On Apr 18, 2013, at 1:06 PM, Dan Harkins <dharkins@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What is this "cure" of which you speak? This diversity discussion has > included statements like: Personally, not wearing an AD hat or attempting to anticipate the conclusions of the study group, I think the cure is to encourage more talented people to participate who do not share the same characteristics as the existing members, specifically with respect to age, sex, culture and/or geography. I think discouraging participation or limiting participation of existing participants is a bad idea, but encouraging new talented participants is always a good idea. And then I think we need to have a kind of ongoing consciousness-raising about how cognitive bias works, and how it might be affecting our decisions as participants. It's not enough to simply get a 50-50 male/female ratio, for example; if it were, the U.S. would elect female presidents slightly more than half the time, but of course we don't. But fixing either problem without fixing the other will not have much impact on diversity; if we fix the cognitive bias problem (should it even exist, which I am not asserting to be the case), that won't matter if the pool of candidates lacks diversity; if the pool of candidates is diverse, that won't matter if we don't correct for cognitive bias.