This is so much BS dressed up as objective. Competency and ability have never been the key criteria used for hiring and education.<p>Griggs v. Duke Power explicitly <i>banned</i> the use of academic credentials and non-specific tests while explicitly <i>allowing</i> the use of job-specific testing. It did this because those non-specific credentials were used to bias in favor of white employees over colored employees. If a person can do the actual job well, or be trained to do it well, that should be all that matters. And according to the actual decision in Griggs v. Duke Power, that <i>is</i> all that matters.<p>Show me a world in which everyone is facilitated in reaching their potential and you won't have many arguments about bias. People recognize when they're in over their heads and usually don't like being in such a position.<p>Are people doing counter-productive things in the name of diversity? Probably. Just like everything else that people do things in the name of. Does "diversity" swamp competency to do a job? To the extent it does, I doubt any more than nepotism or positive implicit bias (hiring people like yourself).
I would argue that unnecessary complexity
results in:<p>1) opaque functionality<p>2) compounded vulnerabilities<p>Owning one feature vs owning two features and having exponentially more difficulty in designing systems to accommodate both possibly incompatible features.<p>This is a direct result of management having no technical competence.<p>Microsoft and Amazon should be nowhere near our defense systems, they are a liability you are happy to inflict upon an adversary.
We have a disease called racism and bias and as a society we are applying various treatments.<p>Those treatments have side-effects of course, but the author is listing a variety of ills and "hand-waving" a supposed causation, and worse, implying by omission that diversity programs are a significant cause, and that's the side-effects are worse than the disease.
> The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity.<p>Really? As fewer people than ever are dying in plane crashes. Medical malpractice claims are declining. There are far fewer errors in banking, communications, convictions, far fewer deaths in fires (and fires in general). There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction, but most things have dramatically improved over the past generation.<p>It is great to have anecdotes, but you need to demonstrate that reliability is declining in some numerical way, as "increasing regularity" is by definition somehow numerical.<p>> Following three completely avoidable collisions of U.S. Navy warships in 2017 and a fire in 2020 that resulted in the scuttling of USS Bonhomme Richard<p>The US Navy has a pretty lengthy record of hitting things, losing boats to stupid, and killing its sailors for want of training.<p>Is it all that unusual for the US armed forces to lose dozens of people in accidents a year? Admittedly anecdotal from Wikipedia reading, but it doesn't seem to be so.<p>> Recently, the tremendous U.S. record for air safety established since the 1970s has been fraying at the edges.<p>A bunch of people have died due to ATC failures between now and the 1970s.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Logan_Airport_runway_incursion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Logan_Airport_runway_incu...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_2415" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_2415</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster</a><p>It is obviously not good that these incidents have happened, but they are not exactly new. The "tremendous record for air safety" still has a lot of bodies attached to it.<p>> Shortly after releasing the 737 MAX, 346 people died in two nearly identical 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.<p>Exactly as many people died when McDonnell Douglas (the real predecessor to Boeing in terms of organization culture) cut corners on cargo doors.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981</a><p>Airline manufacturers killing people due to being sloppy is not new. They are arguably killing the fewest flyers per capita in history.<p>> The modern U.S. is a system of systems interacting together in intricate ways. All these complex systems are simply assumed to work. In February of 2021, cold weather in Texas caused shutdowns at unwinterized natural gas power plants. The failure rippled through the systems with interlocking dependencies. As a result, 246 people died. In straightforward work, declining competency means that things happen more slowly, and products are lower quality or more expensive.<p>That is not lack of competency at all. That is a deliberate choice by Texas to not spend extra money on a resilient system. They deliberately keep their grid disconnected from the rest of the USA so they do not need to comply with Federal standards.