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Well, damn. I didn't upvote you originally, but I have now. I'm less likely to upvote long comments, because the longer they are the more imperfections they have, and if something highly-upvoted isn't 100% good then there's too-often someone who picks out the worst small aspect and says "Look what TheMotte agrees with!!!" ... but I hope it's clear that, even when people disagree with you, we're very glad you're here.
"Harry Potter had replied ... it was not a trap, it was simply a rule of how scientists operated that you had to try to disprove your own theories, and if you made an honest effort and failed, that was victory.
Draco had tried to point out the staggering stupidity of this by suggesting that the key to surviving a duel was to cast Avada Kedavra on your own foot and miss." - HPMOR
One of the lessons of that fan fic is that even the smartest characters aren't nearly as smart as they think they are, but here I think Harry is intelligently expressing the correct attitude and Draco is intelligently expressing the natural attitude. If you're in a fight, then to win you want to express your side's Correct beliefs, not undermine each other. But if you want to have correct beliefs rather than just Correct ones, then exposing your beliefs to challenge is barely even the first step in the process toward the ideal of being both the believer and the challenger.
This is so sad to read. I'm old enough and naive enough to still think that 90s-style "just be blind to race and sex and everything else irrelevant when hiring and it'll all work out fine" is the ideal way for society to operate, but it turns out that that plus a little hysteresis is enough to make whole companies indefinitely segregated even against their own desires? You're making a good argument for company-level affirmative action programs, and an even better argument against disparate impact lawsuits.
This comment and that of @Clementine is basically exactly the Parable of the Polygons IRL, where you can mathematically model how self-segregation happens naturally to some extent under certain conditions. Of course it's natural to expect someone who is a super-minority to not like it there! So no individual is even necessarily at fault. What the math says is one potential "fix" for companies and other organizations with this challenge is simply to insist on some minimum diversity level as a requirement. Well, okay, more specifically it says that individuals should refuse to accept jobs in low-diversity organizations, but I think you can still offer some organizational help for that. I actually quite like that framing personally. Maybe rather than aggressive DEI targeting perfect equity in all things, it's a 'good enough' lower goal for DEI to both penalize over-uniformity as well as reward under-representation, and only to a point. That's not DEI as we currently understand it, but I think it reaches some level of social good as well as maintaining some level of fairness.
I also like it because it's empowering in a certain sense, and applicable to majority-members. It says we should seek out diversity, which I think is as a general rule correct and economically validated to be successful and net-positive return even if a lot of the implementation and rhetoric around it went "too far" and lost sight of some things. It's empowering to the individual who can help prevent segregation in a pretty direct way, even if you're a majority class (locally or globally, it cuts both ways).
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