This, so much. The root of all of these issues is a drastic overestimation of the average persons cognitive ability. To use IQ as a proxy, the mean (100) is shockingly incompetent and to paraphrase a famous comedian, half of us are below that average.
There was a time when merit tended to bubble up into positions of authority but that has been increasingly untrue for decades, for a host of reasons that all point to a rotting western culture.
> There was a time when merit tended to bubble up into positions of authority but that has been increasingly untrue for decades, for a host of reasons that all point to a rotting western culture.
Before diversity and inclusion drives skewed hiring toward genitals and skin color as opposed to merit.
Before we started throwing billions of dollars at our worst performers, and lowering standards across all school districts, in a failed attempt to bring our lowest up, at the measurable cost of bringing our top performers down.
What proportion of the population do you think actually contributes to the progression of society? Scientists, engineers, competent politicians, doctors, policymakers...maybe the top 10% are capable of being and carrying out the orders of visionaries? In the West we've gradually reallocated our resources towards the needy, and now we reap the reward of decades of neglect for our top performers as we graduate 18 year old "adults" who are barely equipped to even live alone. Not to mention how pitifully we are outcompeted on the world stage - have you been to a college career fair lately? It says something about our society that the majority of students, at top tier schools, are foreigners.
This is what happens when "nationalism" and "individualism" are turned into dirty words by decades of propaganda. Either this war on corona turns things around and brings us out desperately needed Pattons and Churchills, or this truly is the beginning of the end of the American Empire.
I'm sorry but the people who most complain about diversity and inclusion being the downfall of our civilization have not exactly been shown to be the brightest minds in this whole thing.
I don't see top performers being actually concerned by this at all. On the contrary, top performers seem to be fairly concerned about how traditionally exclusionary measures have impeded a lot of talent from being developed.
>I'm sorry but the people who most complain about diversity and inclusion being the downfall of our civilization have not exactly been shown to be the brightest minds in this whole thing.
That's because one side is taboo and culturally suppressed. This thread may get me banned from HN, for example.
But by definition the push for diversity, which started in academia, bled into government, and has most recently been taking over the corporate world, selects for characteristics (race and gender) which are not correlated with merit.
Ignoring the fact that the entire idea rests on an unsupportable basis (a conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of representation/outcome), it's a theoretical mechanism by which we can explain the decline of performance across every corporate, political, and academic sector. We spend more per capital on school children than any other country in the world, by the way, so it isn't a question of funding. And the issues seem to exist in all states, regardless of government party, so it isn't likely a strictly political issue.
Clearly there is some deep cultural problem at hand and the people making policy have been leaning left for years in all sectors. Including media outside of Fox news. It fits.
No, it's because you're creating conspirative BS that is so far out of reality it's not even worth considering.
In 15 years of being in the workforce I have never seen any diversity initiative having so much as a modest effect on people taking classes or employment.
You are probably going to get banned because this a racist tirade from an ignoranimus who clearly has no real life experience in neither academia nor industry. It's stupid, delirious, and forgettable.
>In 15 years of being in the workforce I have never seen any diversity initiative having so much as a modest effect on people taking classes or employment
Well, start here [1].
>this a racist tirade from an ignoranimus who clearly has no real life experience in neither academia nor industry. It's stupid, delirious, and forgettable.
You are throwing a lot of vitriol my way but not discussing any of my points. Though it should not be relevant, I am not white. And I am the son of immigrants. There is no need to make this personal.
The entire position between diversity and inclusion is inconsistent. The claim is that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams - this implies that diverse people's perform differently. If they perform differently, why should we expect them to be equally represented in merit based roles?
That's not my point at all. And it is a myopic conclusion to draw from my comments. Unfortunately in our society we have been conditioned to expect a singular outcome from any such discussion and immediately avoid it on grounds of offensiveness.
The point is that here you literally have a mechanism which is explicitly prioritizing traits which have nothing to do with merit. Regardless of whether our other metrics are appropriate, it is by definition clear that with this system you will inevitably dilute competence -
Incidentally this is a source of political bias in academia; you get your way if you can convince a generation or two that that having people with different skin colors working together is somehow going to improve the quality of science that you practice.
No, it is absolutely the point, unless you believe that the skill for CEOs was fairly distributed in its proportion of old, white men, or if you feel that whites and Asians objectively make for better engineers, or if you think that blacks make for better jazz musicians.
Drop this ridiculous rationalization of racism and sexism.
>or if you think that blacks make for better jazz musicians.
But it isn't racist to suggest that they may be better sports players, right?
Look, none of what I'm saying justifies discrimination against individuals, because we are still dealing with probabilistic distributions. What it does suggest is that inequality of outcome can be explained without resorting to racism and sexism. Further it suggests that our goals of gender and racial parity in industry cannot occur without some penalty to merit, which may be worse for society.
> Further it suggests that our goals of gender and racial parity in industry cannot occur without some penalty to merit, which may be worse for society.
Sure, now go out and prove that that's actually what happened and that the penalty is worse than the benefit of elevating of people who used to have no status to even play the game.
