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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 a

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.
brnaftr361 4y ago
It does not follow. Race itself (since you're using 20th century fascism, read: Nazi) is a singular aspect of diversity. Organization is a poor selection of term, too. Institution is better suited. It doesn't matter how you mince it the only truly homogeneous populations are at-risk marginalized nomads. With that framed: you can find greedy, lecherous, exploitative, amoral or immoral slouches in every corner of the Earth regardless of race, you can equally find people that you'd invariably frame as noble, selfless, vulnerable understanding humanitarians... and we can fairly posit then, from every race, creed, region and religion you can pull from these pools any imaginable quantity of the human spectra - and I expect anyone else would, and they would elect people deliberately close to their own beliefs and goals because it's necessary to have some alignment within any large organization and especially a society. In fact there's something to be said for religion to affect this conversation, and it's that it permeated every early civilization - and one would rightly point out that's because values were made concrete and "objective". Now I expect you didn't consider it, but there are a lot of groups that don't share your values. They feel very strongly, to the extent they would kill you and dismember you over it, some would just kill you, maybe torture you beforehand. I mean, that's really diverse is are those individuals you'd want in your institutions? I expect no. Likewise there is not necessarily some imminent moral concern that doesn't at least parallel that: some people don't want to be around other people - values collide because ultimately we live in a relativistic world. The real problems you described can be chalked up to a few things: The state: Monopoly on power, disempowers individuals, individuals relinquish their moral obligations including refusal to participate Nucleated power: Institutions are supposed to act exemplars of behavior, instead they simply are exemplars and people follow, and then more follow suit. Suddenly the Third Reich is marching on Poland. Purpose and moral delegation is performed by institutions that are, due to human limitations, intrinsically unsuitable for the task. Obviously there is the element of controlling incalculable resources like every competing power in WWII had which emerges from this... Limited options: Individuals and communities are unable to disband from their respective state apparatus e.g. secession due to the imminent threat of violence, retaliation and/or a complete lack of peaceable legislative or political option. Scale: Dunbar's number, hypothetical maximum of about 150 people for functional human communities. When a neighborhood school in rural America doubles that easily, one is left to wonder how an institution deals with that, it's by mishandling every human it deals with. Catch-22's and C.S. Lewis's hell. People are abstracted into cattle (see Eichmann) or mechanisms in a greater machine, expected to go flawlessly whirring away without question or complaint at the throw of a lever. It doesn't matter if my friend group is a contractile 10-man squad because we all came from different backgrounds and currently live entirely disparate lives. And we're from one of the most demographically and politically homogeneous states in the US and not one of us has similar views. We're irrelevant because everyone defers to the clueless state, for one, for two we're 10 out of a denominator of millions of hundreds of millions. The problem is with institutions, and hierarchy, and bona fide power, and the concepts of property on which they're founded which again, circularly is a reference to the deference individuals must grant the state which makes it all fall into disproportion. Nazis couldn't work to found a kingdom without people to participate in their game. I elected "institution" because there are a lot of voluntary organizations, but an institution is fundamental and intersections with them are inevitable. My friends, my [hypothetical] church, the workout classes organized by some nice lady, the food bank, salvation army... Individuals have mobility and they're able to reject or accept. Institutions your workplace and government - by dint of being necessitous - drastically reduces one's degrees of freedom, limits their mobility, and entraps them to varying extents. That's a real problem. If I don't like Nicaragua they can arbitrarily refuse me a Passport so I can't leave, forcing me to work at a sweatshop, and then the government can hold me at gunpoint to take some fraction of my infinitesimal income. Anyways, there's different strokes for different folks and there's just as big of a proportion of any "minority group" in every corner of the world that would just as soon self-segregate so they can attend to their communities as there are people who want to live in "diverse" communities in accord with their values. And there's also a lot of performative white guilt bullshit from people who won't bend their ear to a black man, but will naively attempt to run to his "defense" at every opportunity. It's disrespectful.

