In Praise of "Diversity"

Both the woke and the anti-woke fail to appreciate diversity's nature and value

In the King James Bible, Judges 12:5-6 offers this story of people using language to distinguish friend from foe:

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Today, among the Bible-literate, or the merely literate, a “shibboleth” is a marker of a certain group or class. When Bertie Wooster exclaims “what ho!” he marks himself as a old-fashioned Brit of the landed gentry. When Sarah Huckabee Sanders throws out a “y’all” to a crowd, she is saying “I’m one of you.” These are shibboleths.

There is immense diversity in shibboleths, and as the fate of the Ephraimites reminds us, they are not always put to such benign uses as a politician pandering to an audience.

I just used one such word. It is “diversity.”

Does that word give you a thrill or a chill? If you are American and politically engaged, and reading this in today’s polarized political climate, it’s likely one or the other.

Among progressives over the past couple of decades, “diversity” was elevated to a sacred word, a totem. Place it alongside “equity” and “inclusion” and you get “DEI” — the holy trinity of what I shall reluctantly call “wokeism.”¹

So what do you do if you despise wokeism, fear the “woke mind-virus,” and want the woke driven from the land? You track down the three words of the woke trinity and deliver woe unto those who speaketh them.

Long before the DOGE carnival started rolling, even before Trump took office, Elon Musk said that he expected to save $120 billion by finding and cutting all the spending on DEI. “That’s been sent down from on high, that all this DEI stuff has to go,” a source told The Washington Post. “Once all these guys get confirmed and he’s the president on Jan. 20, this is going to happen fast and furious.” Did it ever. It moved as fast as a pimply hacker jacked on Red Bull could type the three words of the woke trinity into a search bar. And delete whatever popped up.

“Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced on Friday that the department has terminated nearly 80 contracts,” reads a story on the Fox News website about the response to a DOGE review. All the terminated contracts contained one or more of the woke shibboleths. One covered “a Hawaii conference room rental for a 100-person Agriculture Department meeting on biodiversity for $11,000.”

That’s right. The Secretary of Agriculture’s list of woke crap she had cut included a conference on biodiversity. Because “diversity.”

But let’s be fair. That may have been the fault of an enthusiastic but clueless junior staffer trying to please the higher-ups.

Which is why something Co-President Elon Musk tweeted in November is significant.

Here’s the screen capture.

What we have here is someone who went through a government directory, saw “director of climate diversification,” and concluded this is another of those woke bureaucrats (“she/her”) sucking up tax dollars to promote woke bullshit. So he decided to broadcast it on X. Pretty routine. But then along came the world’s richest man, who had just bought himself the presidency, and was making plans to gut and remake the government to his liking. He saw this and retweeted it along with his personal comment — “so many fake jobs” — to his 219,000,000 followers.

With clocklike predictability, this naming-and-shaming immediately prompted a deluge of hate to pour down on an otherwise obscure government employee, forcing her to lock down her social media and hide from the Internet.

Just as predictably, journalists subsequently revealed that the “diversification” in that employee’s job title did not have quite the same meaning as “diversity” intoned as part of the holy trinity. In fact, the job of this government employee, who has three degrees from MIT and Oxford, was highly technical work making crops and infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather.

She wasn’t an Ephraimite. She was a scientist doing important work. But the Gileadites put her to the sword. Because “diversity.”

You can probably also guess that Musk never apologized for his grotesque behaviour. He didn’t even delete his brutally stupid tweet.

When Pol Pot set out to slaughter Cambodia’s urban intellectuals, he had a number of shibboleths he used to identify the enemy, including the wearing of glasses. So I suppose it could be worse.

And that’s it. That’s the most positive statement I can muster for this idiocy.

(UPDATE 05/05/25: After publishing this, I learned that Senator Ted Cruz built a whole database of allegedly “woke” science. Among its supposed revelations was a “woke” study of plants — “woke” because it used the word “diversify” in reference to plant biodiversity. Which means, of course, that every financial planner who has ever told a client to “diversify” his or her portfolio is a woke propagandist.)

Kimbal and Elon are sitting at a bong the night before. “You know what would be hilarious?” says Elon. “Mooning the president?” says Kimbal. “Better,” says Elon.

All of this is foolish. All of it. “Diversity” should never have been turned into a holy word. Nor should it be stigmatized by those who despise wokeism.

