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I'm asking from a sincere position here, so I don't wish to come off sounding antagonistic, but could you explain why the statement "diversity is bad" is wrong?

• fwungy 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • opportune 4y ago
    This seems like a very European perspective and not even responding to the OP’s question about why diversity helps. Here in the US most of my friends are second generation immigrants - many not white - who are fully assimilated and just as capable as any one else. Diversity is, in my opinion, entirely about making sure those individuals are fairly considered and welcome, even if racist and edgelords think they must be incapable of fitting in because other people of their ethnicity haven’t integrated.
    • chmod600 4y ago
      "fully assimilated" Then do they still represent diversity? I think you are confusing a rejection of prejudice (treating like people as different based on superficial factors) with desire for diversity (favoring people because of differences).
    • fwungy 4y ago
      Many groups have arrived poor to the US and worked themselves up to over-representation in academia and the professions, without intervention. They were not white and not always native English speakers. To further diversity should their numbers not be limited, to make space for other groups that have not exceled in the same way? If racism is such an endemic problem in the US why have these non-white immigrant groups been able to achieve over-representation in academia, government, and the professions? Why would racists allow a system that harmed rather than benefited themselves. A lot of stuff around DEI doesn't add up. It feels more like a power grab hiding behind virtue signaling.
  • yardie 4y ago
    Funny how the largest western nation has made it abundantly clear they have little respect for women and lgbtq rights. Yet, it is the developing countries that are held up as being backwards. > The problem is that an African cannot replace a European any more than a European could replace an African, for example. Not entirely understanding what you are attempting to assert with this sentence. What can’t Africans do that only Europeans can?
    • dotnet00 4y ago
      He means exactly what it is on the surface. An African is not a European in that life in Africa is not the same as life in Europe, thus a person born and raised in Africa is not the same as if the same person had been born and raised in Europe. Thus the difference in values he cites after that.
• benrbray 4y ago
  As a simple example: I wouldn't want to work with ten copies of myself. It would magnify my strengths but also my weaknesses. It's much better if a team is comprised by people with different backgrounds, different strengths, different weaknesses. Of course, it is helpful if everyone has some common ground, to facilitate better communication. Diversity in college admissions is one way to create an environment where these sorts of teams can form organically. Of course, the devil is in the details. I tend not to agree with how most diversity programs are implemented, despite agreeing with the mission.
  • JamesBarney 4y ago
    This always assumes that the primary way people are different is race. A liberal white and a black business major from Princeton who both grew up upper class in the north going to private school probably have much more in common than a poor conservative white guy from a Alabama and a rich liberal one from New York.
    • chelmzy 4y ago
      This is my entire problem with most diversity programs. Economic class and location are much larger factors in diverse thinking than strictly race. But what do I know. I'm just a hick from Alabama (:
      • Spooky23 4y ago
        That’s one of the reasons why in some circles the “1620 project” and similar interpretations of history are so threatening to some people. The biggest fear of reactionary types who control resources is that rural poor that trends white and urban poor that trends minority will figure out that they share more common interests and challenges. The whole schtick is to keep people angry at their neighbor so they don’t notice what they don’t have.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• claytongulick 4y ago
  I think the idea is that when you have people from diverse backgrounds they bring unique perspectives to problems to help break out of rigid mindsets that can result from inculturation/monocultures. Take a look at the male model of medicine for an example of this. An eyebrow raising example of this is the "treatment" for "female hysteria" in the 1800s [1]. On the surface it seems reasonable that adding diverse viewpoints to a problem set would result in a higher likelihood of locating an optimal solution, though I haven't seen any real science to support this. I also haven't seen any studies that have attempted to measure this effect and balance it against the cost of DEI initiatives, all of which are difficult to quantify. [1] https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/medical-vibrators-treatment-female-hysteria https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/medical-vibrators-treatment-fem...
• cormacrelf 4y ago
  You are thinking very, very shallowly about this. Diversity has become a goal in many organisations because primarily (1) too much cohesion entails out-groups and that often means racism or other illegal and immoral attitudes and practices thrive, and that is a huge problem both for legal reasons and generally; and secondarily (2) too much cohesion means you aren’t exposed to enough different opinions. You have apparently only considered reason (2). Your comment then runs the gauntlet of extreme reactions to the idea of diversity. It seems to be because you don’t understand that both cohesion and diversity sit somewhere in the middle of a priority order for most organisations. The only people who agree with where you appear to have placed cohesion in the priority order are the architects of 1930s fascism. The reason saying “diversity is bad” and all the other things you said (“Diversity is disunity. Chaos”) is wrong is because you sound like a fascist. I am not exaggerating. You absolutely do sound like one. That is a prime example of “bad systemic effects” as the comment above said; if you say stuff like this, your organisation will no longer be conducive to anything except violent political movements. You should, in swift order, reconsider how important cohesion is to you and any organisations you’re a part of. Addendum: you did say you didn’t know how to ask this without sounding hateful. Fair. Pointing out the connection to hateful groups is still appropriate and necessary because the devotion to absolute cohesion was a huge part of what made fascism successful. Saying stuff like you did is a bad way for society to go, good people recognise it and rightly reject it vehemently. So your ideas about cohesion being always preferable to diversity are always going to get this reaction from most, and eventually your organisations will be filled with the remaining people who do agree with your comments, and those people are amenable to hate even if you were originally just trying to get some team spirit going. It is a bad path. So is making your university staff swear allegiance to ideology. The only way forward is a balance of cohesion and diversity.
