Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to Rich Lock,
the first results are ‘ask.com’.
Is that like Google's way of saying "learn to use a search engine, Granddad!"
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One thing has remained constant through decades of change. My hotmail address. Can anyone else here claim an active 18 year old email address? Even more scary, I've never deleted a non-spam message or disposable notification.
It's actually quite a sucky service. But I'm sentimental about it now. It's like driving a vintage car, on the verge of becoming an antique. It's the original web app, and the idea is still humming today.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I meant blaming immigrants for the fact that people supposedly don’t grow veges or keep chooks any more. Not seeing the connection at all.
Yes, that's a strange observation - urban intensification does contribute to less growing of one's own crops, but I wouldn't say immigrants lead the charge on that, except in so far as they are more likely to live on smaller plots closer to the city. If that is true.
But a bigger contributor would seem to be rising incomes. Subsistence farming is more likely to be a lifestyle choice than a function of poverty these days.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Sacha,
However, our world is not ‘highly stable’. And there’s no zero-sum Darwinian thing going on either.
It's changing, certainly, but it's not totally chaotic. As organisms, we're more alike than we're different - it's a quantum leap to even the nearest species, and the range of species is huge. Even then, the range of conditions they can survive in is so narrow that we have not discovered a single other planet out of the thousands found since the 90s upon which even that enormous range of organisms could survive. Out of the possible range of social orders, we select a very narrow band, for the bulk of the population. We may see that range as vast, but it is a tiny, tiny fraction of the possibilities, much the way that the visible spectrum of light seems diverse to us, but is a tiny fraction of all electromagnetic radiation.
Say we were to categorize the possible social orders by governmental system. How many people would be disappointed by the eradication of any slave oriented societies? Even though that would mean a loss of diversity. Any number of things that we would struggle immensely to find acceptable are possible. The same goes culturally - there are many cultural practices we condemn. That diversity is seen as undesirable. Indeed, when it comes down to it, anyone that believes in a strong society of any kind at all actually prefers that we are more in agreement with each other than disagreement, and we enforce our rules to that effect all the time. Criminal behaviour is not tolerated, and many things are considered criminal that are very much in dispute by large subcultures.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Apart from that I really can’t see what you’re getting at.
I think I can see it. Essentially, the question of whether more diversity is a good thing is not settled according to JH. He's asking why it's good. Good for whom? Good for what purpose? Good in itself, perhaps?
I can't see how any progress could even be made on such a debate until the more basic question of what diversity even actually means is strongly qualified, rather than anecdotally characterized.
A measure of diversity could be the diversity index, although it seems more applicable to biology. Essentially:
A diversity index is a quantitative measure that reflects how many different types (such as species) there are in a dataset, and simultaneously takes into account how evenly the basic entities (such as individuals) are distributed among those types. The value of a diversity index increases both when the number of types increases and when evenness increases. For a given number of types, the value of a diversity index is maximized when all types are equally abundant.
Obviously there are a lot of practical issues that come up when trying to actually quantify diversity for race and culture in this way. You have to fix on the way that the types are enumerated to make comparisons between populations.
But even if you can actually achieve that, and make statements which are not just anecdata, the question of what diversity itself achieves, why it is desirable, is not settled.
It might seem like an easy thing to say that diverse population is more resilient, survives better. But unfortunately that's not necessarily true. If the environment is highly stable, the opposite scenario is very likely, certain types will almost certain dominate very rapidly, whenever they gain a survival advantage. The vast majority of large deviation from the population will die off immediately, never even survive one generation. Most adaption, when a population is well adapted, is detrimental.
But I doubt that mere survival is what most people arguing for higher cultural diversity are talking about. I think they would feel that it's a good unto itself.
This, however, is not self-evident. Certainly quite a lot of a population, especially if it's in a particularly sweet spot, is likely to be against it out of pure self preservation. However liberal we may believe ourselves to be, very few people in NZ, for example, would think that a completely open door immigration policy would be a good idea. They believe, and it's not totally irrational, that such an idea would almost instantly drive NZ to become the least desirable place to be on the planet, simply by virtue of anyone living somewhere less desirable already instantly choosing to switch in. It would become a gigantic refugee camp immediately, in this view.
It would, however, most likely become considerably more diverse.
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Wicked, thanks Matt.
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Hard News: Drugs, development and reality, in reply to Stephen Judd,
It's scary to think just how many square meters of land must be dedicated to my coffee habit, somewhere out there.
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I’ve wondered for years whether there is actually any useful metric at all for diversity. It’s not a trivial question, because people use “more diverse” all the time, like it’s a meaningful concept. But what does it actually mean? Can a number be put to it? If not, can we at least order from most to least diverse? Can we ever say we’re there yet, if there is no measurable milestone of any kind?
ETA: I guess we can measure the entropy of the racial data, but does anyone?
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Hard News: Telecom and TV, in reply to llew40,
Suspect you might be talking about Chorus.
Probably. That's Telecom by another name too, right?
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They can change their name all they like, but I still know who they are. I expect they'll be as proactive with 'net TV as they were with the fiber required to deliver it.
I can't think of a way to make their big monopoly model work in this space. My honest opinion is that their days are numbered.
At an end their reign is, and not short enough it was.
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