Pretty sure the idea is that diversity (of thought and other) itself can improve outcomes, not that anyone is necessarily better or worse at their jobs.

well, if we accept that the success of business is the sum of its parts, then it is implied that the diverse people add something more than others

"The sum of its parts" is a very opaque phrase here. But even without defining it, anyone with work experience has some understanding of the effect of workplace dynamics, environmental factors, office morale, and other intangible influences on one's productivity and hence, the business's success. In other words, there are emergent properties in the calculus of success, and pursuing diversity is one way of trying to control that.

"Diverse" people do not have to be intrinsically better employees, for them to positively affect the business's success.

Sorry, you put a lot of buzzwords there, but buzzwords do not constitute any proof. It's certainly true in low-skill businesses like , i dunno, agriculture that production scales linearly. If nonlinear interactions occur it would be interesting to name them, instead of attributing it to some kind of magic ether. I dont like this completely vague explanation because it's exactly the rhetoric that people mock when they want to attack diversity

Well, to make it concrete then: I've seen teams get happier and more productive when some asshole is removed from the team; I've likewise seen teams get less productive because someone is added who drains morale, interest and productivity because they're continually negative and waste everyone's time with distracting concerns and a lot of "yes, but what about this?" type navel-gazing. I've found my own productivity fluctuating with different coworkers based on how well I communicate with them (where someone I struggle to interact with well gets along well with others).

So no, you can't view overall productivity as the sum of individual productivity because there are factors like this that are a function of group composition. And there's a lot of factors that are not functions of individual productivity.

Then let’s hear some hard logic. You’ve presented literally nothing.

If the best response you have is handwaving team dynamics as a buzzword, and pretending its not a real and tangible thing, go to work and start abusing all of your coworkers and see if their performance remains consistent.

Great; I definitely do not accept that, and in fact it’s pretty trivially false even if you can’t really prove it.

to begin with, that's logically false [unless u mean it's undecideable which is a vanishingly small probability]

i also have no interest in replying to flame bait

Please explain your logic. Are you saying that someone’s contribution to the company is: A.) mathematically exact (lol) B.) not dependent on their team dynamics?

> women or lgbt or people of color don't need to be better in order to be accepted, they should be accepted by default.

And yet they are not. Why not?

> Maybe business culture with its rigid and often stupid conventions and demands has a lot to do with it.

If we look at the history of these groups in the US, Occam's Razor points to simple bigotry as an explanation.

I’ve never had an issue with it.

Well I’m not a woman but as for the rest of it it’s never been an issue.

The only time it’s even been mentioned is that when traveling by bus in Texas in 1999 that I should make sure I take my ID with me when leaving the bus just incase there’s ICE around.

My experience has been that people largely create their own problems, right now I’m in a very catholic country and looking for a cross necklace. It’s just to avoid people asking me if I believe in God which I don’t care to talk about.

Blend in and you’ll have 100x less problems. Your work likely doesn’t care who you’re banging but is going to care if you want to talk about your relationship all day instead of business.

>in reality that's a weird argument, women or lgbt or people of color don't need to be better in order to be accepted, they should be accepted by default.

In reality every non-majority demographic has to be better in order to be accepted. They often have to work harder just to reach the default that the majority takes for granted, because that system works with the majority, and against everyone else.

Do they? Here is the composition of Ivy League non-international students, courtesy of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30338742:

                          Ivy League   US      Ratio
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%    7.16
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%    3.71
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%    0.82
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%    0.65
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%    0.61
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%    0.56

Which column identifies how hard people in any of these demographics worked to achieve this outcome?

Meritocracy is bigoted or rational depending on which groups appear in a particular order. Pick one and be consistent with it. Swapping depending on what pecking order shows up is just more moral relativism to benefit one group while demonizing any others who ever try to do the same. Don't think it's not noticed and remembered for future reference.

Why does the concept of "working hard" have to be a categorized by race when it is largely based on individual circumstances such as family income, parental upbringing, and immigration history? Someone who individually works hard that is a member of a group that is not considered to be hard working (or vice versa) would still be treated unfairly by this proposed system, making it no better than the status quo.

You want to attribute different outcomes to differences in behavior by race? In this case, you're saying that Jewish students are 11x more hard-working than Hispanic ones, and Asian students are 6x more hard-working than Black ones?

Which other racial disparities do you attribute to differences in behavior?

>In this case, you're saying that Jewish students are 11x more hard-working than Hispanic ones, and Asian students are 6x more hard-working than Black ones?

