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Is anyone in power going to come out and say that it’s very obvious that you don’t need workplace diversity? Silicon Valley created trillions of dollars of weal

Is anyone in power going to come out and say that it’s very obvious that you don’t need workplace diversity? Silicon Valley created trillions of dollars of wealth in just a few decades and it was staffed with 90% white, Indian, and East Asian men.

automatic6131 4y ago
>Silicon Valley created trillions of dollars of wealth Lol. Lmao even. It's bizarre, because you could have said "trillions of dollars" and been completely correct.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  I don't see the difference. The sentences are equivalent to me except to denote a stock vs. a flow.
whoooooo123 4y ago
Ask James Damore how well that went for him.
neon_electro 4y ago
Sure, you don't need workplace diversity to be insanely profitable. Do you think that's why folks are looking to add diversity to the workplace?
- spoonjim 4y ago
  That's the argument that they make, duplicitously.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  > Do you think that's why folks are looking to add diversity to the workplace? No, but they say obviously untested things like this: "diverse companies are more profitable and more likely to achieve long-term growth as an entity and in their industry." -- Marketwatch If that was true you wouldn't see the push for it, companies would be fine with their competitors missing the boat while they hired all the undervalued diversity. I would prefer honest messaging such as "Diversity may cost in the short term but we believe it is morally worth doing". Then we could have an open conversation about goals and methods and costs.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    Exactly, which is like saying "eating a high protein breakfast increases athletic performance." It may be true, and it may be applicable to the average athlete, but even if such a study was proven conclusively, I would not expect the top athletes in the world to change their breakfasts because of it - they have already achieved an outlier result and changing something is more likely than not to cause mean regression.
AlexandrB 4y ago
A. Created trillions of dollars of wealth doing what? Because it seems like Silicon Valley is well on its way to being the new "big tobacco" with the level of surveillance and advertising that has been normalized. B. There's no way to know whether a more diverse Silicon Valley would have created $trillions + X dollars. Saying something was successful doesn't tell you anything about whether the alternative would have been more successful or not. C. Wealth creation is a shitty metric. Ideally, all economic activity serves some purpose that makes actual people's lives better. This is why breaking windows to stimulate economic activity is considered a fallacy[1]. This is somewhat related to A, but saying "wealth was created so everything must be ok" is not very convincing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  The problem with B. is that there are infinitely many alternatives. Perhaps Silicon Valley would be even better off if all the developers had pet llamas at their disposal. But there is no llama industry that would lobby for that.
- hbrn 4y ago
  > Wealth creation is a shitty metric. Ideally, all economic activity serves some purpose that makes actual people's lives better Shitty compared to what? Wealth does correlate with better life and is fairly easy to measure. Do you a specific "actual people's lives better" metric in mind?
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    If you go from 0 to $10T dollars in the span of 5 years, but are now 25 and soon to die of cancer due to pollution caused by generating that $10T, your wealth as well as the effort to gain it was fairly useless.
    - hbrn 4y ago
      This proves that wealth as a metric is imperfect (like any other metric), especially if we are ignoring all other metrics (we're not). In no way it indicates that wealth is useless. Still waiting to hear which metric is more useful. It looks like you brought up life expectancy, but it does correlate with wealth. Unlike wealth, it's is extremely hard to measure due to enormous lag.
moralestapia 4y ago
Hire the most capable people for the job, period. I sympathize a bit with things like Affirmative Action, but at the end of the day, a person (disregarding gender, physical condition, race, etc...) who earned it doesn't deserve to be displaced by others who didn't.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
That's not really the point. Any individual person will have their own biases and shortsightednesses, and basic assumptions about the world. People with similar backgrounds will tend to have similar biases.
avereveard 4y ago
> white, Indian, and East Asian idk that sounds like diversity
amusedcyclist 4y ago
True but it could have been staffed by other people and created the same things if history had worked out differently. I don't think diversity should be the aim of a company but I also don't think the gender and race of SV employees has much to do with its success

automatic6131 4y ago

>Silicon Valley created trillions of dollars of wealth Lol. Lmao even. It's bizarre, because you could have said "trillions of dollars" and been completely correct.

spoonjim 4y ago
I don't see the difference. The sentences are equivalent to me except to denote a stock vs. a flow.

whoooooo123 4y ago

Ask James Damore how well that went for him.

neon_electro 4y ago

Sure, you don't need workplace diversity to be insanely profitable. Do you think that's why folks are looking to add diversity to the workplace?

spoonjim 4y ago
That's the argument that they make, duplicitously.
LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
> Do you think that's why folks are looking to add diversity to the workplace? No, but they say obviously untested things like this: "diverse companies are more profitable and more likely to achieve long-term growth as an entity and in their industry." -- Marketwatch If that was true you wouldn't see the push for it, companies would be fine with their competitors missing the boat while they hired all the undervalued diversity. I would prefer honest messaging such as "Diversity may cost in the short term but we believe it is morally worth doing". Then we could have an open conversation about goals and methods and costs.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Exactly, which is like saying "eating a high protein breakfast increases athletic performance." It may be true, and it may be applicable to the average athlete, but even if such a study was proven conclusively, I would not expect the top athletes in the world to change their breakfasts because of it - they have already achieved an outlier result and changing something is more likely than not to cause mean regression.

AlexandrB 4y ago

A. Created trillions of dollars of wealth doing what? Because it seems like Silicon Valley is well on its way to being the new "big tobacco" with the level of surveillance and advertising that has been normalized. B. There's no way to know whether a more diverse Silicon Valley would have created $trillions + X dollars. Saying something was successful doesn't tell you anything about whether the alternative would have been more successful or not. C. Wealth creation is a shitty metric. Ideally, all economic activity serves some purpose that makes actual people's lives better. This is why breaking windows to stimulate economic activity is considered a fallacy[1]. This is somewhat related to A, but saying "wealth was created so everything must be ok" is not very convincing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

inglor_cz 4y ago
The problem with B. is that there are infinitely many alternatives. Perhaps Silicon Valley would be even better off if all the developers had pet llamas at their disposal. But there is no llama industry that would lobby for that.
hbrn 4y ago
> Wealth creation is a shitty metric. Ideally, all economic activity serves some purpose that makes actual people's lives better Shitty compared to what? Wealth does correlate with better life and is fairly easy to measure. Do you a specific "actual people's lives better" metric in mind?
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  If you go from 0 to $10T dollars in the span of 5 years, but are now 25 and soon to die of cancer due to pollution caused by generating that $10T, your wealth as well as the effort to gain it was fairly useless.
  - hbrn 4y ago
    This proves that wealth as a metric is imperfect (like any other metric), especially if we are ignoring all other metrics (we're not). In no way it indicates that wealth is useless. Still waiting to hear which metric is more useful. It looks like you brought up life expectancy, but it does correlate with wealth. Unlike wealth, it's is extremely hard to measure due to enormous lag.

moralestapia 4y ago

Hire the most capable people for the job, period. I sympathize a bit with things like Affirmative Action, but at the end of the day, a person (disregarding gender, physical condition, race, etc...) who earned it doesn't deserve to be displaced by others who didn't.

AlotOfReading 4y ago

That's not really the point. Any individual person will have their own biases and shortsightednesses, and basic assumptions about the world. People with similar backgrounds will tend to have similar biases.

avereveard 4y ago

> white, Indian, and East Asian idk that sounds like diversity

amusedcyclist 4y ago

True but it could have been staffed by other people and created the same things if history had worked out differently. I don't think diversity should be the aim of a company but I also don't think the gender and race of SV employees has much to do with its success