kirisutogomen: (lifeboat)
2015-02-28 01:03 pm
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It's a Smallish World After Some

Remember that shoe bomber? Well, I'm taking a class and one of my fellow students was a prominent member of Richard Reid's legal team. (I don't know if he was the lead or what, but he did seem to be the one the newspapers quoted.) We had a short interesting chat about how that experience gave him a lot of understanding of Reid's motivations, but that understanding Reid's motivations was no help in understanding the motivations of people who might superficially appear similar (e.g., the three girls who seem to be attempting to join the Islamic State).
kirisutogomen: (Default)
2010-03-09 07:53 am
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WoUtNW

The Word of Until the Next WoUtNW is propinquity.

People of similar demographic attributes tend to live near one another. People are more likely to fall in love with people with similar demographic attributes. People are more likely to fall in love with people they live near.

The tricky question is which way the causality is flowing. Is the tendency towards assortative mating driven by endogamous norms (with or without some innate endogamy drive), or is it just the statistical consequence of assortative residential location plus the tendency people have to fall in love preferentially with people they see fairly often (Russian mail-order brides notwithstanding)?