Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society

This is fantastic! We were just noticing how segregated our own neighborhood near Boston is, and wondering what drives that and what could be done about it. You can see the same thing all over the city -- neighborhoods that are much more white than average right next to neighborhoods that are much less white than average.

Really interesting that this could be self-generated with very little bias (setting aside that there's definitely still some intentional housing discrimination in Boston). And really interesting that it could potentially be reversed if people started to avoid neighborhoods that are highly segregated in their "favor."

I wonder if integration could be advertised as a benefit of certain properties on real estate sites like Zillow. What would happen if home listings had a "well integrated neighborhood" indicator for neighborhoods that have about the same racial balance as the larger area, the same way they have indicators for good schools and public transportation and so on? Would that be appealing to actual buyers the same way it's appealing to the Polygons in the model?

The risk is that an index like that could be used to encourage segregation instead -- but I'm hopeful that, on average, we're better than that at this point.

Here's one census map if you want to check out your neighborhood:

http://www.socialexplorer.com/

You can show racial data under "Change Data." We also found it helpful to change "Show data by: Tract" to "Block group" (more fine-grained), and to use quantile cutpoints under the color palette menu.

I think one of the problems with the "avoid neighborhoods with segregation" solution is that it's more or less the same idea as affirmative action. As soon as you choose not to rent an apartment because "there are too many white people and not enough black" you're effectively practising reverse racism.

Living in rural Maine, I've watch the deleterious effect this has on a rural community as young white people flock to Portland or Boston looking for black people for their kids to grow up near.

In the meantime, there are 20 other non-race related variables in your community that you're ignoring, like age, health, wealth, gender, sexual orientation, language, education, technological proclivity, Meyers-Briggs results etcetera and so forth.

Race, while a dominant segregator in our society, is not he only one, nor, perhaps, the most pervasive here in 2014.

Sometimes we have to look at questions in a hard, unflinching way, and prepare ourselves for the answers that come.

It could be that "too much" focus on diversity could create "reverse racism" where there are somehow institutional oppressions exerted over white people. That seems very unlikely in any place where white people are a racial majority and also control all institutions of social or political power.

It could also be that focusing on such things leads to the death of communities in rural Maine.

But what do we care about more: creating a world where black youth are not gunned down by police officers on a literally daily basis for either absurdly petty crimes or literally no reason (like Oscar Grant, for example), or preserving rural Maine?

Personally, I don't care at all if rural communities die. I'm living in a rural "community" in New England myself right now, and it's honestly torturous. I'm glad people are moving to Portland or Boston to raise their children because, frankly, it seems abusive raising a child in this environment. There's no Uber, basically no other apps, very few amusements, and virtually zero culture beyond what the majority in the area (old white people) prefer. The lack of competition in general means that there are very few new things, and lots of old, crappy things. Raising children in this area deprives them of stimulation that will literally mean their brains are less dense and less able to fluidly adapt to new situations.

I doubt very much that rural Maine, like my own area, has very much diversity in terms of any of the other factors you've listed (I exclude the MBTI because each MBTI axis is effectively randomly distributed, because the test is based on Jungian psuedoscience that means it has no correlation to the real world -- all areas are diverse in MBTI because all areas are diverse to a random discriminator variable). It is not a bad thing for these areas to die. In the near future, I can easily see the area I'm in dying off as well, and it'll be great for all the people who don't have to live here anymore.

Sigh. I wasn't expressing a fear of institutional oppressions of white people. All I'm saying is that in a desperate attempt to integrate white and black people, you're missing a myriad other -isms.

For my sake, your final paragraph is horribly misguided. I'm sorry you're unhappy where you live, but I can honestly say that there is an ass-load of wealth, education and age segregation where I live.

You can wish for everyone to move into a large urban conglomeration like in some shitty si-fi novel, but the reality is that as long as there is land, people will live there. As they say in real estate, they're not making any more of it.

And back before you hijacked my point to rant about how you don't like where you live and wish others didn't either, I would simply restate my original point that trying to seek out integrated neighbourhoods will most likely lead to unintended consequences as we fail to appreciate that perhaps wealth disparity is more of an issue in 2014 than simply being black or white.

And the only reason I brought up Maine was that friends of ours moved down to Portland looking for black and Hispanic people to expose their children to. What they found was a shitty neighbourhood full of fairly uneducated folks with whom they shared almost no culture touchstones and as a result they had a miserable time.

That may not be everyone's experience, but mashing together black and white people != automatic peacefulness and equality.

Is it possible that at some level humans will always segregate themselves based on what is culturally important to themselves?

Sometimes we have to look at questions in a hard, unflinching way, and prepare ourselves for the answers that come.

I think New Englanders have it worse than most other American regions because their culture is so bland and denialist because of the Puritanical influences that still roam unchecked. It's probable that Mainers would hate Portland just because it's a place where people have fun.

But you seem to be using "culturally important touchstones" as a way to be racist by proxy, so I'll stop this interaction here. I hope you get better.