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Diversity is our Strength. Us being whites
At the top of Marginal Revolution today: "How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation"
I'm a tech development and "innovation" nerd. There's a small, but growing, especially in recent years, online commmunity of people who read organizational histories of places like Bell Labs and the original Lockheed Skunkwords to try and figure out the best ways to do real tech development. Not academic science projects and not VC backed bullshit which is mostly business model innovation (that even more often fails).
You don't have to read the whole study. The abstract itself is either a hilarious self-own or and even more hilarious playing-dumb post.
1850 to 1940. Bruh.
This paper shows that having big time diversity - you know, mixing all those crazy Poles, Irish, French, Germans, English, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Greek, hell even a few Italians and Spanish in there - was a massive reason the USA was such a technologically innovative place!
The HBDers are going to love this one.
Side note on the hard tech angle: patent issuance used to be a decent enough and standardized enough measure for "innovation." Since the rise of legalism post WW2, however, it's so much more noisy now that it's questionable if it remains a valid "fungible currency" for studying innovation and tech development.
Is that satire? Nothing on that page makes any sense. Many surnames come from occupations, so of course there's a relationship to diversity of labour. The reason "diversity" used to correlate with innovation was that skilled migrants from many countries in the world would go to places with opportunities. The diversity was more of a result than a cause. The phrase "Diversity is our strength" is made to imply that diversity of races is good in itself, which is an entirely different topic. It also implies that there's no difference between races, which is trivially false. To begin with, culture is something shared between people, the concept "cultural diversity" contradicts itself. Also, people who advocate diversity of race do not value diversity of political opinion, thought, values or morality. Plus, by the second law of thermodynamics, diversity necessarily destroys itself. Countries are more similar than they were in the past because of globalism, the only way to slow down the trend towards homogeneity is separation (borders for instance). I'd go as far as to disagree that innovation is necessarily good (it conflicts with stability).
And what's a patent? It's something which forbids others from using your ideas.
Lets look at the Abstract in the linked paper. What does it say? "Fostering the diverse social interactions that faciliate idea sharing"
Am I being too pedantic? Do these people even realize that they're being dishonest?
By the mid-19th century, occupational surnames had long been divorced from their associated professions. John Smith wasn't a smith, Geoffrey Chaucer didn't make pants, Benjamin Franklin was pretty much everything but an independent farmer, etc... Beyond which, the point of interest is national origin of surnames. Unless your thesis is the Germans and Poles were bringing in some special occupational knowledge that the various British peoples who initially colonized the Eastern seaboard lacked, but that begs for additional detail.
Shared identity and sharing all the particulars of culture are not the same thing. Leaving aside immigrants for the moment, the US has a fair amount cultural diversity within itself - there are marked cultural differences between North Easterners, Midwesterners, Southerns, West Coasters, as well as racial, religious, state, and rural/urban values divisions. None of that contradicts the existence of the US or of American culture.
That is an argument that they are hypocrites, not that they are wrong.
You're going to need to elaborate on this metaphor.
Occupational surnames may have happened sufficiently long ago that any correlation has been drowned in noise.
It's not a metaphor. You can "race mix" but the opposite operation does not exist. When things interact, they tend towards the average of the two. If you mix cold and hot water, you get lukewarm water. If you mix eastern philosophy and western philosophy, you get something which borrows ideas from both (and the mixture is not necessarily better than either of its components)
The reason Easterns and southerns are different is because there's distance between them. Higher distances means fewer interactions. Long physical distances are similar to physical borders. Any other kind of mechanism which prevent interactions will protect differences - including age gaps and language barriers. But what that article calls for is local diversity, so mixing things. You can do this, but people won't remain diverse for very long. To make matters worse, there will be conflict until people are in alignment, and the definition of alignment is establishing something which is common to all (and therefore not diverse)
In America, some aspects are local, and some aspects are global. A global aspect (e.g. the tendency to have guns) lacks diversity, and local aspects (something which is specific to a single area) does not mix with the rest. Of course, different areas can benefit from trade with eachother, but the more they trade the less they benefit (an equilibrium will be reached).
There's a natural tendency for people to create bubbles of similar-minded people (friend groups, echo-chambers, religious gatherings, ghettos, etc), but the lobal political concensus is (increasingly - as America is exporting this value system) that all people are equal and that all things must be openly accessible to everyone (no gatekeeping, no mens-only spaces, no right-wing spaces, no privacy, no elitism, etc) so the world will rapidly tend towards homogeneity
The inverse operation is ethnic cleansing, it even matches the metaphor. It's unpopular enough that it doesn't happen practically ever, but it's not a hard physical law like entropy.
