Notably, institutions like academia and media increasingly consider viewpoint homogeneity something akin to moral purity, and consequently they end up with lots of racial and gender diversity but minimal viewpoint diversity (of course the degree of homogeneity is not uniform across these institutions, but this doesn’t detract from my point).
Since then it's been perverted into being about superficial immutable physical characteristics like sex and skin color, which is now, ironically, contributing to more racial discrimination and less meritocracy than before. It's a clear example of the "road to hell being paved with good intentions".
By focusing on diversity like this you are elevating these immutable characteristics beyond the importance of individuality, pre-judging what people will bring to a team based on things like skin color or gender. It seems like racism has just gone full circle. I'm sure I will get downvoted to hell as this is a very unpopular take.
First there’s the pressure of “we have to do something now and it has to be externally apparent”, the choice to go with the most outwardly visible change, then other organizations following suit, and soon it becomes mandatory with everyone convinced they are working on resolving the underlying problem.
However, even if the underlying causes behind socio-psychological dynamics that fuel discrimination and xenophobia are unlikely to be best addressed through eliminating the symptoms of it by enforcing diversity via the very mechanism of discrimination by external in-born traits, that action may still help address some adjacent core problems (for example, somewhat reducing the income gap correlating with certain such traits).
In the mean time what do you think happens?
Lot of blundering about. If you focus too much on the blundering most cancer hospitals will get shut down.
Of course, to reiterate, in this case the ‘treatment’ is likely addressing the root causes of adjacent problems, and in dire circumstances even a temporary relief could be worth it, so I would not call against it.
My worry is that as one particular way of addressing discrimination (through applying discrimination, no less) becomes the default, it’s cargo-culted and there is very little incentive to understand and fix the underlying issues that said discrimination is a symptom of—which (underlying issues) may well fester until they manifest themselves as a new, possibly worse symptom.
No, it's not. It's about social justice and corporate citizenship. Viewpoint heterogenity and other arguments of private benefit have always been secondary arguments.
> Notably, institutions like academia and media increasingly consider viewpoint homogeneity something akin to moral purity
AFAICT this isn't increasingly true of either, though it's perhaps slightly increasingly true (with different favored viewpoints) within individual media firms rather than the media as a whole. The argument that it is increasingly true tends to come from supporters of what was, until recently, the dominant ideology in those institutions and all of society, and is more about that viewpoint no longer being as strongly favored than increasing homogeneity.
it's more akin to a sales tactic
compare the shift in preeminence from "free software" to "open source." the pioneers make a moral/ideological argument why doing such-and-such thing is an imperative, get visibility and carve out a niche, but don't achieve mass adoption. bit later, the strivers show up and argue such-and-such actually just makes good business sense, and this proves interesting and palatable enough to get fully institutionalized
or, say, the shift from "gay liberation" to "gay rights." the argument in the 60s and 70s was that we're inherently subversive entities whose lifestyles by their very nature go against the status quo. by the 00s the dominant line is if only we had these and those legal rights, the final obstacles to our complete willing assimilation into the status quo!
as "diversity" continues its transition from ideal championed by believers to administrative function served by a professional class, it will continue to mutate in a way that benefits those who implement it
I know studies have shown this at the organizational level, but has there been much work teasing apart cause and effect? You can make a case that organizations welcoming of different viewpoints outperform for that reason, and they attract and retain diverse people for the same reason.
Being inclusive is, however, something I consider right and, for some, doing the right thing is more important than maximizing profits.
I haven't seen any sign of any of these tech companies "shutting down minorities". From what I've seen, if the right candidate is a minority, they'll hire them without blinking.
That's a very good point. Lack of diversity is completely invisible if the surrounding context also lacks it.
Hire good people, don't deny them on the basis of their immutable qualities. Don't pick someone because they look a certain way, but because they can do the work.
I'm not joking.
I have tried multiple times to hire a friend, who is black, because he is good (and not because he's black), and have failed every time because his cultural support structure is simply not there. That's not his problem, and honestly, it's not the Valley's problem, it's just a factr.
It took me a long time to understand this, but I realized, there's lots of places I wouldn't move, either, even for a good opportunity, because my expectations about the culture is some places and not others.
There is a rate of migration now and then, but honestly, there is a serious geo problem. Some people go where the jobs are (born here, but grew up out east), some won't, and there's nothing wrong with that.