Both the woke and the anti-woke have done “diversity” a severe disservice. They have both popularized a cramped and crude definition of “diversity” that obscures the enormous value of “diversity” more expansively defined.

Diversity is not sacred, as in the woke trinity. Nor is it demonic, as the Muskovites would have it.

It is simply an excellent tool for helping us better understand reality and make better decisions.

Norio Ohga

Here’s a famous story from the annals of corporate lore.

In 1953, a small, little-known Japanese company that made tape recorders got a letter from a young man name Norio Ohga. Their tape recorder was terrible, the young man informed the company.

Ohga was a student of music and he offered more than empty gripes. He had clearly informed himself about recording devices and he made specific, pointed, informed criticisms. So the two co-founders of the company, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, hired Ohga to be a part-time consultant while he continued his studies of music.

A decade later, at the unprecedentedly young age of 34, Ohga was named executive director of the company, which by then was called Sony. Ohga helped turn Sony into a global giant in the last decades of the 20th century.

I doubt any DEI seminar will feature this as a story about diversity. Ohga and the others were all men of the same ethnicity. From the woke perspective, that’s pure monotone, the very opposite of diversity.

But at the time of Ohga’s hiring, Sony was populated by electrical engineers and businessmen. As a musician, Ohga’s skills, talents, education, experience, and interests were very unusual. He was different. And while that difference was not all that made Ohga valuable to Sony, it was part of it.

Diversity is difference. Ohga’s hiring boosted diversity within Sony. And made Sony a better company.

A musician among engineers boosts diversity. So does a rice farmer among ranchers. A poet among accountants. A short man on a basketball team. And on. And on. And on. The number of ways in which humans can differ from one to the next may be greater than the number of humans.

But that is not how wokeism thinks of “diversity.” And thanks to the influence of wokeism, it’s not what most people think of when they hear “diversity.”

In wokeism, “diversity” refers to a handful of demographic characteristics. Sex, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Sometimes age. Sometimes physical and mental ability. Sometimes income and wealth. But that’s it. A highly diverse group is one diverse in those characteristics. Everyone in the group could share the same education, experience, worldview, and politics, but if they have different skin tones and sexual preferences and gender identities the group is highly “diverse.” Conversely, a group of white, heterosexual men that included Elon Musk, Volodymyr Zelensky, Connor McDavid, Slavoj Žižek, a Glasgow mechanic, a teenager who delivers pizzas in Berlin, and a homeless man who lives under a bridge in Sydney would be a group with zero “diversity.”

Of course there is a reason for wokeism’s narrow understanding of “diversity.” It is a movement devoted to social justice and the demographic categories wokeism is concerned with are groups that have been given a raw deal, in the past and present. The goal of wokeism’s drive for “diversity” is to rectify those injustices. Whether wokeism does that wisely or effectively or fairly are debates for another day. Justice is its focus.

Unfortunately, that perspective has driven out other ways of seeing “diversity.” That’s why, for the anti-woke, “diversity” has become a shibboleth for identifying the woke. And why they are doing something as transparently stupid as attacking people and programs for no reason other than the appearance of a word.

In effect, wokeism created an extremely narrow definition of “diversity” and massively popularized it. The anti-woke, in fighting wokeism, have adopted this same definition and are, in effect, aggressively promoting it further.

Both have made us dumber.

“Diversity” in its widest sense is the whole span of difference among humans. And diversity understood that way is indisputably a wonder that should be embraced, promoted, and used at every opportunity.

It pains me to repeat the cliche, but diversity really is our strength. Or at least it can be.

Photo by Slovakian photographer Dusan Beno, whose closeup shots of insects are breathtaking. Go have a look. Yes, for the entomologists among you, that’s a damselfly, not a dragonfly. But this photo is too cool to pass over on such a technicality.

In Superforecasting, Phil Tetlock and I looked at people who were demonstrably excellent forecasters of geopolitical events and found that one element of their thinking was critical to their success: They scored very high in “active open-mindedness.”

That means these excellent forecasters were not only willing to hear different viewpoints, they actively sought them out, treating difference as a value to be captured. In this way of thinking, if you tell me you agree entirely with my analysis, that may feel good to me but it adds nothing whatsoever to the quality of my analysis. If you instead come at the problem differently, and draw different conclusions, you may have captured something of value that I’ve missed. So I very much want to hear about your thinking. And if someone else thinks my analysis is entirely wrong, I want to hear why. The only cap on this process is time and mental exhaustion. When it comes to perspectives, more is always better.

