I was really impressed with the javascript, and went for it, missed the visualization tag (probably lost focus by the time I got down to v). But fair point.
I am not going to argue over the math tag, but if people here think it doesn’t deserve a math tag, I will remove it. I thought it was somehow deserved.
This seems like the start of an interesting puzzle game. How do you make the least amount of moves without making any of the polygons more upset? Or maybe what’s the smallest total distance polygons have to move to make the least amount upset?
As a social commentary it seems over-simplified and racist, though. What about polygons who don’t identify as their shape? Or polygons who move for career opportunities and don’t care about the shape of their neighbors?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this, but looking over it now, it is talking about shapes and a social phenomenon. Obviously this is a metaphor for the influence of race on neighborhood selection, and some of those points might be racially uncomfortable, but it certainly isn’t encouraging anything problematic (in fact, I think it’s doing the opposite).
What about polygons who don’t identify as their shape?
If you’re being genuine, then the answer is this: you can’t really choose your racial identity, at least not in a social sense (have people see you/treat you as that identity). I’m white, I cannot identify as Black. Like, I can say the words “I identify as Black”, but I’m not really doing anything meaningful of the sort. Similarly, a Black woman can’t identify as non-black and suddenly have the world open up to her.
If you are making a “but why can’t I identify as <gender-i-perceive-as-made-up-or-inconsistent>” “joke”, then that’s transphobic. Trust me, I’d know.
Or polygons who move for career opportunities and don’t care about the shape of their neighbors?
As a social commentary you’re missing the point. Look up all of the different forms of housing discrimination that Black communities have had to face throughout the previous generations, especially how many polarized neighborhoods there are (The Case for Reparations for an overview with solid research and personal experiences). So really the article is saying that even small amounts of racial bias can have a large impact on how communities self-regulate to becemoe racially homogenous. And the fact that some people in otherwise segregated areas (ie, communities where more racial bias is present) would choose to live in a neighborhood otherwise entirely another race, doesn’t really effect that point.
Is it oversimplified? Maybe, but that’s only because of the way we are assigning it to a social stance. It is a powerful visualization of how far even small racial biases can go. You shouldn’t be so dismissive.
If you are making a “but why can’t I identify as <gender-i-perceive-as-made-up-or-inconsistent>” “joke”, then that’s transphobic.
Perhaps, but it is also a valid question if asked in earnest.
Is it oversimplified? Maybe, but that’s only because of the way we are assigning it to a social stance. It is a powerful visualization of how far even small racial biases can go. You shouldn’t be so dismissive.
I didn’t read the the GP as being dismissive so much as critical, for what it is worth.
For example, the simulation doesn’t really account for “no preference”. It also doesn’t explore, perhaps quite rightly, the influence of moving costs or property or jobs.
If taken more abstractly, it is a wonderful demonstration piece, but as-is it runs counter to the experience of anybody who has voluntarily lived outside their own group for purely economic reasons.
but as-is it runs counter to the experience of anybody who has voluntarily lived outside their own group for purely economic reasons.
I am curious to know what is the experience of somebody who lives outside their own group, as seen by you? From my experience there couldn’t be one that fits all.
There is very much not a one-size-fits-all experience!
That said, in my observation (and without getting quite off-topic) here is that there are a lot of people for whom access to jobs is what matters, and if they have sufficient means they will move wherever they need to in order to get access to jobs. If they have kids, to schools. If they’re unattached, nightlife. Living with other folks of the same racial background is purely correlative and not causative at that point.
I have a friend who moved their family into the 3rd ward in Houston and lived there for a few years because it let them cycle to work. Only after having their bike stolen twice, car once, and shootings in the area have they considered moving. I’ve had another friend live for over a year in an apartment complex quite outside of their racial/socio-economic/sexual groupings simply because that’s where they ended up when January rolled around and they needed a cheap place that let them have pets.
I’ve had other friends move from Houston to less diverse areas and, despite getting to live with folks who are closer to them in group alignment, express annoyance at not having access to the food and culture that they left behind–so, they’re that other end of the spectra where diversity was their big concern.
All this is to say…we all pay a great deal of lip-service to diversity and whatnot, but when the chips are down people are gonna do what is most economically effective–if that means moving as a straight Catholic into the gayborhood, or building your townhouses in the middle of a Hispanic neighborhood, or eating at the Vietnamese place because it’s consistently half the price of any of the other food options (your own nominal heritage’s included), so be it.
