As we cannot measure the diversity of perspectives of a person directly, our best proxy for it is demographic diversity, as our life shapes our assumptions.
This seems like quite a key premise to your argument, but you don’t seem to spend much time arguing for its plausibility; indeed, it seems quite likely false. Could we not simply ask someone their views on a variety of subjects? If we know what their views are on Sports, Reincarnation, the Holy Roman Empire, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Abortion, Pokemon, the Axiom of Choice, MIRI, and Socks with Sandles, I feel like we could have a pretty good sense of whether they add a new perspective.
Similarly with education and career; I would in general expect more perspective diversity from a group consisting of an economist, a biologist, a nurse, a poet, a cop and a prostitute, even if they were all the same race, age and sex, than I would from a demographically diverse group of harvard-educated lawyers.
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.
As an addendum: First, suppose you compare a group of random people from the same demographic to a random groups of people from different demographics. Next suppose you compare a group of random lawyers to a group of random laywers of different demogaphics. I would suggest that in the second case the increase in diversity from adding demographic diversity would be significantly reduced as the bar to becoming a lawyer would filter out a lot of diversity of experiences from the first case. For example, a greater proportion of African Americans experience poverty than the general population, but the difference among those who become laywers would be much less.
Simply asking someone about their beliefs works if you have something conrete to ask for and know that kind of perspective you want to include. However, how would you know which questions to ask for? Aren’t the questions you are asking not based on your own perspectives? What this post aims for is highlighting the importance of perspectives you cannot easily predict. For example, if you would you are doing a Hamming Circle you might have a hunch beforehand which people you would like to include, but during the circle the best feedback and help comes from a person and perspective you never even would have considered to be important.
And to your second point: Why not both? My post aims to highlight the importance of diverse perspectives. Therefore, I would assume that I would get the most valuable consensus from a group consisting of economist, a biologist, a nurse, a poet, a cop and a prostitute, which are also diverse on race, age and sex.
Of course you can ask people about their views and then use that to establish the intellectual diversity you want, and that can be a helpful tool. The problem, however, is that whoever creates the questionaire is likely biased towards their own beliefs and they might not even know what to ask to surface a specific subject that is mostly relevant for people of a certain demographic background. They may do this on purpose or subconsciously, even in good faith.
This seems like quite a key premise to your argument, but you don’t seem to spend much time arguing for its plausibility; indeed, it seems quite likely false. Could we not simply ask someone their views on a variety of subjects? If we know what their views are on Sports, Reincarnation, the Holy Roman Empire, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Abortion, Pokemon, the Axiom of Choice, MIRI, and Socks with Sandles, I feel like we could have a pretty good sense of whether they add a new perspective.
Similarly with education and career; I would in general expect more perspective diversity from a group consisting of an economist, a biologist, a nurse, a poet, a cop and a prostitute, even if they were all the same race, age and sex, than I would from a demographically diverse group of harvard-educated lawyers.
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.
As an addendum: First, suppose you compare a group of random people from the same demographic to a random groups of people from different demographics. Next suppose you compare a group of random lawyers to a group of random laywers of different demogaphics. I would suggest that in the second case the increase in diversity from adding demographic diversity would be significantly reduced as the bar to becoming a lawyer would filter out a lot of diversity of experiences from the first case. For example, a greater proportion of African Americans experience poverty than the general population, but the difference among those who become laywers would be much less.
Simply asking someone about their beliefs works if you have something conrete to ask for and know that kind of perspective you want to include. However, how would you know which questions to ask for? Aren’t the questions you are asking not based on your own perspectives? What this post aims for is highlighting the importance of perspectives you cannot easily predict. For example, if you would you are doing a Hamming Circle you might have a hunch beforehand which people you would like to include, but during the circle the best feedback and help comes from a person and perspective you never even would have considered to be important.
And to your second point: Why not both? My post aims to highlight the importance of diverse perspectives. Therefore, I would assume that I would get the most valuable consensus from a group consisting of economist, a biologist, a nurse, a poet, a cop and a prostitute, which are also diverse on race, age and sex.
Of course you can ask people about their views and then use that to establish the intellectual diversity you want, and that can be a helpful tool. The problem, however, is that whoever creates the questionaire is likely biased towards their own beliefs and they might not even know what to ask to surface a specific subject that is mostly relevant for people of a certain demographic background. They may do this on purpose or subconsciously, even in good faith.