And as I listen to all these different perspectives, I am constantly thinking about the quality of the evidence and reasoning that supports them. And I am constantly trying to figure out the implications of each view for the others. The goal is to produce the best possible synthesis of all the views, capturing what’s good in each, discarding what’s of no value, until I have a new view that is superior to any one of the views it contains.

In Superforecasting, we used the metaphor of a dragonfly’s eye, which is a large sphere with hundreds or thousands of lenses placed next to each other around the sphere. Each of those lenses has a slightly different perspective, meaning each is unique. Synthesize those hundreds or thousands of unique perspectives into a single vision and you get a magnificently clear and accurate picture of reality. Which is why dragonflies can pluck mosquitoes out of mid-air.

Wise people have understood this principle since ancient times, as illustrated by the parable of the blind men and the elephant. It’s thousands of years old and has appeared in many forms in many cultures but the essence of the parable is that blind men encounter an elephant. One man touches the trunk and concludes it is a snake. Another touches the elephant’s side and declares it a wall. A third touches the leg and says it’s a tree. Some versions of the story end in a fistfight. Others have the men pooling their insights and realizing together that the thing is an elephant.

The blind men may all be the same gender, race, or sexuality. Or not. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that each touches a different part of the elephant so each has a different bit of information. Their experiences are different so the group is diverse. Drawing on that diversity creates insight that could be had no other way.

Diversity makes us smarter.

Superforecasters synthesize diverse perspectives within their own minds. The blind men synthesized diversity within their small group. But synthesis can occur at any scale.

Think about a stock market. Millions of people from all over the world are trying to judge the future value of stocks, and they express their judgements by buying and selling. All these judgements are then “priced in” to the value of the stock.

Prediction markets are functionally the same. They nailed the presidential election last November. Why? They synthesized tons of diversity.

The same is true of democracy. What is an election but the synthesis of millions of perspectives? Democracy is going through a rough patch these days but there is nonetheless overwhelming evidence that democracy delivers the goods. Democracies handle crises better. They are more innovative. They have stronger economies and a higher quality of life. And they are more peaceful and stable.

In the 1930s, when central planning was the exciting new idea, and liberal democracies were in crisis, the idea that more autocratic societies would perform better was increasingly accepted. Then liberal democracies went to war with autocracies, and, to the surprise of many, the democracies out-produced and out-fought the autocracies. Why? It turned out that all the noise and confusion of democracy that people found so frustrating — so many different people with different perspectives pushing for different goals — was far better at understanding and responding to reality than a highly centralized system in which the many were told to shut up while a few attempted to make sense of reality and call the shots.

Diversity works. For an introduction to the science explaining why, see Scott Page’s The Diversity Bonus.

This is a fundamental insight of modern society and we can make use of it a thousand different ways — if we first recognize how the woke and anti-woke are hampering our understanding of diversity’s nature and value.

Universities are full of wokesters and stuffed to the rafters with DEI programs, so they tend to be highly diverse in wokeisms terms. But try to find a conservative in the psychology, sociology, or English departments. It’s only a little hard than finding someone who thinks that’s a problem. That’s because political diversity, and intellectual diversity more broadly, is seldom considered within the rubric of campus diversity. Which is madness. If there’s one place that diversity in its fullest sense should be understood and put to work it’s a university campus.

That dig will undoubtedly please the anti-woke. But notice something the anti-woke would not like at all: If we appreciate that diversity makes us collectively smarter, it becomes critical that the people who assemble groups and lead teams do not choose individuals solely on the basis of individual merit. The extent to which candidates add to diversity, or don’t, matters. In fact, it matters so much that it may be reason to choose the candidate who, in narrower terms, would be considered inferior. Think about Sony executives looking at Norio Ohga: Judged narrowly, Ohga was far less qualified than any number of other candidates whose education was exactly relevant to Sony. But he was a musician. They didn’t have musicians. Ohga had a new perspective that would make the collective smarter. So they chose Ohga.

So let’s not allow the woke or the anti-woke to spoil a good word and undermine an important concept.

Diversity: It’s a good thing.

1. “Woke” is one of those words that sends jolts of electricity through the central nervous system and thus should generally be avoided as the excitement it generates far exceeds the meaning it delivers. But sometimes there is no avoiding it. I hope I’ve provided enough explanation in this piece that its meaning as I’m using it is clear.