Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

The author:

> Charity Majors is cofounder and CTO at Honeycomb.io, a platform that helps engineering teams debug and improve their software applications.

> https://charity.wtf/ Blog, latest article an apologia for DEI, "The diversity of your teams over the long run rests on your ability to build an inclusive culture and equitable policies."... "Don’t underestimate what a competitive advantage diversity can be"

Hmm. Why does no one argue for equitable balance of political views, or religions, or anything to do with ideas at all? Is anyone even measuring ideational diversity? Power-sharing in most countries is principally concerned with it, for example. How many 'inclusive' teams are extremely politically, and ideologically, homogenous?

Clearly there's a apologia for a certain worldview at work here: some sunk-cost investment in a certain notion of inclusion, which is entails (if not aims for) moral and ideological uniformity. Offensive to this notion of 'inclusion' is excellence, since excellence isn't uniform nor even normal -- it's pareto distributed. An excellent runner is exponentially better than a normal one, and sampling uniformly from all groups ("inclusively") produces bad runners.

According to experience, and all evidence, the best talent arises out of healthy competition and cooperation with the best talent -- it does not arise out of uniform, nor even, normal distributions.

If you sample uniformly, then race all against all eventually a powerlaw arises -- and almost everyone is excluded if you want the best. Discrimination based on talent is a ruthless process which cares little for what ought be.

Yes, systems produce excellence by exaggeration of abilities, but this process of exaggeration quickly leaves the normal behind, and is anyhting but inclusive.

Diversity tends to work best when there's alignment to a common goal, and diversity is adding perspectives on how to get there. Consider creating a product that will be used by people from different cultures or backgrounds. But when there's significant difference of opinion about the directional goal, as is often the case with political/ideological differences, then that diversity can be adding friction rather than insight.

Republicans will never be good at leading the EPA, basically.

> Hmm. Why does no one argue for equitable balance of political views, or religions, or anything to do with ideas at all? Is anyone even measuring ideational diversity?

Probably not, no.

About a decade ago, I worked with a woman who had a PhD in psychometric assessment / quantitative psych. She was crazy smart. She said there have been lots of studies of high performing teams, and of course one of the conclusions people have taken from these studies is that "more diversity is better".

But she said if you actually go and read the studies, its far more complex than that. She said the data actually shows:

- A diversity of backgrounds makes a team more effective.

- A diversity of values makes a team less effective.

It makes sense. Imagine your company sells breakfast cereal. You will be more effective if you have people from a lot of backgrounds because they will understand issues your customers will face. If everyone on your team is wealthy, you might price your product too high. If everyone on your team is poor, you might never consider having a premium version of your product for wealthy areas. If your team only speaks English, you might accidentally give your product a name that plays really badly for Spanish speakers or something. And so on. These mistakes can be avoided by having a team with diverse backgrounds.

But if your team members have different values, they won't get along and your team will become less effective. Say, some people on your team want to make a product thats good for the environment. And other people on the team just want to maximise profit. Then they'll spend their energy fighting about that, and the result is a low performing team, making a confused product thats probably expensive and bad for the environment at the same time. Or, one person on the team wants everyone to like each other and someone else on the team loves competition. They'll inevitably clash. The conflict might result in personal growth - but it'll probably be bad for the team's KPIs this quarter.

In essence, nobody talks about diversity of values because nobody wants it. Ironically, not even DEI proponents.

My point wasn't that we should expect high performing teams to have a diversity of relevant values -- rather, that "diversity" is just a means of smuggling people of the same values in together under the guise of inclusion. In other words, its a kind of radical exclusion of those who do not prioritise this sort of diversity -- which is the vast majority of people. Looking around to see if the ethnic mix matches population statistics is bizarre to almost everyone.

This is a problem when these values become extremised in a population such that to select for them is to quite significantly narrow the plurality of values which would otherwise well-coexit. Consider, eg., religious communities living together before and after liberalism -- before = civil war, after = human rights. Classical liberalism is an ideology of values pluralism which thereby permits great diversity of ideas.

We should expect high-performing teams to have a diversity of relevant ideas (, and perhaps, ) of irrelevant values.

The concern arises when the benefit to team cohesion arises from an echo-chambre of shared values, at a great expense, of disruptive innovation and ideational diversity. And also, on my part, just honesty about what this sort of moralist is really aiming for -- to be surrounded by people who wish for a very narrow sort of values-homogeneity.

If "diversity and inclusion" were part of the pluralist fabric of liberal tolerance shared by the vast majority of people this issue wouldn't arise -- since then there could be a great actual diversity of opinon whilst values were shared. The issue is how peripherial prioritising these values is, de facto -- and hence how self-regulatingly narrow the "team" has to be.

If the chief value being pushed were "tolerance", such that we had, "tolerance, respect, effort" (, say) as the new moralist fashion -- then almost none would be excluded.

Consider what the impact of making "racism" a team value would be in these terms: how narrowing, homogenising, and the like. And yet, I suspect the number of people keen to work with "people as racist as they are" is not so different than "people as obsessed by diversity as they are".

I've heard people talking about diversity three ways;

The first is the idealistic one that employers would like to be the default interpretation: A global hiring pool allows for the best possible experts, with the widest experience. And you need an inclusive culture to ensure that the talent is happy to stay.

The second is the more realistic: A global hiring pool allows for cheaper labour: And you need a culture where speaking out against "inclusivity" is dangerous to the individual, in order to prevent unionist sentiment or political barriers to cheap labour emerging.

The third is a bit more cynical, it's similar to the second but considering a wider scale: If an employer with an easy problem can't access a low cost low skill workforce, then they have to compete in hiring from the high skill one. This means that development is tied up with the financial impact of the work. (You only hire someone if there is expected return). Access to a cheaper labour market makes the price of the work more tied to the difficulty, removing the perception that development is a high value activity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com