This seems similar to adding an addictive drug to food. It will certainly appeal to a lot of people, but does it add value? Getting more consumers of your product should not be the end goal if we want a healthy, high trust society. Developing a good product should be.
> Only people already interested in the project on its own merits were following along
Isn't this what we want as a society?
the rest of us want revenue. there is no build it and they will come, its appealing to people's sentiments, and the people have to know its there at all.
There is a right way and a wrong way to achieve success.
Profit is not the only thing that matters in life.
regardless, a for-profit company should not use its runway on ideals as it won't last very long, it has to build and find ways to be known about beyond its small community. that's what this is about.
If the business suffers in the short term, so be it.
I do understand this is not a popular view in todays business world however, and it shows.
That doesnt mean be unethical, it means dont try to move the overton window or “use your platform”, other organizations exist specifically to do this and they are not called for profits
People enjoy representation, imho, because it helps them see that they are not alone, that the deck isn’t stacked against them, and so on. It also helps in removing prejudice against certain groups of people.
Do they have to consider separation of humans by characteristics to be important in order to get you that position where they feel alone with other humans? Bluntly, if a male says I can't be inspired by females isn't that because they're sexist?
It seems extraordinarily damaging to society to say to people, as many seem to 'here are the people you're allowed to be inspired by: they're superficially similar to you', at opposed to saying 'Payne-Gaposhkin asked the same question as you, see you're alike as people' (despite maybe being of different sex, race, nationality, era, class, wealth, etc.).
Not at all.
> Do they have to consider separation of humans by characteristics to be important in order to get you that position where they feel alone with other humans?
Your error in this is that you assume the behaviour is conscious and deliberate. Our brains do many calculations before we are even aware of them. I recommend Gladwell's book "Blink" on the topic [1].
Humans are by all means social beings, and we use heuristics and mental shortcuts to simplify our world, leading to fast and unconscious decisions often to our own detriment. We construct in and out groups before we are aware them, and said groups affect our decisions. This is why people growing in mixed communities are far less likely to be or exhibit racist behaviour.
I am expressing this only as a testament to our innate fallibility, this isn't targeted towards any specific group of people because there are all sorts of communities that are isolated and have very few interactions with others.
I experienced awe and inspiration when I realized that I was sitting at the same benches, and studying at the same place as Heisenberg when he came up with QM. But it was only when I stopped and thought about it, when I thought about the place I was sitting and the history behind it.
Sometimes all we have is superficial information, and our brains try to make the most of it. It's in our nature after all, we are all fallible humans, so why not help alleviate it and enable people to become their best selves?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/03160...
I'm thinking
I am fairly certain that this is something that can be trained, but the degree to which I can relate with a man with ABC properties (except gender) will almost always be less than the degree I relate to a woman with ABC properties as gender is also included.
These decisions are always made rapidly, unconsciously, and when we have very little information about a person other than what we can immediately observe.
Changing the image that we have about people with other properties alleviates this.
It clicked for me when I let my publicist go wild and she got me on listicles of BIPOC founders, before, we just had lots of quotes and interviews. Only people already interested in the project on its own merits were following along. After, there were lots of people that are interested in the representation in that kind of niche who otherwise just wouldn't know how to find that representation. Or just wouldn't be able to tell by founder names alone.
and of course we got the amplified engagement from people arguing about “why does race matter” in the LinkedIn comments. so shoutout to the useful idiots, publicists expect that to exist and calculate it.