Rules Of The Game #27: Is Diversity Diverse?

[koganbot]

Latest column, where I discuss the "diversity" issue I raised here last week, and I add a new twist.

The Rules Of The Game #27: Is Diversity Diverse?

The new twist is this question: Doesn't cultural diversity, like biodiversity, depend on a certain amount of isolation, so that dominant modes of thought don't come in and wipe out everything else?

Oh, and I quote you all (or some of you, anyway).

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

My response to Richard

[koganbot]

But Page was really talking about people with similar knowledge but different perspectives.

Not sure I get this distinction. Seems to me the different perspective comes from different knowledge. Where else would it come from? But then the different perspective/knowledge has to get applied to a common problem where presumably the problem solvers have at least some similar knowledge of the problem. What makes their perspectives different will be what *other* problems they consider analogous to the problem at hand. And I don't see that scientific and cultural questions are necessarily different in kind from business and policy problems. The main way that Page's experience may not be altogether applicable isn't that the problems are different in kind but that businessman and policy makers can *force* a group of relatively diverse people (e.g., employees) to address a problem.

I think my ending was actually something of a tangent, and raises the question of "under whose radar?" since obviously someone who attended teen custom car shows in the early '60s had custom cars in his or her radar. ("Custom cars" were cars that the owners had changed the look of, and one of Wolfe's observations was that Detroit designers were starting to pay attention to what these kids were doing, since it didn't fit into design school's "form follows function" orthodoxy but rather emphasized social markers and decoration, e.g., tail fins.) And you're right that a lot of stuff isn't really big on the cultural radar, but I don't think this undoes my point that in comparison to years past anything is more likely to be on a distant person's radar.

Re: My response to Richard

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Not sure I get this distinction. Seems to me the different perspective comes from different knowledge. Where else would it come from?

From what you do with the knowledge. The thing about groupthink is, nobody asks questions, nobody considers things from another angle. Think about all the people who know what you know about Autobiography and still trash it -- it's not that you have some special secret knowledge about it, it's that you've looked at it in a different way.

Anyway, if I remember the groupthink / Bay of Pigs study correctly, it wasn't so much that every person in the group had the same perspective -- more like they weren't willing to offer different ones. It was more like "groupact."