May I rise to defend the STEM end of the campus. And the STEM end of economy.
There were no special programs to help women get into the engineering profession when I got into Civil Eng, Calgary, 1978, a class of 50 with one woman. There were no such programs at my workplace when the first woman engineer was hired in 1993. But by the time I retired in 2015, four of my last five engineering *bosses* had been women, who hit the place like a tidal wave in the 21st,(40% of applicants) and were promoted rapidly.
This wasn't required. There was a feeling - I can testify, I was in the room during the interviews and the reviews of resumes - that women should be hired if we can. People don't appreciate how *close* a decision most hiring decisions are, you don't *know* who will be best from the interview and paper. So women engineers got some informal breaks, but that's it. Same with promotions to my boss. (Only one of four sucked, the others were as good as any male boss I'd had.)
And race? That 1976-1980 engineering class was half from Asia. We had to overcome accent barriers with our profs from China, India, Iran. (Prof. Chia's "Continuum Mechanics" course, we had to work with the notes, he was barely intelligible. Yes, we made fun.) The Hong Kongers went home to build the staggering metropolis you see today, with Canadian skills.
Two years later, in 1982, I was signed into the licensed profession of engineering by two engineers and gentlemen who had supervised my training. Two fine Canadians named Magdi Khalifa, who came to us from U.Cairo, and Afzal Khan, Islamabad. They taught me not just to calculate, but to judge, and to reflect on my work.
It's what we called the "artisie" side of the quad that had trouble with diversity, maybe because people from poorer countries (or genders) wanted paying degrees, not history and sociology -and maybe because medicine and engineering and law have objective hiring standards.
Alas, it's the "artsies" that go into journalism and politics, and cover their old faculties where the friction is, and ignore half the university. A statistical look at medicine, law, engineering and accounting - the four licensed professions with objective standards - would show diversity has been making rapid progress for decades.
Which brings me, at last, to the article's main point: when you have a serious real-world problem to solve - be it a building a sewage plant, or a doing a lung transplant - you go with those who demonstrate they get the job done, quickly lose interest in what they look like, or do when they go home. Nobody had to come in and make us.
Sorry if I over-reply, but there's another Akio Morita story I just remembered. When Sony invented Betamax (the VCR), they didn't agonize over the design in a long process (the worst of which is military procurement, taking decades, like the F-35 development).
Morita just set no less than FIVE teams to work on the problem, with great latitude to mess about in the shop inventing anything they pleased. And then took the best couple of projects and used their best features together.
Diversity of design, followed by synthesis. It's a fine old academic tradition!
I followed it, doing software design, and trying multiple different engineering solutions to field problems, in my career, and never regretted it. Practical diversity is about letting the lower-decks staff have their head to just try things, instead of handing down the One True Solution from Above.
I didn't know that! Excellent story. I always use the Manhattan Project's twin design for atom bombs to illustrate the same point, and it's not nearly as cheery.
I am a professional personality psychologist, which means that I study psychological individual differences. Because there are multitudes of ways that we differ in our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, I therefore see my area of study as nearly identical to *genuine* human diversity. I have always been frustrated by my university's limited, woke definition of diversity. Whenever they asked me what I was doing to "promote diversity" I felt like saying, "For God's sake, my teaching, research, and service is all about diversity!" But of course they were talking only about their limited definition of diversity: race, ethnicity, gender, etc. I am so delighted that Dan Gardner has written these piece on the errors of limited thinking about genuine human diversity and the problematic backlash this limited thinking has created. Finally, some sanity.
You treat each person that comes to your attention as an individual. If everybody looked at people as you do, there would be no need for their efforts. They are combating the tendency to pre-judge people before they are known as individuals, to pass over an identical resume that has "Alice" instead of "Albert" at the top.
As I note in my post, we just tended to pick Alice if the resumes were too-close-to-call, instead; and boom, the place was full of women in 10 years flat. (A fast-and-furious transition by sociological standards.)
Ironically Trump and his crowd forget that is diversity (and immigration) that has contributed to American thought and dynamism. Canada and the US have both benefited from the "discussion" and mingling of different groups of immigrants and cultures. Jazz is a fusion of African, Cajun, Caribbean, Appalachian, European and Klezmer originating in New Orleans and along the Mississippi River. Canadian cuisine similarly incorporates and melds flavours from the First Nations and subsequent groups of immigrants. In social and political discussions, diversity reminds us that we are all human, that we don't see things the same way and that sometimes others ( even ugh Trump) are right.
