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

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."