Stepping away from race, it isn't irreversible for culture either. Spend a few generations sending all the nerds to the Bay Area, the creatives to Hollywood, and the performers to Broadway, and you can create local concentrations of cultural traits that are far outside the national average. It may not be ethnogenesis, but it's certainly the creation of something.
How is ethnic cleansing the inverse of race mixing? After all, don't both, if carried to their full conclusion, result in the territory in question going from two ethnic groups to one?
As you sort of note at the end of your comment, the true inverse operation is ethnogenesis. But how much can that really happen in our modern, ever more mobile, ever more interconnected world?
It depends on your exact definitions and which axes you care about.
Race mixing (and cultural exchange more generally) involves Group A becoming more like Group B (and vice versa). Ethnic cleansing interrupts and reverses that process, keeping the original group(s) the same.
Isn't the axis in question diversity vs. homogeneity?
So it reduces diversity, moving things in the direction of homogeneity.
So it (theoretically) prevents the process of homogenization — that is, when the ethnic group being "cleansed" from the area survives the process, and doesn't just end up being assimilated by whatever population(s) they end up living with after their expulsion.
What is the operation that increases diversity? Which makes Group A become less like Group B, and vice versa? And further, gives rise to Groups C, and D, and E, and makes all these groups more distinct, culturally and genetically? What, in this age of globalization, can truly make humanity more diverse?
(Other than space colonization, that is? Contolism — the real way to increase diversity.)
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I view that a little different, you can't unmix something which has already been mixed, but you can push it elsewhere and pretend that the problem has been solved.
Your example involves separating things, and it's not impossible for us to play Maxwell's demon and sort people, but society just doesn't take kind to the creation of spaces which excludes certain groups (not even toilets are exempt) so one is not allowed to reverse this process. Even if you make your own society kind of like the Amish, people will come and ruin what you're doing because the rest of the system has laws that it must enforce (for instance, it's illegal to collect rain water in some parts of the world).
If you move nerds around the world, the total amount of nerds does not increase. You're re-ordering what already exists, you're not creating something more. So if white people have less children on average, you can reorder them all you want, the ratio of white people will tend towards zero. And in America, men and women have a poor relationship. This is not the case in Japan, but is that not a manner of time? Once American culture really gets its grip on Japan (As it's trying to), do you not think gender relations in Japan will take the same path? Is the corruption of gender relations reversible?
To really create something unique, you must isolate it and leave it alone for a while. Kind of like petri dishes. Borders used to have this kind of effect.
It's not technically irreversible, but processes which generate certain things are very, very slow. Using money is faster than earning it. Cutting down a forest is much faster than growing it. Destroying trust is much faster than regaining it. Recycling anything back to its base ingredients is tedius work. It's this asymmetry which makes so many processes unsustainable.
If you wish to grow back something which used to exist, like "Uncontacted civilizations", "Untouched wild nature", "High-trust communities", "The wild west", etc. How long do you think it would take, if such a thing was even possible? Caning is currently a form of punishment in Singapore - if we stop this practice, do you think it will ever return again? If we ban gun ownership, will that ever return again? If we rise the age of consent, will it ever drop again? If all ownership is replaced with subscription models, will we ever go back again? Do you think the sexual revolution can be reversed?
True. My point is that once it has started, it can be stopped well before the finish line. Even a few decades is within the realm of physical possibility for cultural diffusion, or a few generations for genetic.
The "challenges" are social and political: One of the older attempts to unmix a population resulted in a bit of a dustup that killed 70-85 million people, while more recent ones are usually stopped before that point.
The creation happens in the years after the re-ordering takes place. Do you think growing up surrounded by nerds would be essentially similar to growing up surrounded by performers? Heck, do you think a mundane unrelated office job would be the same?
On a smaller scale, there's the idea of "startup incubators". They concentrate like-minded people together, forge connections, and hope to strengthen and expand their culture. I think the same thing can happen with culture in general when groups have a strong enough presence in an area.
Fair point. I was focusing more on years-to-centuries timescales. If you're thinking of decades-to-eons, then it's much closer to the bare truth.
"Maintaining the old" is only one half of diversity though. The Wild West came about from a mix of societies, Singapore combines multiple influences, etc. Generating new cultures is the other half.
I'm about 50/50 on your examples.
For gun control, see this gif: states went from mostly may-issue to mostly unrestricted concealed carry over the course of a few decades.
With the current push of sexual content onto school children, I'd be surprised if the age of consent didn't go down in the next couple decades, even if it's restricted to Romeo-and-Juliet laws.
