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A New York Times oped:
Diversity Makes You Brighter
By SHEEN S. LEVINE and DAVID STARK DEC. 9, 2015AFFIRMATIVE ACTION is back before the Supreme Court today. The court has agreed to hear, for the second time, the case of Abigail Fisher, a white applicant who claims that she was rejected by the University of Texas at Austin because of her race. Ms. Fisher invokes the promise of equal protection contained in the 14th Amendment, reminding us that judging people by their ancestry, rather than by their merits, risks demeaning their dignity.
Upholding affirmative action in 2003, in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor argued that it served the intellectual purpose of a university. Writing for the majority, she described how the University of Michigan aspired to enhance diversity not only to improve the prospects of certain groups of students, but also to enrich everyone’s education.
As you can see from this video, everyone’s education is enriched by Diversity. Intellectual discourse thrives when everybody is hyperaware of their racial grievances.
Ms. Fisher argues that diversity may be achieved in other ways, without considering race. Before resorting to the use of race or ethnicity in admissions, the University of Texas must offer “actual evidence, rather than overbroad generalizations about the value of favored or disfavored groups” to show that “the alleged interest was substantial enough to justify the use of race.”
Our research provides such evidence. Diversity improves the way people think. By disrupting conformity, racial and ethnic diversity prompts people to scrutinize facts, think more deeply and develop their own opinions.
As we all know, only conformists are skeptical about the value of diversity. Everybody who is anybody believes that diversity is awesome.
Our findings show that such diversity actually benefits everyone, minorities and majority alike.
This is the kind of assertion that everybody wants to believe these days. You can have your cake and eat it too: diversity and rake in the dough. We saw it with the Housing Bubble, which was concentrated in highly diverse neighborhoods. It eventually turned out that opinions on the value of houses in highly diverse neighborhoods were disastrously stupid, but who can remember what happened way back in the last decade.
To study the effects of ethnic and racial diversity, we conducted a series of experiments in which participants competed in groups to find accurate answers to problems. In a situation much like a classroom, we started by presenting each participant individually with information and a task: to calculate accurate prices for simulated stocks. …
We assigned each participant to a group that was either homogeneous or diverse (meaning that it included at least one participant of another ethnicity or race). To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans. In Singapore, we studied people who were Chinese, Indian and Malay. (The results were published with our co-authors, Evan P. Apfelbaum, Mark Bernard, Valerie L. Bartelt and Edward J. Zajac.)
The findings were striking. When participants were in diverse company, their answers were 58 percent more accurate. The prices they chose were much closer to the true values of the stocks. As they spent time interacting in diverse groups, their performance improved.
In homogeneous groups, whether in the United States or in Asia, the opposite happened. When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction. Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In the diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.
For our study, we intentionally chose a situation that required analytical thinking, seemingly unaffected by ethnicity or race. We wanted to understand whether the benefits of diversity stem, as the common thinking has it, from some special perspectives or skills of minorities.
See. Diversity makes you rich. Only idiots doubt that.
What we actually found is that these benefits can arise merely from the very presence of minorities.
They’re like sacred totems. You should make sure to have some around.
In the initial responses, which were made before participants interacted, there were no statistically significant differences between participants in the homogeneous or diverse groups. Minority members did not bring some special knowledge.
The differences emerged only when participants began interacting with one another. When surrounded by people “like ourselves,” we are easily influenced, more likely to fall for wrong ideas. Diversity prompts better, critical thinking. It contributes to error detection. It keeps us from drifting toward miscalculation.
Obama 2012 HQ
And that explains why Obama was beaten so badly by Romney in 2012: just look at the nondiverse Obama 2012 Brain Trust.
Ethnic diversity is like fresh air: It benefits everybody who experiences it.
These researchers have no doubt used their discovery that diversity makes for better stock picking to make billions as hedge fund managers.
They have made billions off their discovery, haven’t they?
Hmm, one of these things is not like the others…
And of course the “diverse groups” would outperform the “nondiverse groups” on average. The relevant question is whether they outperformed all the nondiverse groups. A group of three white people will slightly outperform a group of one white, one Hispanic and one black (on average the equivalent of between one and two whites), which will in turn substantially outperform a group of 3 Hispanics or 3 blacks.
“Ethnic diversity is like fresh air: It benefits everybody who experiences it.”
If diversity is like fresh air, than poor Oprah Winfrey is living in extremely polluted air. She resides in Montecito, California where only 0.6 percent of the population is Black and a whopping 92 percent of the population is White. She is choking from all of that polluted air which is a result of being surrounded by way too many White neighbors.
Making billions on Wall Street requires connections and schmooze as well.
I do think it’s funny how the NYT tries to cue up arguments just in time for the SCOTUS affirmative action deliberations.
Some people here have suggested the recent protests will annoy Harvard et al. into dropping minority admissions. But I think they actually believe this diversity stuff now.
Assuming that the differences in results were real, statistically significant and reproducible (all very unlikely) might they not suggest that competent traders can make more money off incompetent ones than competent ones?
Multi-ethnic empires and countries have all crashed and burned. Everywhere there’s been Muslims there’s been conflict with everyone else and between themselves so even having different religions next to each other is a formula for trouble. There’s nothing secret about this. The people who write these things need not to even have ever picked up a history book; all they need to do is look at all the current conflicts taking place right now. Diversity is actually a curse, a formula for strife and chaos.
All countries and Empires end. It's what they do.
New York Times claiming diversity makes you smarter? Next an Islamic magazine will be claiming Islam makes your life better.
The readers of the NYT famously practice little in the way of diversity.
Nonobservant Jews don't want to convert me either, but they want to 'tikkun olam' my world into a pesthole. This I resent. Am I a monster for resenting this, the importing of aliens (even those who hate Jews and say so), the gun control, the unlimited growth of the social state, the sexualization of everything and anything? If so, too bad.
I wonder why Oprah Winfrey never wanted to reside in Baldwin Hills and be surrounded by other rich Black people. Maybe Baldwin Hills is too close to the high crime area known as The Jungle/Baldwin Village and that scares her.
Since the Black underclass in The Jungle lives in such close proximity to the Black upper middle class in Baldwin Hills, there must be a lot of home burglaries that take place in Baldwin Hills. Higher than it should be for a supposed “affluent” area.
I do think it's funny how the NYT tries to cue up arguments just in time for the SCOTUS affirmative action deliberations.
Some people here have suggested the recent protests will annoy Harvard et al. into dropping minority admissions. But I think they actually believe this diversity stuff now.
Michael Burry did the opposite of schmooze when he bet against mortgages in diverse communities across the country and made himself and his investors hundreds of millions.
So what they are saying is that people don’t trust one another in diverse groups making them mentally stressful and forcing everyone to be constantly on their toes? Sounds great.
I wouldn’t want to be in a diverse group during the sort of crisis that requires coordination by unspoken understanding.
https://marginalcounterrevolution.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/wednesday-assorted-links/
"Social trust leads to groupthink; therefore, it must be destroyed."
The study they talk about has a title that almost seems to have been chosen to troll Steve: “Ethnic diversity deflates price bubbles”. I haven’t read it, but it was published in PNAS, which in itself is an almost surefire indicator that the results are false. At least the social science published in PNAS is famously shoddy, in part because it doesn’t go through normal peer review.
So better to sell before the Blacks start moving in.
“For our study, we intentionally chose a situation that required analytical thinking, seemingly unaffected by ethnicity or race. ”
That’s really funny.
Also, the mechanism for this purported improvement seems to be that members of diverse groups don’t trust each other. Is a lower level of trust a good thing for society as a whole? I mean outside of all that required analytical thinking.
You spelled predictable wrong.
SHEEN LEVINE!!
Is it April 1st already?
Oh, they’ve believed it ever since they discovered how useful it is in taking the heat off of dull-witted legacy admits and excluding the white ethnics and Asians who threatened to crowd them out.
Someone joked that real Indigenous ethnic Malaysians who are not of Chinese descent, are just Filipinos who don’t eat pork.
Filipinos have been described by some anthropologists as racially being part of the Malay family. Others say they are Austronesians.
To wit, when you ask a group of people to collaborate on an intellectual task, it’s effectively just asking whomever is the most intelligent to do the task on their own. Or whomever is pushiest, if there’s more than one type-A personality in the group.
To an intelligent and able student the Group Project is the academic form of waterboarding.
OK, they are basically rediscovering Putnam’s Bowling Alone thesis: Diversity leads to Distrust.
It leads not only to distrust of persons of other ethnicities, but of everyone, even co-ethnics.
It leads to atomization, to Bowling Alone.
Other social science discoveries demonstrate that people will go along with wrong answers to get along with the group, especially if its a low stakes test problem and they have no social, financial, moral or other skin in the game.
So, come up with a task that is kinda abstract, and where accuracy could be improved by distrust and reduced social cohesion, and it is perfectly plausible that Diversity could have this effect. Unfortunately, in the real world of Universities, this doesn’t play out. The STEM fields have other institutional methods of dealing with group think and confirmation bias, and though these are nowhere near perfect, as criticisms of peer review have shown, it is hard to believe the presence of a few black or lesbian scientists or mathmetiticians make the fields more open to novel string theorums. The Humanities fields are palpably hurt by Diversity, because there is VERY MUCH skin in the game, the prize being control of culture. So here Diversity leads to crushing conformity, not helpful lack thereof. Actually, I can see diversity having originally had this effect in say 1950-1965, when it was a little spice added to the mix, before the power of the diverse to control things was established. Also, in places like the military, where the Diverse aren’t visibly lesser in intelligence and ability, and so the need to hide that uncomfortable fact is less, diversity might still play that role.
But not at the modern Liberal Arts college. Nope.
What a rebuttal!
All of the emphasis on what diversity does for white people stems back to Powell’s decision in the Bakke case. He ruled that, since the U of C never discriminated against blacks in the 1st place, discrimination in their favor as “compensation” would be illegal. However, if the college had a “compelling state interest” in having black people at their school, such as the “benefits” brought to all students by diversity, then AA was ok. What were these “compelling” benefits that come from sitting next to black people in your med school class and how do we know they exist? We don’t – Powell just made it up as a paper thin rationalization for AA and from the ink of his pen a mighty edifice of diversity worship has been constructed.
Before Bakke, the idea of “diversity” barely existed – it became the buzzword that it is solely because Powell endorsed it as a legally permissible way of discriminating in favor of blacks. If he had chose some other rationale, we would be seeing “scientific” studies on how true that rationale was. This is how science was done in the Soviet Union – first the political system would endorse a particular (nonsensical) view – for example that “natural selection” did not exist in nature but rather we had “natural cooperation” instead, and then “scientists” such as Lysenko would set out to prove Stalin right.
So “diversity” doesn’t actually mean, diversity as in having students and faculty with views and opinions that diverge from each other. Colleges obviously have no problem with faculties that are 98, 99, or 100% leftist. Diversity is just the latest Orwellian leftist euphemism, in this case for “a legally permissible way to discriminate in favor of black people”. If the SC says that it no longer passes muster, you will hear no more of it and no one will be doing any studies on it (at least not by that name).
I'll bet if you search college catalogs before Bakke you would find very few mentions of how diverse the student body was, but their would be a statement about disadvantaged students.
Absolutely it doesn't. It's not even a thin smokescreen if you look at it head-on. The list of nations in the world who are having self-dissolution demanded from them contains only European peoples and ALL European peoples are on the list. (a handful resisting successfully atm) This is in-your-face open race hatred of European peoples. We are part of the diversity of the world. If we don't wake the hell up pretty damn quick, we will HAVE BEEN part of the diversity of the world.
How about that Supreme Court decision (Griggs v. Duke Power) that got rid of most intelligence tests? That wasn't Powell's doing.
Mixing certain ingredients makes for better flavors.
But just because tomato sauce and oregano go together doesn’t mean they do so in equal amounts.
Also, most combinations don’t work. Garlic powder and ice cream, anyone?
Diversity can make us brighter. But it can make us dimmer as well.
Depends on the combo, the quantities, and the rules.
Surely a top US college with best minds from all over will be a brighter place.
But I never heard the favelas of Brazil are genius factories.
The actual paper.
Summary: Diversity ruins communities, ‘complicates public policy decisions’, ‘Ethnic diversity facilitates friction. This friction can increase conflict in some group settings, whether a work team, a community, or a region.’, but would someone think of the
childreneconomy(!), ‘However, in modern markets, vigilant skepticism is beneficial; overreliance on others’ decisions is risky.’Students were put in a stock-trading simulation where they could either go along with the prices they saw other students posting, or you could try to take advantage of the other students by identifying their pricing mistakes and trading so as to make money at the expense of the other students. The experiment was zero sum ... one student's gain was another student's loss.
The stakes were very low, a few dollars. So, in the diverse groups, students were more likely to try to grab a few dollars from their fellow students whom they had just met and been encouraged to interact with.
The paper's discussion makes clear that the results are driven by the reduced trust in the diverse groups. The paper even cites Putnam's study, E Pluribus Unum. Like Putnam, the authors had to work hard to put a positive spin on their finding that diversity encourages ruthless backstabbing.
OT but just came here from reading a great example of this kind of thinking in an article touting Merkel’s broad support in the her party despite the “refugee rebels”:
“The critics of Merkel’s refugee policy are the outliers,” Guellner said. “The majority of the party is much more open-minded.”
