This article The Stormtrooper Problem: Why Thought Diversity Makes Us Better on Farnam Street lays out the advantages, nay, necessity, of diversity:
Diversity is how we survive as a species. This is a quantifiable fact easily observed in the biological world. From niches to natural selection, diversity is the common theme of success for both the individual and the group.
Take the central idea of natural selection: The genes, individuals, groups, and species with the most advantageous traits in a given environment survive and reproduce in greater numbers. Eventually, those advantageous traits spread. The overall population becomes more suited to that environment. This occurs at multiple levels, from single genes to entire ecosystems.
That said, natural selection cannot operate without a diverse set of traits to select from! Without variation, selection cannot improve the lot of the higher-level group.
The Stormtrooper metaphor is about extending this natural diversity fact to the workplace. Essentially a warning about avoiding groupthink.
The biological angle is exactly what Rachel Nabors argued back in 2018 (interestingly, before Edge went Chromium) about browser diversity. There were and are a lot of nuances here though. What we lost with Edge was closed-source. The energy that went into that closed source we now know has been redirected to open-source and I gotta count that as a win, despite the hit to engine diversity. With more open-source, we now have more UX diversity in browsers, as we can see. I’m certaintly not against more engine diversity, I’m just convinced it’s near-impossible to create a competitive new browser engine from scratch. There isn’t just one kind of diversity (ironically?).
None of this was really my point though ā and why I saved this article to blog about.
I saved it because, despite liking it, I found it very weird that it doesn’t have a byline or date on it. Metadata suggests it was written in 2019 and the about page suggests it’s Shane Parrish. It’s nothing new that author and date should be prominent on articles, but I think it’s going to become much more important starting now. Read the quoted three paragraphs above again. Doesn’t that sound like something ChatGPT would spit out easily? Soon, we’re just going to assume that it was unless we’re very clearly told it was not.