Is Diversity A Problem?
Untangling the diversity culture war
Here’s a quick way to get canceled. Write this:
That’s from Heather Mac Donald, the conservative scholar/activist who wrote The Diversity Delusion. Her speeches were widely protested.
Scientific American could hardly disagree more:
The devil’s in the details. To understand a complex concept like diversity, dig deep.
Parsing diversity
A student body can be diverse. That’s where culture wars center. But a restaurant menu can also be diverse. Or an ecosystem. Characters in a password. Atoms in a molecule.
A specific kind of diversity — the one we war over— is the variety of race/gender/age/etc. in a group.
Diversity exists in context. You can’t describe the diversity of atoms. You can measure their diversity in a molecule. In a mobile home. On Jupiter.
Let’s use homogeneous as the antonym of diverse.
An obvious question is:
“What works better — homogeneity or diversity?”
Let’s look at contexts.
Diversity in agriculture
In her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Robin Kimmerer describes a native American agricultural practice called The Three Sisters. The sisters are maize, beans, and squash.
Native Americans grew these crops together. Three Sisters survived over 5000 years because evolution rewards success.
Each sister provides essential resources for itself and its sisters.
Maize maximizes photosynthesis and grows straight and tall.
Beans use the stalks for structural support and to gain greater access to sunlight … they bring atmospheric nitrogen into the system, making it available to maize.
Squash performs best in shady, humid places, and that is the type of microclimate provided by the corn and beans together. Squash decreases the erosion that plagues monocultural cropping of corn.
Three Sisters is an example of polyculture. It’s designed for diversity.
Why then is monoculture so prevalent? It has huge short-term advantages.
- Scalable specialization
- Maximizes efficient use of soil and climate conditions
- Simplifies cultivation
Monoculture fits a modern developed economy, where agriculture is a business focused on profit. It’s scalable and maximizes short-term yields.
Polyculture fits an indigenous American society where scalability was irrelevant, cultivation was manual, traditions were important, and people viewed land as a spiritual gift to be nurtured.
Using fertilizer to sidestep the biological control of limited nitrogen maximizes crop yields. Without fertilizer, we couldn’t feed eight billion people. But over-production is costly:
- Monoculture contaminates soil and groundwater by eliminating varieties of bacteria and microorganisms, and introducing pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.
- It requires more water relative to crop yield. A single crop often cannot provide the root structure to maximize water absorption and maintain soil integrity. Squash does this for beans and corn.
Is monoculture better?
If you view agriculture as a profit-making business that prioritizes yields now, with the land being merely a resource, then yes.
But that’s just one worldview. Given a worldview with different priorities, polyculture is superior.
What’s the punch line?
- Simple homogenous solutions work in simple environments.
- Complex diverse solutions are better for complex environments. But complexity comes with a cost.
- It’s wise to keep the solution as simple as possible without sacrificing robustness. Three Sisters. Not Eight.
Dependencies
Another property of complex systems is dependencies. Imagine a plant that only needed sunlight to grow. One dependency. In such a system, monoculture would be ideal.
But plants need soil, micro-organisms, water, light, a variety of chemical elements, and a host of other things to grow.
Dependencies are a burden. When you design a system, you have to address dependencies. The more dependencies, the more complex the system.
Bicycles are far easier to maintain than automobiles.
Simplicity/homogeneity and complexity/diversity in software
Software engineers battle complexity, because complex software is non-linearly harder to use and maintain.
Good design practices enable engineers to keep software simple.
So why is software often hard to use? Adhering to good design principles takes time. That’s often at odds with business directives. Inevitably, corners get cut.
As the saying goes, "You can pay me now or you can pay me later." And software companies do pay. It’s called technical debt and because it’s a positive feedback loop, it often leads to a death spiral.
Software engineers strive to simplify the environment so they can simplify their code. The software becomes easier to use and maintain because it’s simple and homogeneous.
Simplifying an environment without side effects is a great way to make things less diverse and less complex. This is easier to do in an artificial world like software.
Specialists vs. generalists
A generalist is diverse. A specialist is homogeneous. When specialists combine, they provide diversity. Like maize, beans, and squash.
Consider two forms of diversity:
- Each component is diverse within itself
- Specialized components combine to create diversity
Which is better? That depends on size.
When an entity exceeds a particular size, specialization is better if you achieve diversity by combining specialists. But some generalized knowledge — diversity — within a component reduces friction.
For example, a software engineer who is also a pilot is likely a good fit for writing flight software.
Humans have dominated the planet — for better or worse — because we specialize and achieve diversity by combining specialists. We develop complex systems by leveraging diversity, ideal for dealing with a complex world.
Tools
If you could have just one tool, you’d want a screwdriver. It’s a good generalist.
Sometimes a screwdriver won’t cut it. You need a hacksaw.
When resources are limited, you want a component that’s diverse within itself. Like a screwdriver. The same is true when you have a simple task.