Diversity can make one ‘brighter’ by breaking one out of the shell of conventional culture, customs, habits, attitudes, and assumptions.
Someone who grows up in a tight-knit homogeneous culture comes to take certain things for granted. He doesn’t think about the veracity and wisdom of such attitudes and values since he takes them for granted as ‘how things always were, are, and will be’.
Colleges do gain something by diversity. Kids from different regions with different attitudes are taken out of their bubble and forced to mingle with others.
It’s like in PAPER CHASE. Best from all over America must compete as individuals. They cannot rely on knee-jerk cultural assumptions.
Also, someone who is exposed to both leftist and rightist ideas and different worldviews will sharpen his polemical and intellectual skills.
But when affirmative action is used, it pulls together not the brightest but some of the less deserving who, in turn, are coddled and protected from real challenges lest their feelings be hurt.
Also, the culture of PC and sensitivity do the opposite of boosting healthy individualism and freedom of thought that meritocratic and libertine diversity can do.
Instead of breaking people out of provincial shells, PC and culture of sensitivity silence voices out of fear and place people in new shells known as ‘safe places’ that are totally allergic to challenging ideas that might ‘trigger’ or be ‘micro-aggressive’. And it places the ‘oppressor’ groups in the woodshed for the slightest sign of ‘renegade’ thought. People like Richwine must shut up.
Diversity of people + victim mentality + culture of sensitivity = lack of diversity of ideas and lack of true discourse.
NYT certainly would gain more with a diversity of ideas that go against PC and taboos.
Jonathan Haidt is right on this account.
Also, diversity of quality is different from mere random diversity.
If diversity per se works, then mixing geniuses with retards — mental diversity — will make the geniuses smarter.
If racial integration wasn't a panacea, then surely placing kids who are 2 or more SD's below average ability (across math and reading, for instance) in the regular classroom (where kids 2 SD's above average already were bored to tears) will yield Double Diversity Dividends.
From: http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004schools&g.pdfDiversity (tm) marches on.
If fully upheld and applied this would at best be neutral for whites at the Ivy League. What would happen is a significant increase (doubling?) in the number of Asian American entrants….
Diversity Makes You Brighter
I don’t want to be “brighter”. I’m voting for dullness here.
I’d rather be happy and unbright than unhappy; diverse; and extinct.
Back when I used to listen to Howard Stern on AM radio he would talk about being beaten up by black students at Roosevelt High school on Long Island. How he resented that his father, who had the money, did not move to a better suburban school district. So much for diversity!
And if diversity is so good for their children then why do the libs move to suburban suburbs that have a minimum of black and Hispanic students? Asian students being OK, and perhaps being smarter than their own children, and hogging the college scholarships.
I don't see how importing a foreign elite for our country makes any sense. There are a limited number of slots to top colleges and generally a limited number of really plum career opportunities. Or, am I wrong about career opportunities?
It would be interesting to see a study like this done but also segregate by gender and use only heterosexuals. If most people are only interested in having sex with people of the opposite gender but the same race, then perhaps having more possible sex partners around decreases performance because they are distracting. You could test this by having groups of all the same race and gender.
Also, there is no penalty for performing bad in these studies which means it is easier to be distracted. If big money is on the line it is harder to get distracted.
It’s not really a new insight that view point diversity is an effective antidote against various biases and sloppy reasoning. Jonathan Haidt has written extensively on this topic. And I do not doubt that increased racial diversity leads to more accurate and rigorous research insofar as it introduces additional view point diversity (which I think it does in a moderate degree).
However, this fixation on racial diversity ignores a rather obvious way to increase view point diversity much more dramatically: just stop making universities so unbearingly hostile to conservatives, right-wingers and everybody else who’s ideologically not fully on bord with the progressivist agenda. Bring in a few non-Democrats and non-liberals. Don’t treat them like lepers. Encourage them to come out of the closet. Try to make them feel safe and welcome.
That would likely do more to increase view point diversity than any race-based affirmative action program.
If the relatively small view point differences between white liberals and PoC liberals lead to 58% more accurate research, just imagine what effects the view point diversity between liberals and actual conservatives would have!
On the other hand, if you’re committed to purge universities from all non-liberal thought, because absolute supremacy of your tribal moral community is paramount to you, then bringing in racial minorities really is the only alternative left to have at least some view point diversity. So instead of a group of white liberals you will then be a group of racially diverse liberals – which, I guess, is only the second worst outcome in terms of diversity.
Ultimately, racial and ethnic diversity seems to be just a weak compensation for the mind numbing ideological homogeneity liberals have created in academia.
Sheen Levine? Sounds like a character in Billy Bathgate.
Very interesting that they chose stock selection as their test for measuring the benefits of diversity. I seem to recall that being a very difficult thing to do. This is the kind of experiment that they should really air out for the rest of us, so that we can really see all the positives in full glory.
The fundamental premise of the article is that diversity creates a low trust society, which is hugely beneficial. Bold stuff here, NYT.
Before Bakke, the idea of "diversity" barely existed - it became the buzzword that it is solely because Powell endorsed it as a legally permissible way of discriminating in favor of blacks. If he had chose some other rationale, we would be seeing "scientific" studies on how true that rationale was. This is how science was done in the Soviet Union - first the political system would endorse a particular (nonsensical) view - for example that "natural selection" did not exist in nature but rather we had "natural cooperation" instead, and then "scientists" such as Lysenko would set out to prove Stalin right.
So "diversity" doesn't actually mean, diversity as in having students and faculty with views and opinions that diverge from each other. Colleges obviously have no problem with faculties that are 98, 99, or 100% leftist. Diversity is just the latest Orwellian leftist euphemism, in this case for "a legally permissible way to discriminate in favor of black people". If the SC says that it no longer passes muster, you will hear no more of it and no one will be doing any studies on it (at least not by that name).
That’s all true. Bakke won the suit and got into medical school because U of Cal could not legally perform affirmative action for the reasons it gave. It was blatant race discrimination, not remedy of past wrongs. Powel wrote in dicta that, of course if the educators in their expertise had another reason for discriminating on the basis of race such as that it would improve education, then the Court would have to defer to their expertise.
I’ll bet if you search college catalogs before Bakke you would find very few mentions of how diverse the student body was, but their would be a statement about disadvantaged students.
This bit sounds plausible. When I walk through diverse neighborhoods in NYC I am extra-alert for my safety and it takes me extra effort to communicate with non-English speakers. I definitely have cognitive friction that enhances deliberation.
Note the “game” being played here:
So, things that people value that don’t have a number or dollar sign (see, especially, the book Priceless) and that they may be doing quite well at (think high-social-capital neighborhoods, where Robert Putnam showed diversity destroyed them) are ignored in terms of “performance.” Meanwhile, excellence at an artificial game far removed from the real economy (either this one or the actual stock market) is paramount. Once you get your oligarch-message-secret-decoder ring, this stuff gets easy.
I wonder how diverse the crowd at Galton’s county fair was?
OT: Netanyahu criticizes Trump for doing what Israel does. Surreal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/10/trump-delays-israel-trip-as-netanyahu-criticizes-his-muslim-entry-ban-proposal/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumptrip_pp_9am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
Diversity must contain electrolytes or something.
http://youtu.be/3boy_tLWeqA
Before Bakke, the idea of "diversity" barely existed - it became the buzzword that it is solely because Powell endorsed it as a legally permissible way of discriminating in favor of blacks. If he had chose some other rationale, we would be seeing "scientific" studies on how true that rationale was. This is how science was done in the Soviet Union - first the political system would endorse a particular (nonsensical) view - for example that "natural selection" did not exist in nature but rather we had "natural cooperation" instead, and then "scientists" such as Lysenko would set out to prove Stalin right.
So "diversity" doesn't actually mean, diversity as in having students and faculty with views and opinions that diverge from each other. Colleges obviously have no problem with faculties that are 98, 99, or 100% leftist. Diversity is just the latest Orwellian leftist euphemism, in this case for "a legally permissible way to discriminate in favor of black people". If the SC says that it no longer passes muster, you will hear no more of it and no one will be doing any studies on it (at least not by that name).
“So “diversity” doesn’t actually mean, …”
Absolutely it doesn’t. It’s not even a thin smokescreen if you look at it head-on. The list of nations in the world who are having self-dissolution demanded from them contains only European peoples and ALL European peoples are on the list. (a handful resisting successfully atm) This is in-your-face open race hatred of European peoples. We are part of the diversity of the world. If we don’t wake the hell up pretty damn quick, we will HAVE BEEN part of the diversity of the world.
SHEEN S. LEVINE
On his personal web site, under ‘Recent Research’, there is at the moment a video titled ‘How Ethnic Diversity Deflates Price Bubbles’.
I kid you not.
In the referenced article, the unstated premise that is meant to be accepted unquestioningly – the dog-whistle that is calling to be being obeyed – is that without affirmative action as currently defined there will be zero diversity (i.e., no minorities) at, say, the U. of Texas.
But this obviously isn’t the case. The removal of current affirmative action policies would not remove anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it remove the cultural outlook of school administrators or society at large. It would merely redefine the qualifications for enrollment.
It would no doubt reduce at some schools the number of some minorities while increasing the number of other minorities.
The NYT is saying it’s an all-or-nothing offer when there are other options on the table. In other words, the NYT is running a confidence game.
But, if you look at truly elite schools, on a color blind basis their black enrollment would fall to something like 1 or 2%. In the entire US each year, there are only a few hundred blacks who achieve SAT scores high enough to get into a top tier university on a color blind basis.
One of the side effects of getting rid of AA is that in the future this handful of blacks will be recruited the way star athletes are today. I see this as a positive. Once word gets out among black high schoolers that top students get perks like free concubines provided by the admissions office (as sports stars get today) , this might increase their interest in studying. People think that the problem with blacks is intelligence and this is indeed a large part of the problem, but the other 1/2 is lack of motivation. There is no evidence that Caribbean immigrant blacks have any genetic difference from American blacks but they seem to do better at school because they tend to come from less dysfunctional families and are more motivated to study.
Looks to me like this study strongly confirms Putnam: diversity produces “cognitive friction” and reduces the “undue” trust that similar people have for each other.
It’s possible that this does have a positive effect in the context of specific tasks, ones that require disagreement and have a strong incentive for the group to come to the right answer (I assume there was an actual payout to the participants).
I don’t see any basis for extrapolating that result to society in general. Daily life is not a series of stock picking tasks. I want to have “undue” trust that the other person will stop at a red light. I want to have experiences of solidarity with those like me, free of “cognitive friction”. Everybody does.
So looking at that photo it’s safe to conclude that at least the re-election bid was little more than a fraternity/sorority prank? A little like signing your dog up for a credit card.
Nice going guys…..thank for the additional four years with President Santos L. Halper.
When participants were in diverse company, their answers were 58 percent more accurate.
Here’s that 58%:
David Stark and Sheen Levine have discovered an interesting thing about financial bubbles: there’s a trick to deflating them and it has to do with diversity.
“Where other means have failed at stemming the growth of financial bubbles, it turns out that in a diverse market, traders scrutinize a sale more, less likely to accept a price that may be inflated. In a homogenous market, traders trust more, setting the stage to pay more than what the true value is based off a kind of herd mentality.
…
They set out to test their idea in two markets, one in Southeast Asia and the other in North America, and what they found was surprising: market prices fit true values 58% better in diverse markets.”
The homogeneous groups were Latino.
The article says:
“To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans.”
In the appendix of the study:
“In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity.”
Scroll down to “2.1.1 Research Sites”
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
So an honest description of their results would be
"In the US, all-Latino groups tended to mis-price more often as participants went along with the group rather than relied on their own analysis. Adding at least one non-Latino (usually a white student) greatly improved pricing."
The supplement also says,From the paper:Emphasis mine.
Not so much ‘sacred totems’, more like ‘little tin gods’ – you know, the type of ‘household deity’ or lares kept in a larerium, that no respectable Roman household would be without.
Indeed the same sympathetic magic is seen today in Asia and all across the ‘voodoo belt’ of the Carribean and Latin America.
If not ‘little tin god’ perhaps ‘mascot’ in the way that certain British army regiments still uphold the ancient tradition of the ‘regimental goat’, brought out in ceremonies in full honorary goat regalia. I kid you not. No pun intended.
It's possible that this does have a positive effect in the context of specific tasks, ones that require disagreement and have a strong incentive for the group to come to the right answer (I assume there was an actual payout to the participants).
I don't see any basis for extrapolating that result to society in general. Daily life is not a series of stock picking tasks. I want to have "undue" trust that the other person will stop at a red light. I want to have experiences of solidarity with those like me, free of "cognitive friction". Everybody does.
In other words, this study suggests that diversity produces low trust, high conflict societies in which the stock market does really well. I.e. the world we have now.
