I'd go as far and say that you can get more diversity with an all-white/all-black (or any other color of skin) workforce that come from very different backgrounds and went to a wide set of universities than having a perfectly mixed (as in skin color) set of employees that all grew up in the Bay Area and went to Stanford.
And it says a hell of a lot about Thiel—there’s basically no evidence he isn’t a complete psychopath.
You're concentrating too much on the skin color. We should push smart people, we should create the culture of smart, so people want to become smart.
Concrete example, the number of times Americans assume I have a SSN. Or, on a trip to Kenya, my host assumed I’d know how to say grace before a meal. Or how I came to Berlin and assumed that finding a flat would be as easy as it was in the UK.
Edit: Just realised one obvious group I blindly forgot — poor people have very different experiences than rich people. $2/day absolute poverty, $10/day “you’re doing well by Kenyan standards”, $100/day Harlem average (chosen because it’s what non-Americans think of as a poor bit of America). All different from each other, all different lives from us, even if we don’t call ourselves rich.
A group of people with one gender and color of skin from the same country (to be less US centric) will often have little diversity in their ideas. But just by making sure to have x% of non-white employees you won't necessarily reach that either.
E.g. my ex works in HR for a bank that has a diversity board tasked with improving diversity. Problem: The bank prefers to hire from a certain set of universities that is dominated by students from private education backgrounds, which are predominantly upper middle class and above, which means they're predominantly white.
The numbers are such that with the universities in question they can not match the overall ethnic mix of the UK while recruiting staff with the degrees they want from those universities.
Yet suggesting that one hires by merit rather than by which university they're educated at is totally taboo to even suggest, though it'd almost certainly instantly improve their diversity and raise overall skill levels.
Companies where diversity is actually seen as important will quickly realize that they need to revise hiring policies. And one of the ways to revise it in most areas is to actually hire by merit, rather than by university "brand".
Diversity of ideas can be a good thing, but it can also mean diluting good ideas with ones that are valueless or actively harmful.
This is all smoke-and-mirrors though. In 2017 when people argue for or against idea diversity, they're almost always just fighting a trojan war for or against redistribution of resources from 'privileged' to 'oppressed' (or if you're right-wing: from 'deserving' to 'undeserving'.)
Sound reasoning.
Unlike humans, ideas are not created equal - some must be bitterly fought against. The "Diversity of ideas" meme is the "embrace, extend, extinguish" of political ideas, you can basically use it to promote any idea that's unpopular.
Is it?
It's a priori possible that certain cultures tend to hold certain values that contribute to their success in initially-diverse societies, and as such will be over-represented down the road.
I don't know if this is actually the case; the point is rather to show that your position -- which is common in those who explicitly support mulitculturalist policy -- begs the question. In practice, it amounts to a proclamation of faith.