Of course, it’s a lot harder to make convincing simulations of economic differences and a call-to-action because of a whole host of historical baggage.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate what you said.
I don’t really foresee a call-to-action (based on diversity statistics). It has been and will be something of a process where people settle in different behaviors based on their situation (in the article, say a behavior is a neighborhood). If your situation is dire, diversity is hardly the first thing on your mind. Basically, if you have an exam tomorrow, you may not be looking into alternate ways of solving the problem at hand after you found one that is in line with what the professor has taught you.
The way I interpret it: the article is begging you to keep an open mind to diversity whenever possible; by saying that if you are not aware of it, you are going to end up being that statistic that is causing division. (With something close to a proof from statistics)
If you are not pushing against that boundary in your head every so often (especially when you can), you are passively doing a disservice to humanity. :-p
What about polygons who don’t identify as their shape?
I’m gonna bite, despite agreeing with Irene’s comment that this is almost never asked in earnest, and I’m not convinced it is here.
The reality is, society at large treats you as they perceive you. If they perceive you as a square, you’ll get treated like a square. If they perceive you as a triangle, likewise. In all the respects that “identify as a shape” can actually map onto reality — this doesn’t apply to race, but does apply to gender — people usually make efforts to change the way they’re perceived. They’re often successful at this, and as a result (going back to the analogy), the shape that identifies as a circle (regardless of what shape they started as) is perceived as a circle and treated as such.
For shapes who identify as neither square nor triangle, it again comes down to how they’re perceived. Shapes tend to want to fit other shapes into either the ‘square’ or ‘triangle’ pigeonholes, even in spite of strong evidence that the pigeonholes don’t completely describe the shapes available.
Some shapes identify as the binary opposite to that which they started out at, but for many reasons — often class related — they can’t do everything others can to present as their identified shape. This doesn’t just mean the square identifying as a triangle gets treated as a square — they get perceived as a square “trying to be” a triangle, and the treatment Shape Society™ offers them is far, far worse.
In short, the social commentary is entirely adequate for what it’s describing, and your tangent is pretty tangential, but I hope maybe this helps elucidate something.
This was great.
I definitely thought so.
So simple, yet profound.
Beaware of the local minima you are settling down in.
This shouldn’t be tagged
javascript, because it doesn’t talk about javascript.This shouldn’t be tagged
math, because it doesn’t present any math.This should be tagged
visualization, because it’s a visualization.I was really impressed with the javascript, and went for it, missed the visualization tag (probably lost focus by the time I got down to v). But fair point.
I am not going to argue over the math tag, but if people here think it doesn’t deserve a math tag, I will remove it. I thought it was somehow deserved.
Perhaps culture.
Culture would also be a good fit!
This seems like the start of an interesting puzzle game. How do you make the least amount of moves without making any of the polygons more upset? Or maybe what’s the smallest total distance polygons have to move to make the least amount upset?
As a social commentary it seems over-simplified and racist, though. What about polygons who don’t identify as their shape? Or polygons who move for career opportunities and don’t care about the shape of their neighbors?
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this, but looking over it now, it is talking about shapes and a social phenomenon. Obviously this is a metaphor for the influence of race on neighborhood selection, and some of those points might be racially uncomfortable, but it certainly isn’t encouraging anything problematic (in fact, I think it’s doing the opposite).
If you’re being genuine, then the answer is this: you can’t really choose your racial identity, at least not in a social sense (have people see you/treat you as that identity). I’m white, I cannot identify as Black. Like, I can say the words “I identify as Black”, but I’m not really doing anything meaningful of the sort. Similarly, a Black woman can’t identify as non-black and suddenly have the world open up to her.
If you are making a “but why can’t I identify as <gender-i-perceive-as-made-up-or-inconsistent>” “joke”, then that’s transphobic. Trust me, I’d know.
As a social commentary you’re missing the point. Look up all of the different forms of housing discrimination that Black communities have had to face throughout the previous generations, especially how many polarized neighborhoods there are (The Case for Reparations for an overview with solid research and personal experiences). So really the article is saying that even small amounts of racial bias can have a large impact on how communities self-regulate to becemoe racially homogenous. And the fact that some people in otherwise segregated areas (ie, communities where more racial bias is present) would choose to live in a neighborhood otherwise entirely another race, doesn’t really effect that point.
