Rules Of The Game #27: Is Diversity Diverse?

[koganbot]

Latest column, where I discuss the "diversity" issue I raised here last week, and I add a new twist.

The Rules Of The Game #27: Is Diversity Diverse?

The new twist is this question: Doesn't cultural diversity, like biodiversity, depend on a certain amount of isolation, so that dominant modes of thought don't come in and wipe out everything else?

Oh, and I quote you all (or some of you, anyway).

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Having finished the Duncan Watts book you talked about in a previous column, I think that searchability is a huge issue here -- not sure if it's directedly or tangentially related. There are all kinds of trade-offs when we enter online information sharing (even granting that not everyone has constant internet access, I would assume MOST people who would join a given convo about this stuff have access to email) -- if you're a teenage custom car enthusiast in Denver, you probably don't have tons of options. But if you're a teenage custom car enthusiast in Nebraska with the internet, you kind of take what you can get -- you can dabble.

I think one thing the internet does is tend toward dabbling, so that obsession requires less grunt work than it once did. This is good in that it necessarily "broadens scopes" -- if you like girl groups and aren't just leafing through broken down jukeboxes, you're going to get information about X Y Z etc. with a google search; but this might also disperse your attention for being a collector/obsessive. You'd become a dabbler, an enthusiast.

One question I have is -- which is the better model for, say, a department of dilletantes: lots of obsessives with distinct (if overlapping) interests, or lots of dilettantes? My intuition says the former category are key "pillars" in diverse group discussion to provide some kind of expertise, with more general dilettantes making up a good portion of the group. The rolling threads are good examples of this happening -- a few pillars saturate the thread with sheer DATA (xhuxk & country, say) and the community, similarly but not as extensively interested, is occasionally (in xhuxk's case quite frequently) engaged around it.

Anyway, these questions don't come up quite as much, I'd imagine, in academic or scientific (scholarly/specialist) disciplines, though there are some interesting parallels in diabetes research. Someone like Diane Faustus, who successful reversed late-stage diabetes in mice (and is beginning human trials as of this past year apparently), amounts to a "diabetes dilettante," someone who throws ideas at walls and has a good ratio of making them stick, but isn't recognized for specialization. The majority of the scientific community (in terms of scientists) are focused on getting their work published, hence become extreme specialists, to the point that no particularly leap-and-bound-type discoveries get made at all (because no one wants to provide great sums for unknown research; whereas lots of people will provide small sums to achieve known or predictable results).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

...not as extensively knowledgeable, I should say (not "interested"), though I'm not sure this is actually the case with rolling country. I would guess that xhuxk listens to more music than most of the people on the thread do, though, and he has the added bonus of being good at analyzing it, too -- that's a part of collecting that usually isn't as high-stakes (it's more about knowing how to accumulate, not analyze, the difference between collecting rare books and writing reviews of rare books).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Blah Denise Faustman, not Diane Faustus! Who will be the fictional scientist character in my upcoming novel Meet the Beaties (I might actually write this!).