  • registeredcorn 4y ago
    Thank you very much for the response, and for not being too harsh in your critique. :)
    • cormacrelf 4y ago
      I’m not sure it’s a smiley face moment for all of us, more just another day on the internet, but thinking about this on your own is good. One more point to consider is that you might have a mistaken impression of how important idea (2) is in organisations’ views of diversity. Despite the primacy of idea (2) in framing the issue (as in, “diversity is strength” etc), organisations often care about (1) more because the harms from not enough diversity are so stark and obvious and measurable. The benefits of diversity are real, but the toxicity you get from too much cohesion is really dangerous, unproductive, damaging to a company’s hiring and retention ability, and makes your product unattractive if consumers hear about it. (I would cite Travis Kalanick’s tenure at Uber, where “cohesion” seems to have meant “being male”.) But you won’t hear companies talk about that danger, because it would sound like they already have a problem or that they are thinking about this purely in a liability sense or that they feel like they’re being forced to do it which seems like they don’t care. So everyone talks about the potential upside instead, which needs not be measurable in dollars or dramatic, but is regardless a good excuse to take action to avoid the dangers that do have a very concrete cost that these places have learned primarily through the real pain of having done it wrong and run into trouble. It’s easy to lose sight of that when everyone talks about diversity in flowery terms, but remember this is the marketing-department-approved translation of a century of learnings through civil rights movements, political movements, legal reforms, huge lawsuits, spiralling company failures, and wars over this stuff, and it is all still lurking right there behind the flowery language.
• 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  I don’t think we should be down voting this comment even if you disagree. I don’t think we are approaching diversity and inclusion in the right way, but this comment also sounds very wrong to me.
  • registeredcorn 4y ago
    Thank you for the kind words! I do think it's unfortunate that you seem to disagree severely, but I certainly appreciate the concern and thoughtfulness. If you have anything you'd like to add, I'm happy to hear you out, even if we might not agree on it. :) Honestly, I'm just glad that I haven't received any death threats, so far.
    • 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
      I grew up in a multicultural place. Your comments sound very incorrect to me, diversity is a good thing. However getting a multicultural society to function is indeed very hard, and many places that aren’t so diverse definitely operate with less conflict. What I don’t have a good answer for at the moment is if we should be purposely building diverse societies or if we are just trying to make what we have work better. Some things seem obviously true e.g people should have equal rights and women should participate in the work force. When we travel we often talk of broadening our horizons. So incorporating new ideas also seems obviously true. But this mandated bureaucracy seems wrong and unhelpful when you have teaching staff limiting contact with students to minimise the possibility of perceived slights.
• opportune 4y ago
  I guess it depends on the context - both the immediate context like whether it’s a university/employer/neighborhood/group of friends, and the cultural context. There are differing views on this but here are mine (wanted to keep it short, but also wanted to keep it comprehensive for those who don’t understand the reasoning): Speaking as someone in the US, where many disadvantaged groups for a long time were systematically prevented from doing things (like living in a certain area or having a certain kind of job) and represent sizable parts of the population, a lack of diversity often suggests that there is still some kind of inequality causing it. If your institution is big or important enough, people will wonder why those benefitting from it aren’t representative of society as a whole. A cause that unfortunately still exists, and any respectable person wants to avoid associating themselves with, is when you are just outright excluding or hostile to a particular group. This could vary from outright discrimination to a historical association with discrimination that nobody is actively trying to reverse (such as with country clubs, Greek life). The second one that is much harder to deal with and more pervasive, is when there are not explicit barriers preventing diversity, but rather lingering systemic problems stemming from things like historical discrimination - for example, segregation and redlining created black ghettoes with cyclic poverty and poor educational outcomes that still exist today. Another big one is unconscious bias, like how if you modify the same resume to have a “black sounding” name it may get fewer interviews. I’m not saying some group of tabletop gamers in rural Minnesota need to go out of their way to find a non-white person to not be racist. I think a lot of people not from the US or from monocultural parts of the US think that’s what being “pro-diversity” means. I don’t think hiring someone with different color skin magically means your team will be more effective either. In essence it boils down to: 1. Discrimination still exists. Effects from discrimination from the past remain into the present day. Fundamentally nobody should be barred from a job/college because of something like race. And considering the historical injustices that occurred, along with many people harboring those views to the present day or very recently, it’s not enough to not-exclude people - you need to make efforts to actively include people, since they may otherwise think that they “don’t belong” somewhere because of their race. 2. When an institution operates across a broad population, it should try to represent that population. If it doesn’t even come close, this may suggest they are discriminating. Let’s say for instance I start a tech company in the bay area and I only hire white people - with more than a handful of employees that starts becoming astronomically improbable if I’m fairly considering the entire pool of eligible hires. Also, I think some level of representation is helpful from a simple effectiveness standpoint. Maybe some product doesn’t perform as well on darker skin, or maybe it doesn’t address the needs of a bilingual sub population, or unknowingly commits some cultural faux pas. 3. The huge problem is what to do when outcomes are still very far off from being representative even without any kind of active discrimination. Sometimes this leads to controversial policies. But IMO we shouldn’t let those bad implementations detract from the problem or make us think diversity is bad.
• anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at. Active inclusion of members of currently or formerly marginalized peoples. The "inclusion" term of DEI I think more speaks to once the person is inside the group, or sometimes in reaching out to particular outsiders (such as a local community) for input into decisions, because they are also stakeholders.
  • registeredcorn 4y ago
    I think my confusion is I do not understand what the motivation to do this is.
    • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      Anything from pitchforks at the gate, to sympathy for the unfulfilled struggles of other people, to we're leaving talent and opportunities on the table and if we pick it up we'll win over our competitors.