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Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

I am also Asian.

> Speaking as an Asian, the insinuation that my race might be considered a meaningful dimension in the pursuit of class diversity makes my blood boil. This PR rep is barely even trying to hide the real implication here: "we want our class to be visibly colorful". That's some grade A bullsh*t.

But the thing is, it's not meaningless right? Diversity has been shown to be good for performance, or at least I assume that's why they care.

I'm very curious how this will turn out. In my mind, the question is now whether it's still considered discrimination even though it's no longer a case of "all else being equal".

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It’s interesting. I took some classes on this and there is research showing the value of diversity in problem solving. [0]

But making the leap that this somehow means that skin/gender diversity equates to higher performance is quite a leap.

The instructor’s argument went something like this. “A bunch of studies show diversity improves outcome. A bunch of studies show people are racist against these populations. Therefore since having more of this population increases diversity, we need program XYZ.”

The class was infuriating, because the instructor kept using these studies as evidence and then directly linking it to a call for increased representation through positive discrimination for a few select minorities. Many questions were flippantly dismissed as “they’ll get their turn.” Of course this frustrates the different minorities who also wanted to be included.

I never got stuck on the logical leap of “If A then B. If C then D. Therefore A = D.”

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10726-011-9250-x

The term "diversity" is being used in very different ways. The article you posted drfines it based on skill and knowledge:

> By diversity, we mean differences in how agents build problem representations which allow them to access various solutions. We deploy the concept of diversity along two dimensions: knowledge amplitude, which accounts for the level of available knowledge allowing access to poorer or richer problem representations (compared with complete problem representations), and knowledge variety, which pertains to the differences in the constituents of agents’ representations.

So it just further demonstrates the logical gap between A=B and C=D, since the studies didn't even show A=B, they showed E=F

Exactly. This my frustration with the professor and the course. I couldn’t tell if he was stupid, misleading, or obliviously enthusiastic.

Diversity has been shown to be good for performance

Of phenotype and national origin? Has it really?

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