This study (entitled “Downsides of Social Capital”) is one of an interesting new genre. A great deal of research has demonstrated that ethnic diversity decreases neighborliness, trust and other social capital. Advocates of diversity haven’t been able to come up with any contrary evidence. So they’ve been concocting studies that try to show that destroying neighborliness and trust is actually a good thing.
childreneconomy!’Even if racial diversity was great it can only be temporary unless people are endogamous . These ‘scientists’ should, if they think racial diversity is such a boon, be discouraging miscegenation. Maintaining true cultural diversity also requires endogamy and is impossible if people aren’t allowed to be exclusionary. I suppose they could have workplace diversity and social exclusivity. These ‘scientists’ should promote culturally exclusive country clubs. Hitler! Nazis!OT – In South Africa, President Zuma has just sacked his black finance minister and replaced him with an obscure provincial Afrikaner. Help me, baas!
How does “diversity” benefit the person who doesn’t get admitted, despite superior qualifications? And if diversity is so wonderful, why not just double or triple non-Asian minority enrollment?
Wasn’t Hermann Goering supposed to have said, “Whenever someone mentions ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”? I feel the same way whenever the mainstream (liberal) media starts bringing up “experts,” as in “experts say” or “according to most experts.” Whenever NBC Nightly News does this, my first thought is, “Here comes the lie.”
Yes, but he didn't. He was an evil sod but he wasn't a bloody fool.
For “diversity” to be true, we would need evidence and not just speculation, that different demographics ARE different. Not some vague “different cultures MUST prove different abilities”. If blacks are different from whites, what are those specific differences? Which group is better at timeliness? Which group is better at verbal acuity?
Except that explicating actual differences contradicts the other main tenet in racial theology — equality/ disparate impact.
According to the prevailing civil rights scam, ‘diversity’ means we are inherently and substantively different based on our demographics, and ‘equality’ means we are NOT inherently and substantively different based on our demographics.
This condition of “diversequality” means we are to infer substantive differences without actually finding resulting differences in achievement. Our demographics are supposedly distinctions without an ultimate difference.
By the way, could the referenced study possibly be one of those social science experiments that are inexplicably non-reproducible?
So difference is “good for business”. Pure difference. Not quotas. Not “disparate impact”. Not proportional representation. Not “restorative justice”. Just pure variety, pure difference. The more difference the better the economic results.
Since pure difference is good, we should have only one of each ethnic group on every team or committee.
Since there are hundreds if not thousands of minorities in America, we will need to limit each ethnic group to at best one team or committee.
It follows that quotas, disparate impact, and proportional representation are the ENEMY of diversity, since they will radically limit the number of minorities represented.
Since only 0.0000001 percent of Andaman Islanders reside in America, we will NEVER “hear their voices” and get the benefit of their stock-picking talents if we stick with quotas or proportional representation.
These contrived studies are moronic. We have this vast data set called ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY in which to assess the outcomes of diversity. None of it supports the assertion that diversity brings anything more positive than instability and unhappiness. Mostly it brings war, rape, slavery, and massacre. Even the most stable, or at least enduring, diverse structures, the Roman Empire, maintained its pattern through institutionalized slavery and permanent war. It’s pattern of rule by a diverse aristocracy (headed by an Emperor) endured simply through mass application of state violence. This will be the fate of the world if the Paul Ryan-type globalists win. Recalcitrant peoples like our will suffer the same fate of those in the Roman era: extirpation.
I was taught there are three rules for doing analysis: 1) look at the data 2) look at the data and 3) look at the data. I was then warned that I would be surprised by how many people did not actually LOOK at the data. Of course, being young, ignorant, and naive I didn’t believe my mentor.
Apparently it is de rigueur to NOT look at the data in leftist circles today. They contrive artificial experiments to make proxy measurements to avoid looking at the real thing right in front of their faces.
“By disrupting conformity, racial and ethnic diversity prompts people to scrutinize facts, think more deeply and develop their own opinions.”
Because today’s university education is all about developing your own opinions.
Before Bakke, the idea of "diversity" barely existed - it became the buzzword that it is solely because Powell endorsed it as a legally permissible way of discriminating in favor of blacks. If he had chose some other rationale, we would be seeing "scientific" studies on how true that rationale was. This is how science was done in the Soviet Union - first the political system would endorse a particular (nonsensical) view - for example that "natural selection" did not exist in nature but rather we had "natural cooperation" instead, and then "scientists" such as Lysenko would set out to prove Stalin right.
So "diversity" doesn't actually mean, diversity as in having students and faculty with views and opinions that diverge from each other. Colleges obviously have no problem with faculties that are 98, 99, or 100% leftist. Diversity is just the latest Orwellian leftist euphemism, in this case for "a legally permissible way to discriminate in favor of black people". If the SC says that it no longer passes muster, you will hear no more of it and no one will be doing any studies on it (at least not by that name).
If it hadn’t been Powell it would have been something/someone else. This nonsense was building up. Without Powell there would have been a delay in diversity worship and law.
How about that Supreme Court decision (Griggs v. Duke Power) that got rid of most intelligence tests? That wasn’t Powell’s doing.
Diversity is neither intrinsically good nor bad. Most of what’s written about the merits of diversity is pure unadulterated drivel.
Before Bakke, the idea of "diversity" barely existed - it became the buzzword that it is solely because Powell endorsed it as a legally permissible way of discriminating in favor of blacks. If he had chose some other rationale, we would be seeing "scientific" studies on how true that rationale was. This is how science was done in the Soviet Union - first the political system would endorse a particular (nonsensical) view - for example that "natural selection" did not exist in nature but rather we had "natural cooperation" instead, and then "scientists" such as Lysenko would set out to prove Stalin right.
So "diversity" doesn't actually mean, diversity as in having students and faculty with views and opinions that diverge from each other. Colleges obviously have no problem with faculties that are 98, 99, or 100% leftist. Diversity is just the latest Orwellian leftist euphemism, in this case for "a legally permissible way to discriminate in favor of black people". If the SC says that it no longer passes muster, you will hear no more of it and no one will be doing any studies on it (at least not by that name).
One of the “compelling benefits” was going to be black physicians, who would treat black patients. But the black guy who got in to UC Davis’s medical school instead of Bakke ended up maiming a few black women patients and killing one. http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dr-Patrick-Chavis-player-in-reverse-2810140.php
If there is data but no correlation, is that because the actions of affirmative access admissions who subsequently screw up have to screw up egregiously before their licenses are revoked? Ie, affirmative action extends throughout their lives.
P.S.--When I was going through the D.C. public school system, quite a few of my fellow students from K-to-12 were sons or daughters or otherwise related to one or another of the school teachers or school administrators. Of course, that was when the system was still overwhelmingly white. (I had only one black teacher in my 13 years in the school system, a very nice, well-mannered man who taught metal shop (a required course then, along with print shop and wood shop) in the 8th grade. As a result, I got a nice self-made tie rack, matching the earlier ones of my two older brothers, and a nice self-made tea pot. I was very proud of both, and tears came to my eyes when I threw them in the trash a few years later. Nothing to show from print shop, but I acquired a handy skill which I am sure would have landed me a good job with Ben Franklin if he ever came back to life.)
P.P.S.--In a similar vein, something I picked up from my ex-wife, often the best way to pick out a good doctor at a particular hospital where you are away from your own doctor is to ask a nurse who works at that hospital.
Is it time to rerun my favourite diversity remark? A bright young section head in a City of London firm: “Yes, I have a very diverse section. One from King’s, one from Sidney Sussex, one from Caius, and one from Oxford.”
The advocates almost never live in these diverse neighborhoods.
Here’s the study http://www.pnas.org/content/111/52/18524.full
They examine the differences between diverse and homogenous groups, but the study conveniently leaves out any results on the differences between different homogenous groups. There’s no way to see whether a homogenous white group performs better than a black group or a diverse group. All the study really shows is that a diverse group (i.e. a group with some white people) performs better than an all hispanic or all black group.
Surely the only thing that study proves, even taken at face value, is that diversity works because people don’t trust members of other races and so feel it necessary to test their answers more thoroughly before accepting them.
I’m actually a bit surprised by that. It has never occurred to me that there are not stupid fellow white people, so I have a very hard time imagining ever trusting a randomly assigned stranger’s answer on something that could cost me money, without testing it against whatever other information I might have. If any.
Then again I never lived in a Mayberry-like environment or other tv show from the ’50s. The idea of taking investment tips from Joe down the street, without regard to facts or even whether he has any professional qualifications or demonstrable personal wealth, strikes me as insane. And yet plot after plot in shows from the Honeymooners to the Flintstones [the animated honeymooners] and beyond seemed to feature some schlub losing all his money because he got a hot stock tip from some other schlub who neither showed any evidence of financial acumen nor provided any source or analysis for the tip. At least the modern financial advice wizards dress the part, put certificates on the walls, and baffle us with diagrams. I respect them for putting in the effort.
As for non-financial matters more strictly experienced on a campus, this thesis cannot be true. Or it would have been demonstrated somewhere in real life by now.
I would be willing to bet that this “research” will fall into the 50 – 70% of Social Science papers that cannot be replicated by non-believers.
The research here is described in a very cursory way, with no description of how the researchers guarded against inadvertent bias toward the desired outcome that “diversity is good”. And isn’t this research just a rediscovery of what Francis Galton found about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds ?
“The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton’s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts).”
In comparing the accuracy of guesses at a number (e.g., the price of a stock or the weight of a ox), what does it mean to say that guess #2 is 58 percent more accurate than guess #1? Let’s say the true stock price is 82 $/share, guess #1 is 4o $/share, and guess #2 is 95 $/share. As a percentage, how much more accurate is guess #2 than guess #1? How is this percentage calculated?
That is a hate fact. You will now undertake mandatory reeducation.
I’m glad somebody is finally discussing the national epidemic of people trusting each other. Something must be done. Think of the children!
Is that because there is no data or because there is data but no correlation?
If there is data but no correlation, is that because the actions of affirmative access admissions who subsequently screw up have to screw up egregiously before their licenses are revoked? Ie, affirmative action extends throughout their lives.
Diversity Makes You Brighter is a title that would embarrass an author capable of embarrassment. Trump is right about journalists.
Before Bakke, the idea of "diversity" barely existed - it became the buzzword that it is solely because Powell endorsed it as a legally permissible way of discriminating in favor of blacks. If he had chose some other rationale, we would be seeing "scientific" studies on how true that rationale was. This is how science was done in the Soviet Union - first the political system would endorse a particular (nonsensical) view - for example that "natural selection" did not exist in nature but rather we had "natural cooperation" instead, and then "scientists" such as Lysenko would set out to prove Stalin right.
So "diversity" doesn't actually mean, diversity as in having students and faculty with views and opinions that diverge from each other. Colleges obviously have no problem with faculties that are 98, 99, or 100% leftist. Diversity is just the latest Orwellian leftist euphemism, in this case for "a legally permissible way to discriminate in favor of black people". If the SC says that it no longer passes muster, you will hear no more of it and no one will be doing any studies on it (at least not by that name).
Jack D. Back in my high school days, diversity meant sitting next to the really, really smart guy in chemistry and physics and then copying his answers and sharing them with my friends…..it benefited me and my friends….don’t know what it did for the smart guy though. Oh, and we were Italian Americans and he was Polish American….so we were different.
I think there might be a kernel of truth in the study, in that having an outsider or two in any kind of decision making process tends to prevent confirmation bias, groupthink, mass hysteria, etc. But realistically that has nothing to do with college admissions. And, furthermore, having outsiders in a decision making process presupposes (a) skill level of the outsider included, (b) a formal process of advocacy, rebuttal, and resolution. But again that has nothing to do with college admissions or the way college classes are actually handled. You don’t poll a jury to determine what’s going to be in the final.
One more thing, a poster here published the list of the Editorial Board of the NYT, not the least bit diverse.
“Our research provides such evidence. Diversity improves the way people think. By disrupting conformity, racial and ethnic diversity prompts people to scrutinize facts, think more deeply and develop their own opinions.”
They might even begin to percieve the differences in intelligence and behavior between different racial groups.
Let’s not actually automatically pooh-pooh this. If the experimenters aren’t simply making up the results, it may actually be an interesting finding.
It seems plausible that when people all share something in common, they are more easily swayed by groupthink. When they are in diverse company, they may simply speak in the common currency of ideas.
That being said, I wouldn’t totally dismiss the idea that the results were fabricated to get the right result. This isn’t publicly available data that anyone can check. The best you can do is replicate it with a different group of people.
Downsides of social capital is commentary on the paper Ethnic diversity deflates price bubbles.
The commentary provides an even better quote for my earlier facetious summary of the paper:
And I was thinking It was actually a bit of a stretch when I joked: ‘would someone think of the
childreneconomy!’Even if racial diversity was great it can only be temporary unless people are endogamous . These ‘scientists’ should, if they think racial diversity is such a boon, be discouraging miscegenation.
Maintaining true cultural diversity also requires endogamy and is impossible if people aren’t allowed to be exclusionary. I suppose they could have workplace diversity and social exclusivity. These ‘scientists’ should promote culturally exclusive country clubs.
Hitler! Nazis!
It’s worth reading the actual journal article. This link…
http://m.pnas.org/content/111/52/18524.abstract
will take you to the abstract but there you’ll see links to the full article and, even more interesting, an unpublished technical appendix that gives precise details on how they carried out the experiment.
we’re supposed to believe that there is no fundamental difference between blacks and whites, and we’re also supposed to believe that being around people who are different is good for us.
mr orwell, please pick up the courtesy telescreen…
I can hardly wait for someone to look at their raw data and study design, then try to replicate their claimed results.