True, and deplorable. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28). It seems the LDS church was rather late in getting the memo.
Still... that was 42 years ago. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that that's why there are so few blacks in Utah today. (And even pre-1978, you could live in Utah without being LDS.)
> Combined with governmental policies like redlining of majority black neighborhoods, I think it's fair to say that the lack of diversity in Utah isn't the natural state of affairs
Redlining is also deplorable. But did it happen in Utah? I ask because I'm not sure Utah has any majority-black neighborhoods.
And even then, for there to be redlining, the blacks have to already be here. If they came here, they couldn't buy a home because of redlining? As opposed to anywhere else, where they... also couldn't buy a home because of redlining? Or is the claim that Utah had redlining later than everywhere else?
I don't see the logic for your redlining claim to have any relevance to the question of why Utah is not diverse.
Does it? Because to me it doesn't seem like much of a stretch at all to suspect that being entirely unwelcoming to black people would discourage black people from moving there (and encourage black people already there to leave at the earliest opportunity).
There were Black people in Utah before the LDS church. There were Black slaves owned by members of the LDS church until slavery was made illegal, and there are and were Black Mormons since the time of Brigham Young. Per the below link, there might have been more that came or stayed on in Utah, if the area had been more welcoming, but discrimination in housing, work opportunity, and arguably in the LDS faith had an impact.
As best I can tell, Utah never had a particularly big Black population, and many many racist policies kept it that way. I suppose you could argue that that's natural, but I don't see it.
Redlining Maps: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining
Utah and African Americans (1994) https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/a/African_Amer...
100 Year History of Racist Housing Policy: https://www.shareable.net/timeline-of-100-years-of-racist-ho...
Utah can be all-white for entirely nefarious reasons and yet it doesn't follow that any given company (or other organization) in Utah lacks diversity for its own nefarious reasons. It's entirely plausible and likely that the company in question sampled without racial bias from its own hiring pipeline and consequently the company's racial demographics resemble that of its hiring pipeline.
As for why Utah's population is mostly white, I'm guessing the biggest factor is that a predominately white religious sect settled it. I'm sure there's some racial oppression involved as was common at the time, but I don't imagine that that was a particularly strong driver of Utah demographics. However, I could be wrong and it still wouldn't affect my original thesis.
> In the natural state of affairs, since we now have the ability to move around the planet faster than we reproduce, entropy would have the world be an even distribution.
I'm not actually sure that we can move around the planet faster than we reproduce. This is perhaps true for the wealthiest 1% or so of the global population. Moreover, to the extent that it's true, it hasn't been true for long enough to expect some global homogeneity absent discrimination. Absent any segregating forces (malicious or benign--more on benign segregating forces below), it would probably take millennia to get some discernible global racial uniformity. Further, there are benign segregating forces--for example, people of all racial groups tend to exhibit a preference for living in communities which share their language, culture, religion, and traditions (note that the standard group generalization disclaimers apply--this doesn't apply to every individual in the group and it doesn't suggest that this force is uniform across racial groups, etc). Similarly, the nations with the most gender freedom exhibit the least occupational gender diversity and the nations with the least gender freedom exhibit the most occupational diversity.
That church also was not particularly welcoming to Black people and expressly for as slavery.
You didn’t have Black people moving there to join a pretty culty religious group, and you didn’t have slavery, so there was very little influx of diversity.
Edit: I’m not certain off-hand if it was made legal-legal or if Brigham just said it was doctrinal, imagine the effect would be pretty much the same either way at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormonism_and_slavery
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Utah
Edit: Slavery was legal in Utah from 1852 until 1862 when it was banned by Congress.
It’s not like there’s an intellectually honest way of getting a ban on slavery from Christian Scripture. Mohamed was over 600 years later and substantially more liberal with regard to slavery than was the norm before him and his religion didn’t ban slavery either. The Abrahamic scriptures aren’t really ambiguous on this. God does not object to slavery as such.
The problem was that they were actively writing new scripture that supposedly had equal (if not more) weight than both the Old and New Testament.
For the same reason why Utah is largely LDS, of course. Namely, it was largely white LDS who bothered to actually settle the place. It's a bit weird how some people find something nefarious in any perceived "lack" of diversity, as if founder effect, etc. was not a thing.