I think diversity was sacrificed on the altar of globalization. Multinational companies converted us all into consumers. Multinational corporations made more money if they could sell the same goods everywhere. With better telecommunications and closer ties with the rest of the world, we were all convinced that we wanted identical shiny, new goods.( not the stuff our grandparents or parents had). If you go on http://Gapminder.org Dollar Street, it quickly becomes apparent that no matter where you go in the world, within income groups, we are have the same type of clothing, furniture, lodging, transportation, phones and the like.
I am sufficiently decayed that I remember when you could tell where a person was from just by looking at their clothes and when you went to your friends' houses, they would have furniture and things from their grandparents or ancestors. If you were lucky enough to travel abroad, your were expected to bring home exotic little gifts, not hats or T-shirts emblazoned with the country name. But it changed during my working life. And I miss the frisson of surprise that came from seeing someone wearing something different or someone describing a world that is completely unlike my own. I also wonder what we have lost as humans by letting our visual, aural and tactile worlds become uniform.
The reason the western democracies defeated the fascisms and communisms of the 20th century isn't so much that majoritarianism promotes diversity better than the alternatives. Majoritarianism produces a stultifying conformity, too - as we saw all too well, to our detriment, in the time of covid. No, the reason western democracies defeated the fascisms and communisms of the 20th century is that they had more and better protections for individual rights and free markets. This is what unleashes creativity and productivity.
Democracy is certainly better than autocracy; but if you want real diversity, try libertarianism - the epitome of individual rights.
Dan, you intrigued me with the biblically-based definition / origin of "shibboleth", which was not my initial understanding of the term. Oxford Languages / Google offers this version closer to what I remembered: "a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important."
On reflection, that works for "diversity", too.
In practice as well as in theory, the inherent value of diversity is a marvellous and broadening insight. Still, too many of the assumptions underlying its use as a professional discipline have undermined its power and appeal, making it an easy target to be derided as either a distinguishing signal of an elite class (of consultants or bureaucrats) or an altogether ‘outmoded’ concept.
These false assumptions may include:
* Knowing where diversity or equity falls short does not translate into knowing what programs, practices or prescriptions will work best to solve those gaps. (Organizations are not linear)…
* Diversity analytics (especially focussing on the relative representation of fixed demographic categories) often tend to divide a workforce along zero-sum lines whereas a genuine deliberate pursuit of diversity of thinking, ideas and contributions can be enriching and integrating for everyone
* Many broad brush demographic analyses fail to recognize that the individuals lumped into one or more of these categories do not see themselves as primarily defined by, e.g., that race, gender, sexuality or ethnic origin. They may give more weight to their status as a professional engineer, or the youngest child or a late bloomer or politically progressive…
Like the earlier term LGBT, which has now added multiple initials to become LGBTQIA2S+, DEI has recently grown to include a B for belonging. This was a critical missing element and offers great opportunity for finding ways to make diversity and equity to be a more unifying force.
Finally, on the biblical story of shibboleth as a password, a more recent example emerged in World War II Netherlands. How to tell a German spy from a native Dutchman? Ask him to pronounce the seaside resort of "Scheveningen". No agent of German-mother-tongue could get that right, with potentially deadly consequences.
The woke emphasis on diversity contravenes Goodhart’s Law - when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The wokies were blinded by a need to only achieve “diversity” by the numbers on a page, and for its own sake.
But they neglected (or were willfully blind to) the best kind of diversity: viewpoint diversity. The Sony story is a fantastic example. The value the musician brought was viewpoint diversity….and it would not have mattered what the gender, race, religion, or creed of said musician was.
The Muskovites as noted are committing similar idiocy. It’s not the word “diversity” that is the problem. It’s the social justice doctrine as practiced by the wokies that’s the problem. Cutting any position that has the word “diversity” without any consideration of the context is abject stupidity.
It’s another example that the F-wittedness of one extreme end of the horseshoe is matched by the other end. And another reason to strive towards the sane middle.
This is all true. However, the mistake that liberal elites have made is that they refuse to honestly face the idea that diversity can have downsides or weaknesses. And their refusal has allowed them to poison their own information environment.
An honest assessment of any idea looks at both the benefits and the harms. But in your piece there is no accounting for the harms. If we earnestly wanted a highly diverse liberal society to succeed, we should have diagnosed the downsides and proactively worked to mitigate them.
