[JuniorBalleg]

When an entire population is far more homogeneous than most modern Western states, the heightened social trust and cohesion permits this kind of harmless fun (among many other benefits). It's one of those sacrifices made to accommodate diversity which is almost impossible to quantify and existentially unsettling to even try.

[kfajdsl]

Maybe this struck a nerve because I'm an American born-and-raised PoC, but frankly I believe this is a bad opinion that is often pushed by racists (even if the idea itself isn't necessarily inherently racist).

Heightened social trust in people of one's own ethnicity isn't a fact of life, it's just racism. It's what causes PoC to be profiled by law enforcement, on average have worse outcomes for the same crimes in the justice system, etc.

I know that this isn't just the way humans are wired. I met so many people (including police) in my life that I would consider truly "colorblind" and treat everyone with respect, regardless of their ethnicity.

Different shared cultural values (as opposed to just differing race) is also not as much of a problem as some make it out to be. First, most cultures of people that are immigrating to the US (I can't speak for Europe, I'm not very in the loop) have values largely compatible with Western ones. Second, most immigrants will at least somewhat assimilate into the culture of their host country, especially after a generation or two. Note, this doesn't mean throwing away their native culture.

I'd also like to point out that Woz's America was definitely NOT homogenous.

[prmph]

This is a very good comment, and just about exactly what I was about to say.

[JuniorBalleg]

>Heightened social trust in people of one's own ethnicity isn't a fact of life, it's just racism.

It is a fact of life, it's natural and there's a clear evolutionary impetus for it. I would argue that this is how we are wired.

Of course we feel more comfortable among our own. You are far more at ease if you walk into a room to be surrounded by people just like you, rather than strangers from the other side of the world with their alien appearances, behaviours, and even smells! Who knows how the reptilian subconscious analyses this information - are we at war? conquered? lost? isolated? kidnapped?

In a more modern sense, we can more readily let out guard down among our own, knowing we share a common history, culture, humour, etc, while we must precariously navigate the invisible minefield of sensitivities in a more diverse group.

[ModernMech]

I don't find this to be true in my experience. Pretty much any moderately-sized university campus in America is a counterpoint to what you're saying. These communities can be very diverse, and while it's true that you can often find various cliques that split along various demographic lines, members of diverse university communities still live, learn, and work in close proximity.

I think implicit in your comment is the assumption that people with different backgrounds are somehow defacto strangers. But what makes it all work on a university campus, imo, is that everyone has a purpose; there are no scary strangers because everyone's motivations are well-understood, since everyone on campus has a job to do. No one is really a stranger.

It doesn't matter if you are of a different color or gender, or that you come from a place I've never been to, or that you speak a language I've never heard, or that you eat food I've never tasted. My lizard brain doesn't kick in when I interact with you because you are just here to study and learn, or to help in that process.

As an example, I am a professor and I have a new colleague. He is from the other side of the world, he was born a decade before me, he eats food different from mine, he worships a different God than I do. But we get along just fine, and that's because despite all those differences, we still have more in common than not. And even if we didn't, we still have to rely on one another and work as a team to achieve a common goal.

[erosenbe0]

Correct. It's mostly social and not based on 'looks,' per se. Let's give an example. I'm white as a ghost. But from pre-school age I went over to my Indian neighbor's house to play. I'm fond of the cooking and the accent of Indian-born English speakers is totally normal for me, probably more normal than a Southern accent.

Now if I go to India to do some work I will seek out some other Americans to befriend while there, perhaps naturally looking for people like me. But by this I mean other Americans whether Indian-American or otherwise -- I don't mean whites who literally look like me. Get it?

[komali2]

> It is a fact of life, it's natural and there's a clear evolutionary impetus for it. I would argue that this is how we are wired.

Is it? I reject this wholesale. Do you have evidence?

If you do, why have you set definitions of "otherness" at skin color? I feel quite comfortably "among my own" alongside basically any human, because they're humans just like me. Don't you?

[erosenbe0]

You are only confirming that nominally, ethnicity and race are not important.

For example, a white American of Slavic descent is more comfortable in a room of non-white Americans who also smell of Budweiser than they would be in a room of Russians in Russia speaking Russian and smelling of vodka. Get it?

[lupire]

How many of those colorblind people (of the ones who are married), and married outside their race and/or religion?

[kfajdsl]

Several. If race isn't a factor for you selecting a partner, landing on someone with a different race is fairly common, especially considering I live in a diverse area.

[ilyt]

Clearly you haven't read or been in any post-soviet country, near perfect "ethnical cohesion", doesn't stop crime or increase trust in any way.

Frankly that's arrogant and narrow-minded view; homogenous culture might cause less conflicts and problems when the culture itself is one promoting that in the first place

[enedil]

What do you mean? For instance, Poland escaped Soviet block, is almost unilaterally composed of Polish people, and yet look at the chart: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

The countries with lowest crime numbers in EU per capita are (ordered by crime rate increasing): Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Cyprus, Slovenia, Czechia, Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Romania.

