[MUD-Dev] Trouble Makers or Regular Citizens

[Kristen L. Koster]

on 4/9/2000 12:34 AM, Jon Lambert wrote:

> Par Winzell wrote:
> 
> I've always thought that diversity is antithetical to community building.
> Strong communities form because of commonly held values.  The more
> diverse a community is the less commonly held values it has.  The less
> commonly held values a community has, the less value individuals place
> in being a member of that community.  The less value individuals place
> in a community, the less productive that community becomes.
> 'Productive' being defined as the rate a community produces anything
> of value.  As diversity increases and commonly held values decrease a
> community will reach a point where the only commonly held value is
> diversity.  At that point it ceases to function as a tool of production,
> it just exists.

I was with you until the "less productive" part. A community can still be
highly productive with a very diverse population and just a few basic shared
values. The most obvious are the ones that are most basic in Maslow's
heirarchy. Survival and shelter alone are sufficient to make an extremely
diverse community extremely productive. So are other basic motivators such
as greed or social standing. The latter are interesting because they do not
require high investment in the community values per se, merely in the
product of the community or the community's mere existence.

> Peer pressure does scale with size, it does not scale with diversity.
> So the issue is one of managing diversity, not necessarily size.

Of course, diversity inevitably increases with size--not necessarily in
parallel, as you point out, but certainly in correlation. It's pretty easy
to do a Venn diagram for it.

-Raph 




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