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It is necessarily a metaphor, because we're not talking about social systems rather than thermodynamic ones.
That's very clearly not true. New identities emerge all the time. There's even a special word for it: ethnogenesis.
That doesn't seem like a problem for their thesis. They still might be wrong, but the tendency towards homogenization over time within an area doesn't threaten the idea that heterogeneity breeds innovation.
I don't really see a difference in the abstract mechanics.
Am I right to assume that ethnogenesis is a result of things being isolated from one another? If you were to split America in two, and disallow the two sides from interacting, and simulate 100 years of time, the two would grow less similar over time. They'd have different slang, different viewpoints, slightly different values, etc.
I don't think heterogeneity breeds innovation, I think that differences is a finite resource which you deplete every time you force different things to interact. You will generate innovation by using differences as your fuel, but once the fuel is been depleted, the local system will be at equlibrium, and you will need to import more differences.
Let me give you a similar example, call centers exploit the elderly, burning trust in order to generate money. As trust disappears, the ratio of people who fall for the scams will decrease. At equlibrium, either all gullible people have no money left, there are so many call centers in existence that they face hard competition between one another, or it costs more to find a new victim than one can expect to earn.
You don't seem to model the world as being finite in the same way I do. Many people seem to think that innovation and other such things are "better than zero-sum", such that things improve without bounds. That's a much more pleasant way to view the world, but I have a hard time believing that it's true
No. It can, but it doesn't have to. For two examples: "African American" is for all purposes an ethnic group that developed from the interaction of black Americans with the white Americans they lived alongside. Protestant sects splinter eight times a week (and Protestantism originally emerged from Catholic Germany and developed in parallel).
If you stretch the definition of isolation to mean any sort of inter-group barrier, including metaphorical ones separating people in close proximity, then I suppose it might be true, but that would seem to weaken your view of a monotonic trend towards homogeneity. If there's a constant churn of values and identity groups over time as people invent divisions within themselves, the nature of interaction will produce endless new varieties.
That's not a stable equilibrium, it's an arms race. Short of running out of conmen or victims (both of which seem to be functionally endless), the system will continue to evolve new attacks and defenses.
I think you're making the common mistake of "harsh truths exist" => "this is harsh, therefore this is true". We have an abundance of positive-sum interactions and an overabundance of people trapped in a zero-sum mindset generating negative sum outcomes.
"African American" is not a group of people as far as I'm concerned - it's a politically correct term for black people in America (possibly from Africa). Slapping new labels on old things is not the creation of new things, it's a purely cosmetic change. Even worse, if we keep changing labels to have lower thresholds, things which are decreasing will look constant or even like they're increasing (like racism).
Old groups do split and change over time, but some traits become less extreme. We're domesticating human beings on a global scale, and have been doing this for a while. The changes are not only cultural, they're also genetic. The "endless new varieties" are all from a restricted set they're unlimited in the same sense that AI-generated content is unlimited. An AI would never create something like LotR or Made in Abyss, it only generates generic (= average = mediocre) content.
But even before AI, there was a decrease in good videogames, books, movies, etc. You don't think that abstract mathematical laws are to blame for all of these trends? I think it might be due to asymptotic convergence, tight coupling and materialistic competition.
I'm basing all of these things on my own intuition, but I don't think my theory is too crazy. In fact, people seem to have studied these exact things. These papers seems a little more optimistic about these dynamics than me, but many of the things that I've described seem fairly accurate. But there's many models, and the conclusions also depend on what assumptions we make about these systems, so it's not trivial. And I might just be worrying too much. Even if I'm right, other people will notice in ~10-20 years and look for solutions. I'm just a little early
Here's a study called "Statistical physics of social dynamics"
"What is the ultimate fate of diversity? Is it bound to persist or all differences eventually disappear in the long run?"
"According to some estimates, up to 90% of present languages might disappear by the end of the 21st century (Krauss, 1992)."
"Two mechanisms that are believed to be fundamental in the understanding of the dynamics of cultural assimilation (and diversity): social influence and homophily. The first is the tendency of individuals to become more similar when they interact. The second is the tendency of likes to attract each other, so that they interact more frequently. These two ingredients were generally expected by social scientists to generate a self-reinforcing dynamics leading to a global convergence to a single culture. It turns out instead that the model predicts in some cases the persistence of diversity." (emphasis mine)
And here's one called Clustering and asymptotic behavior in opinion formation which also mentions entropy. The abstract includes:
"Because of the finite range of interaction, convergence to a unique consensus is not expected in general. We are nevertheless able to prove the convergence to a final equilibrium state composed of possibly several local consensus"
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