4 ms·

It shouldn't be controversial, but it is. Assuming that everyone in a demographic is the same is why companies try to increase diversity by hiring based on skin

by dx87 6y ago

It shouldn't be controversial, but it is. Assuming that everyone in a demographic is the same is why companies try to increase diversity by hiring based on skin color instead of their actual life experiences. It also means that you can't blindly hate on libs/conservatives, you need to actually talk to people and understand why they think a certain way.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
> Assuming that everyone in a demographic is the same is why companies try to increase diversity by hiring based on skin color instead of their actual life experiences. That makes no sense as a takeaway here. The author's argument is that while religious theology doesn't drive the cultural norms, the religious boundaries define a grouping wherein people tend to converge on or copy cultural norms. Thus, you end up with a particular religious group behaving like X, even if X didn't come from the religion itself. One could easily apply the same reasoning to visible ethnic groups: they don't behave similarly because of their ethnicity, but the ethnicity defines a grouping where the people within tend to converge on shared cultural norms regardless. Ergo, you would indeed end up with people within said grouping behaving similarly, and then it follows that increasing diversity of which groups you hire from would increase diversity of cultural norms or thought/behavior.
- dx87 6y ago
  You're making the same assumption that people with the same skin color will have the same culture. A black person raised in Baltimore or Atlanta is going to be culturally distinct from a black person from Africa who's parents paid to send him to a college in the USA. Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    I didn't say I believed this to be true myself. I'm saying that the logic is analogous to the argument in the article. I do think there's something to 'shared experiences' across ethnic groups to an extent, though it probably won't have as strong an effect as sharing a religion, given that religion is at least nominally a choice, and has an explicit ideology backing it. Nevertheless, you see this effect when you see viral memes with captions like "only asian american kids get this" -- obviously these don't apply universally, but there's enough of something there to drive their virality. Hell, sometimes it may be as simple as shared experiences dealing with racism. > Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism. I don't really see how you got this from what I said.
  - IkmoIkmo 6y ago
    > You're making the same assumption that people with the same skin color will have the same culture. He said ethnicity, not skin colour. Ethnicity is a quite broad and fluid concept which you could assign to any distinguishable cultural group which has some shared history, shared norms or values etc. As such, it's entirely valid to say that if you belong to a certain ethnicity, statistically you're quite likely to converge personally on many of its norms and values. That doesn't mean all muslims are alike, but two muslims are more alike, ceteris paribus, than a muslim and a non-muslim. That also doesn't exclude that there can be many different ethnicities at play at the same time, e.g. there are asian (e.g. Indonesian) muslims and african (e.g. Moroccan) muslims. And again, a muslim moroccan is more alike a Moroccan jew than perhaps an Indonesian muslim. Because Morocco has a culture, and Moroccans as an ethnicity converge to many of its norms and values, just like Indonesians in Indonesia. And so indeed, Black Americans are a distinct ethnicity from African Americans (for lack of better terminology), agreed. And within those ethnicities its willing or unwilling members converge on the norms/values in those groups. I don't see how that's controversial. That doesn't mean they're all copies or mindless drones. Nor does it mean the members cannot have other ethnicities which they also converge on. I'd say the fact members of group A statistically tend to be more likely to exhibit than outside members, the characteristics of group A (i.e., converging weakly or strongly to norms/values of group A), is so obvious that it is almost a truism that isn't worth stating, and hardly controversial or thinly veiled racism.

by dx87 6y ago

TulliusCicero 6y ago

> Assuming that everyone in a demographic is the same is why companies try to increase diversity by hiring based on skin color instead of their actual life experiences. That makes no sense as a takeaway here. The author's argument is that while religious theology doesn't drive the cultural norms, the religious boundaries define a grouping wherein people tend to converge on or copy cultural norms. Thus, you end up with a particular religious group behaving like X, even if X didn't come from the religion itself. One could easily apply the same reasoning to visible ethnic groups: they don't behave similarly because of their ethnicity, but the ethnicity defines a grouping where the people within tend to converge on shared cultural norms regardless. Ergo, you would indeed end up with people within said grouping behaving similarly, and then it follows that increasing diversity of which groups you hire from would increase diversity of cultural norms or thought/behavior.

dx87 6y ago
You're making the same assumption that people with the same skin color will have the same culture. A black person raised in Baltimore or Atlanta is going to be culturally distinct from a black person from Africa who's parents paid to send him to a college in the USA. Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  I didn't say I believed this to be true myself. I'm saying that the logic is analogous to the argument in the article. I do think there's something to 'shared experiences' across ethnic groups to an extent, though it probably won't have as strong an effect as sharing a religion, given that religion is at least nominally a choice, and has an explicit ideology backing it. Nevertheless, you see this effect when you see viral memes with captions like "only asian american kids get this" -- obviously these don't apply universally, but there's enough of something there to drive their virality. Hell, sometimes it may be as simple as shared experiences dealing with racism. > Saying that people naturally converge on a shared culture based on their skin color just sounds like thinly veiled racism. I don't really see how you got this from what I said.
- IkmoIkmo 6y ago
  > You're making the same assumption that people with the same skin color will have the same culture. He said ethnicity, not skin colour. Ethnicity is a quite broad and fluid concept which you could assign to any distinguishable cultural group which has some shared history, shared norms or values etc. As such, it's entirely valid to say that if you belong to a certain ethnicity, statistically you're quite likely to converge personally on many of its norms and values. That doesn't mean all muslims are alike, but two muslims are more alike, ceteris paribus, than a muslim and a non-muslim. That also doesn't exclude that there can be many different ethnicities at play at the same time, e.g. there are asian (e.g. Indonesian) muslims and african (e.g. Moroccan) muslims. And again, a muslim moroccan is more alike a Moroccan jew than perhaps an Indonesian muslim. Because Morocco has a culture, and Moroccans as an ethnicity converge to many of its norms and values, just like Indonesians in Indonesia. And so indeed, Black Americans are a distinct ethnicity from African Americans (for lack of better terminology), agreed. And within those ethnicities its willing or unwilling members converge on the norms/values in those groups. I don't see how that's controversial. That doesn't mean they're all copies or mindless drones. Nor does it mean the members cannot have other ethnicities which they also converge on. I'd say the fact members of group A statistically tend to be more likely to exhibit than outside members, the characteristics of group A (i.e., converging weakly or strongly to norms/values of group A), is so obvious that it is almost a truism that isn't worth stating, and hardly controversial or thinly veiled racism.