So, sadly, "nefarious" seems to describe it exactly.
How about ethnic religions? Should they open up, too?
I would just stay away from any organisation in the first place (if possible), if they care about my skin color and not my skills.
Diversity can go pretty far before some are happy. I assume people may not be happy until there is a non-white skin prophet. There were plenty of those in ancient times I’m sure with the Lamanites and all (Book of Mormon reference). Or maybe even some will take the Ginsburg approach of until there are 12 non white skinned apostles then we “might” have to stop worrying so much about diversity.
I’ll give you a bit of The Churches Doctrine in the following so if you aren’t too keen on religion you can feel free to skip, but these are by no means all stances of the church but mostly my own wisdom I’ve gathered from scripture reading and Gospel study over the years.
Honestly I love diversity of all kinds. I love diversity of thought too. I also really like unity of purpose. I believe that diversity isn’t the most important goal the Church has. We church members believe that Zion has come at previous times and will come when the people are of one heart and one mind. I’m sure that doesn’t mean we don’t have diversity in any given respect such as different thoughts but when it comes down to it we unify in purpose much like Christ, God, and the Holy Ghost are one in purpose to further the Salvation of men in fact that is who we strive to unify with. Despite our mistakes we are able to improve and make that at-one-ment of purpose due to Christ’s Atonement (otherwise as the Book of Mormon states men[/women] were fallen and no good could come of them). I haven’t studied the Bible as much as the Book of Mormon, but at least in the Book of Mormon it states that prophets themselves make mistakes I mean I guess there’s examples of that in the four gospels such as when Peter denied Christ or when Judas betrayed Christ and many other examples of imperfect principles and even flat out mistakes such as with King David committing adultery with Bathsheba and his mistakes covering it up the way he did. I’ve learned else where in Gospel teachings that they don’t always speak for the Lord in their actions. The gospel also teaches each man is given the Light of Christ to discern for themselves whether something be good or evil. You feeling those things as “nefarious” is likely correct. Bad and toxic culture and the sins of our fathers as well as our own can really lead us away from God and the Truth and even prophets are fallible in that sense. This is not to degrade them just to say that they too can be fallible. Prophets have a divine purpose and most of them have gotten very close to the character of Christ at least in terms of what men can do. We are all fallible in those senses we all sin and we believe the only perfect sinless man was Christ. But also I recognize these people are called of God and that Christ is at the head of the Church. Despite those at the head of the Church much like we do may at times make mistakes though often when they do they given the degree of mistake will be removed from their station.
I think your use of David here is a great example of where we may disagree. David absolutely sinned with Bathsheba, and subsequently killed her husband to cover it all up. Yes, that was an example of very bad leadership. But, do you get what happened after that? Nathan the prophet visited him and told him the truth about his wickedness. It cut him to the heart! He repented and sought forgiveness. He wrote Psalm 51 (go and read it) as a lamentation of his wickedness. Contrast that with Dallin H. Oaks' assertion that the Church does not apologize: https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/06/18/their-church-may-... That is not an isolated or off-handed comment. It's one of the most un-Christ-like displays I've seen lately. In this way, I don't know who those guys the first presidency are following, but it's not Jesus Christ.
That said, I don't personally expect every Utah resident to spend all their resources on diversity nor do I expect many are in the position to. That said, the argument that passive participation in an unjust system is tacit approval of that system isn't so far fetched.
I'm not sure this is true in Utah's case, and anyway it misses the point (Utah could be white for entirely nefarious reasons and we would still expect any given colorblind institution in Utah to be similarly white).
> That said, the argument that passive participation in an unjust system is tacit approval of that system isn't so far fetched.
It's entirely possible that one is:
* unaware of the injustice
* unsure of what can be done to help
* already helping in a different capacity
* spending one's resources otherwise making the world a better place (including potentially addressing worse injustices or just trying to provide for one's family, community, workforce, etc)
* etc
This "if you're not for my pet issue, you must be against it" isn't doing anyone a service.
Without a huge draw of good paying jobs I’m not sure you’ll see a lot of diversity since no ethnic group has a lot of incentive to move there.
I mean, this is eliding a lot of history, none of it pleasant and with no convenient villains. Mormons themselves were more or less forced there; they forced enslaved people to come with them making Utah the first western area with African slavery; they accidentally and purposely, violently displaced indigenous people who also actually settled there; and Mormonism held racism as a core precept much longer than most US religions.
