This, so much. The root of all of these issues is a drastic overestimation of the average persons cognitive ability. To use IQ as a proxy, the mean (100) is shockingly incompetent and to paraphrase a famous comedian, half of us are below that average.
There was a time when merit tended to bubble up into positions of authority but that has been increasingly untrue for decades, for a host of reasons that all point to a rotting western culture.
> There was a time when merit tended to bubble up into positions of authority but that has been increasingly untrue for decades, for a host of reasons that all point to a rotting western culture.
Before diversity and inclusion drives skewed hiring toward genitals and skin color as opposed to merit.
Before we started throwing billions of dollars at our worst performers, and lowering standards across all school districts, in a failed attempt to bring our lowest up, at the measurable cost of bringing our top performers down.
What proportion of the population do you think actually contributes to the progression of society? Scientists, engineers, competent politicians, doctors, policymakers...maybe the top 10% are capable of being and carrying out the orders of visionaries? In the West we've gradually reallocated our resources towards the needy, and now we reap the reward of decades of neglect for our top performers as we graduate 18 year old "adults" who are barely equipped to even live alone. Not to mention how pitifully we are outcompeted on the world stage - have you been to a college career fair lately? It says something about our society that the majority of students, at top tier schools, are foreigners.
This is what happens when "nationalism" and "individualism" are turned into dirty words by decades of propaganda. Either this war on corona turns things around and brings us out desperately needed Pattons and Churchills, or this truly is the beginning of the end of the American Empire.
I'm sorry but the people who most complain about diversity and inclusion being the downfall of our civilization have not exactly been shown to be the brightest minds in this whole thing.
I don't see top performers being actually concerned by this at all. On the contrary, top performers seem to be fairly concerned about how traditionally exclusionary measures have impeded a lot of talent from being developed.
>I'm sorry but the people who most complain about diversity and inclusion being the downfall of our civilization have not exactly been shown to be the brightest minds in this whole thing.
That's because one side is taboo and culturally suppressed. This thread may get me banned from HN, for example.
But by definition the push for diversity, which started in academia, bled into government, and has most recently been taking over the corporate world, selects for characteristics (race and gender) which are not correlated with merit.
Ignoring the fact that the entire idea rests on an unsupportable basis (a conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of representation/outcome), it's a theoretical mechanism by which we can explain the decline of performance across every corporate, political, and academic sector. We spend more per capital on school children than any other country in the world, by the way, so it isn't a question of funding. And the issues seem to exist in all states, regardless of government party, so it isn't likely a strictly political issue.
Clearly there is some deep cultural problem at hand and the people making policy have been leaning left for years in all sectors. Including media outside of Fox news. It fits.
No, it's because you're creating conspirative BS that is so far out of reality it's not even worth considering.
In 15 years of being in the workforce I have never seen any diversity initiative having so much as a modest effect on people taking classes or employment.
You are probably going to get banned because this a racist tirade from an ignoranimus who clearly has no real life experience in neither academia nor industry. It's stupid, delirious, and forgettable.
There was a time when merit tended to bubble up into positions of authority but that has been increasingly untrue for decades, for a host of reasons that all point to a rotting western culture.