It's like in PAPER CHASE. Best from all over America must compete as individuals. They cannot rely on knee-jerk cultural assumptions.Also, someone who is exposed to both leftist and rightist ideas and different worldviews will sharpen his polemical and intellectual skills. But when affirmative action is used, it pulls together not the brightest but some of the less deserving who, in turn, are coddled and protected from real challenges lest their feelings be hurt.Also, the culture of PC and sensitivity do the opposite of boosting healthy individualism and freedom of thought that meritocratic and libertine diversity can do.
Instead of breaking people out of provincial shells, PC and culture of sensitivity silence voices out of fear and place people in new shells known as 'safe places' that are totally allergic to challenging ideas that might 'trigger' or be 'micro-aggressive'. And it places the 'oppressor' groups in the woodshed for the slightest sign of 'renegade' thought. People like Richwine must shut up.Diversity of people + victim mentality + culture of sensitivity = lack of diversity of ideas and lack of true discourse.NYT certainly would gain more with a diversity of ideas that go against PC and taboos.Jonathan Haidt is right on this account.Also, diversity of quality is different from mere random diversity.If diversity per se works, then mixing geniuses with retards -- mental diversity -- will make the geniuses smarter.
Congratulations. You just described the newest and more pervasive system in public education: the Inclusion Model.
If racial integration wasn’t a panacea, then surely placing kids who are 2 or more SD’s below average ability (across math and reading, for instance) in the regular classroom (where kids 2 SD’s above average already were bored to tears) will yield Double Diversity Dividends.
From: http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2004schools&g.pdf
Diversity ™ marches on.
It's like in PAPER CHASE. Best from all over America must compete as individuals. They cannot rely on knee-jerk cultural assumptions.Also, someone who is exposed to both leftist and rightist ideas and different worldviews will sharpen his polemical and intellectual skills. But when affirmative action is used, it pulls together not the brightest but some of the less deserving who, in turn, are coddled and protected from real challenges lest their feelings be hurt.Also, the culture of PC and sensitivity do the opposite of boosting healthy individualism and freedom of thought that meritocratic and libertine diversity can do.
Instead of breaking people out of provincial shells, PC and culture of sensitivity silence voices out of fear and place people in new shells known as 'safe places' that are totally allergic to challenging ideas that might 'trigger' or be 'micro-aggressive'. And it places the 'oppressor' groups in the woodshed for the slightest sign of 'renegade' thought. People like Richwine must shut up.Diversity of people + victim mentality + culture of sensitivity = lack of diversity of ideas and lack of true discourse.NYT certainly would gain more with a diversity of ideas that go against PC and taboos.Jonathan Haidt is right on this account.Also, diversity of quality is different from mere random diversity.If diversity per se works, then mixing geniuses with retards -- mental diversity -- will make the geniuses smarter.
Like “it’s safe for me to walk to the bus station” or “the guys down the street aren’t planning a terrorist attack” or “Muslims aren’t allowing strangers to rape my little sister for money with tacit police approval”.
The NYT Editorial Board doesn’t look too diverse – 18 members, one black, one Asian. Tokenism.
It seems plausible that when people all share something in common, they are more easily swayed by groupthink. When they are in diverse company, they may simply speak in the common currency of ideas.
That being said, I wouldn't totally dismiss the idea that the results were fabricated to get the right result. This isn't publicly available data that anyone can check. The best you can do is replicate it with a different group of people.
Explains why the Royal Society was able to accomplish so little in the seventeenth century. Not enough diverse people were challenging the traditional groupthinking mindset typified by men like Boyle and Newton.
Un-freakin-believable.
UT-Dallas’ undergraduate MIS program was at the top of my list for programs that I wanted my HS Junior son to consider. I was under the mis-guided impression that this school was more focused on professional programs and science/engineering. Now I see that they employ diversity demagogue “Sheen Levine”
I suffered through a required diversity seminar while employed by one of the US auto companies in the 1990’s. The basic theme was “Diversity makes companies better!!”
My boss’s boss’s boss was also present in this seminar. He was not an American citizen, and he apparently felt that he could ask some questions of the presenter.
“So, what you’re saying is that a more diverse design team would make a better car? A more popular car with bigger sales? So, if we looked at the carmakers and examined pictures of their design teams, we would be able to find the maker of the most popular, biggest-selling, most profitable family sedan? Because it would be the most diverse team?”
The presenter basically agreed.
Then the guy said “Well, if you look at the biggest selling sedan in America, you’re looking at the Toyota Camry. The design team for the Camry is the most non-diverse team you can imagine: ethnic Japanese males between the ages of 30 and 60. So how do you explain that?”
The presenter moved on to other topics.
That’s exactly what I was thinking! Diversity means low trust. That’s all
I'm actually a bit surprised by that. It has never occurred to me that there are not stupid fellow white people, so I have a very hard time imagining ever trusting a randomly assigned stranger's answer on something that could cost me money, without testing it against whatever other information I might have. If any.
Then again I never lived in a Mayberry-like environment or other tv show from the '50s. The idea of taking investment tips from Joe down the street, without regard to facts or even whether he has any professional qualifications or demonstrable personal wealth, strikes me as insane. And yet plot after plot in shows from the Honeymooners to the Flintstones [the animated honeymooners] and beyond seemed to feature some schlub losing all his money because he got a hot stock tip from some other schlub who neither showed any evidence of financial acumen nor provided any source or analysis for the tip. At least the modern financial advice wizards dress the part, put certificates on the walls, and baffle us with diagrams. I respect them for putting in the effort.
As for non-financial matters more strictly experienced on a campus, this thesis cannot be true. Or it would have been demonstrated somewhere in real life by now.
I think it’s nuts that it was plausible to the majority of those shows’ viewers that a schlub—in almost every case a married schlub supporting his family with a crummy job and a wife who did not work—had sufficient spare funds to speculate on the stock market and endure only humiliation as the consequence of his failure. Different times, huh?
Isn’t the gist of this essentially that when you add a white person to a group of NAMs, the results improve?
As anyone who ever suffered through “group work” in school knows, the smartest kids end up doing all the work while the dullards goof off and then take the credit. Since everyone in America who ever went to school is perfectly familiar with this dynamic, I’m pretty sure it happened just like that in these “studies.”
I suppose there is a similar dynamic between Chinese, Indian and Malay. But bottom line, all that’s needed is inserting one smart person into a group of dolts, and you’ll get 58% better results, because the smart person carries everyone else.
Diversity: one smart guy in a bunch of idiots.
The article says:
"To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans."
In the appendix of the study:
"In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity."
Scroll down to "2.1.1 Research Sites"
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
Rigging to win, well tried men. Well tried.
Don’t laugh too hard. Such affirmative action stupidity made Obama president.
“accurate prices for simulated stocks” – um…
“In homogeneous groups, whether in the United States or in Asia, the opposite happened. When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction. Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In the diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales, participants were more likely to distinguish between wrong and accurate answers. Diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.” – Their reasoning here is that because people did not trust each other, things were better.
“They have made billions off their discovery, haven’t they?” – simulated billions.
The article says:
"To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans."
In the appendix of the study:
"In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity."
Scroll down to "2.1.1 Research Sites"
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
Well there it is.
Affirmative Action may have been well-intended in the beginning…
My favorite analogy is flying an airplane. When you overcontrol, when your inputs into the system are out of proportion to the response, you don’t get the results you want.
Placing students in classes or colleges that don’t match their ability or progress will cause them to spin out into chaos and failure. Just as when you move the stick or wheel too far over in an aircraft, you will cause it to overreact to your input.
Inputs need to be moderated in proportion to the response. For people or airplanes!
Unfortunately, the fat part of the curve (which includes most policy-makers and political agitators) thinks only linearly and in a one-to-one proportion. They all think that more of a good thing will give you more of what you want. E.G., turn the wheel farther over, push those ailerons even more, and you will get the plane to just turn even better. Unfortunately, almost everything in nature and the real world doesn’t respond that way.
Who was it who advised, “moderation”? That’s the idea, plus understanding the system and how it responds. People respond in proportion to their distribution of ability and tendancies. (That is a hate fact that cannot be used, however.)
I make this point both to help with the software and to fend off those Aspergery spellers who like to use my vowel choices as evidence of stupidity.
Anybody ever get stuck in a group with diversity at work or school where they break the larger group into smaller ones that are supposed to discuss or work on something? Horrible, excruciating experience. I felt like I was in grammar school having to converse with representatives of diversity. The cognitive gap is really there. One thing one learns from diversity is that a little bit is already more than enough.
… and the lies get faster ,bigger ,more brazen,dumber welcome to the clown soviet union.
I’ve done my own experiment on the effects diversity has on creativity. I call it Detroit, I offer a rebuttal.
Singapore was (is?) a police state precisely because of racial strife. To the political left and their corporate cronies bringing about multiculturalism in order to engineer a police state is a feature, not a bug. A major feature. No more having to consider those pesky, recalcitrant white lower classes as real citizens with some actual moral claim to part of the the plantation.
Always remember that when a liberal says diversity what he means is die, whitey, die. A neighborhood that is 95% Mexican is a diverse neighborhood that troubles his dreams not. What makes a cuck a cuck is that he pretends the first sentence isn’t true.
And if diversity is so good for their children then why do the libs move to suburban suburbs that have a minimum of black and Hispanic students? Asian students being OK, and perhaps being smarter than their own children, and hogging the college scholarships.
“Asian students being OK, and perhaps being smarter than their own children, and hogging the college scholarships.”
I don’t see how importing a foreign elite for our country makes any sense. There are a limited number of slots to top colleges and generally a limited number of really plum career opportunities. Or, am I wrong about career opportunities?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/10/trump-delays-israel-trip-as-netanyahu-criticizes-his-muslim-entry-ban-proposal/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumptrip_pp_9am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
It’s good to have such a staunch ally. Wherever I stand, I stand for Israel!
My favorite analogy is flying an airplane. When you overcontrol, when your inputs into the system are out of proportion to the response, you don't get the results you want.
Placing students in classes or colleges that don't match their ability or progress will cause them to spin out into chaos and failure. Just as when you move the stick or wheel too far over in an aircraft, you will cause it to overreact to your input.
Inputs need to be moderated in proportion to the response. For people or airplanes!
Unfortunately, the fat part of the curve (which includes most policy-makers and political agitators) thinks only linearly and in a one-to-one proportion. They all think that more of a good thing will give you more of what you want. E.G., turn the wheel farther over, push those ailerons even more, and you will get the plane to just turn even better. Unfortunately, almost everything in nature and the real world doesn't respond that way.
Who was it who advised, "moderation"? That's the idea, plus understanding the system and how it responds. People respond in proportion to their distribution of ability and tendancies. (That is a hate fact that cannot be used, however.)
Tendencies… Now is a good time to inform Steve or Ron that the edit function no longer appears from where I sit. Once I hit enter, my bad spelling is committed to the permanent record.
I make this point both to help with the software and to fend off those Aspergery spellers who like to use my vowel choices as evidence of stupidity.
The article says:
"To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans."
In the appendix of the study:
"In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity."
Scroll down to "2.1.1 Research Sites"
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
Wow, just wow.
Wrong ideas as in following people like Donald Trump or questioning the promoted narrative. Hence, we must flood Western nations with third worlders to ensure this does not happen
The Cold War created all of this. Against the Soviet push for international communism White Western Elites had … Diversity. And PC to enforce it. The US and the West were the hip, cool, multi-racial, diverse people who had fun against the stodgy, vodka pounding elderly Soviet rulers and fat babushkas.
And this Diversity stuff became the Western religion. It will not go away, save a hot, not a cold, civil war in the West. Which fills me with dread, since I’m not too keen on living in Sarajevo, circa 1992. But there it is, Diversity is the concrete foundation of the West; a massive lie that underlies everything and makes ALL of Western society incapable of recognizing the truth.
Diversity is why Western music since 1988, TV, movies, books etc are mostly junk, garbage, not even minimally entertaining and instead a moral PC/Diversity lecture on who are the cool kids and who are the boring Nazis. Science too, the lack of advance points to Diversity being the Inquisition driver pushing out intellectual inquiry as scientists must make sure they wear the correct shirt and not worry about discovery.
Okay, I concede ‘diversity’ will make us brighter.
But NYT should concede that ‘racism’ makes us funnier.
ROTFL.
Except that explicating actual differences contradicts the other main tenet in racial theology -- equality/ disparate impact.
According to the prevailing civil rights scam, 'diversity' means we are inherently and substantively different based on our demographics, and 'equality' means we are NOT inherently and substantively different based on our demographics.
This condition of "diversequality" means we are to infer substantive differences without actually finding resulting differences in achievement. Our demographics are supposedly distinctions without an ultimate difference.
By the way, could the referenced study possibly be one of those social science experiments that are inexplicably non-reproducible?
One commenter wrote that the nondiverse group was Latino. I think anyone can easily reproduce that a group of three Latinos will solve problems worse than a group of one black, one white and one Latino b
How about that Supreme Court decision (Griggs v. Duke Power) that got rid of most intelligence tests? That wasn't Powell's doing.
