Let us talk about DIVERSITY

[SOTTREADER]

Today on SOTT, the main headline is an article on diversity by JP: The Great Ideological Lie of Diversity -- Sott.net

On the forum, there is another thread loosely related to this, however, that also delves into multiculturalism and immigration which are subjects outside the scope of this thread i.e. mostly just touching upon the concept of diversity within professional set ups e.g. in terms of employment.

The thread mentioned above: Tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism

Onto the topic in hand: In the JP article, as expected and in line with JP's views, diversity essentially leads to oppression. It leads to less competent people being employed or getting grants i.e. as selections are made based on arbitrary criteria e.g. race, sex etc whilst ignoring the relevant criteria, competencies. In addition, diversity itself is quite broad and if you break it down, it would be quite difficult / impractical to cover all different groups (which dependant on the measure you use, could end up topping 500+ categories).

All in all, diversity equals bad in practise, but on the face of it, it masquerades as something positive.

Assessment of the article:

Of course the article was written by JP, a highly qualified and competent academic who has changed the lives of countless. In no way is this meant to diminish or criticise, in any case, any such thing would just be wrong as the qualifications and competencies of the author are top tier.

With the above qualifiers, a few things jumped out to me

- Job selections are rarely black or white​

The argument goes that the best person should get the job. In most situations, I believe that the final few applicants of any job are usually pretty much equivalent to each other in that technically, they could perform whatever job it is they have applied for. To illustrate

Imagine a graduate programme for a multinational american engineering company. In a specific years intake, they hire 10 new graduates. This year, they have received 5000 applicants (yes, usually that many apply for these graduate programs) and before any face to face interviews or assessment centre, the graduates all go through online tests including personality testing. At each stage the number is reduced... This is not to mention that to apply in the first place, you must have already met certain minimum criteria e.g. on type of academic qualification, type and ranking of university etc

Onto the face to face assessments and the numbers are now reduced even further until we're now at 30. All these 30 have demonstrated that they are essentially the best, in terms of the job, they can do it, they have the credentials having proven themselves in multiple stages of assessment. However, we can only select 10.

Say the profile of the 30 is the below

- 15 white males (american)
- 5 white males (European / Australian etc)
- 4 White females (american)
- 1 minority female (american)
- 1 minority female (Indian)
- 2 minority males (american)
- 2 minority males (african)

We can also break the profiles further based on personality traits.

How do we choose the 10?

In real life, the final selection in my view comes down to subjective views of recruiters e.g.

- They may choose on what they deem to be the best fit e.g. based on personality, likeability, confidence (but if the company is 95% male, then is the best fit also male?)

- Would the recruiters at this point be wrong to say
- determine that out of the 10, based on the final remaining members, that say they give a job to 1 or 2 of the females to maintain or increase their female quota, say 1 or 2 minority males, and the rest, say 6 jobs to white males (say 4 american and 2 foreign)

The balance might change year to year depending on the finalists etc.

The point is, in the real world, there is usually quite a lot of grey... the best person for the job might not be 1 person... it might be a whole group of them but the company can only hire a certain amount and therefore must make choices that at this juncture, don't really tie back to the competencies of the individuals involved (as they all can technically perform the job to a broadly equivalent level).

In keeping with the theme of grey areas

- In the area of scientific research, as I have come to understand it, research money is sometimes (more often than it should) granted based on political views rather than competencies e.g. say an anti-vax researcher is unlikely to get any grant money or, an anti-darwinian, a climate change denier etc....

In any case.... my main aim is in understanding....

- Does diversity always leads to 'reverse' discrimination?
- How do we factor in situations where things are not as black or white e.g. where more than 1 applicant is capable
- At what point does human preference become unethical e.g. after determining the final round of capable individuals, can we choose based on what we like? e.g. personality, what about race? (say my team is all white and I want to maintain that, is that wrong?), what about even arbitrary stuff like beauty (say I'm choosing a secretary and out of the remaining applicants, I deem 1 more beautiful than the others, can I choose her to be the secretary?) etc
- Can I choose to increase representation of certain groups and therefore have an image of my company being inclusive? E.g. can I hire a woman for the mere fact she's a woman (having demonstrated that she is as able as all the other applicants)?

 

[Ina]

Hi Sottreader and welcome to the forum.
I’m afraid that the current times will provide answers that will prove redundant and useless to your question. However I think discussing the diversity principle could be useful if explored in the ideal setting of a perfect human society.
As far as your example is concerned the selection would be done based on the logical academic criteria you listed as well as subjective criteria exuded by policy requirements. I cannot discuss pros and cons or levels of fairness or unfairness because my evaluation capacity changing from an egalitarian communist to white minority in african tribalist context has attenuated to maximum its utility. I will however, follow the answers with interest.

