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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

There's no such thing as a "homogeneous population". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory#Robb...

> From the study, they determined that because the groups were created to be approximately equal, individual differences are not necessary or responsible for intergroup conflict to occur.

> Lutfy Diab repeated the experiment with 18 boys from Beirut. The 'Blue Ghost' and 'Red Genies' groups each contained 5 Christians and 4 Muslims. Fighting soon broke out, not between the Christians and Muslims but between the Red and Blue groups.

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Continuum fallacy. Might as well claim that there's no such thing as blue or violet, since there's a gradient between them.

Also you can establish homogeneity using genetic analysis such as the fixation index. Unsurprisingly, Swedes and Finns are extremely closely related.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index#Autosomal_genet...

There are many possible metrics to measure heterogeneity, such as linguistic and religious diversity, variations in value systems, etc.

Then again if you look at the continium as something multidimensional. It is easy to make everything either a very specific hetrogenity or a big homogenic pile. The greatest fallacy is the group think, you can always create groups of people and that was the point. Given a bit of encourgement the dividing lines will shift. I have personal experience from work about this and I think some of these meaningless work things we do are there for a reason.

Understanding that we are hetreogenic is hard.

… No, it's not the continuum fallacy: I'm saying that "the fixation index", and other such metrics, are irrelevant, except as far as people are racist. The sociological theory of "homogeneous population" is false, to the extent it was ever even meaningful.

More broadly, scientific racism is bunk. (This is a generalisation: I didn't establish it in my previous comment, but it's true nonetheless.)

As another point to your argument, if there's no homogeneity then there's also no diversity, which would be the minimization of homogeneity.

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