I don’t disagree. Powell was just the messenger, channeling the popular (elite) beliefs of his day, just as the S. Ct. didn’t come up with “separate but equal” out of thin air in the Jim Crow era. But the particular word and reasoning that he latched on was “diversity” (taken no doubt from the briefs in favor of AA submitted by UC and other “friends of the court” – most likely they proposed several other rationales as well, hoping that at least one of them was good enough) and that’s what turned it into the totem that it is today. If he had said that AA was permissible because of Reason X then we would be hearing passionate defenses of Reason X today and reading about scientific studies which validate Reason X as the gospel truth. But I did not mean to imply that Powell bears sole responsibility for this mess – he had lots of help.
I wonder whether all this tumult at our nation’s elite educational institutions will start to scare some of the best white applicants away from those places to universities that are more tolerant of intellectual diversity. Along the same lines, I wonder if this will fuel efforts to credentialize more online education. This could be a blessing in disguise.
This New York Times article is hilarious. It reads like sponsored content.
“The findings were striking. When participants were in diverse company, their answers were 58 percent more accurate. The prices they chose were much closer to the true values of the stocks. As they spent time interacting in diverse groups, their performance improved.”
This result should be repeated in our local diverse middle school. Put all the white kids in a room, but instead of having them pick stock prices, have them do simple math word problems read to them by the teacher for the first hour. Then add kids of color. See if the white kid’s scores go up or down in the second hour.
It's like in PAPER CHASE. Best from all over America must compete as individuals. They cannot rely on knee-jerk cultural assumptions.Also, someone who is exposed to both leftist and rightist ideas and different worldviews will sharpen his polemical and intellectual skills. But when affirmative action is used, it pulls together not the brightest but some of the less deserving who, in turn, are coddled and protected from real challenges lest their feelings be hurt.Also, the culture of PC and sensitivity do the opposite of boosting healthy individualism and freedom of thought that meritocratic and libertine diversity can do.
Instead of breaking people out of provincial shells, PC and culture of sensitivity silence voices out of fear and place people in new shells known as 'safe places' that are totally allergic to challenging ideas that might 'trigger' or be 'micro-aggressive'. And it places the 'oppressor' groups in the woodshed for the slightest sign of 'renegade' thought. People like Richwine must shut up.Diversity of people + victim mentality + culture of sensitivity = lack of diversity of ideas and lack of true discourse.NYT certainly would gain more with a diversity of ideas that go against PC and taboos.Jonathan Haidt is right on this account.Also, diversity of quality is different from mere random diversity.If diversity per se works, then mixing geniuses with retards -- mental diversity -- will make the geniuses smarter.
It’s hard to think of a more tight-knit homogeneous culture in existence today than the culture that is prevalent on college campuses, especially with regard to the faculty. Some very high % of college faculty accept the dictates of PC culture (and all that goes with it – a belief in global warming, the “right” to abortion, etc.) as unassailable gospel truth. I’d believe the demands for “diversity” if colleges were actually interested in practicing it, but in reality they have not the slightest interest in actual diversity – as I said before they cling to it only because Justice Powell decreed that it provides a legal pretext for otherwise unconstitutional discrimination against whites.
Why? Cuz Jews have a powerful sense of individuality and personality along with high IQ and culture of argument. So, there have been Jews such as Marx and Chomsky but also Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. In Brazil, Eric Hobsbawm was a superstar historian and intellectual. Why would Brazilians look to some British Jew? Cuz Jews got individuality and intellect. You don't need ethnic or racial diversity to have a multiplicity and plurality of views. The Founding Fathers were all white males of Northern European stock, but Jefferson and Hamilton had very different idears.
19th century Germany was mostly all German(and some Jews), but it produced tons of seminal thinkers and cultural figures.
Japan being all Japanese didn't prevent it from producing some of the greatest film-makers from 40s to 60s.
The French New Wave was all-French but truly revolutionary. Now in US colleges, they emphasize diversity of color but uniformity of tenor. The so-called 'multi-culturalism' has been about every non-white group uniformly yammering, 'we are victims of white racism'. This is esp funny when white Hispanics pull the same stunt. Just how did Conquistador-Americans become 'people of color'? Now, diversity CAN lead to more interesting views and ideas. But this is only the case if the diverse group in question have intelligence, intellectual culture, curiosity, independent-mindedness, and etc. If not, all they'll do is just listen to their professors and parrot what they've been told. As they cannot think for themselves, they offer nothing new or fresh. They just listen to professors and yammer the same crap. Look at all these college eruptions. There is nothing original or insightful about all these PC gripes. Sometimes, professors do get burned but it's NOT because the students are rebelling against what the professors teach but took them to heart a bit too much.
Professors teach 'white privilege is bad', but students sometimes can't tell the difference between white guy and Jewish guy. So, Jewish guys get burned too, especially when, on the TV, there is Zionist Netanyahu(who looks white) humiliating the first Negro prez. If colleges were to promote the culture of freedom, controversy, and debate, then diversity could lead to lots of fresh exchange of ideas. But as colleges promote the culture of grievance, victimization, hysteria, rage, envy, artificial self-esteem, and narcissism, diversity only leads to more need for sensitivity lest any 'victim group' be offended. Diversity leads to clashes, confrontation, and controversy. This can be harnessed for fresh new ideas and exchanges of perspectives. But it is stressful cuz people are bound to be offended from so many contrasting views and interests. So, institutions have a choice: more stress and more interesting ideas.
or more 'harmony'(imposed by coercion) and more conformity.
It looks like institutions have opted for the latter. So, diversity now has a repressive effect on society. Eventually, institutional power wins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VczaeqFHjzU
OT:
But don’t dress up as a ghost, you might be mistaken for a KKKlansman!
http://www.abcnews4.com/story/30715880/photos-shows-citadel-cadets-dressed-in-klan-attire-singing-christmas-carols#.VmmkFY9VtsM.twitter
Its remarkable that the white people in the Obama Chicago Brain Trust appear to all have black or brown hair.
No blondes and no redheads are visible. That seems quite remarkable for the American Midwest.
I’m sure that signifies something.
The article says:
"To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans."
In the appendix of the study:
"In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity."
Scroll down to "2.1.1 Research Sites"
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
I think Netanyahu missed a wonderful opportunity to stay silent.
Suppose the diverse groups actually performed better because they were less susceptible to groupthink. Ok, put them together in an office environment with regular meetings for a year and tell me how much of that “creative friction” has survived.
Fun thing: I was talking to a guy at work recently; smart Indian guy. He recently moved to get more diversity in his kids schooling. I was somewhat horrified an otherwise hard nosed director of sales engineering would torment his children with some shitlib’s idea of diversity paradise (their kids getting the crap beat out of him) until I realized he was in an Indian neighborhood, and wanted his kids around more whites and chinese kids.
But this obviously isn't the case. The removal of current affirmative action policies would not remove anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it remove the cultural outlook of school administrators or society at large. It would merely redefine the qualifications for enrollment.
It would no doubt reduce at some schools the number of some minorities while increasing the number of other minorities.
The NYT is saying it's an all-or-nothing offer when there are other options on the table. In other words, the NYT is running a confidence game.
Note that in Texas (the state involved in the current Fisher case) they already have a “top 10%” program – the top 10% of every high school gets into U of T automatically. So this (because of housing segregation) ensures a large % of blacks and Hispanics already (and a “top 10%” student in an all black high school might be a 50% percentile student in a mostly white school). Fisher is contesting a supplemental AA program that took extra blacks above and beyond those who got in under the top 10% program.
But, if you look at truly elite schools, on a color blind basis their black enrollment would fall to something like 1 or 2%. In the entire US each year, there are only a few hundred blacks who achieve SAT scores high enough to get into a top tier university on a color blind basis.
One of the side effects of getting rid of AA is that in the future this handful of blacks will be recruited the way star athletes are today. I see this as a positive. Once word gets out among black high schoolers that top students get perks like free concubines provided by the admissions office (as sports stars get today) , this might increase their interest in studying. People think that the problem with blacks is intelligence and this is indeed a large part of the problem, but the other 1/2 is lack of motivation. There is no evidence that Caribbean immigrant blacks have any genetic difference from American blacks but they seem to do better at school because they tend to come from less dysfunctional families and are more motivated to study.
http://m.pnas.org/content/111/52/18524.abstract
will take you to the abstract but there you'll see links to the full article and, even more interesting, an unpublished technical appendix that gives precise details on how they carried out the experiment.
Are there any other gems?
Are Latinos "homogeneous" to begin with? Wouldn't the stock picking ability differ between say Cuban-Americans with Harvard MBAs and Mexican sheetrockers?
“We pitted two three-person basketball teams—one homogeneous and one diverse—against each other and found to our astonishment that the non-diverse group (a trio of five-foot-tall drywallers from a country with no meaningful basketball tradition) was consistently outperformed by our diverse group (a white guy, an Arab, and retired NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal).”
OT – what happens when you bring people from low-trust, high-corruption societies into a high-trust, low corruption society. The interesting thing is that the scammers were only discovered when “a separate terrorist investigation found payments in a bank account used by someone who later travelled to Syria.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35064360
“Four men have been convicted over a phone scam carried out across the south of England that defrauded 18 pensioners out of a total of £600,000. Mohamed Dahir, 23, Sakaria Aden, 22, and Yasser Abukar, 24, were found guilty of conspiring to commit fraud. Mohammed Sharif Abokar, 28, was convicted at the Old Bailey of converting criminal property.
The trial heard how the victims – aged in their 70s, 80s and 90s and from Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Bedfordshire, London and Kent – were phoned by men posing as police officers supposedly investigating a fraud at the person’s bank. They were advised to transfer money or hand it over for “safekeeping”. The scam had been carried out between May 2014 and May 2015.
Three other men had already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud before the trial started. Two others had admitted converting the proceeds of crime ahead of the trial.
Dahir’s defence barrister Patrick Harte told the court his client had a letter from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn “setting out his roots in the area” of Islington. The letter had been sent as part of Dahir’s earlier bail application, Mr Harte told the press.”
So a Muslim fraudster, arrested on charges of defrauding elderly Britons, is vouched for by the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition (he actually did get bail, and turned up for the trial, or someone did). Be interesting to see if this gets used against him, and by whom.
Stereotype Threat obviously made this study useless for American populations; the white groups spent all their time worrying about the hideous whiteness of their groups and what that could do to their futures if word got out and people got the wrong idea.
Since diversity is such an advantage for a country, I think it is only fair that the Third World, the Muslim world, and Asia go ahead and take the lead on becoming diverse first, since they are already behind us Westerners. It wouldn’t be fair for us, who are already leading them in so many ways, to stretch our lead out even further by availing ourselves of these wonderful diversity benefits. It just wouldn’t be fair. It would lead to further inequality!
So let’s make the West as completely non-diverse as we can, for the sake of international equality, and after the rest of the world has been thoroughly blessed by diversity for several hundred years, then we can talk about maybe allowing ourselves the benefits of diversity as well.
I would bet billions none of this ever happened.
I would argue that multiplicity and plurality is more crucial than diversity in the academic setting.
Granted, diversity can lead to greater multiplicity and plurality of views & perspectives, but this isn’t necessarily so.
For example, US colleges now have many yellows, but yellows don’t offer much in the way of multiplicity or plurality of views. They just parrot whatever they’ve been taught by their professors. Yellows bitch about ‘model minority’ stuff, but their adherence to PC is so model-minority-like. They are such teachers’ pets who parrot everything according to program.
So much of multiplicity and plurality of views in American intellectual thought came from just one community: Jews.
Why? Cuz Jews have a powerful sense of individuality and personality along with high IQ and culture of argument. So, there have been Jews such as Marx and Chomsky but also Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.
In Brazil, Eric Hobsbawm was a superstar historian and intellectual. Why would Brazilians look to some British Jew? Cuz Jews got individuality and intellect.
You don’t need ethnic or racial diversity to have a multiplicity and plurality of views. The Founding Fathers were all white males of Northern European stock, but Jefferson and Hamilton had very different idears.
19th century Germany was mostly all German(and some Jews), but it produced tons of seminal thinkers and cultural figures.
Japan being all Japanese didn’t prevent it from producing some of the greatest film-makers from 40s to 60s.
The French New Wave was all-French but truly revolutionary.
Now in US colleges, they emphasize diversity of color but uniformity of tenor. The so-called ‘multi-culturalism’ has been about every non-white group uniformly yammering, ‘we are victims of white racism’. This is esp funny when white Hispanics pull the same stunt. Just how did Conquistador-Americans become ‘people of color’?
Now, diversity CAN lead to more interesting views and ideas. But this is only the case if the diverse group in question have intelligence, intellectual culture, curiosity, independent-mindedness, and etc. If not, all they’ll do is just listen to their professors and parrot what they’ve been told. As they cannot think for themselves, they offer nothing new or fresh. They just listen to professors and yammer the same crap.
Look at all these college eruptions. There is nothing original or insightful about all these PC gripes. Sometimes, professors do get burned but it’s NOT because the students are rebelling against what the professors teach but took them to heart a bit too much.
Professors teach ‘white privilege is bad’, but students sometimes can’t tell the difference between white guy and Jewish guy. So, Jewish guys get burned too, especially when, on the TV, there is Zionist Netanyahu(who looks white) humiliating the first Negro prez.