 

[Alejo]

Hi sottreader,

those are valid questions I think. But the way I understand the point of the article is this: we will always have unconscious biases that will lean our choices one way or the other (Attractiveness, race, gender, etc), BUT the goal is consciously to find the best fit for a position, IF we get rid of that conscious goal and change it to “diversity quotas”, the discrimination required to maintain quality disappears and we end up with a poor choice.

maybe with a simpler example, if we’re picking players for a soccer team, and our goal is to have the most diverse soccer team in the world, how likely are we to have a good soccer team?

if our priority is: 2 Asian, 3 Africans, 1 European, 3 Latinos, 2 homosexuals and 1 woman... or whatever. We could discriminate the applicants towards our goal as such, but how likely is it that by chance we’d have a good team. We’d succeed at something entirely different. And we’d end up discriminating against competence, as a rule I’d say.

 

[SOTTREADER]

Interesting Alejo and I agree... So I suppose, there are two things here - you have competency (i.e. what you call the best fit) and you have diversity.

I might be wrong but in the main (at least on the face of it), in terms of professional roles, the main attribute considered for suitability is competency. Diversity policies are secondary in nature and their aim is to curb unconscious bias e.g. I doubt I'll get a job in the NHS as a doctor because I'm a woman or I'm a minority. This is how I understand it i.e. removing pathological elements from the equation e.g. diversity should trump competency

To use your example of soccer team(s) - in terms of suitability, both these teams below are equally competitive

Ps, this is for illustrative purposes, the players below do not play in the same team.

Team 1 - Non Diverse (racial diversity)	Team 2 - Diverse (Racial diversity)
GK - De Gea (White - Man UTD)	GK - De Gea (White - Man UTD)
RB - Kimmich (white - Bayern)	RB - Trent Alexander Arnold (Black - Liverpool)
CB - De Ligt (White - Juventus)	CB - Virgil Van Dijk (Black - Liverpool)
CB - Ramos (White - R Madrid)	CB - Ramos (White - R Madrid)
LB - Jordi Alba (White - Barcelona)	LB - David Alaba (Black - Bayern)
CM - Toni Kroos (White - R Madrid)	CM - Toni Kroos (White - R Madrid)
CM - Sergio Busquets (White - Barcelona)	CM - N'golo Kante (Black - Chelsea)
CM - Luka Modric (White - R Madrid)	CM- Luka Modric (White - R Madrid)
FW - Ronaldo (White - Juventus)	FW- Mbappe (Black - PSG)
SC - Lewandoski (white - Bayern)	SC - Lewandoski (white - Bayern)
FW - Messi (White - Barcelona)	FW - Messi (White - Barcelona)

In the second team, certain players from the first team have 'lost' their jobs to a plethora of minority players in the second team (5 bolded black players have now entered the team)... however, in the whole, the team hasn't lost its competitive edge.... if you know soccer, you'll know the players on both lists are some of the best in their positions in the world and are therefore pretty much interchangeable with each other from a 'competency' point of view.

However, the second team up there looks a bit more 'inclusive' than the first one in that it has a certain level of 'diversity'. Should this matter? Well, my argument is yes, we do live in an inclusive world, our society is inclusive in that we have people from various backgrounds, races, genders etc all occupying the same space therefore society should be that there is representation across the spectrum (albeit proportional) to the extent possible without compromising on 'competency' or 'best in class' selections (which is distributed across the population as per the example in my initial post on the 30 finalists)

Is there any argument against constructing a 'team' this way?

 

[Beorn]

Hi Sottreader, how do you know the second team is more 'diverse' then the first? Because of the way they look? The reason why competency is paramount is because you never know what someone's been through, what their life experiences are, how hard they've worked to get there. You don't know what their beliefs are, their personality, and so on.. It could be that the second team are all in the same political club. Who knows? That's why it's best to keep to objective standards of assessment.

Adding quotas discriminates based on arbitrary characteristics and lowers competence. We can see this in real world examples such as firefighters lowering lifting standards to accommodate 'diversity' requirements.

I don't think having all teams/groups/companies represent the structure of society is encouraging to minorities at all. People connect on many different levels. Perhaps they have the same hobbies and this brings them together. Being diverse is more about being divisive, IMO.

 

[Alejo]

Interesting Alejo and I agree... So I suppose, there are two things here - you have competency (i.e. what you call the best fit) and you have diversity.

I might be wrong but in the main (at least on the face of it), in terms of professional roles, the main attribute considered for suitability is competency. Diversity policies are secondary in nature and their aim is to curb unconscious bias e.g. I doubt I'll get a job in the NHS as a doctor because I'm a woman or I'm a minority. This is how I understand it i.e. removing pathological elements from the equation e.g. diversity should trump competency

To use your example of soccer team(s) - in terms of suitability, both these teams below are equally competitive

Ps, this is for illustrative purposes, the players below do not play in the same team.