Homogeneity leads to certain kinds of strength. It promotes unity. It promotes strong collective action. It reduces the costs of prosecuting divisions and disagreements. And it creates solidarity. Diversity is good for deliberation but not for action. Yet any functional society needs to excel at both. Liberals should have honestly considered how much they need these things, and in what amounts, and what they will do about the fact that their enemies have more of these things than they do.
This wasn't a long and tedious essay on the nature of diversity (I hope) and I certainly didn't claim diversity is everywhere and always wonderful in all forms and degrees. I would never claim that about any idea. Life is full of tradeoffs and conditions. Same holds true for diversity. Can it inflict costs we should be aware of? Sure. The Tower of Babel is a rather old story in that vein.
As Freddie deBoer puts it: "21st century liberalism is ensuring a panel at a defense industry conference called Building a Deadlier Drone has adequate gender diversity.". That is, "diversity" can often (not always, but often) be a type of intra-elite warfare, where extraordinarily class-privileged people claim oppressed status based on e.g. race or gender identities.
Note, one has to be careful applying "diversity" complaints, and not treat everything like political factionalism. Otherwise one gets stuff like asking how many Creationists are part of the biology department, or how many Flat-Earthers in the geology department. Or nowadays, how many doctors are there who are anti-vaccine, especially in public health positions?
And there's a joke I've heard about Wikipedia, that it's very concerned about having a wide range of gender, orientation, race, geography, etc editors, all of whom are completely ignorant of the subjects they write about.
This reminds me of the great architectural historian Richard Krautheimer, who used to say to his grad students: "I don't like it when you agree with me, because then I don't learn anything from you."
The part about "wokeism’s narrow understanding"? I'm saying that's wrong.
I was first acquainted with the term over 26 years ago, and while it did originate from a context of black consciousness about American racism, it was already, then, advanced by activist women with a multi-dimensional and intersectional understanding (though I don't recall *that* term in use until a few years later).
Among people I know or read who use the term, sincerely and non-pejoratively, in recent years, none limits it to a consideration of ethnicity.
Well, you've now repeated the claim which is belied in my essay. I enumerate the dimensions wokeism is concerned with. And yes, it's concerned with "intersections" among those categories. But it most definitely is not concerned with varieties of human difference outside those categories.
I'm sorry, but it really seems like you've taken your "definite" understanding of woke/diversity advocacy exclusively from (ignorant or disingenuous) anti-diversity critics.
I'll bow out now, but to be clear: for everyone I've known for whom being "woke" is a *good* thing, all the varieties of human difference you mention, and many more, can be relevant in a pro-diversity mindset.
OK, thank you for clarifying. But I strongly disagree. I could walk you through a thousand DEI policies and we would see the categories I enumerated and little or nothing more. I'm sure that if you had a nice discussion in the abstract with people who support such policies and asked, "is there more to human diversity than that?" they'd say yes, of course. Any reasonable person would. But in practice? Woke is relentlessly focused on a handful of demographic categories.
This is a thought provoking piece. What makes this issue difficult is that it's not a matter of "the more diversity the better". My laboratory benefits from having people with biological and computational backgrounds in varied degrees, and my training in chemistry sometimes helps. At the same time, I don't think hiring a poet, Altai herdsman, and Sentinelese fisherman would improve my research. Then there's border cases. A physicist with limited biology background might be able to take my research in new directions, but I would have a hard time supervising such a person, and if the physicist wasn't fairly self-directed and able to communicate with the rest of us, the undertaking would probably fail.
The only rule I can think of is selecting for pure merit is the right thing for a group of 1, and the larger a group is, the stronger the weighting should be for diversity. At the country level, diversity of abilities and outlooks is therefore essential.
Excellent writing, Dan, made better by your limited foray into your personal animus towards the new US administration. A long form expansion of the principle of “Distributed Computation” which in various permutations is the core of the strength and power of Judeo-Christian based Western democracies.
May I rise to defend the STEM end of the campus. And the STEM end of economy.
There were no special programs to help women get into the engineering profession when I got into Civil Eng, Calgary, 1978, a class of 50 with one woman. There were no such programs at my workplace when the first woman engineer was hired in 1993. But by the time I retired in 2015, four of my last five engineering *bosses* had been women, who hit the place like a tidal wave in the 21st,(40% of applicants) and were promoted rapidly.
