# Diversity With Andrew  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: Diversity With Andrew - Show: It Could Happen Here - Owner / Host: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts - Episode publish date: 2026-09-23 - Episode AI description: Andrew and James explore diversity as essential to life, creativity, resilience, and freedom rather than a corporate slogan. They connect biodiversity loss with endangered languages, colonialism, globalization, and industrial standardization, examining how ecosystems and cultures preserve unique ways of seeing the world. The conversation also considers conservation, commodified difference, and the possibility of many ways of living side by side. - Mentioned books: [In Light of Our Differences](https://share.snipd.com/book/21ab8534-da65-4a7f-acb0-600dbd0a478b) by [David Harmon](https://share.snipd.com/person/7ba2bf2f-7395-41c5-9cf2-0a42aae247fc), [The Difference](https://share.snipd.com/book/c5626a6a-786b-4afa-b550-01e2b9595b33) by [Scott Page](https://share.snipd.com/person/8d863b6b-d457-4397-9e3e-8cbc51b967df), [Babel](https://share.snipd.com/book/71f682f2-bf76-46b3-98c8-606f302b7385) by [Rebecca Kuang](https://share.snipd.com/person/93d482f2-e811-4bec-a224-6da058fd6cd3), [Michel Pagel](https://share.snipd.com/person/8626dabb-7230-4cd3-9923-6c67a0ef2571) - Duration: 43:50 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/0511bcca-65c4-42d0-8c2f-37b0e84cee49) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/e85a6d89-8266-4ed5-8971-e6fdf5712bc5) - Export date: 2026-09-26T17:19:50 ## Snips ### [Diversity Is More Than Representation](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d63ae8ec-f462-49ca-97b7-cf70774164c7) 🎧 04:24 - 06:22 (01:57) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/61a7fe7c-1b95-4529-b207-72553d294759" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Diversity includes biological life, languages, cultures, and ways of organizing—not merely demographic representation. - Andrew Sage frames it as a condition that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible amid the sixth mass extinction. #### 💬 Quote > Diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on why diversity matters #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** I find that the word diversity has become so politically charged nowadays. You know, as a buzzword, as a dirty word. You know, we see it caught up in terms like DI, in the debates around immigration and representation, and all the culture wars that have captured so much of the attention as of late. But what has my attention recently, the kind of diversity that I want to focus on, is the diversity that we are losing, that we are critically losing. Right now we're living through what many scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction. Species are disappearing at a rate driven overwhelmingly by human activity. Languages are dying, indigenous knowledge is disappearing, and entire cultures have been erased, assimilated, or reduced to museum visas. We are, in our lif witnessing a profound loss of what author David Harmon calls biocultural diversity, the combined diversity of life and human culture. And all of this is happening at the same time that diversity itself has become so politically controversial. So the question I want to talk about today is why we should even care about diversity in the first place. Why does it matter that thousands of languages exist? Why should we care for species disappears? Why does it matter whether there are countless different ways for people to live and think and create and organize themselves? Typically we speak of diversity as an unquestioned value, as something that some people like or dislike, are opposed to or are in favor of politically. But I want to make a deeper argument that diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible. --- ### [Markets Cannot Price A Living Forest](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5fdc6126-2d09-4eb0-8816-fae824c5f74e) 🎧 08:15 - 09:58 (01:43) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/90e37c19-3c2d-448a-9706-cfae453ccf02" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Capitalism can price timber and road construction but cannot adequately value forests’ beauty, insects, plants, and noncommercial relationships. - What markets cannot quantify often receives insufficient protection, even when communities deeply depend on it. #### 💬 Quote > Because capitalism can't ascribe value to them, it sometimes fails to protect them. > — James Stout James Stout on capitalism and ecological value #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** I think that a lot of times as well, the conversation is really focused on diversity as it relates to people. But, you know, even before we get to diversity within our species, there is the diversity that, you know, transcends our species, the diversity of all the species of planet Earth. You know, the variation as a feature of the world we live in. Yeah, **James Stout:** I think that's also like super valuable, right? And in a way that we can't... I was thinking about this this morning, I was hiking this morning, and capitalism lacks a means to ascribe value to that kind of thing, right? Like I was thinking about that in the US, they've proposed to rescind the roadless rule, which allows you not to build roads into national forests in certain infantry roadless areas. And there is a way of ascribing value to timber, right? You can talk about board feet of timber, like, there is a way of ascribing cost to roads, right? We can estimate how much it will cost to build roads into this area. But like, isn't a way of ascribing value that works to the forest being there, to all the things in the forest that are not commercial timber being there, right? The plants, animals, **Andrew Sage:** the insects. It's like the quantifiable value versus like the unquantifiable value, basically. Yeah, **James Stout:** like they're not productive to capital, but they do give us something that is valuable. And because capitalism can't ascribe value to them, it sometimes fails to protect them, right? --- ### [Conservation Should Not Freeze The World](https://share.snipd.com/snip/24089459-5faa-4443-8a7a-b3b73e1fc1dd) 🎧 14:00 - 16:10 (02:09) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/5cfdbbb0-dd25-4d4c-a67d-dbdf1a3651e0" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Preserving diversity does not mean freezing ecosystems or cultures in place; change has