[nickff]

Many (but not all) diversity advocates are looking for evidence to back up their preference for racial, gender, and other forms of non-ideological diversity, so they make the (often true) assertion that people of different backgrounds bring different perspectives. This is ideology searching for evidence (often known as 'motivated reasoning').

[scooble]

I remember when this was known as ‘prejudice’, in the strict sense of pre-judging aspects of a person (such as their perspective) based on e.g. their race.

It was considered to be a bad thing, so it’s been very strange to see it used as a premise by diversity advocates.

[lopmotr]

I've seen it justified as every single member of the marginalized group has some life experience that no member of the majority/powerful group has. So although it's a prejudice, it's a correct one. That's different from traditional prejudices that aren't true for every individual.

[waterhouse]

Just to note, it is possible for an academic who is not part of a group to interview many members of the group, and combine other sources of information, and end up knowing more about "the experience" of that group than most individual members of that group. Because it's not a single experience.

It is even possible that, say, the black son of a black doctor, raised in a rich neighborhood, knows less about the plight of blacks in ghettos than the white son of a white janitor, raised in a ghetto with lots of blacks—even if the latter made no deliberate study. One could also consider Africans who immigrated to the United States as adults. They do have the experience of being a certain race, but that may not imply nearly as much as people seem to think. (In fact, I would hazard a guess that the members of "marginalized groups" that do get hired for the highly professional jobs that diversity advocates talk about, are very disproportionately likely to have come from well-off backgrounds, and to have no direct ghetto experience.)

[joshuamorton]

> Just to note, it is possible for an academic who is not part of a group to interview many members of the group, and combine other sources of information, and end up knowing more about "the experience" of that group than most individual members of that group.

This is a common fallacy. Statistics don't substitute for qualia. (much as we say the plural of anecdote is not data, it is also not firsthand experience or even necessarily understanding)

Further, "Having experience with the ghetto" isn't what people are discussing when we discuss the importance of diversity. There are still common experiences between wealthy racial minorities and poor ones, that white Americans don't experience. Try reframing this fallacy in terms of say, women and men, or gender minorities. It doesn't work.

[waterhouse]

Nor do qualia substitute for statistics, or for different qualia. Almost every woman will have the experience of menstruation, yes, but, for example, how many of them have been sexually harassed by a man? Some of them have never had that experience, others have had it dozens of times. If you have a woman in your group and you assume she knows what it's like for women in general, you may be very wrong. Yet that assumption seems pretty common—I've seen a decent number of accounts of people who belong to some group, complaining that progressives assume they speak for everyone in that group. There's an example upthread.

I'm not saying everything can be gotten vicariously through research, but a lot of things can be. And then the question becomes, which specific things do you want, and what's the best way to get them? I think the diversity discussion rarely gets that far—and if it did, strategies would end up very different.

[joshuamorton]

> for example, how many of them have been sexually harassed by a man? Some of them have never had that experience, others have had it dozens of times.

How does knowing that 80% of women will be sexually harassed in their life substitute for having had that experience? Speaking for myself, a man, I've been sexually harassed before (not in the workplace), and it's absolutely not an enjoyable experience, but my qualia, and the qualia a woman who is sexually harassed has are still going to be different.

And yes not every woman has the same experience. That's obvious. But who is more likely to have qualia that are more representative of woman's experience? A man who studies women, or a random woman? There is indeed the place for expertise (and similarly: data), but neither expertise nor diversity is a substitute for the other.

> I'm not saying everything can be gotten vicariously through research

Qualia cannot be. If you entirely discount the value that qualia have, that may not matter to you, but there are good reasons to believe that that's a bad idea.

> I've seen a decent number of accounts of people who belong to some group, complaining that progressives assume they speak for everyone in that group

Indeed, but this isn't unique to progressives. It's just a problem that minorities have to deal with. And that's absolutely not a good thing (and awareness of this is good!). But again, it's not a progressive attribute (or one caused by diversity initiatives) to assume that the "other", whatever group it is, is cohesive in ways that the groups you are familiar with aren't. (e.g. When a member of a minority group commits a crime, you have reactions and narratives that minority crime is on the rise, or that this specific minority are criminals etc.)

A great way to fix this, by the way, is to interact with various people who are members of the other group, and see them disagree and debate. This can only really happen if you have a diverse enough group that you have multiple people of whatever minority to interact with. And this is good for everyone! It broadens majority perspectives and reduces microaggressions.

