score one for the bleeding heart liberals
Diversity is not just a feel good thing. It makes organizations more productive. Like even more productive than just putting all the smartest/best at whatever you're doing people together.
"What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.
The other thing we did was to show in mathematical terms how when making predictions, a group’s errors depend in equal parts on the ability of its members to predict and their diversity. This second theorem can be expressed as an equation: collective accuracy = average accuracy + diversity."
hat tip to Richard Florida's blog.