"Are cars and other goods tailored to the needs of local markets?"
I would argue they always were. The color of a band-aide does not change its main functionality. Neither do any of your other examples. Humans all need a car with 4 wheels and band-aides that stick.
I would posit we can't even get healthcare without bias for people that aren't straight white men. There are subtle differences in body composition between men and women, doubly so for larger (or smaller) body types, but ignoring those differences isn't exactly something from the far-flung past [0].
Otherwise we can quibble over how treating everyone as an average can and has cost lives [1]. People are different, and very small differences can have unexpectedly outsized impacts on usability.
> The most important products don't care about what you look like
The product doesn't care, but this site is awash in stories about how management or engineering should have just talked to the damn floor workers. Worked together, instead of dictating from on-high that the machine in question works well in the lab, and is an elegant, cost-effective solution - that the people actually in the shop know will fail immediately.
DEI (when done right) is not diversity hires. It's accepting others have different ideas that you may not have seen.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28343109/
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
You're all over the place trying to avoid my question. We're talking about product consumers. Mismanagement is an aberration in a long reversion to the mean of the product's specs that people want. What car would black Henry Ford make? What kind of induction motor would hispanic Tesla make? Keep cherry-picking references, though. Isn't there a crisis in the replication of journal articles anyway??
There are many examples like this if you care to look for them. I would recommend the books Weapons of Math Destruction and Invisible Women for some very well done research on the way that you can codify human biases in processes that should neutral.
I would also personally recommend that you give an earnest try to understanding why so many people argue for diversity. A genuine attempt. Even if you don't fully change your mind on it I think you will find it easier to approach the world with a little more compassion for people who don't look like you.
[0]: https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/commentary-more-health-inequalit...
Pulse oximiters are another terrible example by the way. Couldn't we hire a bunch of really tanned white people since you're just talking skin color?
I wish I could agree in good conscience that we are currently in a perfectly meritocratic system, but alas (sorry to drop another reference on you, I guess I just enjoy having evidence to point to for justifying my beliefs), there's many cases where minorities are being unfairly passed up on [0].
Regarding pulse oximeters... maybe, maybe not. Seems like it would be an interesting field of study, the research of the different levels of light absorption between skin with different melanin pigments, and whether tanning or genetics plays a bigger role. If only there was more funding for something like that, huh? :)
[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
I understand the DEI stuff as partially trying to get more diverse input, but also as a way to help make up for disadvantages that minorities have had historically. Of course a white person from a wealthy background has more chances to get in the "merit" club.
r.e. tsmc VS Intel, is tsmc much more meritocratic than Intel? I haven't really heard this anywhere. I've heard they're an extremely hierarchical org and work insane hours for comparatively low pay.
For Explore type problems diversity has a much bigger impact then Exploit type problems. To add to the drama/misunderstandings/confusion sometimes you assemble a team for explore and they do find the gold mine, but then they arent suited to exploit it cuz its in their nature to explore. And vice versa.
What is your clearly rhetorical question getting at?
