If I were reading into things, Nicky, the author, has a small personal game about comming out as gay - and there is pressure from the mom to conform and pressure from boyfriend to come out. And the alternative reality where everybody is accepting would be nicer, right?

So I see this as plea for acceptance. And I understand that plea, as I have many ways I don't entirely fit.

But I do understand the pull of insular culture and small villages, where diversity is less of a virtue.

This is just a systems-level analysis. Replace "shapist" with "racist", "segregation", or "apartheid" and perhaps your point no longer holds. There are many types of diversity and in the US only eight are protected.

> There are many types of diversity and in the US only eight are protected.

Indeed. When people call for more diverse corporate boards, they don't mean "we need more plumbers in there". They mean "we need more of the same evil, soulless, corrupt nihilists, just with different physical traits".

Which essentially unmasks the whole concept as a farce.

> I can't say I ever felt that diversity itself was the problem, or the solution for anything.

Tolerance (within decent limits) is the goal I guess. I like tolerance societies/people. Monocultures cause intolerance IME. Diversity brings tolerance. Again IME.

> It doesn't say a single word about why society should strive to be diverse.

Fair enough, but what in your view does a non-diverse culture bring?

I think it's fine to assume that "I wonder how we can get this group of people to interact more with this other group people" is the sort of problem that most reasonably thoughtful people have thought about at some point in their lives.

Regardless of whether you think diversity is desirable all the time in all circumstances, I think there are definitely times where certain kinds of diversity are lacking, and it's clearly a bad thing.

Because humans are diverse. Diversity is not something that is a standard state, it is a construction based on repressing strays and cutting every head that sticks out.

Diversity also isn't a stable situation. In the XIVth, everybody was Catholic, then suddenly Protestantism arrived and war of religion tore through society...

>Instead, the article (ironically) appears to be written from the biased standpoint that it "ought to be" so

This attitude is pervasive in the US due to the history of violence, enslavement and segregation against other races. The Chinese, African American and Japanese have all been victims of such crimes in the US.

Internationally the biggest culprit that comes to mind is the systematic slaughter and extermination of the Jewish people aka the holocaust.

Thus what you see in modern society is an over correction. In attempt to get away from one extreme we've headed towards our objective and over shot it like a control system overshooting equilibrium. Assuming "diversity" as a default without scientific basis isn't even the extreme I'm talking about here, we're shooting way past that.

But you see what your post implies right? Yes it's scientifically valid to ask whether diversity is good or bad. Yes it's very possible to find out via science that diversity is bad. But the consequences of such knowledge, means a valid utilization of segregation enforced on the basis of science.

Right? Imagine kicking all black people out of a white neighborhood based off of valid and real science about how diversity is bad. Questioning diversity is scientifically valid and a negative conclusion against diversity is a realistic possible truth we may not want to face. Anyway, I digress... I mentioned we overshot the whole diversity question right?

We can all probably agree that it's not good to segregate based off of race. But should we segregate people who identify as a wolves or penguins? https://www.lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Therian_system

Where is the line drawn? Allowing a transgender female to compete in female sports? Or allowing someone who identifies as a turtle to fly a passenger airplane? When does "diversity" cross the line into scientific absurdity? When should it be classified as insane? That's the big question here and modern society is at a point where all of this is blurry and not obvious yet.

Literally I posted a link to a website that lists "therian" as a formal scientific concept. We've definitely overshot here.

Try to read about the "veil of ignorance".

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