5 ms·

> Increased diversity could lead to new project-wide perspectives and overall community enrichment, if solely due to life-experience-based heterogeneity. One m

> Increased diversity could lead to new project-wide perspectives and overall community enrichment, if solely due to life-experience-based heterogeneity. One might wonder what benefits alternate uses for scarce resources spent chasing that "could" could provide instead.

civilitty 9y ago
One might wonder what benefits alternate uses for scarce resources spent chasing chemistry could have provided for alchemy instead.
- teacup50 9y ago
  If you're ascribing the pseudoscience in this analogy to the parent's position, you have it backwards.
  - civilitty 9y ago
    It wasn't pseudoscience when they were making that decision.
    - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
      And similarly, I know plenty of people who consider gender-inclusive policies as a form of psuedoscience too (in that they don't give it much credence).
      - civilitty 9y ago
        Diversity is quite literally the reason life still exists after billions of years and five mass extinction catastrophes. It is the foundation for the predominant economic system in human society as well as all of the technological and scientific progress we've made. Hell, you can't even really have cultural (in the broadest sense) progress without a diversity of ideas and opinions, let alone a functioning, stable democracy. I'm skeptical of race- and gender-inclusive policies because they're often blindly implemented and detrimental to their goals but diversity has shown itself to be not just important, but vital, to the long term success of any large, complex system, whether it be the Apollo program or our planet's ecosystem. I'd love to hear rational arguments against, however.
        jhasse 9y ago
        > diversity has shown itself to be not just important, but vital, to the long term success of any large, complex system, whether it be the Apollo program or our planet's ecosystem. It could be correlation, not causation.
        civilitty 9y ago
        No, it's causation. The probability that everything goes right in a sufficiently complex system is zero and the probability that a single failure will cause runaway feedback loops or cascading side effects is extremely high, which causes a stable system to go unstable and makes total failure almost inevitable. Without diversity, you can't recover from these failure modes (drastic changes in the ecosystem causing extinction in the case of evolution, limits of physics or economics causing a dead end in science and engineering, changes in the rest of the economy causing centrally planned economies to fall apart, etc).
        teacup50 9y ago
        Imagine an underground lake that's never struck by the light of day, but is teeming with life. Over millions of years, the species in that lake evolve ... and lose their eyesight. In that environment, how much value is there in diversity of traits like color?
        civilitty 9y ago
        That is a contrived counterexample that completely ignores the very basics of evolution and how changing environments help drive adaptation. Picking out one irrelevant trait here and asking if diversity is useful is like asking "how much value is there in diversity of spleens in the Rust Community?" They don't care about spleens, they care about people who are interested in Rust; just like natural selection favors organisms who can reproduce, not individual traits. Natural selection will favor the animals who don't have to waste energy on pigmentation... until a billion years later when a sink hole opens up or one of the species evolves bio luminescence and all the organisms that lack pigments start to reflect all incoming light back at their new, hungry predators. That's the whole point: environments change all the time and the chance of a species surviving is dependent on the diversity of its members, just like the survival of carbon based life through a planetary mass extinction event is dependent on the diversity of species. Evolution can only happen through random mutation so, by definition, any environment with evolving life forms is always changing unpredictably.
kybernetikos 9y ago
This could be used as an argument against every effort that ever led to anything good in the world. It's not that there aren't times and places it might be appropriate, but I think it'd be better to say precisely what and whose effort you wish to spend on something better and what that better thing is. There's room for lots of people to pursue different, complimentary goals. If you really hope to tell other people that they should spend their energy on something other than the things they have chosen to think are important, you'll need a stronger argument than vague hints of mysterious opportunity costs.
- elgenie 9y ago
  Attention of people currently inside the community doing outreach and outside the community is finite. In analysis of their outreach efforts, I'd hope that they would know what the trade-offs are. I don't. Hence the question. For me, both the assertion that no opportunity costs exist and the assertion that the/a top problem faced by an upstart systems language is the lack of representation in their community of people with attributes orthogonal to language development strain credulity.

civilitty 9y ago

One might wonder what benefits alternate uses for scarce resources spent chasing chemistry could have provided for alchemy instead.

teacup50 9y ago
If you're ascribing the pseudoscience in this analogy to the parent's position, you have it backwards.
- civilitty 9y ago
  It wasn't pseudoscience when they were making that decision.
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    And similarly, I know plenty of people who consider gender-inclusive policies as a form of psuedoscience too (in that they don't give it much credence).
    - civilitty 9y ago
      Diversity is quite literally the reason life still exists after billions of years and five mass extinction catastrophes. It is the foundation for the predominant economic system in human society as well as all of the technological and scientific progress we've made. Hell, you can't even really have cultural (in the broadest sense) progress without a diversity of ideas and opinions, let alone a functioning, stable democracy. I'm skeptical of race- and gender-inclusive policies because they're often blindly implemented and detrimental to their goals but diversity has shown itself to be not just important, but vital, to the long term success of any large, complex system, whether it be the Apollo program or our planet's ecosystem. I'd love to hear rational arguments against, however.
      - jhasse 9y ago
        > diversity has shown itself to be not just important, but vital, to the long term success of any large, complex system, whether it be the Apollo program or our planet's ecosystem. It could be correlation, not causation.
        civilitty 9y ago
        No, it's causation. The probability that everything goes right in a sufficiently complex system is zero and the probability that a single failure will cause runaway feedback loops or cascading side effects is extremely high, which causes a stable system to go unstable and makes total failure almost inevitable. Without diversity, you can't recover from these failure modes (drastic changes in the ecosystem causing extinction in the case of evolution, limits of physics or economics causing a dead end in science and engineering, changes in the rest of the economy causing centrally planned economies to fall apart, etc).
        teacup50 9y ago
        Imagine an underground lake that's never struck by the light of day, but is teeming with life. Over millions of years, the species in that lake evolve ... and lose their eyesight. In that environment, how much value is there in diversity of traits like color?
        civilitty 9y ago
        That is a contrived counterexample that completely ignores the very basics of evolution and how changing environments help drive adaptation. Picking out one irrelevant trait here and asking if diversity is useful is like asking "how much value is there in diversity of spleens in the Rust Community?" They don't care about spleens, they care about people who are interested in Rust; just like natural selection favors organisms who can reproduce, not individual traits. Natural selection will favor the animals who don't have to waste energy on pigmentation... until a billion years later when a sink hole opens up or one of the species evolves bio luminescence and all the organisms that lack pigments start to reflect all incoming light back at their new, hungry predators. That's the whole point: environments change all the time and the chance of a species surviving is dependent on the diversity of its members, just like the survival of carbon based life through a planetary mass extinction event is dependent on the diversity of species. Evolution can only happen through random mutation so, by definition, any environment with evolving life forms is always changing unpredictably.

kybernetikos 9y ago

This could be used as an argument against every effort that ever led to anything good in the world. It's not that there aren't times and places it might be appropriate, but I think it'd be better to say precisely what and whose effort you wish to spend on something better and what that better thing is. There's room for lots of people to pursue different, complimentary goals. If you really hope to tell other people that they should spend their energy on something other than the things they have chosen to think are important, you'll need a stronger argument than vague hints of mysterious opportunity costs.

elgenie 9y ago
Attention of people currently inside the community doing outreach and outside the community is finite. In analysis of their outreach efforts, I'd hope that they would know what the trade-offs are. I don't. Hence the question. For me, both the assertion that no opportunity costs exist and the assertion that the/a top problem faced by an upstart systems language is the lack of representation in their community of people with attributes orthogonal to language development strain credulity.