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.

brnaftr361 4y ago

It does not follow. Race itself (since you're using 20th century fascism, read: Nazi) is a singular aspect of diversity. Organization is a poor selection of term, too. Institution is better suited. It doesn't matter how you mince it the only truly homogeneous populations are at-risk marginalized nomads. With that framed: you can find greedy, lecherous, exploitative, amoral or immoral slouches in every corner of the Earth regardless of race, you can equally find people that you'd invariably frame as noble, selfless, vulnerable understanding humanitarians... and we can fairly posit then, from every race, creed, region and religion you can pull from these pools any imaginable quantity of the human spectra - and I expect anyone else would, and they would elect people deliberately close to their own beliefs and goals because it's necessary to have some alignment within any large organization and especially a society. In fact there's something to be said for religion to affect this conversation, and it's that it permeated every early civilization - and one would rightly point out that's because values were made concrete and "objective". Now I expect you didn't consider it, but there are a lot of groups that don't share your values. They feel very strongly, to the extent they would kill you and dismember you over it, some would just kill you, maybe torture you beforehand. I mean, that's really diverse is are those individuals you'd want in your institutions? I expect no. Likewise there is not necessarily some imminent moral concern that doesn't at least parallel that: some people don't want to be around other people - values collide because ultimately we live in a relativistic world. The real problems you described can be chalked up to a few things: The state: Monopoly on power, disempowers individuals, individuals relinquish their moral obligations including refusal to participate Nucleated power: Institutions are supposed to act exemplars of behavior, instead they simply are exemplars and people follow, and then more follow suit. Suddenly the Third Reich is marching on Poland. Purpose and moral delegation is performed by institutions that are, due to human limitations, intrinsically unsuitable for the task. Obviously there is the element of controlling incalculable resources like every competing power in WWII had which emerges from this... Limited options: Individuals and communities are unable to disband from their respective state apparatus e.g. secession due to the imminent threat of violence, retaliation and/or a complete lack of peaceable legislative or political option. Scale: Dunbar's number, hypothetical maximum of about 150 people for functional human communities. When a neighborhood school in rural America doubles that easily, one is left to wonder how an institution deals with that, it's by mishandling every human it deals with. Catch-22's and C.S. Lewis's hell. People are abstracted into cattle (see Eichmann) or mechanisms in a greater machine, expected to go flawlessly whirring away without question or complaint at the throw of a lever. It doesn't matter if my friend group is a contractile 10-man squad because we all came from different backgrounds and currently live entirely disparate lives. And we're from one of the most demographically and politically homogeneous states in the US and not one of us has similar views. We're irrelevant because everyone defers to the clueless state, for one, for two we're 10 out of a denominator of millions of hundreds of millions. The problem is with institutions, and hierarchy, and bona fide power, and the concepts of property on which they're founded which again, circularly is a reference to the deference individuals must grant the state which makes it all fall into disproportion. Nazis couldn't work to found a kingdom without people to participate in their game. I elected "institution" because there are a lot of voluntary organizations, but an institution is fundamental and intersections with them are inevitable. My friends, my [hypothetical] church, the workout classes organized by some nice lady, the food bank, salvation army... Individuals have mobility and they're able to reject or accept. Institutions your workplace and government - by dint of being necessitous - drastically reduces one's degrees of freedom, limits their mobility, and entraps them to varying extents. That's a real problem. If I don't like Nicaragua they can arbitrarily refuse me a Passport so I can't leave, forcing me to work at a sweatshop, and then the government can hold me at gunpoint to take some fraction of my infinitesimal income. Anyways, there's different strokes for different folks and there's just as big of a proportion of any "minority group" in every corner of the world that would just as soon self-segregate so they can attend to their communities as there are people who want to live in "diverse" communities in accord with their values. And there's also a lot of performative white guilt bullshit from people who won't bend their ear to a black man, but will naively attempt to run to his "defense" at every opportunity. It's disrespectful.