If colleges were to promote the culture of freedom, controversy, and debate, then diversity could lead to lots of fresh exchange of ideas. But as colleges promote the culture of grievance, victimization, hysteria, rage, envy, artificial self-esteem, and narcissism, diversity only leads to more need for sensitivity lest any ‘victim group’ be offended.
Diversity leads to clashes, confrontation, and controversy. This can be harnessed for fresh new ideas and exchanges of perspectives. But it is stressful cuz people are bound to be offended from so many contrasting views and interests.
So, institutions have a choice: more stress and more interesting ideas.
or more ‘harmony'(imposed by coercion) and more conformity.
It looks like institutions have opted for the latter. So, diversity now has a repressive effect on society.
Eventually, institutional power wins:
“Multi-ethnic empires and countries have all crashed and burned”
All countries and Empires end. It’s what they do.
Wasn't Hermann Goering supposed to have said, "Whenever someone mentions 'culture' I reach for my gun"? I feel the same way whenever the mainstream (liberal) media starts bringing up "experts," as in "experts say" or "according to most experts." Whenever NBC Nightly News does this, my first thought is, "Here comes the lie."
Wasn’t Hermann Goering supposed to have said, “Whenever someone mentions ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”?
Yes, but he didn’t. He was an evil sod but he wasn’t a bloody fool.
Summary: Diversity ruins communities, ‘complicates public policy decisions’, ‘Ethnic diversity facilitates friction. This friction can increase conflict in some group settings, whether a work team, a community, or a region.’, but would someone think of the
childreneconomy(!), ‘However, in modern markets, vigilant skepticism is beneficial; overreliance on others’ decisions is risky.’Reading the actual paper makes it clear that the NYT summary is a very dishonest spin job.
An honest statement of the study’s results would be “students in a diverse setting trust each other less and try to take advantage of each other more”. Saying that “participants competed in groups to find accurate answers to problems” is very misleading because it suggests some sort of cooperative group project where everyone benefited from cooperation. It was the exact opposite.
Students were put in a stock-trading simulation where they could either go along with the prices they saw other students posting, or you could try to take advantage of the other students by identifying their pricing mistakes and trading so as to make money at the expense of the other students. The experiment was zero sum … one student’s gain was another student’s loss.
The stakes were very low, a few dollars. So, in the diverse groups, students were more likely to try to grab a few dollars from their fellow students whom they had just met and been encouraged to interact with.
The paper’s discussion makes clear that the results are driven by the reduced trust in the diverse groups. The paper even cites Putnam’s study, E Pluribus Unum. Like Putnam, the authors had to work hard to put a positive spin on their finding that diversity encourages ruthless backstabbing.
We have two names:
Sheen Levine and David Stark
And a publication.
Do we have an editor?
To whom should we present our case?
RE: “Diversity,”
THE ATLANTIC reminds us that demography is destiny:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/how-hamilton-recasts-thomas-jefferson-as-a-villain/401669/
Here’s the real problem with academia’s claims about “Diversity”: it isn’t. Academia [i]obviously[/i] and [i]blatantly[/i] avoids intellectual diversity while pursuing superficial diversity (racial and ethnic non-whiteness). Academia’s idea of diversity is superficially diverse and academically homogeneous (i.e., leftist).
What they claim do pursue, they studiously avoid.
In fairness, it doesn’t deserve much of a rebuttal. I suppose it deserves peer review, and many an attempt at replication. Then, if years of review show the results are robust, it deserves to spend many more years being applied to a wide variety of other tasks. It certainly doesn’t deserve to be used to buttress massive social engineering, based solely on semantic relevance.
Bigoted, hegemonic enforcement of Diversity is bad. Right or wrong, diversity risks eventual guilt by association. In other words, Freedom is inherently good, and consistently winding up on the wrong side of Freedom is bad.
I haven’t read it, but that’s what I assumed it would do, simply because that’s what I would do if I were trying to “prove” the point the authors are trying to prove.
Which means, if the study is correct, we got a shitty article about it.
Then it’s worthless lies. Confirming what a hostile elite has been foisting on the recalcitrant masses (but avoiding for themselves) requires proof.
But I’m open to testing Levine’s theories extensively in, say, Israel.
If diversity increases mistrust and disagreement, how did the test subjects finally come to a consensus –if they really did? Were some participants more accurate in their estimates or more persuasive in pitching their expertise to the rest of the group? And just how accurate did the estimates turn out to be?
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dart-throwing-chimp-still-making-monkey-of-internet-funds
http://partners4prosperity.com/three-monkeys-and-a-cat-picking-stocks
In theory I can understand how a group with a diverse array of experiences can lead to better decision-making, but this is not necessarily contingent on ethnic diversity.
And when the culture promotes a narrative in which persons from “less privileged” groups are allowed to bully and intimidate persons from “privileged” groups, ethnic diversity would probably have a negative effect on decision making.
We were splitting atoms and making moon-landings when America and it’s college-campuses were something like 90% white, which is to say, not diverse.
“Diversity + Proximity = Conflict,” said a Tutsi just before he died with a machete embedded in his skull.
The article says:
"To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans."
In the appendix of the study:
"In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity."
Scroll down to "2.1.1 Research Sites"
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
Very good catch.
So an honest description of their results would be
“In the US, all-Latino groups tended to mis-price more often as participants went along with the group rather than relied on their own analysis. Adding at least one non-Latino (usually a white student) greatly improved pricing.”
Diversity does not seem to have been very good for some white girls in the UK:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/10/rotherham-grooming-ring-targeted-teenagers-over-three-decades-court-told
Also, the behavior that is described is not grooming. The Guardian is being completely disingenuous there. It was simply rape and violence on a daily basis it seems.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rotherham-child-abuse-the-victims-stories-doused-with-petrol-and-told-she-would-be-set-alight-9692577.htmlIt is Muslims doing this and little to nothing is done.
And Obama wants to let more of them into the US!
A Negro standing next to.me will make me smarter.What if the Negro is NEAR me but hidden,so I don’t know he is there? Will I become smarter,or must I know that he is there for the neurons to align and my chakras to resonate?
Burry is a probably a reader of this site
I have cited the case of the civil rights rabble rouser Julius Hobson, who filed lawsuits challenging the school system in Washington, D.C. back in the 1960’s. He succeeded in getting the federal courts to scuttle the “Track System” in D.C. on the grounds it discriminated against blacks. He also succeeded in getting the courts to order the hiring of more black teachers, justified in part because the student body was by then overwhelmingly black. (Fortunately, by then, I had already graduated from high school.) As a result, more black teachers were hired, but subsequent newspaper investigations revealed that these black teachers for the most part chose to keep their own children out of D.C.’s public schools and send them to private schools, like parochial Catholic schools, instead. The net result over the years was that D.C. had one of the highest per capita expenditures on K-to-12 education in the country but the worst test results. I guess those black school teachers knew what they were doing when it came to their own children. Damn if they were going to entrust their own kids’ education to the care of their fellow black teachers with whom they worked.
P.S.–When I was going through the D.C. public school system, quite a few of my fellow students from K-to-12 were sons or daughters or otherwise related to one or another of the school teachers or school administrators. Of course, that was when the system was still overwhelmingly white. (I had only one black teacher in my 13 years in the school system, a very nice, well-mannered man who taught metal shop (a required course then, along with print shop and wood shop) in the 8th grade. As a result, I got a nice self-made tie rack, matching the earlier ones of my two older brothers, and a nice self-made tea pot. I was very proud of both, and tears came to my eyes when I threw them in the trash a few years later. Nothing to show from print shop, but I acquired a handy skill which I am sure would have landed me a good job with Ben Franklin if he ever came back to life.)
P.P.S.–In a similar vein, something I picked up from my ex-wife, often the best way to pick out a good doctor at a particular hospital where you are away from your own doctor is to ask a nurse who works at that hospital.
Speaking of the NYT, I never really appreciated Nicholas Kristof until today, when he was “off”, and his space filled by the execrable Gail Collins. Bring back Nick!
Couldn't they use that space for advertising?
Mistakes spread as participants seemingly put undue trust in others’ answers
Right from the horse’s mouth – homogeneous groups trust each other. Multiple by 10.784 bazillion across the whole economy and then measure the gains which result from business being conducted in a high trust society compared to doing business with people you distrust and how are likely to cheat you.
I think the article mentions a 58 percent improvement. Although once a trader by trade I wasn’t exactly clear on how the contrived trading game was set up or played. But a hedge fund that can consistently beat an index by even a few percent is considered a superstar. So the large improvement itself speaks against the results. That is to say. The bigger deviation from a non result (that diversity does nothing) speaks to the effect being just a random one similar to flipping 10 heads in a row in a run of a thousand flips.
I thought it was ironic that somehow the benefits accrue to everybody. But according to the book “Mismatch”, and Scalia’s recent remarks that blacks do worse in STEM courses at selective schools, NAM’s are actually hurt by being with better performing whites and asians. So The study sort of says diversity helps whites, blacks be damned.
Maybe not.
To test this, we constructed experimental markets in Southeast Asia and North America, where participants traded stocks to earn money.
Does the model actually model reality? The researchers can check their hypothesis by looking at ACTUAL results from the world of Wall Street trading with respect to mortgage securities. Did diverse teams of traders price the assets more realistically than less diverse teams?
The article says:
"To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans."
In the appendix of the study:
"In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity."
Scroll down to "2.1.1 Research Sites"
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
Thanks for running that to ground. Compare a homogeneous group of Affirmative Action students to a heterogeneous group of whites and Asians and the whites and Asians perform to a higher standard. Who would have ever guessed that outcome?
Couldn’t they use that space for advertising?
With the idea of “Mismatch” much in the news, I’m curious what people think a good match is. I’m thinking if your ACT or SAT is at about the 75th percentile for the school it would be an ideal match. What do you guys think? (On my mind because my son is starting to look at colleges.)
When surrounded by others of the same ethnicity or race, participants were more likely to copy others, in the wrong direction.
I’m glad to see they being completely objective in their research…
People, rejoice in the mainstream. This just in: Donald Trump is not a fascist! The most overused word in the political taxonomy is being misapplied. They still think the Constitution gives us foreigners rights.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism
The article says:
"To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans."
In the appendix of the study:
"In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity."
Scroll down to "2.1.1 Research Sites"
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
This should be gilded. Unbelievable.
Their blindness to their own assumptions is breathtaking and shows how far gone we are. They are like the fish who aren’t even aware that they are swimming in water. It apparently never occurs to them that it would make any difference whether the “homogeneous” control group was white or Latino or whatever – any homogeneous group is as good as the next in their world. No point in getting say two homogenous US groups (say whites and Latinos) to compare with the “diverse” group. Of course the next time someone tries to replicate the study, the “homogeneous” group might be white and the results completely different. This study is laughable from a scientific point of view but it reinforces the prejudices of the NYTimes so it gets touted as “science”.
Are Latinos “homogeneous” to begin with? Wouldn’t the stock picking ability differ between say Cuban-Americans with Harvard MBAs and Mexican sheetrockers?
From the “Totally, seriously not at all a parody” section of the NYT.
I feel bad writing this but it’s funny so my brain is forcing me…
First they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn’t blank
Then they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn’t blank
Then they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn’t blank
and then everyone else lived happily ever after.
Then we came for the moderate conservatives because modern conservatism might lead to conservatism.
Then we came for the conservatives because conservatism can lead to hardline conservatism.
Then we came for the hardline conservatism because hardline conservatism can lead to rightism.
Then we came for the rightists because rightism can lead to far-rightism.
Then we came for the far rightism because far rightism can lead to antisemitism.
Then we came for the antisemites because antisemitism can lead to the Nazis.It's like ADL flips out over even the mildest trace of talk that is critical of Jews since it may gradually lead to the Holocaust. A stranger logic is 'we came for Reagan's indifference cuz it led to all those dead homos'. Alice in Wonderland.
I read somewhere, I’m sure it was the New York Times, that just being around black people and Muslims cures tuberculosis, low back pain, post nasal drip, and syphilis.
Exactly what I said when I first linked to this in the Marginal Counterrevolution assorted links (before Steve did so):
https://marginalcounterrevolution.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/wednesday-assorted-links/
“Social trust leads to groupthink; therefore, it must be destroyed.”
Sometimes, diversity is good.
The latest heresy to emerge from the Vatican is more evidence for the fact that the Roman Catholic Church is a bad choice for Christians. Now the Pope has heretically declared that Catholics must not attempt to convert Jews to Christianity. Centralized hierarchy is a bad idea because all you have to do is convert the upper hierarchy of the church to heresy, and the rest of the church will follow. Jews and Protestants know that decentralized religion is the way to go.
Diversity in gov’t and policy can be good, too. That’s why liberals are so in love with homgeneous, centralized, rigid, top-down, federal solutions to everything.
Consider why DARPA designed the internet to be so decentralized – so our communications network wouldn’t be crippled by a nuclear strike on D.C.
Steve, your readers have done a far better job reading that paper, than the editors and peer reviewers of the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ did. Which sort of corroborates the idea that diversity makes us smarter in aggregate (just not the kind of diversity they like)!
But never mind. From now on, Putnam’s work on diversity and social capital is officially “debunked”. Or if you wish, “the science is settled”.