All of them are socially pretty homogenous. Most of them escaped Soviet block. Some even escaped Soviet Union. On the other hand, look at the countries from the other side of chart (this time, rate decreasing): Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany.

As this data concerns only EU, there is no UK here, but as I remember, it had around 3x crime rate as the Republic of Ireland, which would put it on the tops of the EU list.

Of course, increased diversity might not be the only differentiator between the countries from the top of the list and those from the bottom, but I think it defeats your point (almost as if you were racist for having irrational fears against living in a post-soviet society, which aren't backed by numbers).

[qwytw]

I think focusing exclusively on latest data is problematic. Many post soviet countries had huge amounts of crime in the 90s and early 2000s. Crime rates gradually decreased after they joined the EU until they reached their current levels.

The degree of ethnic homogeneity did not increase during that time, if anything it slightly decreased (or significantly in some major cities).

One possible explanation is that people willing to engage in low level crime simply moved to richer western countries because well they were (and still are) richer... e.g. in Norway Lithuanians are the second largest group of people who are imprisoned (after local Norwegians). The situation is similar in some other Western European countries. I'm not an expert but if I wanted to rob/steal from people and businesses I'd probably do that in Norway, Germany, or Switzerland rather than Romania or Lithuania. The risk versus reward ratio seems much better there. Also there prisons are way nicer (especially in Norway).

[enedil]

This is disingenuous to say that people emigrated in order to do crime. But you could also find statistics on sexual assaults which also suggest that rape is a lot more prevalent in western europe (and probably, that the rates since the 90s didn't change much on the east).

I would say, that based on my experience on growing in Poland (I was born in 1998), the people become richer and suddenly everybody now seems to be minding own business. So after you fill some economic needs, the will to pick on people decreases. But that will is surely dependent on how much you trust others are think similar (and won't rob you).

Anyway, the parents' commenter point was > near perfect "ethnical cohesion", doesn't stop crime or increase trust in any way

I can't see why should it be true. Perhaps it doesn't stop crime completely, but perhaps it actually increases trust. Based on the argument above we can't know.

[qwytw]

> This is disingenuous to say that people emigrated in order to do crime

Why? Obviously the majority of those who emigrated did not do so with the intention to commit crimes. However some people did. The question is whether they are under/over represented in the emigrant population.

Another aspect is that high emigration generally results in better conditions for those who remain due to higher demand for labor. Which might also decrease crime due to lower unemployment/higher wages.

> Perhaps it doesn't stop crime completely, but perhaps it actually increases trust

According to https://ourworldindata.org/trust Eastern European countries have lower interpersonal trust compared to most Western European countries and especially Scandinavia.

Of course it's also a question of attitude. And people in different cultures might interpret the question differently and/or be predisposed to answer it in a certain way even. Then again being from the region myself I can't really say that people here trust others more than in WE, ussually it's the opposite especially outside of certain social groups.

[shrimp_emoji]

Hahaha. Great point.

The U.S. is one of the higher-trust societies, socially, while also being extremely racially diverse.

It sounds like pro-social culture and your people being rich probably matter more than race, and Eastern Europe has a critical deficit in both of those. :p

[ilyt]

Mostly thanks to "inheriting" it from russia in form of being post-soviet satellites... it took decades for most countries (and for other it is still in progress) to get from "you need bribe or connections to get anywhere in bureaucracy" for example.

[KptMarchewa]

That's true for countries in which russia directly meddles. Countries that thrown off the yoke, like Czechia or Poland have one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

[qwytw]

You might be correct now. They are probably correct about the 90s or early 2000s.

Then again crime rates in Belarus for instance don't seem to be much higher than in Poland or Lithuania.

[KptMarchewa]

That's one of the sources of Lukashenko's legitimacy, just as economic growth is a source of CCP's legitimacy. Russia has to reason to destabilize Belarus since their ruler is complicit.

[pjc50]

Struggling to work out when the nondiverse America ever existed, that Woz could have been in?

[hindsightbias]

Born & raised in: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/SanJose50.htm

Even Atherton was more diverse back then.

Lives in Los Gatos: https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0644112-los-gatos...

[JuniorBalleg]

It's not binary. Mark Potok of the SPLC has a poster on his wall tracking the demographic decline of Whites in America. You don't need to look far - official population statistics, your kid's school, or your local Walmart - to see this massive, rapid demographic shift in action.

You're welcome to argue the absence of causation.

[dbingham]

> the heightened social trust and cohesion permits this kind of harmless fun

This needs a citation. It's the sort of "common sense" all too often advanced by people with - frankly - racist or ethnonational agendas.

[jameslk]

> This needs a citation. It's the sort of "common sense" all too often advanced by people with - frankly - racist or ethnonational agendas.

Jumping straight to claiming someone has a racist or ethnonational agenda because they didn't provide a citation seems uncharitable. It comes off as a worse form of sealioning. I'm not sure if you're trying to do that intentionally but I mention it so you can understand the hostility it may create.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007...

