Sean Last's Critiques of Diversity and "Social Cohesion"

I also want to address Sean Lasts’ 2018 post on diversity where he explicitly breaks down Putnam, different studies by Alberto Alesina and others. First, he doesn’t address the most important studies we have here. His post is mostly a critique on studies dealing with self-reported “trust” and other surveys – which were always the weakest of the studies counter-diversity proponents ever used. The gist of my criticisms are that 1) Its not a complete critique and 2) Sean can’t really control for IQ or other things here. If you do this, you basically violate the left’s assumptions on race, and you can only vindicate East Asian and white (high-IQ) “diversity” – this is not the lived reality of “diversity” in western countries today, and not what pundits mean when they say “diversity.” Plus, the west was sold on “diversity” being a “strength” – there is no evidence in his post to suggest this is the case. After controlling for SES and IQ, Sean makes the conclusion that “diversity probably doesn’t decrease social cohesion.” However, most of the studies still show some negative effect or no effect once the analysis is done. So, the results Sean uses don’t really substantiate this conclusion, they’re just weaker than before.

Imagine that you live in a very diverse society of only blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Imagine there is no real racial segregation and you experience predictable levels of crime and income disparities, paying for welfare, govt disruption etc. and you also feel this society is unfair and atomizing. Over time, you attribute this at least partly to “diversity.” However, Sean visits you one day to give you some news – turns out that diversity qua diversity is not actually a problem at all. He tells you that, after he controlled for IQ, racial differences in crime rates, and the tendency of Asians to be more introverted and collectivist, all the negative effects of diversity went away. See, you are likely to find these arguments very unhelpful. Sean has empirically taken away too many of the essences of what “diversity” is supposed to capture – and such awareness hasn’t improved the situation at all. I have partially written a response to this post, but some user ‘Matty, The Slav’ does the best job in succinctly criticizing this so I will shamelessly take his paragraph from youtube and post it unaltered here:

Let's presume that diversity only marginally affects cohesion once you tease out SES. This still doesn't dismiss the optimality of an ethnostate. If you optimized all of the variables in these models (ones which have decent r² at least) but treated diversity as trivial, then you'd still be missing out on that marginal increase in cohesion that homogeneity predicts. That's sort of what the model tells us. So your obsession with SES being greater than diversity in increasing cohesion is absurd, as no ethnocentrist has ever suggested diversity trumps all other factors, just that it has an effect. Rather, these designs don't control for genetic diversity directly, rather implicitly. This study does: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21079 What you'll find in this study is that the models' r² are consistently 10-80%, depending on the model design. What is found on Table 12, for instance, is that an increase of genetic diversity, after controlling for a variety of geographic variables, predicts a decrease in interpersonal trust. All the other tables tell the exact same story: genetic Diversity causes civil conflict and ethnic conflict even after controlling for a variety of geographic, ethno-social, and institutional factors. As for the mechanism behind this, they actually bring up sociobiology as a potential explanation (though they don't cite anything on genetic similarity theory, [See: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2005.00216.x] which is the lens that I see these results through, it's still consistent with genetic Similarity theory.) As to how this all relates to prescriptions, it's clear that encouraging people to be around those who are more genetically similar to themselves, on the societal and individual level, will mitigate the frequency and severity of both civil conflict and interethnic conflict. Even if we dismiss trust or cohesion as bases for our prescriptions, we can still use conflict-laden bases to argue for the ethnostate. I'd appreciate critiques on this. I really want to create a strong basis for ethnocentrism. Edit: I scoured the literature on this niche study of diversity and found a replication of my study published 4 months ago. It basically confirms Everything from the 2015 paper with more sophisticated methods. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://ftp.iza.org/dp11487.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjc9LHKuY7dAhVH2IMKHa6xDnUQFjAHegQIIBAB&usg=AOvVaw0dltqL7YvYeYhjvmb_cTv5 SEAN, you're wrong on this buddy. Diversity does not tell you that increased interethnic interaction has occurred. Segregation is real. Atomization is mediating this. How the fuck do you not put this into context.

There are many users that have pointed these things out, but I liked this one best. Again, I don’t know why AltHype and Sean went this direction in 2018 but I plan to discuss it later. To be clear, I’m not dismissing the things Sean lays out in his post - but IMO they are very weak and a lot of stronger evidence against diversity is missing