Yeah, just seems pretty obvious that if we care about intellectual and cognitive diversity, we can just measure that directly, by getting people with different educational and professional backgrounds.
It seems that demographic diversity is one of the worst proxies of cognitive and intellectual diversity that I can think of, with it’s primary benefit just being that it is really easy to enforce (i.e. it’s very easy to tell whether a group is demographically diverse, whereas it might take a conversation with a group of people to figure out the diversity of their cognitive styles and philosophical assumptions).
You seem to assume that diversity of perspectives is easy to measure, because you only link it to the professional background of a person. However, I would argue that while profession is important, so is how I grew up and what experiences I had in my life due to sex, gender, race and other markers. Those things you cannot easily measure directly, but they improve discussions, as they lead to more assumptions being challenged.
Sure, but in the above post you claim that demographic diversity is the best way to measure diversity of perspectives, which is a much stronger claim. I am not saying demographic diversity is completely irrelevant, I am just saying that it seems far from the best measure of cognitive diversity that we have.
Yeah, just seems pretty obvious that if we care about intellectual and cognitive diversity, we can just measure that directly, by getting people with different educational and professional backgrounds.
It seems that demographic diversity is one of the worst proxies of cognitive and intellectual diversity that I can think of, with it’s primary benefit just being that it is really easy to enforce (i.e. it’s very easy to tell whether a group is demographically diverse, whereas it might take a conversation with a group of people to figure out the diversity of their cognitive styles and philosophical assumptions).
You seem to assume that diversity of perspectives is easy to measure, because you only link it to the professional background of a person. However, I would argue that while profession is important, so is how I grew up and what experiences I had in my life due to sex, gender, race and other markers. Those things you cannot easily measure directly, but they improve discussions, as they lead to more assumptions being challenged.
Sure, but in the above post you claim that demographic diversity is the best way to measure diversity of perspectives, which is a much stronger claim. I am not saying demographic diversity is completely irrelevant, I am just saying that it seems far from the best measure of cognitive diversity that we have.