[skybrian]

"The only diversity that matters": says who?

You brought up height and weight, but there actually are situations where they matter. For clothes, obviously, but this also comes up when flying, or anywhere that space is a premium.

And yep, it matters even in the Air Force:

"Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one."

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

[sattoshi]

Most of your post is talking about clothing size. I don't know what to say about it.

Why does any diversity except thought matter?

After all, that is the argument I have for racist diversity: "different perspectives".

If I can get those perspectives without being a racist, why bother?

[skybrian]

Where do you think different perspectives come from?

As a hypothetical example, if you're designing a chair someone very large or small may have a different perspective than someone of average size.

So the causality in that case is different body results in different lived experience results in different perspective.

This isn't to say you can't learn these things in other ways (such as doing user studies, or previous experience) but it's not as easy to notice what you weren't paying attention to.

Another example might be targeting the Chinese market without being from China. It's not the only way, but think about the amount of travel and study required to get a similar perspective.

Meanwhile you have lots of people who already have the knowledge you're looking for.