Team 1 - Non Diverse (racial diversity)	Team 2 - Diverse (Racial diversity)
GK - De Gea (White - Man UTD)	GK - De Gea (White - Man UTD)
RB - Kimmich (white - Bayern)	RB - Trent Alexander Arnold (Black - Liverpool)
CB - De Ligt (White - Juventus)	CB - Virgil Van Dijk (Black - Liverpool)
CB - Ramos (White - R Madrid)	CB - Ramos (White - R Madrid)
LB - Jordi Alba (White - Barcelona)	LB - David Alaba (Black - Bayern)
CM - Toni Kroos (White - R Madrid)	CM - Toni Kroos (White - R Madrid)
CM - Sergio Busquets (White - Barcelona)	CM - N'golo Kante (Black - Chelsea)
CM - Luka Modric (White - R Madrid)	CM- Luka Modric (White - R Madrid)
FW - Ronaldo (White - Juventus)	FW- Mbappe (Black - PSG)
SC - Lewandoski (white - Bayern)	SC - Lewandoski (white - Bayern)
FW - Messi (White - Barcelona)	FW - Messi (White - Barcelona)

In the second team, certain players from the first team have 'lost' their jobs to a plethora of minority players in the second team (5 bolded black players have now entered the team)... however, in the whole, the team hasn't lost its competitive edge.... if you know soccer, you'll know the players on both lists are some of the best in their positions in the world and are therefore pretty much interchangeable with each other from a 'competency' point of view.


However, the second team up there looks a bit more 'inclusive' than the first one in that it has a certain level of 'diversity'. Should this matter? Well, my argument is yes, we do live in an inclusive world, our society is inclusive in that we have people from various backgrounds, races, genders etc all occupying the same space therefore society should be that there is representation across the spectrum (albeit proportional) to the extent possible without compromising on 'competency' or 'best in class' selections (which is distributed across the population as per the example in my initial post on the 30 finalists)

Is there any argument against constructing a 'team' this way?

I see your point, but the thing is the first team was
built with the aim to be successful. The second one was built with the aim to be diverse and by chance you happened to have good players. That is to say, quality was secondary and accidental.

Moreover, a team built for success isn’t necessarily non-diverse, look at Liverpool for instance, or ManCity, were they looking for minorities actively? Or were they looking for quality and thus found it where it objectively was and ended up with a diverse team.

And the argument is, if the goal is to succeed, why leave quality and competence to chance?

What if now, you were placed under further rules in favor of diversity? Now I’d require you add to the second team a homosexual, and a trans woman/man. And the black players can’t be nationals, they have to be first generation immigrants from 3rd world countries, Van Dijk, Mbappe and Alexander would be out (and sure, you could get Neymar, same quality, but now your criteria isn’t quality).

 

[SOTTREADER]

Alejo, good points. And Beorn, I agree, regardless of anyone's views on the matter, the topic itself is divisive.

I suppose, the point I was aiming at is perfectly encapsulated by the user David who has commented on the article... his comment

The article makes sense but what is left out about current hiring practices is that the person(s) doing the hiring can and almost certainty do have prejudices of one form or another that could hit any diversity group. I have entered many stores where all I see are attractive your people, coincidence, probably not. How to solve that problem. How about no application should ask for any details about you sex, race, gender, etc., and the interview would be like the show The Voice with blind additions. The decision would be made on the application matching the job and questions in the interview. Of course the voice would have to be electronically made neutral or your sex would likely be a dead giveaway. In the end it's all pretty ridiculous. You can't force people to be open minded, far, nice, not prejudice, etc. by laws. It will never work.

Diversity / inclusivity, in the main is meant to ensure women and racial minorities don't get overlooked due to 'biases'... before the subject gets complicated by all sorts of 'intersectionalities' - the backbone is to protect women and minorities in the workplace.

I've recently heard a saying... power doesn't corrupt, instead the corrupted are attracted to power. The people who have the power to hire and fire people, a decent percentage being pathologicals and outright psychopaths, can and will exercise decision making led by nothing but their biases amongst other things. Without laws to keep such things in check, then well, you leave a massive number of people open to abuse, discrimination and things that in all honesty, you wouldn't want to fall upon you.

Having said all the above, I suppose ideology underpins each person's views - my views are somewhat left leaning but not a lot really, and yours, I could argue is more 'free market' leaning i.e. leave things as they are and the markets shall set themselves at the most optimum position.

 

[Ursus Minor]

MARVEL AT THE DIVERSITY of the

French Under-17 National Football Team (Equipe de France de football des moins de 17 ans)

Remark by "Paul1977" on gloria.tv:
"Pour saisir l'ampleur du grand remplacement" (Understanding the extent of the grand replacement)


I'm wondering when diversity will be diverse enough.
Makes you wonder whether the three or four light-skinned lads are just there for keeping up diversity...