This wasn't required. There was a feeling - I can testify, I was in the room during the interviews and the reviews of resumes - that women should be hired if we can. People don't appreciate how *close* a decision most hiring decisions are, you don't *know* who will be best from the interview and paper. So women engineers got some informal breaks, but that's it. Same with promotions to my boss. (Only one of four sucked, the others were as good as any male boss I'd had.)
And race? That 1976-1980 engineering class was half from Asia. We had to overcome accent barriers with our profs from China, India, Iran. (Prof. Chia's "Continuum Mechanics" course, we had to work with the notes, he was barely intelligible. Yes, we made fun.) The Hong Kongers went home to build the staggering metropolis you see today, with Canadian skills.
Two years later, in 1982, I was signed into the licensed profession of engineering by two engineers and gentlemen who had supervised my training. Two fine Canadians named Magdi Khalifa, who came to us from U.Cairo, and Afzal Khan, Islamabad. They taught me not just to calculate, but to judge, and to reflect on my work.
It's what we called the "artisie" side of the quad that had trouble with diversity, maybe because people from poorer countries (or genders) wanted paying degrees, not history and sociology -and maybe because medicine and engineering and law have objective hiring standards.
Alas, it's the "artsies" that go into journalism and politics, and cover their old faculties where the friction is, and ignore half the university. A statistical look at medicine, law, engineering and accounting - the four licensed professions with objective standards - would show diversity has been making rapid progress for decades.
Which brings me, at last, to the article's main point: when you have a serious real-world problem to solve - be it a building a sewage plant, or a doing a lung transplant - you go with those who demonstrate they get the job done, quickly lose interest in what they look like, or do when they go home. Nobody had to come in and make us.
Provocative essay which makes me realize what the fear of diversity is about. It's a threat to conformity.
That's only half the message. The diversity ethos, if adopted too rigidly, also leads to conformity.
Sorry if I over-reply, but there's another Akio Morita story I just remembered. When Sony invented Betamax (the VCR), they didn't agonize over the design in a long process (the worst of which is military procurement, taking decades, like the F-35 development).
Morita just set no less than FIVE teams to work on the problem, with great latitude to mess about in the shop inventing anything they pleased. And then took the best couple of projects and used their best features together.
Diversity of design, followed by synthesis. It's a fine old academic tradition!
I followed it, doing software design, and trying multiple different engineering solutions to field problems, in my career, and never regretted it. Practical diversity is about letting the lower-decks staff have their head to just try things, instead of handing down the One True Solution from Above.
And Roy, as long as one has something substantive to say, there's no such thing as over-replying. And you always have something substantive to say.
I didn't know that! Excellent story. I always use the Manhattan Project's twin design for atom bombs to illustrate the same point, and it's not nearly as cheery.
Wonderful thought provoking article.
Thank youuuuu! Diversity (real diversity, not identidad politics) is really good!!!
Sorry, I meant "identity".
I am a professional personality psychologist, which means that I study psychological individual differences. Because there are multitudes of ways that we differ in our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, I therefore see my area of study as nearly identical to *genuine* human diversity. I have always been frustrated by my university's limited, woke definition of diversity. Whenever they asked me what I was doing to "promote diversity" I felt like saying, "For God's sake, my teaching, research, and service is all about diversity!" But of course they were talking only about their limited definition of diversity: race, ethnicity, gender, etc. I am so delighted that Dan Gardner has written these piece on the errors of limited thinking about genuine human diversity and the problematic backlash this limited thinking has created. Finally, some sanity.
You treat each person that comes to your attention as an individual. If everybody looked at people as you do, there would be no need for their efforts. They are combating the tendency to pre-judge people before they are known as individuals, to pass over an identical resume that has "Alice" instead of "Albert" at the top.
As I note in my post, we just tended to pick Alice if the resumes were too-close-to-call, instead; and boom, the place was full of women in 10 years flat. (A fast-and-furious transition by sociological standards.)
Ironically Trump and his crowd forget that is diversity (and immigration) that has contributed to American thought and dynamism. Canada and the US have both benefited from the "discussion" and mingling of different groups of immigrants and cultures. Jazz is a fusion of African, Cajun, Caribbean, Appalachian, European and Klezmer originating in New Orleans and along the Mississippi River. Canadian cuisine similarly incorporates and melds flavours from the First Nations and subsequent groups of immigrants. In social and political discussions, diversity reminds us that we are all human, that we don't see things the same way and that sometimes others ( even ugh Trump) are right.
