[jacobsenscott]

Maybe we've discovered diversity etc is worth studying, in part because it does have such a profound effect on the world. There's a reason these words and studies are considered "politicized" and that's because understanding them threatens the status quo. Just because something is politicized doesn't mean it isn't worth studying.

[e4e78a06]

> Maybe we've discovered diversity etc is worth studying, in part because it does have such a profound effect on the world

Or alternatively, NSF favors grant applications that mention it and toe the party line, so everyone begins to add more and more garbage to their application to optimize for grant acceptance.

Generally if something is so profound that it disrupts the status quo we quickly see it take over. For example the smartphone. But there still isn't a scientific consensus on diversity despite the well-known liberal lean of college campuses. And companies pay lip service and it almost seems that the most successful companies implement DEI programs _after_ they become successful, implying that it provides no competitive advantage.

[irrational]

But, how does that explain the decline from, say, 1900 to 1990? The decline appears fairly steady over the 120 year period.

[rland]

It totally doesn't, which is why it's baffling that (either!) author goes into so much detail about "diversity words."

I can put a chart of lexical similarity over a chart of the number of employed airplane mechanics and probably pontificate that by golly, we need to stop fixing airplanes for the sake of intellectual diversity!

And that would be about as well-reasoned.

[ALittleLight]

Doesn't the article say basically this?

"The diversity words are new (new-ish). Anything else newish would be inversely correlated with cosine distance too. For example, I repeated the same experiment with "tech" words like Google, YouTube, iPhone, browser, and so on. Those tech words correlated at -0.6 with cosine distance"