Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
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Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#2As someone who knows it intimately, I would like to say that this kind of thing is endemic across the social science literature. What is frustrating is that only very few people seem to have the ability to understand why it is not sound.
Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#3I was shocked to read the original article. I can't believe that such overarching conclusions about human nature were drawn from a little toy box computational experiment. You might as well publish a psychology paper after a weekend playing The Sims.
Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#4As someone who knows it intimately, I would like to say that this kind of thing is endemic across the social science literature. What is frustrating is that only very few people seem to have the ability to understand why it is not sound.
Probably because the mathematicians don't seem to have the ability to explain why it is not sound without devolving into obscure symbols and jargon.
Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#5As someone who knows it intimately, I would like to say that this kind of thing is endemic across the social science literature. What is frustrating is that only very few people seem to have the ability to understand why it is not sound.
Probably because the mathematicians don't seem to have the ability to explain why it is not sound without devolving into obscure symbols and jargon.
I think that's a very important point.
Indeed, when you try to explain something simply to people, they often won't believe that it's really that simple, since there's all those symbols!
Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#6As someone who knows it intimately, I would like to say that this kind of thing is endemic across the social science literature. What is frustrating is that only very few people seem to have the ability to understand why it is not sound.
Probably because the mathematicians don't seem to have the ability to explain why it is not sound without devolving into obscure symbols and jargon.
If this was html & written to the point instead of stuffed in a pdf & written up in this roundabout manner, it would be on top of HN with 100+ votes :) I read the whole pdf but here's the TL:DR; anyways -
Randomization improves algorithms. This is so obvious to CS folks its taught in basic cs101 - the ones i'm familiar with are where you pick a random pivot element for quicksort, or say the one where you draw a circle inside a square & pick n random points inside the square, four times the number of points inside the circle will equal pi as n becomes large, or you resort to the miller rabin test for primality when you are doing those rsa calculator type problems where you pick keys for encryption, which will randomly sample some number of possible witnesses and call the number prime if none turn out to be witnesses, or using monte-carlo methods to compute integrals for functions for which no closed-form formula exists etc....there's like tons of examples where you introduce a little bit of randomness & it'll speed up your algorithm.
So this Page+Hong wrote a paper where they want you to randomly hire employees ( who they call problem-solvers or agents ), because diversity trumps ability ?! So if you have 1000 applicants, instead of hiring based on some metric like ivy-league/test-scores/IQ/github/whatever, you just hire randomly, because the randomness introduces diversity which trumps ability ?!! To prove this nonsensical point, they introduce an artificial math problem where agents proceeding randomly obtain the right answer, & not doing so gets you stuck. Ergo, diversity > ability. Sheesh.
Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#7I was shocked to read the original article. I can't believe that such overarching conclusions about human nature were drawn from a little toy box computational experiment. You might as well publish a psychology paper after a weekend playing The Sims. http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~spage/pnas.pdf
It also seems to defy common sense. How many top ACM programming teams randomly pick programmers from the college? How many great bball teams are randomly picked from players? There are few activities, where excellence is easily measured, where randomly picking participants results in superior results.
Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#8If anyone is interested in better research on diversity and team outcomes, I recommend looking into research on "faultlines" in teams. It is an interesting way of operationalizing diversity and predicting its effects.
Link to abstract: http://amr.aom.org/content/23/2/325.short
I can't find a direct link to the PDF at the moment. That's the original article. There's been a lot of research since testing the theory, typically supporting it (though I'm not 100% up to date on this topic).
Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#9In finance it has long been known that diversity in a portfolio can often trump the performance/ability in a particular stock.
Turns out, you can see portfolio theory popping up outside of financial markets, not only in assembling a team, but also advertising campaigns, ant colonies and bacterial colonies.
And yes, I know that the linked article debunks a paper that abuses math... It's just that portfolio theory is at least an analogy to understand why diversity can trump ability. Within reason.
Re: Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics [pdf]
#10[deleted]