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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Why has it become acceptable to assume so much about someone's view of the world based on their race, gender and sexual identity? Why has our definition of "diversity" become so narrow and stereotypical?

If you want to hire people with diverse viewpoints, then look for people with diverse viewpoints. It's incredibly easy to fill a room with people who look like a Benetton poster but who all read the same books in the same colleges and all rigidly adhere to the same dogma. It's incredibly easy to use tokenism to justify your own prejudices. It's difficult to build a genuinely diverse collaboration based on profound and meaningful differences of perspective.

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...the two categories I mentioned -- software developer and consumer rights activists -- are not race, gender, or sexual identity...

In fact, the whole thrust of my comment was that it's sometimes desirable to have "a genuinely diverse collaboration based on profound and meaningful differences of perspective", and the last paragraph of my post calls out the "nice looking poster" approach.

What point are you trying to make? It sounds to me like we're largely agreeing.

> Why has it become acceptable to assume so much about someone's view of the world based on their race, gender and sexual identity? Why has our definition of "diversity" become so narrow and stereotypical?

US Supreme Court jurisprudence more or less. No one actually cares about diversity as a goal. The political coalition that passed the Civil Rights Act looked around, saw they’d won and wanted more stuff for their constituents. Affirmative action was one of the ways to get more stuff. It’s also illegal under a plain reading of equal rights. For reasons I’m unqualified to opine on a quota system is too blatant legally (also explicit points based systems with group X getting Y extra points) so the Supreme Court went with diversity as an acceptable workaround to get to the desired goal of getting more stuff for the desired interest groups. This all happened in the context of university admissions and the buzzword spread from the case law.

Same as free speech or state’s rights people who genuinely believe in them are rare compared to those who use them as talking points when convenient and drop them when not.

Yeah, no one actually cares difficult, deeply rooted social and cultural problems that affect millions of people. It's clearly just about getting more stuff.

Yes, that’s broadly right. The number of principled ideologues is always very low compared to those who see that an ideology has something for them and then follow it. I’m not suggesting these people are self-aware hypocrites that’s just how human psychology works.

In under a generation people go from arguing that everyone deserves equal rights and dignity to campaigning for explicit racial privileges for their side, or from supporting the right of the federal government to seize slaves who escape and travel to a free state to yakking about state’s rights to justify Jim Crow, or the one we’re in the trailing end of right now, the transition from free speech being a left wing value to a right wing one. When the right had the establishment the left was all about people’s right to speak and be heard. Now that they’re in charge it’s safe spaces and hate speech. Or look at the collapse of the anti-war movement once Obama was elected. Bush bombed Muslims for eight years, Obama bombed Muslims for eight years. Bush destroyed Iraq and had no real effect in Afghanistan as it comes pre destroyed. Obama destroyer Libya and cape quite close with Syria before his good sense overcame the presence of Hilary Clinton in his cabinet.

Politics is overwhelmingly about sides, coalitions and spoils. Insofar as it’s about ideology most people have 1-3 things they really care about and the rest they’re pretty happy to modify to fit in with their coalition.

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