Who cares about diversity?

Similarly, what do you mean stop subsidizing dependency? What specific dependencies are being subsidized and what are the outcomes of no longer subsidizing them?

You are correct that if the author's definition does not match the one in the wild, their argument falls apart, but by and large, I don't think that's going on here.

For what its worth, though I think we might disagree at some core level about this topic, I do appreciate your way of reasoning through your criticism. It's amazing how many disagreements start at the level of definitions without the disagreeing parties ever reconciling, or even acknowledging, the problem of messy definitions.

This strikes me as faulty thinking. Revenge-driven justice fails; two wrongs don't make a right. Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against , which makes you a discriminator.

Anyone who followed that "Activism as a Vocation" link here a few days ago can probably agree that the fix to the current cancel-culture chaos of academia isn't going to happen within academia. It's about mass media dollars. School administrators, like the rest of us, are just manipulated "useful idiots."

I think we get into trouble when we start treating individuals as mere tokens of their groups. To pick on your comment for example, "those people have been systematically discriminated against forever" is true at the collective level, but is very likely not true at the individual level. There's no justice in choosing a well-off black candidate on the basis that other black people disproportionately experienced slavery slavery, poverty, Jim Crow, etc, especially when it comes at the expense of a white person who had a very hard life.

Moreover, even if we insist on tokenizing people, we rarely treat people as the median of their group, and instead we treat whites, men, etc as though they have the privilege of board room executives, politicians, kings, etc (e.g., arguments that a given male has privilege based on the observation, "men have ruled for millennia").

> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.

I emphatically deny this, especially the idea that a black woman is going to have interesting things to say, but a white man won't. There is far more diversity within a race than between them, including diversities of experience and how we process those experiences (for example, even if you have two people of the same race with similar adverse experiences, one could come out of those experiences with additional resilience and another with a trauma response). If you want interesting/different experiences, there are much better proxies (e.g., if your team is coastal and well-educated, a well-educated rural candidate is probably going to offer a lot more diversity than a black woman who came from the same pipeline as the rest of the company). What does a white man from rural Appalachia have in common with a white man from the Bay Area that you can conclude that neither will have interesting thoughts?

Moreover, if your company is super ideological about diversity, people who don't want to be regarded as tokens probably opt out, and you end up with a bunch of people with different skin color but similar viewpoints (and anyone with a unique viewpoint is probably afraid to speak it). Not exactly a way to optimize for "interesting thoughts".