 

[Joe]

- Does diversity always leads to 'reverse' discrimination?

If one group or demographic has been deliberately excluded due to prejudice, then changing that is not "reverse discrimination", it's simply correcting an obvious injustice. While some claim that that has been the case in Western societies for many decades: that certain 'minorities' were deliberately excluded due to prejudice, I don't see any convincing evidence for it (and that also allows for "unconscious bias"), and as such I think the moves afoot today DO fall into the category of reverse discrimination.

- How do we factor in situations where things are not as black or white e.g. where more than 1 applicant is capable

Where more than one applicant is capable, "unconscious bias" of one type or another comes into play. That's pretty normal and not something that anyone should get worked up about.

- At what point does human preference become unethical e.g. after determining the final round of capable individuals, can we choose based on what we like? e.g. personality, what about race? (say my team is all white and I want to maintain that, is that wrong?), what about even arbitrary stuff like beauty (say I'm choosing a secretary and out of the remaining applicants, I deem 1 more beautiful than the others, can I choose her to be the secretary?) etc

See above.

- Can I choose to increase representation of certain groups and therefore have an image of my company being inclusive? E.g. can I hire a woman for the mere fact she's a woman (having demonstrated that she is as able as all the other applicants)?

If she is as capable as all others, then it comes down to personal preference of the person making the selection, although today, CONSCIOUS choices are being made by people making the decisions to "diversify" because they get more social credit for doing so.

 

[Joe]

MARVEL AT THE DIVERSITY of the

French Under-17 National Football Team (Equipe de France de football des moins de 17 ans)

Remark by "Paul1977" on gloria.tv:
"Pour saisir l'ampleur du grand remplacement" (Understanding the extent of the grand replacement)


I'm wondering when diversity will be diverse enough.
Makes you wonder whether the three or four light-skinned lads are just there for keeping up diversity...

It's possible that the makeup of that team has to do with ability more than anything else, and the ability is itself the result of genetics and social class.

 

[Gruchaa]

Hi Sottreader,
Are you asking What is wrong with current aspects of „Diversity”?
In my opinion it is similar to other postmodernism ideas: Acting against the truth. Denying of common sense. Forcing the outcome. Simple example: if someone is telling you to hire 50% women and 50% men for 6 positions in your company. And you received 3 applications from men and 100 from women. Lets assume that you interviewed all of them and your best candidates are within this 100 of women. However you need to hire these 3 Guys, even they are much words than other applicants. That is wrong with this whole concept in my opinion.

 

[SOTTREADER]

MARVEL AT THE DIVERSITY of the

French Under-17 National Football Team (Equipe de France de football des moins de 17 ans)

Remark by "Paul1977" on gloria.tv:
"Pour saisir l'ampleur du grand remplacement" (Understanding the extent of the grand replacement)


I'm wondering when diversity will be diverse enough.
Makes you wonder whether the three or four light-skinned lads are just there for keeping up diversity...

Chances are, if you look at the origin of the non-white players in the photo, you'll find that their parents are migrants from former french colonies... countries which up to the present day are controlled by France through the monetary system - the so called CFA zone (Mass Migration - a plan, or just a consequence of some other plan)

These players are technically a conglomerate of individuals from various countries who have been naturalised as French linking back to historic colonial roots. Of course there will only be a few 'purely' French individuals as they are competing against individuals from 14 or so other countries (which are part of the wider French web), the best of which are selected to represent France!

It's not diversity policy per se... it's simply those who are best BUT they aren't all from one country, they are naturalised French.

As a contrast, Swiss national team wouldn't have a similar make up, not because they have poor diversity policy... more like simply because Swiss don't have a colonial past, therefore the make up of their team is more as you'd expect, the talent pool they can pick from comes mostly from within the confines of Switzerland. I can't load the image for some reason, but if you google, you'll see for yourself.

The European football teams with highest minority representation all have colonial pasts - France, England and Belgium! Is it a coincidence?

It therefore should not be 'Marvel at the diversity', it should be, "This is what happens to your country if you invade a bunch of other countries and refuse to ever leave, make them all speak French and keep them all under your control"

 

[Goemon_]

The first time I heard about diversity quotas was for french government make-up or something like that (parliament or whatever).

So, basicaly, someone think it is not fair to have mostly politician men. Let's go fifty men for fifty women.
Probably, as things where, some women were excluded because of a bias that goes like "Sure, she can't be a good politician, she's a woman". And that's unfair.

Still, it seems obvious that less women than men wants to become a good politician. So what happens with the fifty fifty rule: you exclude a lot of good politician men and you get a lot of bad politician women, plus a few good ones.

Overall it's far worth. And then you want to add to that all the minorities. That gets very complicated.

There is a funny fact in this matter. There is a well know bias: a tall guy is very more likely to get a job and still I never heard of anyone talking of including more small guys into the diversity mix...