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[spekkeh]

Eh, Switzerland has among the highest immigrant rates in the world and 4 different language regions... it's federally organsied because it's diverse, not the other wa round.

Yeah I didn't mean to single out Switzerland as cheating or anything, but the federalization keeps the groups clearly distinct. There are technically four ethnic groups that make up the ethnicity 'Dutch' in the Netherlands (actually there are many more in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but I take it they mean Netherlands proper). Frisian, Lower Saxon, Lower Franconian and Middle Franconian. If the Netherlands would have formed as a federalized state according to ethnic groups (and not united provinces later coalescing into one nation state), people would likely still identify themselves Frisian, Saxon, etc, instead of Dutch. That the diversity rate here is lower than the immigration rate, furthermore means that people self identify as Dutch even when it's not technically their ethnicity.

A similar thing probably happens in the US. Ethnically, the WASP Americans are arguably as ethnically diverse as Western Europe. But whereas we would consider them distinct in Europe, they'd call themselves "American" in the USA, and be considered a single group.

 

[Okamid3n]

You look at all possible options for picking a pair of people. If there are 2 groups, that gives you four options. If there are 4 groups, 16 options, etc.

Let's list the options, shall we?

If there are two groups, the possible pairings are (1,1), (1,2), (2,2), (2,1). 50% chance of picking two people of the same group.

Same thing with a 25/25/25/25 split, 25% chance of picking a group containing two of the same group.

 

[Irminsul]

That is to say, in western nations the identifier of race tends to come to the forefront when discussing diversity. This in turn is partially down to the history and nature of the slave trade, where the ethnic identities of African slaves were marginalised and slowly erased for many, leaving most (but not all) of the resulting minority population to be identified and identify itself not as Yoruba or Igbo or so forth, but merely... 'Black'. This reduction to race, especially with various western europeans (but only the 'good' sorts) as 'white', consequently got applied to others, resulting in terms like 'Middle Eastern' and 'Asian'.

In the US, maybe.

All discussions around Brexit about evil Polish immigrants stealing jobs from hard-working-if-they-had-the-chance British people should tell you that it's not like that in all Western countries.

 

[patapuf]

You're telling me that there are big differences between tribe A and tribe B from down the road in PNG compared to the range of ethnicities you may find in say, Brazil or any country in the Americas whose populations are made up almost entirely of people from all over the rest of the world. It's all relative.

Yes? They have diferrent languages, customs, genetics ect. How else do you define differences between ethinities?

Prejudices that they are "all the same" is one of the reasons we have BS borders in Africa for example.

I'm not arguing places like Brazil or the americas are not diverse btw.

 

[Giant Panda]

I had guessed Indonesia. Do I get points for being geographically close?

On a serious note, it is disappointing that many of the countries high on the list have less stability, so it seems to me ethnic tensions are still causing major issues especially in poorer countries.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

Let's list the options, shall we?

If there are two groups, the possible pairings are (1,1), (1,2), (2,2), (2,1). 50% chance of picking two people of the same group.

Same thing with a 25/25/25/25 split, 25% chance of picking a group containing two of the same group.

Edited my post but your reply was quicker. We are in agreement.

 

[KingK]

Adding to this, and in response to some posters saying there is no objective way to measure diversity: there is, it's called genetics. And some may find this surprising but a person who would be ethnically classified as European and another person who would be classified as Chinese are likely to be more genetically similar than two people from central Africa that would both be classified as Black.

Yeah, this is what we learned in introductory human anthropology. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most genetically diverse region of the world by a large margin, because humans exclusively lived there for a long time.

 

[His Majesty]

No it means that international audiences get to criticize such products - even to the point that they decide to not buy them. Nobody has a gun to any Japanese developers head, they can do as they please. It's just if they narrow the audience of some of their products as a result, that's all on them.

Fair enough, I just don't think it is fair to expect international (aka American?) games from highly homogeneous countries nor do I think it would be beneficial. I absolutely love games like The Witcher 1, Metro and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for their Slavic influences and atmosphere.

 

[shintoki]

I think counting tribes of >1000 people seperatly is cheating tbh.

