Diversity or Ability: Which Promotes Intelligent Nonconformity? by Steve Sailer. An academic study finds that:
[On company boards, committees, juries, and other decision-making bodies] a subject’s lack of ability predicts both a true propensity to accept others’ judgment (informational social influence) and a propensity to agree despite private doubt (normative social influence). Thus, as an antidote to conformity in our experiments, high individual ability seems more effective than group diversity.
Sailer concludes that:
affirmative action appointees promoted in the interest of “diversity” tend to be conformists, and thus we get the opposite of what is promised: instead of far-ranging arguments over the merits of proposals, we get less debate and more conformism.
Skin/sex diversity can’t imbue intellectual ferment to a committee process; if anything it draws new non-intellectual factional lines to sap from the dedication of the group, basically enabling various parties’ … virtue signal motives (taking the woman’s or NAM’s side).
The initial justification for affirmative action was just straight up: “reparations for blacks.” Read the initial speeches given by LBJ and Nixon.
Conservatives challenged this in court, saying “Why are a bunch of public universities that never practiced discrimination against blacks paying reparations to blacks?” And as a result, affirmative action in public universities was upheld, but only on diversity grounds.
The long-term effect of this has been for “diversity” to be elevated to the point of religion, and for anyone who is not a white male to be eligible for various preferences, because hey, they add to diversity.
A far superior policy would be just to give blacks a 10% quota and cancel the oppression Olympics. But the courts have ruled quotas unconstitutional, and we’re stuck with the far worse diversity racket.
