(no subject)
So, let's talk .
A word of explanation: jd3000 posted a link to this article, which notes that there's a CPAC panel with the title "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity Is Weakening the American Identity." We went back and forth on politics for a bit, ending with his request for how one could interpret the title in a way that isn't terrible. I answered... but briefly, and I think he deserves a better reply.
A caveat first: I don't know anything about this panel. It may be terrible - there may be absolutely nothing of merit in it. Since we don't know one way or the other, though, here's some thoughts on why someone might object to "the pursuit of diversity" without also, you know, hating everyone who is different.
So. What does it mean to pursue diversity, anyway?
Well, let's say we're trying to perform some task that requires choosing some people (but not all) from a pool of possibilities. We might be choosing academic papers, or college admissions, or firemen to hire, or any number of other things.
How do we do this? Presumably, we have some set of standards or guidelines that tell us what sort of person (/paper/etc.) we're looking for. From the group at hand, we ideally try to choose those who best satisfy our standards; these people get in, and the rest don't.
How does this picture change if we explicitly pursue diversity? Well, we have to modify our standards - to add new guidelines (or delete old ones, or both) such that "more diverse" is one of the principles they look for. If this change is meaningful - if we actually are promoting diversity - that will necessarily mean that some of the people we would have selected before won't get selected now, and some of the people we wouldn't select before will be chosen instead.
But there is a reason we made our original choices: namely, that they satisfied the rest of our standards better. Our new group, if it satisfies diversity better, must therefore be worse at satisfying the rest of these standards (at least, so far as we can tell). So there is, necessarily, a trade-off here. That fact doesn't even really have anything to do with diversity itself; there's going to be a trade-off every time we modify our standards meaningfully.
And I want to stress that, to this point, nothing says that trade-off is bad. Suppose I'm putting together a group to tell me about issues in the community. If I want a good representation, diversity is an obviously beneficial goal; if all my applicants are alike, they'll tend to overlook issues that are outside their shared field. Explicitly pursuing this goal will make them non-optimal in other ways, but diversity may be crucial to the task to such a degree that this is an acceptable balance.
I think we would generally agree, though, that the trade is bad in cases. Suppose, for instance, that I'm putting together a weightlifting team. I develop a simple criterion: the top ten people who can lift the most weight go on the team. (Perhaps I also ask for a couple of other useful properties: they show up to practice, they have endurance, they practice safely, etc. For the sake of simplicity, let's set these aside.) Having established my team, I realize it's not very diverse: the members tend, with high statistical significance, to be muscular, relatively young men.
Now, I could adjust that lineup. I could make diversity a goal, and include shrimps (like me), women, the elderly, etc. in my team. This might make for a better group in some respects; they might have more enlightening discussions, better rapport, etc. At the primary goal of "lifting heavy stuff," though - the thing for which the team was formed - they are necessarily worse. (If they were better, after all, I would have picked them the first time around!) And if we care about winning weightlifting tournaments, that's a bad thing.
Well, so what, then? Where does this practically matter?
It would matter, for instance, in cases where firefighters who lack the upper body strength to pull people from buildings are hired over those with it - with the result that more people die in fires. It would matter when people who are worse teachers are hired over those who are better - with the result that whole crops of students learn less. It matters when, for any job whose primary measure is "performance at task X," we choose people who are more diverse but less adept at task X.
And at a system-wide level, if lots of people who are chosen to do various task Xs are less adept than others who might have been chosen, it matters because the whole system performs worse. When that system is "your country" - and when "perform worse" means things like "have fewer jobs, fewer new technologies, and lower quality of life for everyone" - that's a bad thing.
Maybe it's still better than the alternative! Maybe the things we gain are worth the trade. There's an argument to be made there. But that pursuing diversity can, in some senses that we care about, weaken the country in parts or as a whole... yeah. That's a true thing.
The panel, of course, talks about weakening the American identity. I don't know whether they mean by that what I've stated above or not. Let me offer, then, one possible note, there: I think we all want there to be, in at least certain senses, an American identity. If we didn't, we wouldn't care about a political rally in the first place.
I mean, the point of political action is to get things made into law (or unmade, or to protect existing laws, etc.). If we're interested in making sure that "The law says you can do this, and not that"... well, then we're interested in making sure that people in America act in certain ways, and not in others. That's enforcing an identity; it's saying, "In this country, you will be like this."
And that's good! "You will not be a crazy axe-murderer free on the streets" is an identity we should impose, I think. None of us (I would think) want to allow so much diversity of thought and action that Patrick Bateman is a totally acceptable American lifestyle choice.
Is that a far cry from saying, "And you must be able speak English?" Yeah, absolutely - but if we agree on axe-murderers, then we agree that there is a line there somewhere. It's no longer the existence of a line that we're arguing about; we accept, "Yes, there are some things that should be promoted (or at least left to do their own thing), and others that should be blocked." What's left is then the question, "Are multiculturalism and the pursuit of diversity causing us to promote things that we should not be promoting, or to block things that we should not be blocking?"
And that's a question to which reasonable people can have different, reasonable answers. For myself, I would say that anyone who chooses to make diversity a priority in their own decisions is welcome to do so - that's a good, solid free thing to do. But at the point where it's a thing we legally require - and in many cases, it is! - we're both abridging freedoms and, in at least some cases, hampering the ability of systems to perform their primary function. I don't think that it's unreasonable to call that a bad thing.
Is that an argument that the panel makes? Heck if I know - but it's the first thing to come to mind. I feel like, on all sides, we too quickly assume that our political opponents are as bad as any rumor can make them out to be - and where that keeps us from even understanding each other, I think that's a bad thing, too.
