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Comment by mwbajor | Hacker News Reader

" look something like the population they're selling to"

Would the car have been any less useful to african people if it was invented by a black henry ford?

Of course not. What does that have to do with anything? People with different lives and experiences will have different perspectives that are likely to be helpful. We all care deeply about the things that directly affect us and our loved ones and less about the things that do not. You can cover more bases with a diverse workforce and avoid making dumb mistakes. I don’t get why this is controversial.

I have to wonder if this comment is made in good faith -

Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?

Are they adjustable for different people's shapes and sizes?

How long was it before car chairs were adjustable to be driven by women, and how much longer until regulators started considering women-sized crash dummies?

Sure, your skin color doesn't mean much to a car, but it does to an automatic faucet, a skin-toned band aid, face login (or whatever apple calls it). There are obvious benefits to hiring or doing studies within your target market.

Answer the question, would the car be different if Henry Ford was black? Would the AC induction motor be different if Tesla was Hispanic? Would the transistor be different if Shockley was Asian? Shall I go on? Believe it or not, it doesn't just apply to White people. The most important products don't care about what you look like.

"Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?"

I would argue they always were. The color of a band-aide does not change its main functionality. Neither do any of your other examples. Humans all need a car with 4 wheels and band-aides that stick.

> I would argue they always were.

I would posit we can't even get healthcare without bias for people that aren't straight white men. There are subtle differences in body composition between men and women, doubly so for larger (or smaller) body types, but ignoring those differences isn't exactly something from the far-flung past [0].

Otherwise we can quibble over how treating everyone as an average can and has cost lives [1]. People are different, and very small differences can have unexpectedly outsized impacts on usability.

> The most important products don't care about what you look like

The product doesn't care, but this site is awash in stories about how management or engineering should have just talked to the damn floor workers. Worked together, instead of dictating from on-high that the machine in question works well in the lab, and is an elegant, cost-effective solution - that the people actually in the shop know will fail immediately.

DEI (when done right) is not diversity hires. It's accepting others have different ideas that you may not have seen.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28343109/

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

"should have just talked to the damn floor workers. "

You're all over the place trying to avoid my question. We're talking about product consumers. Mismanagement is an aberration in a long reversion to the mean of the product's specs that people want. What car would black Henry Ford make? What kind of induction motor would hispanic Tesla make? Keep cherry-picking references, though. Isn't there a crisis in the replication of journal articles anyway??

I would insist that you try to open up your worldview slightly and accept that sometimes having a team with more than just white men can be desirable and lead to better outcomes for the end product. Maybe bandaids are not the best example, but consider pulse oximeters[0].

There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for some very well done research on the way that you can codify human biases in processes that should neutral.

I would also personally recommend that you give an earnest try to understanding why so many people argue for diversity. A genuine attempt. Even if you don't fully change your mind on it I think you will find it easier to approach the world with a little more compassion for people who don't look like you.

[0]: https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/commentary-more-health-inequalit...

Lets make a deal: I'll read your diversity books if you realize that meritocracies will never go away. You might be able to suppress them, but the smart people (and they're not just white people) will reorganize behind your back and be better than whatever you are doing. See INTC vs. TSMC for probably the best example since you're into references.

Pulse oximiters are another terrible example by the way. Couldn't we hire a bunch of really tanned white people since you're just talking skin color?

Hmm, I would hope that you want to read books that challenge your way of thinking to strengthen your beliefs and help you examine them through a lens you haven't considered before.

I wish I could agree in good conscience that we are currently in a perfectly meritocratic system, but alas (sorry to drop another reference on you, I guess I just enjoy having evidence to point to for justifying my beliefs), there's many cases where minorities are being unfairly passed up on [0].

Regarding pulse oximeters... maybe, maybe not. Seems like it would be an interesting field of study, the research of the different levels of light absorption between skin with different melanin pigments, and whether tanning or genetics plays a bigger role. If only there was more funding for something like that, huh? :)

[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...

> if you realize that meritocracies will never go away

I understand the DEI stuff as partially trying to get more diverse input, but also as a way to help make up for disadvantages that minorities have had historically. Of course a white person from a wealthy background has more chances to get in the "merit" club.

Are you seriously suggesting that really tanned white people have a similar skin tone to Black people?

r.e. tsmc VS Intel, is tsmc much more meritocratic than Intel? I haven't really heard this anywhere. I've heard they're an extremely hierarchical org and work insane hours for comparatively low pay.

Dont deflect, the example is meant to show that your criteria for diversity, why and how, is dumb. Please give a better example or answer my original questions. I never said a diverse workforce is bad, I simply asked for concise examples on why its good.

You can make whatever excuses that you want, but Asian companies are not diverse at all and they are doing pretty well and show no signs of slowing down. Don't you think that if a diverse workforce really mattered (as opposed to the most qualified workforce) they would be pursuing it?

I gave 2 examples - automatic faucet and women sized crash test dummies, your response was seriously that they could use very tanned white people. As if that is not "deflection".

> Don't you think that if a diverse workforce really mattered (as opposed to the most qualified workforce) they would be pursuing it?

"A company from a homogenous country is homogenous. They are the best at XYZ, therefore DEI must be bad because how else could they become number 1 without diversity"

This is a bad argument because there's a million other things that other companies, diverse or not, are best at. It doesn't really tell us much.

I'm sad your profile says you joined to talk fpga, since I used to do that and you don't seem nice to work with.

Diversity does make a diff but it depends on the problem. Its sort of the Explore-Exploit trade off.

For Explore type problems diversity has a much bigger impact then Exploit type problems. To add to the drama/misunderstandings/confusion sometimes you assemble a team for explore and they do find the gold mine, but then they arent suited to exploit it cuz its in their nature to explore. And vice versa.

Bandaids are a bit of an ironic example. They were probably made the skin color of their majority customers, and not that of their inventors, but someone might have been in a position to ask whether there should be more than one color.

Why answer? Your argument as far as I can read it is "Physics exists, therefore DEI is bad". Can you help me fill in the gap?

What is your clearly rhetorical question getting at?

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