Does Michael Phelps (23 Olympic gold medals) swim 23x faster than Mack Horton (1 Olympic gold medal)?

Fine. N-times more likely to be hard-working enough for the Ivy League.

There are indeed racial disparities in time spent on academics [1].

1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...

Internet arguments aside, the fact that certain cultural groups push their children to study hard (and also provide them with as many resources as possible to make sure their studies are fruitful) probably is a big contributor to the disparity illustrated in your table.

It does not seem to have helped non-Jewish whites any, compared to Blacks and Hispanics.

I guess it's a very special kind of studiousness whites have - one that helps with SAT scores, but not Ivy League admissions: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...

Anecdotally, it absolutely has. The people I knew growing up (regardless of race) whose parents encouraged educational excellence were far more likely to attain it.

(Looking at your link, it's important to note that it doesn't separate Jewish and non-Jewish Whites.)

But it looks at all students (not only those that make it into the Ivies), so Jewish whites, that are only ~4% of all whites, have a minuscule effect on white SAT scores. Yet, for non-Jewish whites, comparatively higher SAT scores have not translated into higher Ivy enrollment.

>Jewish whites, that are only ~4% of all whites, have a minuscule effect on white SAT scores

On average, yes. At the Ivy League level, though, they account for a solid third of the white admissions. I'm sure you'd find a similar overrepresentation in the top few percentiles of the SAT.

> I'm sure you'd find a similar overrepresentation in the top few percentiles of the SAT.

Even supposing this is true, it still doesn't answer the question: Since non-Jewish whites do better at the SAT than Blacks and Hispanics, why does this translate to lower, not higher, Ivy enrollment rates?

The data clearly shows: higher SAT scores help every group except non-Jewish whites.

I get the general point about the affirmative action, but it's important to remember that it's not just Whites getting the short end of the stick. Asians are absolutely underrepresented too.

You're the one who responded with the start of a refutation ("Do they?"). It's reasonable to expect you to actually make the argument.

I'm the only one that presented any data at all - the original comment simply asserted something was true, without backing it up in any way.

It's reasonable to expect a refutation to contain at least some data, instead of dismissing what data we do have as not complete enough, and reverting back to the original fact-free assertion.

You can't just throw up a data table and go "ok I refuted it!" That's not an argument, it's just some contextless numbers. It is legitimately not clear to me in any way what you're trying to say or what it has to do with the thing you're replying to.

As a sibling reply said, I'm not making an argument. I'm asking for the relevance of your reply to the statement you replied to. I think there are a lot of confounding factors to the data you presented, so personally consider it to hold very little value on its own. You're the one who seems to draw meaning from it.

So, what meaning do you draw from it? What explanation do you have for these discrepancies? How do they relate to what you replied to?

In other words, show your work.

Don't be deliberately obtuse. Of course you were making an argument. You were making it sarcastically, to be sure, but it was still an argument dismissing the data presented as irrelevant because it doesn't purport to show the level of effort from the groups involved. And it's a spurious argument in any case, because the data presented still shows a major issue in the initial claim, which was that non-white students need to expend significantly more effort than white students to be accepted into the Ivy League, unless you happen to believe that (non-Jewish) white students for whatever reason expend much, much less effort than other demographics to join. If you think other factors are the cause of that, state them; don't just off-handedly and rudely dismiss people presenting valid contrary data.

> initial claim, which was that non-white students need to expend significantly more effort than white students to be accepted into the Ivy League

You've added a whole bunch of words here that weren't in any claim of this thread. The person I was replying to is the one who brought students and school acceptance into it. I've double checked the whole thread to make sure, so if I missed it please point it out. The conversation above car_analogy's post was about business leadership.

At any rate, while of course I'm being a little obtuse, I really do not know what car_analogy is driving at. I can speculate, but I suspect I'd be accused of being uncharitable if I said my speculation out loud. It's not up to me to make their argument for them, and they didn't even bother to make one.

Anyways,

> If you think other factors are the cause of that

Fortunately, as I'm not the person who threw a snark bomb into the thread tied to a table of tenuously related data, it's not my job to interpret the data I don't think is significant to the argument at hand. If car_analogy wants to convince me of its relevance, they can say more than two words about it and then get defensive.

US immigration policy selects for high earners, the already wealthy and the highly skilled and educated. I think that can explain the demographics pretty well.

what'd those numbers look like in 1980 no reason just curious.