A word of explanation: jd3000 posted a link to this article, which notes that there's a CPAC panel with the title "The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity Is Weakening the American Identity." We went back and forth on politics for a bit, ending with his request for how one could interpret the title in a way that isn't terrible. I answered... but briefly, and I think he deserves a better reply.
A caveat first: I don't know anything about this panel. It may be terrible - there may be absolutely nothing of merit in it. Since we don't know one way or the other, though, here's some thoughts on why someone might object to "the pursuit of diversity" without also, you know, hating everyone who is different.
So. What does it mean to pursue diversity, anyway?
Well, let's say we're trying to perform some task that requires choosing some people (but not all) from a pool of possibilities. We might be choosing academic papers, or college admissions, or firemen to hire, or any number of other things.
How do we do this? Presumably, we have some set of standards or guidelines that tell us what sort of person (/paper/etc.) we're looking for. From the group at hand, we ideally try to choose those who best satisfy our standards; these people get in, and the rest don't.
How does this picture change if we explicitly pursue diversity? Well, we have to modify our standards - to add new guidelines (or delete old ones, or both) such that "more diverse" is one of the principles they look for. If this change is meaningful - if we actually are promoting diversity - that will necessarily mean that some of the people we would have selected before won't get selected now, and some of the people we wouldn't select before will be chosen instead.
But there is a reason we made our original choices: namely, that they satisfied the rest of our standards better. Our new group, if it satisfies diversity better, must therefore be worse at satisfying the rest of these standards (at least, so far as we can tell). So there is, necessarily, a trade-off here. That fact doesn't even really have anything to do with diversity itself; there's going to be a trade-off every time we modify our standards meaningfully.
And I want to stress that, to this point, nothing says that trade-off is bad. Suppose I'm putting together a group to tell me about issues in the community. If I want a good representation, diversity is an obviously beneficial goal; if all my applicants are alike, they'll tend to overlook issues that are outside their shared field. Explicitly pursuing this goal will make them non-optimal in other ways, but diversity may be crucial to the task to such a degree that this is an acceptable balance.
I think we would generally agree, though, that the trade is bad in cases. Suppose, for instance, that I'm putting together a weightlifting team. I develop a simple criterion: the top ten people who can lift the most weight go on the team. (Perhaps I also ask for a couple of other useful properties: they show up to practice, they have endurance, they practice safely, etc. For the sake of simplicity, let's set these aside.) Having established my team, I realize it's not very diverse: the members tend, with high statistical significance, to be muscular, relatively young men.
Now, I could adjust that lineup. I could make diversity a goal, and include shrimps (like me), women, the elderly, etc. in my team. This might make for a better group in some respects; they might have more enlightening discussions, better rapport, etc. At the primary goal of "lifting heavy stuff," though - the thing for which the team was formed - they are necessarily worse. (If they were better, after all, I would have picked them the first time around!) And if we care about winning weightlifting tournaments, that's a bad thing.
Well, so what, then? Where does this practically matter?
It would matter, for instance, in cases where firefighters who lack the upper body strength to pull people from buildings are hired over those with it - with the result that more people die in fires. It would matter when people who are worse teachers are hired over those who are better - with the result that whole crops of students learn less. It matters when, for any job whose primary measure is "performance at task X," we choose people who are more diverse but less adept at task X.
And at a system-wide level, if lots of people who are chosen to do various task Xs are less adept than others who might have been chosen, it matters because the whole system performs worse. When that system is "your country" - and when "perform worse" means things like "have fewer jobs, fewer new technologies, and lower quality of life for everyone" - that's a bad thing.
Maybe it's still better than the alternative! Maybe the things we gain are worth the trade. There's an argument to be made there. But that pursuing diversity can, in some senses that we care about, weaken the country in parts or as a whole... yeah. That's a true thing.
The panel, of course, talks about weakening the American identity. I don't know whether they mean by that what I've stated above or not. Let me offer, then, one possible note, there: I think we all want there to be, in at least certain senses, an American identity. If we didn't, we wouldn't care about a political rally in the first place.
I mean, the point of political action is to get things made into law (or unmade, or to protect existing laws, etc.). If we're interested in making sure that "The law says you can do this, and not that"... well, then we're interested in making sure that people in America act in certain ways, and not in others. That's enforcing an identity; it's saying, "In this country, you will be like this."
And that's good! "You will not be a crazy axe-murderer free on the streets" is an identity we should impose, I think. None of us (I would think) want to allow so much diversity of thought and action that Patrick Bateman is a totally acceptable American lifestyle choice.
Is that a far cry from saying, "And you must be able speak English?" Yeah, absolutely - but if we agree on axe-murderers, then we agree that there is a line there somewhere. It's no longer the existence of a line that we're arguing about; we accept, "Yes, there are some things that should be promoted (or at least left to do their own thing), and others that should be blocked." What's left is then the question, "Are multiculturalism and the pursuit of diversity causing us to promote things that we should not be promoting, or to block things that we should not be blocking?"
And that's a question to which reasonable people can have different, reasonable answers. For myself, I would say that anyone who chooses to make diversity a priority in their own decisions is welcome to do so - that's a good, solid free thing to do. But at the point where it's a thing we legally require - and in many cases, it is! - we're both abridging freedoms and, in at least some cases, hampering the ability of systems to perform their primary function. I don't think that it's unreasonable to call that a bad thing.
Is that an argument that the panel makes? Heck if I know - but it's the first thing to come to mind. I feel like, on all sides, we too quickly assume that our political opponents are as bad as any rumor can make them out to be - and where that keeps us from even understanding each other, I think that's a bad thing, too.