I was going to say the same thing. You're basically counting 30 million people as one, yet a tribe of 200 as one.

 

[orava]

Finland is pretty low. It works great for us and nothing wrong with that.

 

[PaulloDEC]

Man, I knew Australia wasn't very diverse, but yikes. Had no idea we were that non-diverse.

 

[Jotaka]

I mean its not like there are a million resources exist to learn about people not like you or that their products are made for export in a global industry :/

 

[Charles Brandon]

You're essentially arguing that "eyeballing" from a cultural imperialist pov is more valid than actual anthroplogy, linguistics, and genetics.

The arbitrary lines that European countries drew on maps hundreds of years ago don't factually define diversity, even if they did define hundreds of years of wars, stereotypes, and flat out bigotry. Could you at least consider that your dismissal of the diversity of these countries is informed by your perspective as an outsider to their cultures?

No, it's defined by the methodology of the study, which is essentially self-selecting and does not attempt to determine the depth of ethnic difference on any other basis than the perspective of people from any particular country. That is interesting but as measure of diversity or difference it is somewhat superficial. I do acknowledge and did acknowledge already that this basically boils down to a semantic argument on what you think "diversity" actually means.

 

[Dylan]

Papa don't preach.

 

[patapuf]

I was going to say the same thing. You're basically counting 30 million people as one, yet a tribe of 200 as one.

Think of it like of places like the galapagos islands. There's an immense diversity of species there, with very low population. They don't have a huge impact on a global scale, since they can only exist there. That doesn't mean they don't exist or that all animals on these islands are similar to each other.

 

[JonnyDBrit]

Adding to this, and in response to some posters saying there is no objective way to measure diversity: there is, it's called genetics. And some may find this surprising but a person who would be ethnically classified as European and another person who would be classified as Chinese are likely to be more genetically similar than two people from central Africa that would both be classified as Black.

Admittedly in that particular case it doesn't help that fuckin' Alexander the Great had an empire that spanned the middle east, and in its collapse there were a bunch of military garrisons who made small greek kingdoms in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Sorry, just felt like a chance to bring that up.

Otherwise though, factors to also bear in mind are that not all of these tribes and ethnicities do allow themselves to be measured genetically, while others still have simply slipped through the radar because of not being considered by the people drawing out samples. Many are recognised as ethnic minorities because that's what they want to be, and their governments have chosen to recognise such - such a point is much bigger a deal in many post-colonial countries than it is say, western european nations, both in people wanting it and the government being willing to recognise it. In contrast, see how long it took the Cornish people to get recognised by the British government as being in any way distinct from 'English'. Meanwhile say, China, is of mixed interest in properly categorising the numerous ethnicities within its borders, because it can potentially run counter to the whole concept of a unified China, but they love appropriating the cultural stuff to show off. Point is, different countries have different metrics, this informs what we are able to use for making any study like this; no-one actually has the time and money to sample every possibly distinct population from every country on Earth in a singular experiment, it's all compiled from existing data.

In the US, maybe.

All discussions around Brexit about evil Polish immigrants stealing jobs from hard-working-if-they-had-the-chance British people should tell you that it's not like that in all Western countries.

As a Brit, I will say that this exception largely exists with regards to other white ethnicities, because we have to bother with distinguishing others from ourselves. Many will complain about Poles or the Turks, but we outright warped 'Asian' to mean South Asian.

 

[Tal Shiar Agent]

Lol at the Netherlands being 151 and so terrified of Islamization.

But at the same time, I'm pretty sure that means the methodology is seriously flawed. Self-defining as belonging to a group would be severely slanted towards federalist states, where people self-identify as their group over their country. Like Switzerland, or Indonesia, etc.

I mean, just look at the immigrant rates and cross-check it with the list:

By immigration population the United States outstrips the rest of the world by a large margin. 19.8% of the world's immigrants are in the United States. Next highest is 4.9% in Germany.

 

[Fallout-NL]

Lol at the Netherlands being 151 and so terrified of Islamization.

Yeah, that does explain some things.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

I don't understand the math.

In a 50/50 split, you pick one individual, and then the next one has a 50% chance of being from the same ethnic group as the first pick, no matter who you picked first.

