
Parable of the Polygons (2014) - Tomte
http://ncase.me/polygons/
======
alexvoda
This might be malicious of me but I found another way to maintain an almost 0
% segregation in the polygon experiment. Turn the satisfaction threshold way
up: "I'll move if less then 85% are like me". This resulted in constant
movement.

But a different conclusion might be reached. Improve mobility (remote work,
coworking spaces, high speed cheap eco friendly transportation, etc.) and the
world might become more dynamic, and stable. This is a tech problem and it's
something we can work on solving. Changing mentalities is not a tech problem.
Imagine if we had the technology to move entire dwellings as easy as packing a
suitcase. Even further, if we had teleportation, the notion of neighbourhood
goes away, the entire world becomes your neighbour.

And lowering segregation by increasing mobility might result in gradually
increasing tolerance (due to exposure), thereby further decreasing
segregation.

Just my two cent ramblings.

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justinmeiners
Is it bad to prefer to be around people with similar backgrounds and
interests? Isn't this the definition of a community?

~~~
danharaj
That is just one type of community.

~~~
justinmeiners
What kind of community isn't centered around some form of shared values or
common interests?

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patcon
what about the original form of community: physical location -- the one we
spent deep history evolving to be suited to navigate with wetware, instinct,
intuition and body language, and from which initial social behaviour emerged
:)

~~~
jamesrom
That clearly is not an answer the question asked.

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jcims
Doesn’t really do a good job of addressing minorities. What if your ethnicity
makes up 3-5% of an area, are you just expected to diffuse into the general
population?

For example, I come from a relatively rural area and spent a few months
working in Mountain View. At first i thought it was a proverial melting pot
relative to home, but then i realized that i never saw any black folks...

Demographics for the area show African American at 2-3%. So if you happen to
be black and get hired on at Google, for example, is there sonething wrong
with looking for an area where you might relate to your neighbors more or
should you optimize for diversity?

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MRD85
Isn't the whole point of integrating people together to create a melting pot
where you end up with a homogenous society? If you create "perfect"
neighbourhoods with a mix of all races then you'll end up losing individual
identities over a few generations. Children will mix at school, couples will
form and you get mixed families, and within a couple of generations, you're
roughly homogenous.

The way to end racial discrimination is to end racial identities. Humans are
always going to prefer people similar to themselves, so you need to make
everyone similar.

~~~
rixed
> Humans are always going to prefer people similar to > themselves, so you
> need to make everyone similar.

A very strong and potentially pernicious conclusion for such vague premises.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that humans feel reassured within their
group(s) (whatever that is) and also sometime feel threatened by other groups?
This behavior itself being worsened by social insecurity (giving signs of
one's belonging to the in group by being hostile to the out group), as
frequently documented.

Following this line of thoughts I don't think looking more similar would solve
anything. It's not aiming at the problem and it's not even doable (we would
have to look the same, speak the same, think the same, etc, or we would always
be able to form groups).

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MRD85
I think you took the wrong conclusion from my comment. The whole point of
mixing communities isn't for skin colour, it's to homogenise culture. Families
will mix too but that is much slower than culture.

~~~
rixed
I was not thinking specifically about skin colour. You might still need to
make clearer what you are thinking about, because to be honest homogenising
culture sound even more impractical and hazardous than homogenising skin
colour.

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daenz
If you're living around too many people who look similar to you, you should be
unhappy and move somewhere else?

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dang
Many previous submissions:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Parable%20of%20the%20Polygons&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Parable%20of%20the%20Polygons&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

But only one significant discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716538)

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rgoulter
I like Nicky Case's interactive systems. It's a way of bringing practical
considerations to discussions which are usually more moral, and usually "more
heat than light". It seems like it's useful for surfacing two kinds of
disagreement: differences in the models people hold of the world, and
differences in moral foundations about how to feel about that.

Models can be wrong, etc. but where disagreeing with someone's moral argument
makes you 'bad', disagreeing with a practical argument is 'dumb'.

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monochromatic
Why is it inherently and obviously good to mix the polygons?

~~~
aeturnum
For some categories, it's probably harmless. I don't think we need to re-sort
living arrangements until we have a proper diversity of sports fandom, for
instance.

However, the most prominent understanding of "difference" in the western world
is race. Racial hierarchies have led to unequal distribution of resources,
unfairly balanced prospects for individuals and unequal representation in
government. Arguably, race has been weaponized to disenfranchise a large
number of human beings, only some of which are members of the "lesser" race.
For instance, scholars have argued that racial hierarchies allowed landowners
in the post-civil-war-south to avoid material compensation of their white
workers because the workers were satisfied by the 'comparative gain' of being
better off than working class african americans (who the same landowners paid
even less).

~~~
woofie11
Although your precise wording is correct ("prominent understanding"), far
greater splits exist, for example, on political views and on income, and
arguably even more harmful.

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aeturnum
I focus on race because it's an entirely artificial construction. It makes
sense that, say, communists and capitalists might want to live in different
communities (and it's not clear it's a bad thing). There are also forces that
combine to push people of different incomes into different areas that aren't
related to a desire for cultural homogeneity.

P.s. If you're interested in how race is artificial this is a good read:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-
we...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-
we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/)

~~~
woofie11
At least where I live, the segregation isn't on skin color, although it sure
looks that way at first glance.

There are two major communities (African Americans and whites) and a number of
smaller ones.

The "white" community actually refers to "WASPs and their descendants," but a
number of other people get lumped in based on skin color. The AA community
refers to descendants of slaves.

The two communities speak different dialects of English. They have drastically
different communication patterns (when do you use last name versus first name?
when is it okay to yell? how do you show respect?). They have different
religious practices. They have different practices for raising kids. They work
different jobs. They differ, significantly, on almost all cultural dimensions.

I see very little discrimination or desire to segregate based on skin color.
If an Ghanian moves into the community, they're more likely to move into the
white community than the African American one. Likewise with African Americans
who grew up in WASP communities.

In practice, many immigrants -- of all skin colors including whites coming
from places other than Western Europe -- tend to form their own community;
they don't quite fit in in either the "white" and the "AA" community. Both
communities accept a narrow range of behaviors as appropriate; the broader
international community tends to give a bit more cultural leeway. A Nigerian,
a Japanese, a Russian, and an Indian immigrant will interact with each other
just fine, but quite often don't assimilate too well into either "white" or
"AA" communities.

~~~
aeturnum
Distinct cultural communities that often, but don't always, correspond to
ethnicity is exactly what you would expect from the construction of a "racial"
hierarchy.

If we divided caucasian Americans into two groups, designated one group as
"lesser," and then waited a few hundred years you would find similarly stark
cultural differences. Again, race is entirely artificial. People were divided
based only on superficial appearance and, once those divisions are enforced,
cultural distance grows.

So, what you're experiencing is the outgrowth of a racial classification
system. It's entirely artificial but, as you say, it also has _real_
consequences. Even if, by magic, we were all transformed to have the same
ethnic heritage, the cultural legacy of "race" would make "race" very
apparent. African American and caucasian American culture _is_ different -
even though those differences are partially (largely? hard to say) from the
racial structure imposed on African Americans.

The answer is in your final paragraph. Neither "white" or "AA" culture is a
perfect fit for new arrivals (just ask Jamaicans or darker skinned Dominican
ex-pats how well they feel seen by any American culture). Indeed, no single
cultural approach is "right" and we do ourselves a disservice by searching for
one. We have had structures and policies that have driven the two largest
cultural groups (white and African American) apart for generations. Abating
that push should be a high priority. We also need to be attentive to including
as many cultural groups as possible in finding common ground and understanding
for living together comfortably. All groups will need to "give" a little
ground in terms of what they would most prefer and, in the interest of equity
and facing history, many experts think caucasian Americans should give the
most.

