Conversation

Fake bets on diversity look like effusive praise and superlatives of people who don’t appear to have done anything special to deserve it. Real bets on diversity look like pointless decentralization/distribution in projects where there’s an obvious, cheaper centralized approach.
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The first sounds like “We have an amazing, incredible, wonderful, talented team blah blah” The second sounds like “Yeah I know it would be easier to simply have 1-2 people make all the decisions or even just do the whole thing, and it looks needlessly messy and complex but...”
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I was looking at a group thing I’m leading and thinking: I could knock this whole thing out in a day and be done with, and it would probably be very good, even better on many dimensions than this group thing we’re doing.
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The only reason to do it this way at 10x the coordination cost and synthesis headaches is as a bet on viewpoint diversity. Otherwise it would be Keynesian makework.
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This takes serious architecture. It’s like map-reduce distributed programming to achieve a simple sort of a small list that could easily be done one a single computer with a one-line program. Except it’s not a simple sort with a mechanical formula to get to the one right answer.
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This is a problem with zillions of acceptable answers that fit the nominal solution constraints, and the size of the problem is within reach of 1-2 people. Getting to *a* answer or even *the best* answer in some sense is easy, and best done in the most centralized way possible.
Replying to
But the kinds of answers you get depend on how you set it up. Engineering diversity into a solution process generates types of solutions that don’t emerge with low diversity. And sometimes that’s what you want in a solution set. Even if it means giving up quality in other ways.
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