When resources are ample, and conditions are complex, it’s better to have a variety of specialized components. An auto mechanic needs a huge toolbox.
Foxes vs. hedgehogs
Psychologist Phil Tetlock has written about fox and hedgehog cognitive styles.
- Foxes have different strategies for different problems. They’re comfortable with nuance; they can live with contradictions. Their thinking is diverse.
- Hedgehogs, on the other hand, focus on the big picture. They reduce every problem to one organizing principle. Their thinking is homogeneous.
Elon Musk is a classic hedgehog. He is a slash and burn, let’s take that hill leader. Musk is a workaholic; demanding, blunt, dictatorial, obsessive, technical, and focused. His laser hedgehog focus enabled him to create world-leading electric car and spacecraft companies.
Musk brought this approach to Twitter, where it’s been an epic failure. Users are leaving in droves, the Engineering department has lost a critical mass of expertise, and the system is crumbling. Slash and burn was the wrong approach.
What about foxes? A classic example is forecaster Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. There’s a reason. As explained by Conceptually.org:
The best forecasters put their own theories aside, embraced uncertainty, and used multiple ways of looking at a problem to achieve a more accurate prediction. Hedgehogs who were more sure of their big-picture grasp of how the world worked, performed worse than their more unpresuming fox colleagues.
Foxes sample a diversity of empirical evidence. Hedgehogs pursue a single theoretical idea.
Is it better to be a fox or a hedgehog? That depends. A fox is less likely to build a greenfield market-leading company, like Tesla or SpaceX. A fox is more likely to forecast who will win the next presidential election. And would probably do a better job of leading Twitter.
Context is king. A fox’s perspective!
Anti-fragility
Nicholas Taleb invented the concept of anti-fragility, which describes how things react to turmoil.
- Fragile things break
- Resilient things are impervious
- Anti-fragile things thrive
When I studied ecosystems, the professor’s mantra was Stability through diversity.
A complex ecosystem is more resilient to changing variables, such as a new tree fungus or the introduction of an invasive species. Those changing variables could even make the ecosystem stronger by making it more diverse. That’s anti-fragility.
What else is anti-fragile? ChatGPT. Presently, ChatGPT produces bizarre results. But it learns and grows as people try to trick it. The chaos introduced by people who want to break ChatGPT actually improves it. Why? ChatGPT adapts.
Anti-fragile things, like The Three Sisters, last a long time. ChatGPT isn’t going away.
Diversity culture wars
Let’s untangle the diversity culture wars.
Diversity is often lumped in with Inclusion. They’re different.
Inclusion is about fairness. Inclusion seeks to correct past and present wrongs due to various isms.
It’s misleading to make statements about diversity when you really mean inclusion.
Diversity is about variety. It has nothing to do with social justice. When Scientific American asserts Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent, and harder working, that’s science. It’s not good or bad. It just is.
So which is better — diversity or homogeneity? It’s contextual! And that’s the crucial point culture warriors blithely ignore.
Diversity wins in complex environments and loses in simple environments.
Say you need five students to dig a ditch. Do you want five offensive linemen? Or a band trumpeter, a math whiz, a stoner, a point guard, and a cheerleader? Simple -> homogeneous.
Flip the scenario. The school has a worsening drug problem. You want a group of students to figure out the root cause, and brainstorm ways to turn things around. Complex -> diverse.
The clash and friction of experience and perspective lead to creative thinking and solutions. You need those when you are solving a drug problem. When you’re digging a ditch, you need physical strength.
What about colleges? A college is a complex system. Its mission is to promote learning, growth, and innovation. This includes adapting to a changing world. A college with a diverse faculty and student body has enormous advantages over a school that’s homogeneous.
Should a college favor students or faculty with lower quantitative academic credentials to promote diversity?
If inclusion is the goal, absolutely. But we’re considering diversity. A school benefits from qualified and diverse students and teachers. Both matter.
A college benefits from the union of qualified and diverse students and faculty.
What about in the workplace? Same same.
Many workplaces tend to be complex environments solving complex problems at scale. Complex -> diverse.
But that’s not always true. Why do fast-food restaurants hire so many teenagers? They’re willing to do unappealing work for low pay, part-time. Simple -> homogeneous.
If a company’s world becomes more complex, the risks of homogeneity grow. Your team is handicapped if it doesn’t harvest the fruits of the clash, friction, and cross-pollination that diverse experiences and perspectives create.
TLDR
There is no TLDR. That’s the point.
Culture warriors rarely stop to read, think, and consider nuance. When they do, they’re hedgehogs, like Heather Donald, pushing a single grand idea independent of context.
Without a deeper understanding, people are prone to oversimplify and align in dogmatic camps that are big on talk and light on understanding.
That’s true of diversity. In some contexts, diversity has enormous value. In others, it might be useless or even counter-productive. Your mileage may vary.
The battlegrounds of other culture wars are similar. Warring is easier than thinking and understanding. And that’s why we have culture wars.