I think diversity was sacrificed on the altar of globalization. Multinational companies converted us all into consumers. Multinational corporations made more money if they could sell the same goods everywhere. With better telecommunications and closer ties with the rest of the world, we were all convinced that we wanted identical shiny, new goods.( not the stuff our grandparents or parents had). If you go on http://Gapminder.org Dollar Street, it quickly becomes apparent that no matter where you go in the world, within income groups, we are have the same type of clothing, furniture, lodging, transportation, phones and the like.
I am sufficiently decayed that I remember when you could tell where a person was from just by looking at their clothes and when you went to your friends' houses, they would have furniture and things from their grandparents or ancestors. If you were lucky enough to travel abroad, your were expected to bring home exotic little gifts, not hats or T-shirts emblazoned with the country name. But it changed during my working life. And I miss the frisson of surprise that came from seeing someone wearing something different or someone describing a world that is completely unlike my own. I also wonder what we have lost as humans by letting our visual, aural and tactile worlds become uniform.
The reason the western democracies defeated the fascisms and communisms of the 20th century isn't so much that majoritarianism promotes diversity better than the alternatives. Majoritarianism produces a stultifying conformity, too - as we saw all too well, to our detriment, in the time of covid. No, the reason western democracies defeated the fascisms and communisms of the 20th century is that they had more and better protections for individual rights and free markets. This is what unleashes creativity and productivity.
Democracy is certainly better than autocracy; but if you want real diversity, try libertarianism - the epitome of individual rights.
Dan, you intrigued me with the biblically-based definition / origin of "shibboleth", which was not my initial understanding of the term. Oxford Languages / Google offers this version closer to what I remembered: "a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important."
On reflection, that works for "diversity", too.
In practice as well as in theory, the inherent value of diversity is a marvellous and broadening insight. Still, too many of the assumptions underlying its use as a professional discipline have undermined its power and appeal, making it an easy target to be derided as either a distinguishing signal of an elite class (of consultants or bureaucrats) or an altogether ‘outmoded’ concept.
These false assumptions may include:
* Knowing where diversity or equity falls short does not translate into knowing what programs, practices or prescriptions will work best to solve those gaps. (Organizations are not linear)…
* Diversity analytics (especially focussing on the relative representation of fixed demographic categories) often tend to divide a workforce along zero-sum lines whereas a genuine deliberate pursuit of diversity of thinking, ideas and contributions can be enriching and integrating for everyone
* Many broad brush demographic analyses fail to recognize that the individuals lumped into one or more of these categories do not see themselves as primarily defined by, e.g., that race, gender, sexuality or ethnic origin. They may give more weight to their status as a professional engineer, or the youngest child or a late bloomer or politically progressive…
Like the earlier term LGBT, which has now added multiple initials to become LGBTQIA2S+, DEI has recently grown to include a B for belonging. This was a critical missing element and offers great opportunity for finding ways to make diversity and equity to be a more unifying force.
Finally, on the biblical story of shibboleth as a password, a more recent example emerged in World War II Netherlands. How to tell a German spy from a native Dutchman? Ask him to pronounce the seaside resort of "Scheveningen". No agent of German-mother-tongue could get that right, with potentially deadly consequences.
This post nails it.
The woke emphasis on diversity contravenes Goodhart’s Law - when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The wokies were blinded by a need to only achieve “diversity” by the numbers on a page, and for its own sake.
But they neglected (or were willfully blind to) the best kind of diversity: viewpoint diversity. The Sony story is a fantastic example. The value the musician brought was viewpoint diversity….and it would not have mattered what the gender, race, religion, or creed of said musician was.
The Muskovites as noted are committing similar idiocy. It’s not the word “diversity” that is the problem. It’s the social justice doctrine as practiced by the wokies that’s the problem. Cutting any position that has the word “diversity” without any consideration of the context is abject stupidity.
It’s another example that the F-wittedness of one extreme end of the horseshoe is matched by the other end. And another reason to strive towards the sane middle.
This is all true. However, the mistake that liberal elites have made is that they refuse to honestly face the idea that diversity can have downsides or weaknesses. And their refusal has allowed them to poison their own information environment.
An honest assessment of any idea looks at both the benefits and the harms. But in your piece there is no accounting for the harms. If we earnestly wanted a highly diverse liberal society to succeed, we should have diagnosed the downsides and proactively worked to mitigate them.
