Comment by throwow3439 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwow3439 | Hacker News Reader

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> For the same reason why genetic bottlenecks are a bad thing.

What is that "genetic bottleneck" ? it's a pretty racist expression if you ask me , it sounds like it leads to "degeneration" or something like that, it really sounds like nazi rhetoric but reversed, instead of the "purity of the race" that must be preserved, it is now mandatory to diversify "white people's genes" to avoid genetic defects ?

You take a Slovenian and an Irish, they are both "white" , does that constitute a "genetic bottleneck" because of a superficial trait ( color of the skin ) ? I mean only racialists speak about genetics when it comes to race. Just because now a specific racial narrative is pushed by the left doesn't make racialism less obnoxious. And white women despite being women are still white , does it also constitute a "genetic bottleneck" too ? people pushing for all that should take a step back and think about what they say, for a second. "Diversity" AKA affirmative action AKA "positive discrimination" isn't inherently good or bad, from a productivity or a financial perspective for businesses that engage into all these diversity policies. If they see value in it, good for them, now let's see if they perform better on the long run just because they replaced a good white candidate with an average non white one.

I'm not american, but I'm puzzled by all this which mostly looks like feelgood PR, seen from abroad, especially at a time US finds more and more difficult to hide its racial tensions to the rest of the world.

The point wasn't to take genetics literally.

The point was that - much like how a homogeneous genetic population will tend to amplify its defects compared to a heterogeneous one - so will a homogeneous ideological population. The diversity is what brings in new ideas and viewpoints.

The very idea of the American "melting pot" is rooted in this philosophy; immigrants both adapt to existing customs and introduce new ones, thus making the America as a whole (lots of us Americans seem to forget this, including at least one of our presidential candidates, but such is life). This can be and has been applied on smaller scales to various organizations with much success.

This isn't only about race or only about gender or only about sexual orientation or only about political affiliation or only about socioeconomic class; it's about all of these things influencing an individual's background in a way that is different from the group as a whole.

> much like how a homogeneous genetic population will tend to amplify its defects compared to a heterogeneous one - so will a homogeneous ideological population. The diversity is what brings in new ideas and viewpoints.

Ahhhh! But we don't know that. Memetics is not genetics.

It's like assuming that a larger population has a larger number of ideas than a smaller population.

But what if I told you my smaller population sample was from a university and the larger one was from a prison.

I believe Dense networks is what causes a flowering of intellectual diversity. There are heuristics we can use. It is associated with wealthy areas and cities.

I suspect myself that intellectual diversity is orthogonal to the physical phenotype of diversity. However this, like your statement, remains to be shown. There is a lot of contradictory information out there, probably due to confounding factors and gloming unrelated factors together.

In my previous post in a different thread I wrote something related to this subject which is that Facebook (users) has a lot of genetic diversity in its population but it's a sterile wasteland. Facebook and Twitter are tourists on the Internet, but 4chan, reddit and HN are like natives.

"Ahhhh! But we don't know that. Memetics is not genetics."

No, but it's a perfectly good starting point for a hypothesis. Memetics may not be genetics, just like how ducks might not be crows. But, like how ducks and crows are both birds, memetics and genetics are both means of conveying/replicating/mutating information.

"But what if I told you my smaller population sample was from a university and the larger one was from a prison."

What if you told me such a thing? Would you be implying that prisoners come up with fewer ideas than universities? From what do you derive such an implication?

"I suspect myself that intellectual diversity is orthogonal to the physical phenotype of diversity."

On paper, it is.

In practice, intellectual characteristics correlate strongly to educational background, which correlates strongly to socioeconomic class, which (at least here in the United States) correlates strongly to - you guessed it - physical phenotype. Some people break out of those correlations, but they're (last I checked) the exception, not the norm.

This is by no means anything inherent in those phenotypes, of course. You already know that. Rather, it's a systemic issue: one of social norms and preconceived notions. We can pretend that everyone's equal, but it ignores the core of the issue: that the segregation of viewpoints still exists, and thus still requires conscious effort to correct that segregation.

Intellectual diversity, in short, correlates with phenotypical diversity, since viewpoints correlate with phenotypes thanks in no small part to our world's rich xenophobic history.

"In my previous post in a different thread I wrote something related to this subject which is that Facebook (users) has a lot of genetic diversity in its population but it's a sterile wasteland."

I'd argue that has far less to do with the users than it does Facebook itself.

"Facebook and Twitter are tourists on the Internet, but 4chan, reddit and HN are like natives."

I don't blame you for believing that; it's natural to believe that we're somehow "special" because we happen to be chatting on some forum run by some venture capital firm. Never mind that even HN's users, let alone reddit's (and possibly 4chan's, but I don't really venture over there all too often), have no problem with posting links to Twitter posts for "karma", or that Medium (a favorite among HNers, so it seems) required logins using either Facebook or Twitter until only very recently.

The flow of thoughts between the "tourists" and the "natives" is very bidirectional in reality, and Facebook and Twitter (and Instagram and $DEITY-knows-what-else) might as well be natives at this point, too.

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