Polarized preferences create a need for segregation

I have argued in the past that cultural and linguistic homogeneity help facilitate societal efficiency but that that efficiency can sometimes come at the cost of lesser effectiveness. In other words, the conditions that foster common cultural and linguistic homogeneity can also isolate the societal system from new knowledge. It is not an either-or situation, it is, especially in an exogenously evolving environment, a trade-off and optimization equation.

The faster the exogenous environment evolves, the more important it is that there be sufficient cultural and linguistic variation within the system but that variation comes at a cost in efficiency. I use the example from Dunkirk, It contained the three words “but if not … ”

Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

Some other examples are here, here, and here.

All of which relates to a new paper, Why Echo Chambers are Useful by Ole Jann and Christoph Schottmuller. From their Abstract

Why do people appear to forgo information by sorting into “echo chambers”? We construct a highly tractable multi-sender, multi-receiver cheap talk game in which players choose with whom to communicate. We show that segregation into small, homogeneous groups can improve everybody’s information and generate Pareto improvements. Polarized preferences create a need for segregation; uncertainty about preferences and the availability of public information magnify this need. Using data from Twitter, we show several behavioral patterns that are consistent with the results of our model.

Early days to be specifying points of optimization, but one of the few papers I have seen empirically investigating the trade-offs between homogenous systems (potentially "echo chambers") and variant systems in terms of costs between efficiency and effectiveness.