"Nefarious" is a sadly accurate summary of two centuries of Utah history.
That said, Japan, China and others have been very successful without having to import much external talent. And there are places with more social diversity than the US such have not done well, though there are examples of very diverse places that do extremely well too (Singapore and to a lesser degree Malaysia). So success is probably more aligned with economic policies and other policies weigh less.
It's not really comparable to the US (or the UK or commonwealth countries or much of Europe) in that way.
Ironically, this is the 'Coastal Writers' being guilty of not respecting diversity (!) in that, not every place is like NYC or LA.
That doesn't mean Utah is off the hook for not being fair, or for concerns about systematic issues, but Utah is literally less than 2% Black. So that's a starting point.
I'm pretty empathetic to issues of unfairness or discrimination, but I lose interest when I see a ham-fisted or lack of contextual elements on the part of writers.
Someone noted that Utah has a highly educated workforce - a lot of places do, that's not enough to make a 'Valley'.
I think that such places will be great for Tier2 tech, by that I mean, tech that is an end product, not tech used by other techies.
Shopfiy in Ottawa, is an example. Ottawa has 'great schools' super B+ competent work force, the most safe and stable place in North America. But not nearly the depth needed to make a Google or MS. Wix. Survey Monkey. I can see Stripe maybe happening out of the Valley. Though I often wonder what the difference would be - maybe Shopify needed to 'start' elsewhere but if it was now a fully SF company I wonder where they would be.
But the 'centres' of social networks I think will remain in the big cosmo areas, and 'core tech' will mostly remain in the valley, other than little dots here and there, that usually get eaten up anyhow.
Non-Mormon whites are treated quit differently in SLC. You don't even have to be brown.
This is one of the arguments given, and it makes a whole lot of sense, so much so, it's hard to negate. But in my years of business experience, I don't believe it's true.
Having Engineers of 'XYZ Heritage' will not really in any way help you 'think differently' vis-a-vis the XYZ market. It just doesn't work that way.
Now - having Engineers 'born and raised' in a certain part of the world - yes, that can possibly make a difference. It's no surprise that Vancouver has a lot of 'ties' to APAC.
Paradoxically, when you start a business, generally you want to hit the very narrow segment of your best possible followers, in which case, diversity may be the opposite of important: you want to nail a demo, that may or may not be related to diversity.
The primary advantage, I believe, of diversity, actually has nothing to do with diversity. I have mostly come to believe that most of it doesn't matter materially - what matters - is that companies and individuals have an opportunity to connect with one another. A young, white, CEO may simply be unwilling to look beyond his network and local horizons to find, for example, a lot of women. It's the issue of gender that will help the company, rather massive talent pools overlooked.
So having internal biases agains 'certain types' results in just missing out on talent, not so much on some 'special thing' that those candidates bring. Mostly.
Diversity as being good for capitalism is red herring.
https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-t...
How are you expected to add thousands of jobs if Asians, Indians need not apply?
Economic growth in the US over the same period was mediocre, with declining productivity, and in Europe, it was anemic.
There is just no evidence that nations which focus on diversity in and of themselves have had better economic outcomes.
Now it does make sense that if you are in a large multi-ethnic society then you will be at a disadvantage if you only hire from one group, since good people are hard to find, so why limit yourself to just a small subset of the population. This is less important for a small company than a large company that really needs to cast a wide net. So not intentionally excluding subgroups of your population makes economic sense.
But I'm not aware of any evidence that being more diverse than your population will improve outcomes.
This is not true. In the case of Japan, so long as an employer there is willing to sponsor your visa, you'll have no problems immigrating there or becoming a permanent resident.
Hungary has successfully created incentives to raise their birth rates for example. The Hungarian government doesn't want to rely on mass immigration to sustain the country's population it seems. You don't need imported diversity for more jobs - you can just create very "un-diverse" people yourselves, which will work those jobs once they've grown up.
If other Western nations like the US would seriously get behind an idea like this, with all the power of the media and various propaganda outlets, they, too, would quickly see a cultural shift towards rising birth rates. Unfortunately the people in control don't want this to happen.
Whether ever-continuing growth to chase the 0.3% higher GDP each year is desirable, is another topic though.
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