Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Inclusive
On the serious side: Gary's comment brings up something I've been wondering about since we started this. There's probably research out there somewhere. But I'm wondering if having a community that's more inclusive ( less divided by age or anything else, less focus group oriented) is a healthier community over all, maybe less self-centered? It's probably in sociology journals somewhere? Any observations or experiences. I appreciated Gary's comments.
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There's an analagous situation genetically, I believe. Species with greater variations will survive longer than those with a very narrow range of genetic diversity. If the second set is attacked by disease, they could all be wiped out. In the first set, immunities are likely to arise more readily.
ReplyDeleteYeah, good old religion/phiosophy degree.
Tyler has religion/philosophy, I have (almost) a CS degree.
ReplyDeleteWe sometimes try to mathematically modelling "real" things, e.g. people's brains, social structures, etc.
One of my professors is doing work in modelling social interactions with instant messaging, blogs, etc.
In his recent work (I don't think this paper has been published yet, so I can't link to it) they attempted to model discrimination in instant messaging networks- how it spreads/dissapates. Originally I think he wanted to study deaf/hearing relations. Basically the model he used had lots of people playing a game with their "neighbors" (i.e. anyone you could transfer information to). The game is called iterative prisoners dilema, if you care.
Basically for each move, a player has the option of transferring information or not, and there are different strategies and rewards for each (e.g. you can always transfer info, never transfer, etc).
He modified this to create "classes" of users, and created a strategy that favors people of your "class." A class could be "deaf", "hearing" or "red" or "blue."
If anyone cares about this ask me later - it's a little longer, and whether or not this paper is important is rather debatable.
The interesting result of his experiments was that when communities (or classes) have a lot of interaction (e.g. lots of veteran adults are in touch with kids, deaf with hearing, etc) - prejudice (as he modelled it) slowly disappears. When the communication boundaries are limited (there is a fringe of each community that communicates with a fringe of the other) - prejudice does not disappear.
Of course, this is not based on any actual real data, but it sounds good, and I think there is some truth in it (I could tell more stories, but this is already a novel of a post) (Can you tell I like parenthesis?). The significance, of course, is that there is benefit to intentionally not being exclusive of those different from you (if you are one who considers prejudice bad). Note that this is also acknowledged by colleges that favor diversity.