My theory of human evolution says there are mechanisms that produce diversity of skills and knowledge. These mechanisms evolved because diversity of goods and services is crucial to a healthy economy. Human diversity generates economic diversity — the person who likes to paint becomes an artist, the person who likes to make things becomes an engineer. These differences are crucial because they allow trade. If everyone made the same things, there could be no trade and no gains from specialization. The more diversity, the better. This is the opposite of the way variation is viewed in statistics. A statistician thinks of variation in measurement as “error” — something to be reduced, perhaps by averaging. Variation is everywhere, of course; you can think of it as something to be encouraged or discouraged.
Human nature encourages diversity. You can build (a) institutions that encourage, benefit from, or at least accept human diversity or (b) institutions that discourage it. The former will work vastly better than the latter because the latter are always fighting human nature. It is the difference between swimming with the current and swimming against it. This is the heart of my criticism of higher education: It is anti-human-nature. It is anti-human-nature because every student in a class is treated the same. Every student is expected to learn the same things and is measured using the same yardstick. Such classes ignore diversity and try to reduce diversity (every student is supposed to learn the same stuff, thus making their brains more similar). They are ignoring and fighting human nature.
When I told Sarah Kapoor this critique, she recommended First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (1999) by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. “You’ll like it,” she said. She was right. At the heart of what distinguishes better managers from worse managers, say the authors, is that the better managers have this “revolutionary insight”:
People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. [In other words, don’t try to make your employees identical.] Try to draw out what was left in.
In other words: 1. Start by accepting diversity. 2. Try to use it to advantage.
Better managers achieve better results, defined all sorts of ways, than worse managers. The author’s conclusions are based on a vast amount of research done by the Gallup Organization.
Another book on this subject is “The Difference” by Scott Page, which recently came out. He shows how teams and groups of diverse individuals, or individuals with diverse tools, are better at solving problems and making predictions than those with lots of “ability.”
Dear Seth
I just thought you (and perhaps some of your readers) might like to check out my new blog that traces the scientific story of human evolution from the Big Bang on, and makes the case for diversity as one of the key factors in all evolution.
The accompanying book is available free to anyone signing in to my guestbook.