Is it oversimplified? Maybe, but that’s only because of the way we are assigning it to a social stance. It is a powerful visualization of how far even small racial biases can go. You shouldn’t be so dismissive.
Perhaps, but it is also a valid question if asked in earnest.
I didn’t read the the GP as being dismissive so much as critical, for what it is worth.
For example, the simulation doesn’t really account for “no preference”. It also doesn’t explore, perhaps quite rightly, the influence of moving costs or property or jobs.
If taken more abstractly, it is a wonderful demonstration piece, but as-is it runs counter to the experience of anybody who has voluntarily lived outside their own group for purely economic reasons.
I’ve never heard it asked in earnest. I’m fond of this response; I feel that’s roughly the level of engagement that the question deserves.
I am curious to know what is the experience of somebody who lives outside their own group, as seen by you? From my experience there couldn’t be one that fits all.
There is very much not a one-size-fits-all experience!
That said, in my observation (and without getting quite off-topic) here is that there are a lot of people for whom access to jobs is what matters, and if they have sufficient means they will move wherever they need to in order to get access to jobs. If they have kids, to schools. If they’re unattached, nightlife. Living with other folks of the same racial background is purely correlative and not causative at that point.
I have a friend who moved their family into the 3rd ward in Houston and lived there for a few years because it let them cycle to work. Only after having their bike stolen twice, car once, and shootings in the area have they considered moving. I’ve had another friend live for over a year in an apartment complex quite outside of their racial/socio-economic/sexual groupings simply because that’s where they ended up when January rolled around and they needed a cheap place that let them have pets.
I’ve had other friends move from Houston to less diverse areas and, despite getting to live with folks who are closer to them in group alignment, express annoyance at not having access to the food and culture that they left behind–so, they’re that other end of the spectra where diversity was their big concern.
All this is to say…we all pay a great deal of lip-service to diversity and whatnot, but when the chips are down people are gonna do what is most economically effective–if that means moving as a straight Catholic into the gayborhood, or building your townhouses in the middle of a Hispanic neighborhood, or eating at the Vietnamese place because it’s consistently half the price of any of the other food options (your own nominal heritage’s included), so be it.
Of course, it’s a lot harder to make convincing simulations of economic differences and a call-to-action because of a whole host of historical baggage.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate what you said.
I don’t really foresee a call-to-action (based on diversity statistics). It has been and will be something of a process where people settle in different behaviors based on their situation (in the article, say a behavior is a neighborhood). If your situation is dire, diversity is hardly the first thing on your mind. Basically, if you have an exam tomorrow, you may not be looking into alternate ways of solving the problem at hand after you found one that is in line with what the professor has taught you.
The way I interpret it: the article is begging you to keep an open mind to diversity whenever possible; by saying that if you are not aware of it, you are going to end up being that statistic that is causing division. (With something close to a proof from statistics)
If you are not pushing against that boundary in your head every so often (especially when you can), you are passively doing a disservice to humanity. :-p
I’m gonna bite, despite agreeing with Irene’s comment that this is almost never asked in earnest, and I’m not convinced it is here.
The reality is, society at large treats you as they perceive you. If they perceive you as a square, you’ll get treated like a square. If they perceive you as a triangle, likewise. In all the respects that “identify as a shape” can actually map onto reality — this doesn’t apply to race, but does apply to gender — people usually make efforts to change the way they’re perceived. They’re often successful at this, and as a result (going back to the analogy), the shape that identifies as a circle (regardless of what shape they started as) is perceived as a circle and treated as such.
For shapes who identify as neither square nor triangle, it again comes down to how they’re perceived. Shapes tend to want to fit other shapes into either the ‘square’ or ‘triangle’ pigeonholes, even in spite of strong evidence that the pigeonholes don’t completely describe the shapes available.
Some shapes identify as the binary opposite to that which they started out at, but for many reasons — often class related — they can’t do everything others can to present as their identified shape. This doesn’t just mean the square identifying as a triangle gets treated as a square — they get perceived as a square “trying to be” a triangle, and the treatment Shape Society™ offers them is far, far worse.
In short, the social commentary is entirely adequate for what it’s describing, and your tangent is pretty tangential, but I hope maybe this helps elucidate something.