Prometheus 6

Yesterday I was looking for a PHP reference book around here and did not find it. Instead I found the pile of books I was supposed to read and haven't gotten to. This interview with Scott E. Page has me interested in his new book, “The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies”. What caught my attention was his working definition of "diversity"

Q. In your book you posit that organizations made up of different types of people are more productive than homogenous ones. Why do you say that?

A. Because diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it.

People from different backgrounds have varying ways of looking at problems, what I call “tools.” The sum of these tools is far more powerful in organizations with diversity than in ones where everyone has gone to the same schools, been trained in the same mold and thinks in almost identical ways.

...which removes it entirely from the anti-racism toolkit, combined with an interesting bit of honesty.

Q. The term “diversity” has become a code word for inclusion of racial, ethnic and sexual minorities. Is that what you’re talking about?

A. I mean differences in how people think. Two people can look quite different and think similarly. Having said that, there’s certainly a lot of evidence that people’s identity groups — ethnic, racial, sexual, age — matter when it comes to diversity in thinking.

Here’s the bottom line: I myself am an affirmative action child. I got into the University of Michigan in the 1980s on a program. I’m from a rural part of Michigan. No calculus in high school. So I was given bonus points toward undergraduate admissions.

If the policy had been to consider mainly grades and SATs and not to make room for some geographic diversity, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten in.

I figure it will ultimately be as useful to me as Gary Becker's work, which is to say not at all. But it's interesting.