Twenty years from now, wonder how many offspring those in that pic will have produced and of them, wonder what kind of life they will be leading. One wonders if those who do produce kids will have the nerve to tell them, “I worked to elect Obama.”
No blondes and no redheads are visible. That seems quite remarkable for the American Midwest.
I'm sure that signifies something.
Maybe the picture was taken in winter? Chicago white guys vary a lot in hair color between summer and winter.
But no blonde women. Half my high school in Madison was blonde.
Kind of like the anti-girls Lacrosse team where everyone is blonde and fluffy.
1) everything the NYT says that is in any way connected to race or immigration is a lie
2) it should be obvious by now the Pope isn’t Catholic – the cardinals should do a dna test
Newton automatically provided diversity since there’s never been anyone so clever.
The readers of an Islamic magazine are likely to practice Islam.
The readers of the NYT famously practice little in the way of diversity.
“Ethnic diversity deflates price bubbles”.
So better to sell before the Blacks start moving in.
Students were put in a stock-trading simulation where they could either go along with the prices they saw other students posting, or you could try to take advantage of the other students by identifying their pricing mistakes and trading so as to make money at the expense of the other students. The experiment was zero sum ... one student's gain was another student's loss.
The stakes were very low, a few dollars. So, in the diverse groups, students were more likely to try to grab a few dollars from their fellow students whom they had just met and been encouraged to interact with.
The paper's discussion makes clear that the results are driven by the reduced trust in the diverse groups. The paper even cites Putnam's study, E Pluribus Unum. Like Putnam, the authors had to work hard to put a positive spin on their finding that diversity encourages ruthless backstabbing.
Given the moral hazard involved in letting such journalistic malpractice stand unchallenged, any action taken to challenge it stands as a clear case of unalloyed social good.
We have two names:
Sheen Levine and David Stark
And a publication.
Do we have an editor?
To whom should we present our case?
Amazingly, PNAS claims to be peer-reviewed. http://www.pnas.org/site/authors/pnasplus_faq.xhtml
To wit, when you ask a group of people to collaborate on an intellectual task, it’s effectively just asking whomever is the most intelligent to do the task on their own.
To an intelligent and able student the Group Project is the academic form of waterboarding.
All countries and Empires end. It's what they do.
What is history but the obituary of nations?
Mr. Sailer,
I think I hazily recall you’ve already discussed the introduction of public housing to Yonkers, NY.
It looks like HBO has got a miniseries with a nice manipulative progressive spin.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/little-boxes
All the bien pensants at the Atlantic, Slate and so on will surely be breathlessly covering it.
Perhaps it’s time for you to revisit?
I suspect that if I gathered a diverse group from Singapore made up of Chinese and other Far Eastern people they would simply crush and humiliate a homogeneous group of black African witch doctors. And if I put together a diverse group of various ethnic Europeans they would probably do far better than a homogeneous group of Aztec Indians. But is that science? Only if these are the kind of diverse groups these colleges and universities are trying to form. But since its not, its just lying and obfuscation.
“Step right up folks, and partake of the vibrant elixir of diversity! It’s a surefire cure for all that ails you!”
Covered wagon, medicine show
Take you to the place where the healing flows, oh, oh
Weak in spirit, we got the juice
Won’t save your soul, it’ll shine your shoes
Treated king to kangaroo
Santa Fe to Timbuktu, oh, oh
Don’t be fooled by imitation
This is the stuff that cured a nation
We took the tube and the high plains too
Never stopped long, just passing through
A drop of the laughter of the maids of France
Makes a hopeless cripple dance, oh
It was really vile weather
When we got tarred and feathered
You could hear the six guns sound
As they chased us out of town
In India we’re all the rave
Discovered that it’s great as aftershave
Dropped in the sea just off Japan
Swapped twenty bottles for an Aqua Walkman, oh
Immunity from ridicule
Improves your brains if you’re a fool, oh, oh
And I read in the Middle East
They traded some for a hostage release
Now, if you’re bald it’ll give you hair
If you got straight trousers it’ll give you flares
Feeling up you’ll get depressed
Out of style, here’s a brand new dress, oh
It was really vile weather
When we got tarred and feathered
You could hear the six guns sound
As they chased us out of town
The stuff we sell is just the best
Passing all consumer test, oh, oh
Days of heaven, nights of sin
Voodoo stick and shark’s fin
When all around you seems like Hell
Just one sip will make you well, oh, oh
Multipurpose in a jar
If you ain’t ill, it’ll fix your car
In days of yore for all bad feelings
Washing socks and stripping ceilings
Nowadays, it’s used medicinally
For all known human malady, oh
It was really vile weather
When we got tarred and feathered
You could hear the six guns sound
As they chased us out of town, oh
We have two names:
Sheen Levine and David Stark
And a publication.
Do we have an editor?
To whom should we present our case?
There is no comment section for the NYT article. Go figure.
Amazingly, PNAS claims to be peer-reviewed. http://www.pnas.org/site/authors/pnasplus_faq.xhtml
We have two names:
Sheen Levine and David Stark
And a publication.
Do we have an editor?
To whom should we present our case?
The Times is, unfortunately, not taking comments on this article. But maybe some place that does has picked it up? Would be fun to go there and pile on…
https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/3w5qso/diversity_makes_you_brighter/
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3w3fsi/diversity_makes_you_brighter_when_participants/
Some reasonableness:They did allow comments that time. It got one.
This experiment is not about solving problems cooperatively as a group, but about individual participants trying to maximize their value in a non-cooperative game.
Two big things driving the result: people in homogeneous groups were more willing to offer higher prices, and were more willing to accept offers even aside from overpricing. Diverse groups were in part just less willing to trade. Their lesser willingness to trade protected them from making the errors associated with making and accepting offers.
Also check out p. SI11 of the study materials. Accuracy in the Singapore groups was r^2= .847 diverse and .545 homogeneous. For Texas it was .317 diverse and … R^2=.033 homogeneous. Not a criticism exactly, just hilariously bad accuracy among the Americans.
So an honest description of their results would be
"In the US, all-Latino groups tended to mis-price more often as participants went along with the group rather than relied on their own analysis. Adding at least one non-Latino (usually a white student) greatly improved pricing."
Oh, it’s much better than that. Their homogeneous all-Latino sample was so inept that in the pre-test, their answers had about a zero correlation to the correct answers (where the problem they had to solve was something all undergraduate business majors are expected to handle–an elementary expected-value exercise).
The math problem the students had to solve was not very hard, but it wasn't trivial. They had to calculate an expectation and realize that the payoff declined as the game progressed.
Someone with modest math skills and some motivation can do this, but many college students simply don't get math. It looks like this is particularly true for Latinos. They couldn't do the math or didn't want to bother doing it. That seems to be the real bottom line here.
I'm guessing the authors knew this and they made the math hard enough that many Latinos would note be able to do it. They then structured the "study" so they could label the low-performance Latino-group "homogeneous". An honest study would have studied different flavors of "homogeneity" and noted which types of "diversity" increased performance.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/10/rotherham-grooming-ring-targeted-teenagers-over-three-decades-court-told
Also, the behavior that is described is not grooming. The Guardian is being completely disingenuous there. It was simply rape and violence on a daily basis it seems.
And, some of the allegations are shocking:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rotherham-child-abuse-the-victims-stories-doused-with-petrol-and-told-she-would-be-set-alight-9692577.html
It is Muslims doing this and little to nothing is done.
And Obama wants to let more of them into the US!
“The Times is, unfortunately, not taking comments on this article.”
Fortune favors the bold.
Where else are the authors of this articles employed? I can’t imagine that their employers would be thrilled about this sort of behavior. Or if they are, we’ve just acquired another target.
Absolutely it doesn't. It's not even a thin smokescreen if you look at it head-on. The list of nations in the world who are having self-dissolution demanded from them contains only European peoples and ALL European peoples are on the list. (a handful resisting successfully atm) This is in-your-face open race hatred of European peoples. We are part of the diversity of the world. If we don't wake the hell up pretty damn quick, we will HAVE BEEN part of the diversity of the world.
Not sure it’s entirely race hatred. I think a much bigger factor is the intersecting lines of increasing resource control by whites and decreasing white populations. We are growing fewer yet still control a lot of resources in a world that is getting more competitive by the day. The other peoples smell opportunity. I think most current race hatred derives from and doesn’t precede that fact.
Yup, the effect, if it exists and is applicable beyond a contrived laboratory experiment, requires people to see racial differences as non-superficial, as more than just the difference between, say, blondes and brunettes. In other words, it requires otherisation.
Isn’t the real message here “Diversity makes most non-white groups smarter if their diversity is increased by including whites”?
This "study" is so dishonest from beginning to end that I think it was all set up from the beginning to get these results. I suspect the thinking went like this:
"We want to show that homogeneous groups are stupid and diverse groups are smart, how can we do that?"
"How about if we set it up so the homogeneous group is made of low-IQ people."
"Yeah. Latinos tend to be low IQ so let's make the homogeneous group Latino. But don't say that in the writeup, of course."
"How do we make the diverse group smart? Diversity usually means more blacks. That's not going to work."
"Easy. Make the diverse group have more whites. If we pick somewhere where whites are a minority, then diversity = more whites. But don't say that in the writeup, of course."
"How about we find a Texas school with a lot of Latinos and a minority of whites?"
"Great idea!"
"But won't it look weird that we chose such a weird school?"
"We can say we chose a school where 'studies such as this were rare, so participants were not jaded by repeated participation.'" [The study actually says this.]
"But, this is a market simulation, so aren't we really showing that intelligence makes markets more efficient? We don't want to say that."
"No problem, just call it a group decision making situation, and say that diversity is making us smarter, rather than markets smarter. Of course, its not true, but this is Sparta ... I mean Columbia sociology."
"But won't some people read the paper and point all this out?"
"In the New York Times? Hahahahahahaha .... no, no .... stop, ... hee hee hee ... you're killing me ... (gasp) ... I can barely breathe."
"The New York Times will have to close the comment section."
"Of course, they're not stupid. They will do that without us telling them."
The readers of the NYT famously practice little in the way of diversity.
That’s a good point.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/10/trump-delays-israel-trip-as-netanyahu-criticizes-his-muslim-entry-ban-proposal/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_trumptrip_pp_9am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
It’s called chutzpah.
These are the same people that get published in first-tier sociology journals with models boasting R2 values < 1%. One percent! Dishonesty among the publishers, peer ‘reviewers’ and readers is their stock-in-trade. Deception is their mode. Obfuscation their coin of the realm.
Others have identified a low, dishonest 20th-Century decade (the 1930s, I think). But the 20th Century was a low, dishonest century. The 21st Century has eclipsed the dishonesty of the 20th in less than 20 years, and by a wide margin.
This article is co-authored by a professor there, and there is an article in Columbia's alumni magazine by a Columbia sociology professor that is also pretty wacky.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/a-symbolic-black-autumn-campus-name-change-we-can-all-agree-upon/?highlight=Columbia#comment-1253668
I didn’t see that.
The math problem the students had to solve was not very hard, but it wasn’t trivial. They had to calculate an expectation and realize that the payoff declined as the game progressed.
Someone with modest math skills and some motivation can do this, but many college students simply don’t get math. It looks like this is particularly true for Latinos. They couldn’t do the math or didn’t want to bother doing it. That seems to be the real bottom line here.
I’m guessing the authors knew this and they made the math hard enough that many Latinos would note be able to do it. They then structured the “study” so they could label the low-performance Latino-group “homogeneous”. An honest study would have studied different flavors of “homogeneity” and noted which types of “diversity” increased performance.
The latest heresy to emerge from the Vatican is more evidence for the fact that the Roman Catholic Church is a bad choice for Christians. Now the Pope has heretically declared that Catholics must not attempt to convert Jews to Christianity. Centralized hierarchy is a bad idea because all you have to do is convert the upper hierarchy of the church to heresy, and the rest of the church will follow. Jews and Protestants know that decentralized religion is the way to go.
The rather obvious Catholic retort to this would be that all of the schismatic offshoots of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church are each and every heretical not only in the view of Holy Mother Church but also one to the other. When you break off and reject the authority of the See of Peter, endowed by Christ and ensured by the Holy Spirit, you do not free yourself from the Pope so much as elect yourself a new mini-Pope, and history is full of them.
I at least respect Orthodox Jews for not telling me my life would be better if I converted to Judiasm. Indeed, they kvetch that being an observant Jew is a pain in the ass. So, we just mostly don’t interact that much, which is mutually agreeable.
Nonobservant Jews don’t want to convert me either, but they want to ‘tikkun olam’ my world into a pesthole. This I resent. Am I a monster for resenting this, the importing of aliens (even those who hate Jews and say so), the gun control, the unlimited growth of the social state, the sexualization of everything and anything? If so, too bad.
Others have identified a low, dishonest 20th-Century decade (the 1930s, I think). But the 20th Century was a low, dishonest century. The 21st Century has eclipsed the dishonesty of the 20th in less than 20 years, and by a wide margin.
Up until 1914, the twentieth century looked like a pretty ideal time. A lot can happen yet.
Reddit is starting a thread on the paper. No comments yet, but perhaps it will grow.