In a 25/25/25/25 split, you pick one individual and the next one has a 25% chance of being in the same group as the first pick, no matter who you picked first. Yes, there's only 6.25% chance of picking two individuals from group one, but there's also 6.25% chance of picking two individuals from group 2, 3 and 4, which adds up to 25%.

You have to two groups, A and B. Both groups make up 50% each of your (presumably large) total population.

Assuming complete random chance, if you picked one person out of the total population, the chances of them being from column A is 50%.

If you were to randomly choose a second person, the chance of being from column A is also...50%.

The chance of choice 1 being from group A and choice 2 being from A is the product of their individual probabilities, or .50 x .50, or 25%.

If you begin to introduce populatiom C, D, E, & F, and their numbers are tiny compared to A or B, the odds don't drop that much for picking a person from group A. This is what is described in the OP; having one person from a lot of different groups isn't a great reflection of diversity because the odds might change only slightly, like .49 x .49, or 24%.

However, as C, D, E, F grow closer to A or B, the probability of selecting A drops exponentially. As I pointed out in my previous post, if you change a population from two evenly mixed groups to 10 (a 5-fold increase), the probability drops 25-fold when looking for group A.

This is only the most basic probability model. The probability of picking any group (A-F) twice from the total population of the groups gets a bit more complicated.

 

[Gutek]

I'm warning you guys - America is waking up and we're not gonna take kindly to these fake news.

Spoiler

I tried to convince GAF before about this but was shouted down. We here in America do not understand the ethnicity thing. It's all about skin color here.

 

[Okamid3n]

The chance of choice 1 being from group A and choice 2 being from A is the product of their individual probabilities, or .50 x .50, or 25%.

And the chance of choice 1 being from group B and choice 2 being from group B is also 0.5 x 0.5 or 25%. This adds up to 50% chance of picking two people from either (A,A) or (B,B).

I agree with your overall point, though. I was just confused as to whether my math was wrong when your original statement was that in a 50/50 split there was only 25% chance of a sample of 2 people being from the same group. There is actually a 50% chance of such a split producing a sample of 2 people from the same group.

 

[Christhor]

I'm warning you guys - America is waking up and we're not gonna take kindly to these fake news.

Spoiler

I tried to convince GAF before about this but was shouted down. We here in America do not understand the ethnicity thing. It's all about skin color here.

I think it's a valid point. From history it seems easier for people to get along if they have the same skin colour. The brits might dislike eastern European people, but imagine if they had a different skin colour?

Nobody in Sweden is going to complain about all the Finnish people immigrating to their country.

 

[30yearsofhurt]

Would a Mancunian and a Liverpudlian be in the same ethnic group?
If not you're comparing apples with oranges.

 

[EGM1966]

Interesting but flawed I'd say. The approach seems to skew in a certain direction.

Personally I'd be interested to see a view of major cities vs countries.

Diversity clearly isn't as diverse as many would think which actually seems about right. We're progressing from a place of distinct countries and majority statistically still have a major bias to the core indigenous population.

Real diversity will require more years yet and a lot more social integration and change. Heck true diversity might require a world state to truly achieve.

 

[Charles Brandon]

Would a Mancunian and a Liverpudlian be in the same ethnic group?
If not you're comparing apples with oranges.

It depends on whether British people surveyed considered the two groups to be "socially relevant ethnic groupings".

 

[Hashmal_Bringer_of_Order]

I was going to say the same thing. You're basically counting 30 million people as one, yet a tribe of 200 as one.

Try several hundred million Chinese as one vs 200 dudes in PNG as one, lol.

Would a Mancunian and a Liverpudlian be in the same ethnic group?
If not you're comparing apples with oranges.

Sort of, because Sub-Saharan Africa and other "diverse" places haven't gone through the process that molded these types of "tribes" into the "Nations (super-tribes) we know today.

 

[Gutek]

I think it's a valid point. From history it seems easier for people to get along if they have the same skin colour. The brits might dislike eastern European people, but imagine if they had a different skin colour?

Nobody in Sweden is going to complain about all the Finnish people immigrating to their country.

I think you're underestimating this a little.

There's even Swiss people bitching about all the Germans moving down there.

 

[kswiston]

By immigration population the United States outstrips the rest of the world by a large margin. 19.8% of the world's immigrants are in the United States. Next highest is 4.9% in Germany.

If you go by absolute numbers. The US is the third most populated country in the world. Most of the others in the top 10 either have strict limitations on immigration or are developing countries that few people actually want to immigrate to.

So ya, not really apples to apples to compare a country of 325M to a European state that is between a quarter and a 30th the size using absolute numbers.

 

[Irminsul]

Nobody in Sweden is going to complain about all the Finnish people immigrating to their country.

No, that's the other way around, actually. But of course also due to a shared history.

Also, I find some posts in here a bit weird. I mean, Papua New Guinea may be very diverse, but the different tribes probably rarely mingle with each other. Which probably doesn't fit the definition of "diversity" one would use in most Western countries. And I'd be really cautious with a higher rating on this list being necessarily better, even if you think cultural diversity in a society is a good thing.

 

[Trokil]

I'm warning you guys - America is waking up and we're not gonna take kindly to these fake news.

Spoiler

I tried to convince GAF before about this but was shouted down. We here in America do not understand the ethnicity thing. It's all about skin color here.

I noticed this in a lot of discussion about racism. People seem never to understand, how that works between ethnicities. For example how the English treated the Irish or the racism against people from Eastern Europe. All the same skin color but the racism still is existing.

 

[mnz]

I think you're underestimating this a little.

There's even Swiss people bitching about all the Germans moving down there.

There are West Germans bitching about East Germans moving west lol

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

Interesting but flawed I'd say. The approach seems to skew in a certain direction.

Personally I'd be interested to see a view of major cities vs countries.

Diversity clearly isn't as diverse as many would think which actually seems about right. We're progressing from a place of distinct countries and majority statistically still have a major bias to the core indigenous population.

Real diversity will require more years yet and a lot more social integration and change. Heck true diversity might require a world state to truly achieve.

Technology will be key in this. Imagine a world where you can cheaply travel between any two points on the globe in an hour - such a revolution would do more to break down cultural (and ethnic) barriers than a hundred peace treaties or trade agreements.

 

[LOLDSFAN]

You mean America that has ALL BLACK TV shows that get high ratings like Empire, Blackish, Power, Atlanta, Insecure, Being Mary Jane, etc...

An All Asian American show in Fresh Off the Boat.

Not to mention TV shows lead by minority actors like Mindy Kaling, Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, and Aziz Ansari.

A show being all black or all Asian is the complete opposite of diverse.

 

[JonnyDBrit]

Would a Mancunian and a Liverpudlian be in the same ethnic group?
If not you're comparing apples with oranges.

Funny enough, there actually is a fine scale genetic map of the UK:
https://tinyurl.com/z6jhrjd

So they probably are, but actually may be distinct from the rest of the UK, on a genetic basis.

 

[patapuf]

I think it's a valid point. From history it seems easier for people to get along if they have the same skin colour. The brits might dislike eastern European people, but imagine if they had a different skin colour?

Nobody in Sweden is going to complain about all the Finnish people immigrating to their country.

Many groups in europe assimilated into each other.

And theres plenty of animosity between the remaining ethinicities in europe. It took WWII to make us stop killing each other en masse, but that's very recent. Africa isn't exactly a beacon of stability either and neither was asia.

Some of the worst massakers and genocides in human history were commited by people that had the same skin colour as their victims.

 

[CheDominik]

I think it's a valid point. From history it seems easier for people to get along if they have the same skin colour. The brits might dislike eastern European people, but imagine if they had a different skin colour?

Nobody in Sweden is going to complain about all the Finnish people immigrating to their country.

Yeah hundreds of wars and civil wars in European history really show that people get along as soon as they share a skin color.

 

[teruterubozu]

Technology will be key in this. Imagine a world where you can cheaply travel between any two points on the globe in an hour - such a revolution would do more to break down cultural (and ethnic) barriers than a hundred peace treaties or trade agreements.

Perhaps. The internet is supposedly a globally connecting tech, but it also seems to create more isolationists.

 

[Gutek]

Many groups in europe assimilated into each other.

And theres plenty of animosity between the remaining ethinicities in europe. It took WWII to make us stop killing each other en masse, but that's very recent. Africa isn't exactly a beacon of stability either and neither was asia.

Some of the worst massakers and genocides in human history were commited by people that had the same skin colour as their victims.

I mean, just look at the Balkans.

 

[lightskintwin]

A show being all black or all Asian is the complete opposite of diverse.

LOL Not within a White dominated society.

 

[Zaru]

No, that's the other way around, actually. But of course also due to a shared history.

Also, I find some posts in here a bit weird. I mean, Papua New Guinea may be very diverse, but the different tribes probably rarely mingle with each other. Which probably doesn't fit the definition of "diversity" one would use in most Western countries. And I'd be really cautious with a higher rating on this list being necessarily better, even if you think cultural diversity in a society is a good thing.

Cautious? It'd be completely pointless to use a ranking on this list as a measure of "success" regarding diversity.
Almost every high-ranking country here was made ethnically diverse by arbitrary colonial border-drawing and a historical lack of assimilation/mixing. It's meaningless diversity, and not much better than a pure ethnostate. And the latter has much better odds of working in favor of its citizens.

 

[karasu]

I think it's a valid point. From history it seems easier for people to get along if they have the same skin colour. The brits might dislike eastern European people, but imagine if they had a different skin colour?

What? White people have had two world wars despite their shared skin color.

 

[Christhor]

Yeah hundreds of wars and civil wars in European history really show that people get along as soon as they share a skin color.

Who's saying that? There's been wars between people of the same skin colour all over the world. People are always going to dislike people who are different from them, but it seems like race can make this a much larger issue, especially with integration. I'd love to be proven wrong and that anyone of any race can actually move to any of the top 20 countries on this list and not have any issues/be accepted as one of their own. It would be really neat to see a place like that.

 

[Principate]

Yeah hundreds of wars and civil wars in European history really show that people get along as soon as they share a skin color.

It's funny because it's true. No other continent is known for it's wars quite like the Europeans.

 

[efyu_lemonardo]

Perhaps. The internet is supposedly a globally connecting tech, but it also seems to create more isolationists.

I think there are two reasons for that:

The first is that communicating over the Internet is not the same as meeting a person in real life, and our brains have evolved to respond much more to the latter. In this sense I believe that connecting the world virtually is only the first step towards connecting it completely.

The second reason is something Historians like to talk about: social and cultural change has always been driven by recombination of different factions leading both to unification of separate groups as well as emergence of new subgroups within those groups. It's basically one everlasting mixer.
In this sense it's possible to imagine a future where humanity is divided not along cultural or ethnic lines, but along ideological or intellectual lines, with each group being highly genetically diverse within itself.

 

[Gutek]

Who's saying that? There's been wars between people of the same skin colour all over the world. People are always going to dislike people who are different from them, but it seems like race can make this a much larger issue, especially with integration. I'd love to be proven wrong and that anyone of any race can actually move to any of the top 20 countries on this list and not have any issues/be accepted as one of their own.

This is not a Top 20 "most accepting of foreigners" list. Why are you conflating the two? Diversity doesn't mean acceptance or integration.

 

[lightskintwin]

What? White people have had two world wars despite their shared skin color.

He's still using a very colonialist viewpoint on skin color and the social/racial hierarchy that were created and gave a sense of unity of the same skin color towards/against somebody of a different skin color.

 

[Spectone]

Why does that list have the USSR on it?

 

[mnz]

Why does that list have the USSR on it?

The data is actually pretty old if you look at the documents. 1990s.

 

[Christhor]

This is not Top 20 "most accepting of foreigners" list. Why are you conflating the two? Diversity doesn't mean acceptance or integration.

Okay, so then what was with your initial point? Why compare this to America at all when the situation is completely different?

 

[Gutek]

Okay, so then what was with your initial point? Why compare this to America at all when the situation is completely different?

My point is there are countries more diverse than America. Quite a bit, actually.