Homogeneity leads to certain kinds of strength. It promotes unity. It promotes strong collective action. It reduces the costs of prosecuting divisions and disagreements. And it creates solidarity. Diversity is good for deliberation but not for action. Yet any functional society needs to excel at both. Liberals should have honestly considered how much they need these things, and in what amounts, and what they will do about the fact that their enemies have more of these things than they do.
This wasn't a long and tedious essay on the nature of diversity (I hope) and I certainly didn't claim diversity is everywhere and always wonderful in all forms and degrees. I would never claim that about any idea. Life is full of tradeoffs and conditions. Same holds true for diversity. Can it inflict costs we should be aware of? Sure. The Tower of Babel is a rather old story in that vein.
As Freddie deBoer puts it: "21st century liberalism is ensuring a panel at a defense industry conference called Building a Deadlier Drone has adequate gender diversity.". That is, "diversity" can often (not always, but often) be a type of intra-elite warfare, where extraordinarily class-privileged people claim oppressed status based on e.g. race or gender identities.
Note, one has to be careful applying "diversity" complaints, and not treat everything like political factionalism. Otherwise one gets stuff like asking how many Creationists are part of the biology department, or how many Flat-Earthers in the geology department. Or nowadays, how many doctors are there who are anti-vaccine, especially in public health positions?
And there's a joke I've heard about Wikipedia, that it's very concerned about having a wide range of gender, orientation, race, geography, etc editors, all of whom are completely ignorant of the subjects they write about.
Just to illustrate the process, when now-Justice Clarence Thomas had a controversy being confirmed, he called it
"... a high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks ..."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/09/25/high-tech-lynching-how-clarence-thomass-fury-saved-his-supreme-court-nomination/
Having a rough confirmation hearing for one of the most powerful positions of government is very far from being lynched.
This reminds me of the great architectural historian Richard Krautheimer, who used to say to his grad students: "I don't like it when you agree with me, because then I don't learn anything from you."
"Ohga and the others were all men of the same ethnicity. From the woke perspective, that’s pure monotone, the very opposite of diversity."
A woke perspective recognizes many possible axes of diversity, not just ethnicity.
There's a paragraph discussing the dimensions the woke perspective is concerned with. Did you miss it?
The part about "wokeism’s narrow understanding"? I'm saying that's wrong.
I was first acquainted with the term over 26 years ago, and while it did originate from a context of black consciousness about American racism, it was already, then, advanced by activist women with a multi-dimensional and intersectional understanding (though I don't recall *that* term in use until a few years later).
Among people I know or read who use the term, sincerely and non-pejoratively, in recent years, none limits it to a consideration of ethnicity.
Well, you've now repeated the claim which is belied in my essay. I enumerate the dimensions wokeism is concerned with. And yes, it's concerned with "intersections" among those categories. But it most definitely is not concerned with varieties of human difference outside those categories.
I'm sorry, but it really seems like you've taken your "definite" understanding of woke/diversity advocacy exclusively from (ignorant or disingenuous) anti-diversity critics.
I'll bow out now, but to be clear: for everyone I've known for whom being "woke" is a *good* thing, all the varieties of human difference you mention, and many more, can be relevant in a pro-diversity mindset.
OK, thank you for clarifying. But I strongly disagree. I could walk you through a thousand DEI policies and we would see the categories I enumerated and little or nothing more. I'm sure that if you had a nice discussion in the abstract with people who support such policies and asked, "is there more to human diversity than that?" they'd say yes, of course. Any reasonable person would. But in practice? Woke is relentlessly focused on a handful of demographic categories.
I'm not following.
This is a thought provoking piece. What makes this issue difficult is that it's not a matter of "the more diversity the better". My laboratory benefits from having people with biological and computational backgrounds in varied degrees, and my training in chemistry sometimes helps. At the same time, I don't think hiring a poet, Altai herdsman, and Sentinelese fisherman would improve my research. Then there's border cases. A physicist with limited biology background might be able to take my research in new directions, but I would have a hard time supervising such a person, and if the physicist wasn't fairly self-directed and able to communicate with the rest of us, the undertaking would probably fail.
The only rule I can think of is selecting for pure merit is the right thing for a group of 1, and the larger a group is, the stronger the weighting should be for diversity. At the country level, diversity of abilities and outlooks is therefore essential.
Right. None of this makes for snappy bumper-sticker slogans.
Excellent writing, Dan, made better by your limited foray into your personal animus towards the new US administration. A long form expansion of the principle of “Distributed Computation” which in various permutations is the core of the strength and power of Judeo-Christian based Western democracies.