Others have identified a low, dishonest 20th-Century decade (the 1930s, I think). But the 20th Century was a low, dishonest century. The 21st Century has eclipsed the dishonesty of the 20th in less than 20 years, and by a wide margin.
Columbia’s sociology department seems to be particularly bad.
This article is co-authored by a professor there, and there is an article in Columbia’s alumni magazine by a Columbia sociology professor that is also pretty wacky.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/a-symbolic-black-autumn-campus-name-change-we-can-all-agree-upon/?highlight=Columbia#comment-1253668
“Maybe the picture was taken in winter? Chicago white guys vary a lot in hair color between summer and winter.”
But no blonde women. Half my high school in Madison was blonde.
Kind of like the anti-girls Lacrosse team where everyone is blonde and fluffy.
That sounds right.
This “study” is so dishonest from beginning to end that I think it was all set up from the beginning to get these results. I suspect the thinking went like this:
“We want to show that homogeneous groups are stupid and diverse groups are smart, how can we do that?”
“How about if we set it up so the homogeneous group is made of low-IQ people.”
“Yeah. Latinos tend to be low IQ so let’s make the homogeneous group Latino. But don’t say that in the writeup, of course.”
“How do we make the diverse group smart? Diversity usually means more blacks. That’s not going to work.”
“Easy. Make the diverse group have more whites. If we pick somewhere where whites are a minority, then diversity = more whites. But don’t say that in the writeup, of course.”
“How about we find a Texas school with a lot of Latinos and a minority of whites?”
“Great idea!”
“But won’t it look weird that we chose such a weird school?”
“We can say we chose a school where ‘studies such as this were rare, so participants were not jaded by repeated participation.’” [The study actually says this.]
“But, this is a market simulation, so aren’t we really showing that intelligence makes markets more efficient? We don’t want to say that.”
“No problem, just call it a group decision making situation, and say that diversity is making us smarter, rather than markets smarter. Of course, its not true, but this is Sparta … I mean Columbia sociology.”
“But won’t some people read the paper and point all this out?”
“In the New York Times? Hahahahahahaha …. no, no …. stop, … hee hee hee … you’re killing me … (gasp) … I can barely breathe.”
“The New York Times will have to close the comment section.”
“Of course, they’re not stupid. They will do that without us telling them.”
WRT to UT’s admissions:
UT is developing a reputation for being ranking whores. They will do whatever it takes to keep jumping spots on the lists put out by US News and others. For those who don’t know, many college rankings are determined solely by volume of research papers published. That’s largely why good schools like Steve’s alma mater, Rice, score disproportionately low – they just don’t have as many profs and postdocs cranking out papers like Our Genius President’s paper on the Quantum Legal Theory or whatever it was as schools like Harvard do.
Their quality of education, meanwhile, is decreasing. I’ve heard (non-Aggie) employers say things like “I get much better results hiring computer science grads from A&M than UT” despite UT’s top 10 CS ranking. They also have two concurrent affirmative action admissions policies, although one is kind of subtle. Texas public universities admit the top 7% of graduating high school seniors by class rank (down from 10% when I graduated HS). It’s based solely on GPA, so a kid that coasts through the easiest classes his high school will let him take has a better shot than an ambitious student who overloads on AP classes and whatnot. On top of this, they have race-based admissions. The results of their admissions policies are… questionable.
I expect that whenever Austin’s current (and bizarre to me) trendiness is a thing of the past, UT’s credibility will slide as well, as there will be fewer top students competing to go to school there.
Another Reddit thread on the paper. This is getting some comments.
Little chance of the other thread taking off given that the links show bad the article's argument is right off. Though perhaps someone will be stupid enough to defend the article anyway.
I don’t think that Putnam’s work is debunked. In a way it is reaffirmed: Diversity indeed leads to social distrust, as Putnam told us. Only, Putnam believes that trust is a social capital, and these authors here believe that distrust is much more profitable.
Both is correct. It’s useful to have friends you can trust, and it’s as useful to distrust everyone else.
Students were put in a stock-trading simulation where they could either go along with the prices they saw other students posting, or you could try to take advantage of the other students by identifying their pricing mistakes and trading so as to make money at the expense of the other students. The experiment was zero sum ... one student's gain was another student's loss.
The stakes were very low, a few dollars. So, in the diverse groups, students were more likely to try to grab a few dollars from their fellow students whom they had just met and been encouraged to interact with.
The paper's discussion makes clear that the results are driven by the reduced trust in the diverse groups. The paper even cites Putnam's study, E Pluribus Unum. Like Putnam, the authors had to work hard to put a positive spin on their finding that diversity encourages ruthless backstabbing.
Thanks for having read through this study!
lack of social cohesion was the cristism against the early modern city. the city was that scary place where everyone was trying to pull a fast one on everyone else and crimes went unsolved – an offence to traditional (rural) moral sensibilities. but mercantile minorities thrived in that environment.
one of the selling points of capitalism was that putting a price tag on informal and unreflected social interactions would do away with certain pathologies of feudalism, thus increasing freedom. the personal was not political (as in cultmarx), but economical, but there would be retreats such as family and community. capitalism was to feudalism what cultmarx is to today.
this then is the final phase of both capitalism and cultmarx – being a merchant and a politician 24/7 is not merely encouraged, but not even optional.
Well since the result for all whites would be the same, (strangulation by footwear), even a Marxist white might see the need for a measure of group solidarity.
I don’t disagree. Just trying to be clear-eyed about the situation. It’s easy to get emotional.
The average Lebanese would probably strike you as more creative and intelligent than the average Japanese. Which society has been more succesful over the past 60 years?
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
I wonder how diverse the crowd at Galton's county fair was?
The article states:
I wonder how that stock simulation worked. And especially, why simulated and not real stock were used. This reeks of manipulation and data massage.
PNAS links to which news sites covered it. The trouble is they covered it last year or months ago.
For example, it was covered by a news site called The New York Times last year.
Emphasis mine.
Some reasonableness:
They did allow comments that time. It got one.
The article says:
"To ascertain that we were measuring the effects of diversity, not culture or history, we examined a variety of ethnic and racial groups. In Texas, we included the expected mix of whites, Latinos and African-Americans."
In the appendix of the study:
"In Texas, we created homogeneous markets by including only participants
that were Latinos. In diverse markets, we included at least one participant of a numerical
minority ethnicity."
Scroll down to "2.1.1 Research Sites"
http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/11/15/1407301111.DCSupplemental/pnas.1407301111.sapp.pdf
The other homogeneous group was Chinese, the corresponding diverse group including at least one Indian, Malay, or member of another smaller ethnic group.
The supplement also says,
From the paper:
Emphasis mine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3w3fsi/diversity_makes_you_brighter_when_participants/
Looks like the moderators found it. It currently says “All 7 Comments” with only 3 displayed and 1 “Comment removed.”
Little chance of the other thread taking off given that the links show bad the article’s argument is right off. Though perhaps someone will be stupid enough to defend the article anyway.
First they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn't blank
Then they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn't blank
Then they came for the blank and I said nothing because I wasn't blank
and then everyone else lived happily ever after.
This is how PC thinks.
First we came for the liberals because liberalism might lead to modern conservatism. (Genuine liberalism is dead in colleges and media.)
Then we came for the moderate conservatives because modern conservatism might lead to conservatism.
Then we came for the conservatives because conservatism can lead to hardline conservatism.
Then we came for the hardline conservatism because hardline conservatism can lead to rightism.
Then we came for the rightists because rightism can lead to far-rightism.
Then we came for the far rightism because far rightism can lead to antisemitism.
Then we came for the antisemites because antisemitism can lead to the Nazis.
It’s like ADL flips out over even the mildest trace of talk that is critical of Jews since it may gradually lead to the Holocaust.
A stranger logic is ‘we came for Reagan’s indifference cuz it led to all those dead homos’.
Alice in Wonderland.
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Desiderius, Thanks for bringing back the painful memory of trying to memorize these verses so that I could gain freedom from after school detention at my Catholic, all boys high school. You squatted like a catcher, hands raised over your head, with your English Lit. text book open on the floor before you. You had one chance to recite correctly, or you endured a whole hour of detention.Our fiftieth reunion this year featured lots of “cut-ups” with knee problems.
That scenario sounds like Blake's personal hell.
That or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C79L3vjKAWQ
What universities need is diversity of viewpoints. Here is a study on the lack of political diversity in the social sciences:
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/
Diversity is like Global Warming; they are both responsible for so much.
Nicely done. That could be the explanation. Did you look at the study to see whether your hypothesis actually does explain the conclusion?
When conservatives say diversity is bad they talk about crime, property values, safety of their families and survival of their culture. When liberals say they love diversity they talk about cuisine, music, television shows and perhaps movies.
This shows you the difference between inborn intelligence and formal education like college.
Some people say crowds are smarter than individuals, but the French Revolution had mobs and a Reign of Terror, while Napoleon built a European Empire mostly by himself by conscription which he thought of himself who followed him and didn’t have much input.
Why is it that people who say they love diversity live in mostly White neighborhoods? Why is it that people who are socialist and represent the downtrodden are such snobbish elitists who look down at the common man?
Is it a difference of opinions or point of view? No actually its lack of empirical data and hypocrisy.
This only matters because the capacity for abstract thought is presently overvalued, which is how such people end up being (mis)considered elite in the first place.
What is actually valuable is capacity for both abstract and concrete thought, and the facility to move appropriately from one to the other, which is the practice of reason: deductive in the former case, inductive in the latter.
Abstraction alone is useless either way.
The supplement also says,From the paper:Emphasis mine.
Oops, I meant the other homogeneous groups were Chinese, the corresponding diverse groups including at least one Indian, Malay, or member of another smaller ethnic group.
Heh.
That scenario sounds like Blake’s personal hell.
That or this:
This shows you the difference between inborn intelligence and formal education like college.
Some people say crowds are smarter than individuals, but the French Revolution had mobs and a Reign of Terror, while Napoleon built a European Empire mostly by himself by conscription which he thought of himself who followed him and didn't have much input.
Why is it that people who say they love diversity live in mostly White neighborhoods? Why is it that people who are socialist and represent the downtrodden are such snobbish elitists who look down at the common man?
Is it a difference of opinions or point of view? No actually its lack of empirical data and hypocrisy.
They’re lost in abstraction.
This only matters because the capacity for abstract thought is presently overvalued, which is how such people end up being (mis)considered elite in the first place.
What is actually valuable is capacity for both abstract and concrete thought, and the facility to move appropriately from one to the other, which is the practice of reason: deductive in the former case, inductive in the latter.
Abstraction alone is useless either way.
Apparently, Snorlax was right. The study’s authors compare all-“Latino” groups with mixed groups, and the mixed groups (presumably because of the inclusion of Whites) did better.
No blondes and no redheads are visible. That seems quite remarkable for the American Midwest.
I'm sure that signifies something.
“Its remarkable that the white people in the Obama Chicago Brain Trust appear to all have black or brown hair.
No blondes and no redheads are visible. That seems quite remarkable for the American Midwest.
I’m sure that signifies something.”
From the internet pictures and television documentaries I have seen of Woodstock 1969, there was an extremely high percentage of blond haired men and blonde haired women there. That seems quite remarkable for New York, a state which has a very large Italian and Jewish population. I was expecting Woodstock to be as brunette as the cast of Seinfeld and The Sopranos.
Most of the blond hippies at Woodstock must have traveled there from flyover country states and were not native New Yorkers.
Woodstock looked more like it took place in Norway or Nebraska rather than New York. I go to New York all of the time to see my relatives and it is definitely not as blond as it is portrayed at Woodstock.
.
Woodstock 1969
Woodstock was in August. Hair color changes a lot over the course of the season, with peak blondishness probably in August or September, due to sun and chlorine in swimming pools. Young people in the hippie era spent a lot of time in the sun, more than today. Back then (say 1970-71) my cousin, the organic farmer who is still a hippie, and I competed during the summers over things like getting most tanned, getting blondest, and being able to walk barefoot on the hottest pavement. He always won.
But, yeah, the hippie thing wasn’t very Italian. It was more Brits and Germans. Italians were culturally discombobulated by the Late Sixties. They’d loved the Sinatra Era, and then made a cultural comeback in 1970s with all the fine Italian-American movie directors and actors, but the late 1960s were not a comfortable time for Italian-Americans.
My hippie cousin is half German, half Italian, but he is more German in looks and takes after his Swiss German mom, the hiker. His (non-hippie) sisters take after their Italian dad.
I am leaning more towards Woodstock attracting masses of Nordic WASP hippies from all over the country for it’s very high percentage blondness and leaning less towards the sun making their hair more blond. I doubt the vast majority of people who attended Woodstock were born in New York.
In 1969, Woodstock was being advertised as far out west as California. Lots of White hippies from California flew in or drove to Woodstock. And also don’t forget extremely liberal states like Maine and Vermont also had a lot of White hippies. A lot of them drove down to New York for Woodstock.
And yeah there were not too many Italians involved in the hippie movement. Especially since most Italians in the 1960s grew up in very macho alpha male blue collar neighborhoods. They thought hippie guys looked like a bunch of Fanooks.
The hippie movement never did attract a lot of Caucasian men from ethnic groups that like to wear gold chains. Hippy culture is very Nordic.
The WSJ reports on the how we can increase diversity in NYC’s cultural institutions: