const_cast 6 months ago

Ugh, homogeneous population is overrated. When you remove axis of discrimination from humans they just go down a level or too and use that as the basis for prejudice.

wizzwizz4 6 months ago

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.

  • exoverito 6 months ago

    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.

    • pastage 6 months ago

      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.

    • wizzwizz4 6 months ago

      … 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.)

    • vasco 6 months ago

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

presentation 6 months ago

I don't have evidence to say that it is irrelevant, but people love using homogeneity as a cope for being unwilling to try things to improve the status quo. Hate this argument.

  • wizzwizz4 6 months ago

    I've mostly seem them use it as an excuse to try to make ethnostates.

kurikuri 6 months ago

They were likely in a homogeneous population when they committed the crime that got them there in the first place, so that confounder might not matter much at all.

shrubble 6 months ago

Yes, in the sense that higher social trust, enabled by homogeneity is helpful in many ways. Robert Putnam among others wrote about it; Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone”.