> you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity

Diversity, as everything else, has a sweet spot. Too little and too much are equally bad. Of course nobody knows where the sweet spot is, but merely increasing diversity is not a guarantee for improvement. I mean, you can hire someone who hates your gut and doesn't speak your language. This will definitely increase the diversity, but you probably not going to like it.

> will also explain that trying to increase diversity in the workplace is terrible. It’s almost like there’s something else going on there.

I think most of those folks just despise hypocrisy. "Being anti-racist by being racist" makes me cringe.

If you're making a diversity hire to get alternative viewpoints, you're doing it for your own benefit and being honest, I don't think anybody will have problem with that. It's the virtue signaling that makes it despicable.

There's also argument to be made that if you're allowing diversity hires, you might have to allow "cohesion" hires. Justifying one but not the other seems disingenuous.

> Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better.

What evidence do you have to support the claim that DIE-focused companies outcompete merit-focused companies?

> … people who will insist that cancel culture is bad because we have to invite all the viewpoints …

Are we to understand that, given your espoused commitment to viewpoint diversity, that you also oppose cancel culture on this basis?

Either you also agree that “cancel culture is bad”, or you don’t actually believe viewpoint diversity is valuable, and yours is just an ethics-of-convenience argument.

> Oh, that’s easy. Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better.

It would help if you cited your sources here, but I do remember myself seeing some studies on this.

One in particular was about how venture capital firms did better when they hired for diversity and had diverse people in top roles [1]. The study mentioned that venture capitalism has very particular homogenous in-group culture, which diversity hiring helped firms break out of. In fact many articles seem to push this idea that diversity hiring leads to more perspectives on issues and more out-of-the-box thinking, leading to greater success.

While this makes sense, this is very different from the rational pushed by the top-level comment of this thread, which says that diversity hiring is to make up for discrimination at the beginning of the funnel. Because if the goal is just to broaden perspectives by tweaking their hiring process, companies can do this without looking at race or gender. There are metrics that can specifically optimize for this. There's no reason why race/gender needs to be specifically considered in order to end up with more diversity of thought.

[1]: https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-other-diversity-dividend

You probably don't hire diversity, you hire conformity.