> And then the question becomes, which specific things do you want, and what's the best way to get them? I think the diversity discussion rarely gets that far—and if it did, strategies would end up very different.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Whose goals'? The business? The employees? The minority's? To explain why I'm dubious of the whole "data can solve the problem", someone has to drive the research to gather the data. By and large, if you want this to be done reasonably, you need to have input from the group under discussion. There's tons of hilarious-if-they-weren't-horrible examples of this if you're willing to look. The ML community is full of them (Gender Shades is perhaps the seminal example).

That is, with relatively few exceptions, for research to be done correctly, or in many cases, to be done at all, you need someone who is like the people being researched in important ways to be able to champion, contextualize and guide the research. Without that, a culturally unaware researcher is, if history is a guide, more likely than not to misconstrue cultural signals or make harmful and long lasting mistakes.

[afiori]

but on the other extreme you have a different common fallacy: Here meet Person A! Person A shares a couple of macrodemographics traits with Person B so they are automatically and authority on B's experience (and probably already friends)

something to consider is that in most demographic groups there is a similar internal diversity than the entire population. so yes there are many experiences shares mostly by only women and also by most women, but this does not mean that many will be completely alien to that experience.

in my opinion any kind of diversity effort needs to be based on our shared humanity and a belief that we can learn from each other (without treating the other neither as a saint nor an enemy)

[scooble]

I find that claim very implausible. I would also be very concerned as an anti-racist if I found myself sharing a premise (e.g. black people just have a different perspective to white people) with racists, no matter what the rationalisation. Particularly since it would legitimise discrimination in contexts where that perspective was seen as undesirable.

Also, the act of prejudice was seen as wrong, not particular prejudices.

[joshuamorton]

Note that they didn't say perspective, but "experience". People with vastly different perspectives can share perspectives.

> Also, the act of prejudice was seen as wrong, not particular prejudices.

From your statements you appear to be prejudiced against people you judge to be racist. Are you saying that is morally wrong?

[scooble]

They invoked experience to support a claim about perspectives.

I consider racism morally wrong and therefore people who act in a racist way are acting in a way that is morally wrong. This is a valid inference, not prejudice. Prejudice might be if my inference was not valid, e.g. that racist people are sexist. That would be wrong.

[joshuamorton]

> I consider racism morally wrong and therefore people who act in a racist way are acting in a way that is morally wrong.

But note you are now projecting a belief to an act. Are you claiming that someone who believes that "people of different backgrounds will provide different perspectives" (I chose this intentionally here) will undertake racist acts 100% of the time?

Otherwise as far as I can tell, you're being equally prejudicial. You believe that there is a high likelihood that these people will act in a specific way based on a belief they hold. That's no different than believing that people will with a high likelihood act in a specific way (or more precisely, a nonspecific, but different way) based on differences in their experience.

Perhaps I misunderstand you here. Let me instead ask a different question: Why do you believe that "black people have a different perspective than white people" is a premise shared with racists?

Usually, at least from what I've seen, racism is rooted in a belief that the other group is lesser in some way, or occasionally that the group is dangerous, etc.

The idea that a white person and a black person could, theoretically, have exactly the same life experience is probably true, but do you really think it's possible for that to happen in (presumably) the United States? Can a white child and a black child come out of a class on slavery with the same perspective on it? One of those people has the perspective of "I would have been the oppressed" and one does not. Those are different. And I don't see how one can say otherwise, nor do I see how recognizing that is a concern.

> They invoked experience to support a claim about perspectives.

And? It's not possible, a-priori to construct a group of people who will have different perspectives on a problem. Selecting for diversity of experiences as a proxy seems reasonable, but I'm open to other suggestions.

To jump back a bit, I think there's a bit of a mismatch here:

> Particularly since it would legitimise discrimination in contexts where that perspective was seen as undesirable.

I'm not suggesting that there is one black perspective on things, much as there isn't one white perspective on things, that would be reductive. Perspectives are more complicated than that. So the idea that "the black perspective" could be labelled undesirable doesn't really make sense to me. I certainly would find it suspicious if someone labelled all of the minority perspectives as undesirable though.

[OminousWeapons]

I think at a high level they are right. It probably is true that being a different race or sex or whatever results in different experiences on average which inform worldview. The problem is that any differences that might arise are largely out of scope of work. My domain knowledge, acuity, communication style, and professionalism really have nothing to do with experience relating to race, sex, orientation, or any other factor these people are concerned about.

In reality these diversity programs are basically societal anti-discrimination programs in disguise. While those types of programs aren't necessarily bad, proponents know that if they pitched them purely in this way they would never get management buy in because that's largely not work related; hence all the ill supported talk about diversity automatically yielding better teams.

[DoofusOfDeath]

I can accept ideology seeking evidence, as long as everyone is clear about that. If it results in good evidence (either way) that holds up to critical analysis, all the better.