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.

It hard to keep track of who to hate. Apparently it is OK to hate old people. Or maybe just old white people. Or is it just old people who live in rural areas? And also apparently we should hate those who aren't serviced by Uber. And those whose culture we don't like.

It's funny you read 'hate' into my comment. I certainly don't like living in a place where people who are actively trying to perpetuate a society of domination along class, race, and gender divides dictate the culture, but that doesn't imply that I hate them.

The actual hate, and worse, the cold, seemingly-benign, hate, is in your attacks (you seem to have created this account exclusively to do this) on progressive politics on Hacker News.

Maybe this is actually 'hot' hate. Maybe you truly think that non-whites have no great books of 2014 or no cultural contributions for you. But I don't think so.

I think it's more likely that you just see any divergence from the status quo you grew up used to as "going too far." Because you somehow think that a thousand years of liberatory struggle ended in 1985.

That is a thing worth hating. People will die because of that. The longer we allow white supremacy to exist, the more black children will be gunned down in the streets.

Personally, I don't think areas that are the equivalent of a white rice diet are good areas to raise a child, because I'd think it was cruel to raise a child on a diet of nothing but white rice. But it's a stretch to say that I hate old white people in the country because of that. Plenty of them are fine.

It's just you who isn't.

>It's funny you read 'hate' into my comment.

It is not so funny, because you could make a very minor tweak to your comment, and even you can see it is unacceptable:

"Personally, I don't care at all if urban Detroit dies. I'm living in an urban "community" myself right now, and it's honestly torturous. I'm glad people are moving to away 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 black 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."

That is not a minor tweak, it changes the entire meaning of that statement.

It's also factually wrong, because Uber has launched in Detroit, plenty of other apps have launched in Detroit, and Detroit is a cultural nexus. Virtually all of electronic music has origins in Detroit house and techno. Detroit is still a center for cultural innovation along multiple axes. And it's a city dominated by the young.

You are:

1. Not understanding my point in a factual manner

2. Implying that you if you swap "black" and "white" or "men" and "women", sentences retain any meaning, even though you've totally changed the context in which they exist

3. Very literally a white supremacist apologist, because every one of your HN comments is attacking progressivism.

Please leave HN and the tech community. Racists are not welcome here.