From Wikipedia on the study:

Harvard professor of political science Robert D. Putnam conducted a nearly decade long study on how diversity affects social trust. He surveyed 26,200 people in 40 American communities, finding that when the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, the more racially diverse a community is, the greater the loss of trust. People in diverse communities "don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," writes Putnam.

That said, there can both be problems and benefits of something, and in his research on diversity this is considered:

Putnam says, however, that "in the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits."

He asserted that his "extensive research and experience confirm the substantial benefits of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity, to our society."

[ipaddr]

When everyone comes from the same background and/or culture there is a shared understanding. Mix two different cultures and you have less shared background mix in 100 and you have little.

It's not a race issue when this is experienced in Africa/Japan/Sweden/Finland.

Calling new idea to you racist is racist. Most of the times the word racist is used it is used incorrectly and often in a racist way.

[dbingham]

It's not a new idea to me. It's an idea I've encountered many times, often propping up arguments of various kinds against pluralistic societies - which is an argument implicit in the comment above. Those arguments lead directly to ideas around ethnonationalism and segregating societies by cultural background, which is a direct analog for ethnicity.

There's a straight line between that argument - which again, almost always gets through around with out any kind of citations or research support - and ethnic cleansing. It's directly attached to racist ideas. Similar to social darwinism, it's something that seems like relatively harmless common sense on the surface, but leads to horrific implications when followed to its logical conclusion.

[jlawson]

Interesting. So you don't actually argue that it's untrue.

You just argue that people shouldn't acknowledge it because doing so would lead to policies you think would be immoral.

I'm just not sure that this anti-truth stance is tenable or really worth it. What if we can acknowledge the facts and then... handle them in a non-evil way?

Or perhaps even use that knowledge to head off terrible outcomes that might otherwise happen? E.g. Lebanon-style ethnic civil wars.

I generally think that knowing the truth is useful and equips you to do good things. You just need a non-childish moral system to integrate it (too easy to feel moral if you just wish away the hard facts of the universe).

[dbingham]

No, I argued that it's the sort of thing people assume is "common sense" when it is often very poorly supported. And my argument was that said assumption often comes from a bad place (when you examine it) and leads to a bad place.

[georgeburdell]

Have you ever nodded your head in agreement at the assertion that the middle east/Africa/etc is so screwed up because the colonial powers drew arbitrary borders?

[scarface74]

I knew I read something somewhere and this is the closest I could find. But I think it’s related.

So when I asked ChatGPT

> Are countries with less racial diversity more likely to have a larger safety net”

because my GoogleFu was failing me, of course it gave me a non controversial generic answer.

But when I asked it for citations it gave me this

> A 2018 study published in the journal Social Science Research, which found that countries with more ethnically diverse populations tend to have less generous welfare states.

Which led me to this link

https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/37/1/89/5934740

> First, vignette experiments established a consistent and pervasive deservingness gap: welfare recipients belonging to the ethnic ingroup are more likely to be considered deserving of welfare support than the ethnic outgroup

[dbingham]

That's very circumstantial evidence that requires more examination. Is that a direct result of the diversity - or of the history that generated that diversity in the first place?

In most countries that are ethnically diverse, that diversity was created through various forms of colonialism. Often with racial imperialism deeply ingrained in it. Which means those countries have long running strains of racist ideas and ideologies that forms the foundations of the ethnic "in group" and "out group".

Which is not to say that ethnic strife doesn't exist in non-colonial countries as well, but that this line of thinking and examination is a) extremely complex, b) inextricable from the history of the systems under examination, c) inextricable from deep histories of racist thought - often imposed by colonnial or imperialist powers, and d) similar to social darwinism in that it is often presented as common sense, but leads to some very dark places when taken, unexamined, to its logical conclusion.

[scarface74]

That last paragraph sound like the same non committal answer I got from ChatGPT at first. That’s not meant to be a criticism, just a random aside.

You do raise a fair point

[dbingham]

Yeah, I mean, there's a good reason for that. To do the topic justice requires a lot of pretty delicate work. The only way to give a shorter answer with out tripping into dangerous territory is for it to look something like my last paragraph.

[tonmoy]

What source do you have to show there was higher social trust and cohesion at that time?

[manimino]

People often refer to the Scandinavian countries or Japan as examples of low ethnic diversity and high trust.

Are there any quantitative studies on this topic? It would be a stronger argument if a clear trend was observable over many countries.

[landemva]

If I was searching for comparisons, I would look at Stockholm and suburbs in 1990s compared with present. I am told there are now areas where those born in .se and the police just avoid due to take-over by gangs of (some) recent immigrants.

[qwytw]

> Scandinavian countries examples of low ethnic diversity

That's no longer the case and hasn't really been for a decade or two at least. Especially in Sweden.

[ramraj07]

What’s the argument supposed to be? Homogeneity in service of peace?

I’d rather live in a diverse hellhole than some whitewashed “utopia”.

[butlerm]

I think you are failing to distinguish between 'is' and 'ought' here.