How much is enough?

An aggravating article (Opposites Don’t Attract (And That’s Bad News) by Jonah Lehrer) only because it is such a good example of how journalists write the story they wish to write and treat evidence and logic as purely incidental dressing to the narrative.

In this instance, Lehrer wishes to make the case that people ought to want to make friends with all sorts of individuals, particularly people who are not like themselves. It is a hoary trope that almost mocks itself.

His first evidence is summarized:

It doesn’t matter where we live or how we grew up or which language we speak – we still want to spend time with people who feel similar.

Without either a rationale or evidence, he concludes this happens because:

It’s simply more comfortable.

The question Lehrer should be asking is not whether people ought to socialize with like minded people but whether they in fact do so. He does muster at least a modicum of evidence to support that argument (and I suspect that with digging a robust case can be made that in most situations people do like to socialize with their own). But having demonstrated a fact - birds of feather flock together - he fails to ask the next logical question which is - why do they flock together. Instead, he simply leaps to the conclusion that it is simply more comfortable.

Had he asked the why question he might have headed in a different direction. Several obvious alternate answers come to mind that might take precedence over the simple imputation that it is more comfortable. Perhaps socializing with similar people is easier (common assumptions), or more entertaining (shared weltanschauung), or more productive (common language and knowledge base), or less risky (accidental insults or misunderstandings), or more likely to yield commercial or social advantages down the road. Instead, in his eagerness to condemn those that don't share his goal of networking with unknown (and potentially unknowable) people, he doesn't ask but instead assumes: they are lazy rubes.

As his sole evidence for the advantage of diversity in networking, he offers this summary of a study:

Other studies have found that having a diverse social network comes with impressive payoffs, such as this analysis of Stanford Business School graduates. (Those entrepreneurs with more “entropic” and “diverse” social networks scored three times higher on a metric of innovation, suggesting that the ability to access “non-redundant information from peers” is a crucial source of new ideas.)

Well, based on my detailed scientific research at bars near harbors, fishermen consuming large volumes of alcohol also have impressive metrics of innovation, particularly in their narratives about the one that got away. This whole article is a sad joke of a stereotype. Sad in part because it deals with a real and potentially highly useful topic - how much diversity of thought and behavior can be accommodated within any stable social system. You want at least some variation in thought and behavior because that drives adaptive evolution. At the same time you don't want so much diversity of thought and behavior that you undermine the cohesion of the group in responding to exogenous shocks. I am firmly of the view that every system needs some internally generated variation in order to constantly evolve with changing circumstances but I don't know how much variation is optimum. And I won't find out from Lehrer because it appears that for him it is simply an article of faith that any amount of variation is good and anyone disagreeing is a less developed person.

Lehrer seems so intently blinkered that he entirely misses the point of the somewhat intriguing research in his eagerness to elevate his own status by putting down others. Hmmph.