always shaped both. - The better target is balance, rejecting the false choice between untouched wilderness and unrestricted exploitation. #### 💬 Quote > The correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special is like just fucking leave it, and the correct way to deal with everything else is just fucking pillage it. > — James Stout James Stout on rejecting the wilderness-or-exploitation binary #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** and you know as we speak of preserving preservation conservation i think there's a tendency within those who value diversity that can lead to a sort of a misdirection or it can lead to maybe a misplaced aspiration, I would say. Because obviously, change itself is not bad. You know, change is inevitable. Extinction has always been part of the history of life. Ecosystems have always been in flux, always evolving. The borders of, you know, ecosystems have been moving throughout deep time. Similarly, cultures have always evolved and mixed and some have faded away. So we can't necessarily reject change, right? And reject the processes by which cultures and environments may change, even in response to human intervention. You know, we look at the forests of North America, since we've been focusing on that example, and many of those forests were engineered, you know, by human activity, right? So the Amazon rainforest also shows some evidence of human engineering in terms of the terra preta, you know, the soils being this very rich soil that was deliberately designed by the indigenous peoples. Yeah. The **James Stout:** same with like, I've been reading a lot on indigenous cultural use of fire **Andrew Sage:** for **James Stout:** the last few weeks here since I got back from Spokane and thinking a lot about like how it's a very western perspective right to be like the wilderness is the thing that humans don't touch and have no engagement with and then everything else humans use as they wish like to create it as this binary distribution right of like the correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special is like just fucking leave it and the correct way to deal with everything else is just fucking pillage it like there's a way to find balance that they're like we struggle with it under capitalism right like capitalism has struggled to provide us with that. --- ### [Speed Turns Ordinary Change Into Crisis](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a00b0970-4dce-4552-a414-c35f8adbf6cc) 🎧 16:39 - 18:10 (01:31) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/127cbb9f-5923-42ec-a8bc-d12e3ab262f9" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Human activity is dangerous less because change exists than because industrial change operates at unprecedented speed and scale. - Removing one foundational species can trigger cascading ecosystem effects, often before people recognize the danger. #### 💬 Quote > What is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place. It is the speed and the scale of that change. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on accelerating ecological loss #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** What is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place. It is the speed and the scale of that change. You know, we don't know exactly how many species we are losing or have lost. We don't even know how many species currently exist. We could even talk about the definitions of species and how that taxonomic system has evolved with time. But for that discussion, I leave it to a book that I read on the subject that I quite enjoyed, which was In Light of Our Differences by David Harmon. But regardless, we are still talking about thousands to hundreds of thousands of species lost each year. And these are losses that are not happening in isolation because we know that every ecosystem is made up of relationships. They remove one species and you can risk disrupting everything connected to it. Thankfully, these systems are typically quite resilient. So a species loss doesn't have to lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem, but there are species that are foundational. You know, then the disappearance of that single species can trigger cascading effects that threaten the entire ecosystem. There's also often a lag between our realization that a species has fallen below its minimum viable population and the death of the final individual of that species. As you mentioned, the last passenger pigeon in the zoo, I was reminded of that. --- ### [A Language Opened A Different World](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e167ca74-350c-4e01-bf4f-ad4d5cd76d46) 🎧 25:04 - 28:00 (02:55) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/b1a5eea1-8b57-462c-badb-eae1c1194905" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - James Stout describes learning Cornish words for wildlife and natural phenomena from a Cornish anarchist. - The language’s sounds and categories offered a beautiful, intimate way to perceive relationships with animals and landscapes. #### 💬 Quote > There was so much beauty in seeing the world through the lens of that language, and it would be a real shame if we ever lost that. > — James Stout James Stout on learning Cornish #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** As you were mentioning, there are like, according to the ethnologue, at least 7,170 living languages in the world today. Our lowest underestimations of the amount of cultures, that is an accumulation of knowledge, values, customs, technology, social practices. Our lowest estimate of the number of cultures on earth is like 4,000. There are definitely, certainly more than that. Especially if we are using language as a proxy for cultural diversity right and even within languages there's tremendous cultural diversity yeah **James Stout:** biologically **Andrew Sage:** we have a lot of diversity as well neglected to mention you know blood types heights hair textures all of these have emerged across the continents we've spread out across. I mean, obviously the concentration of the diversity is in Africa where we began, but even our adaptations to different environments is a form of diversity that is necessary, you know, to maintain us. I'll get into some of the arguments for why later on. But, so I didn't know that Basque had all the different words for rain, but I am reminded, I think that there are different words in Inuit languages for describing snow. Yeah, **James Stout:** like the, I think it's in Yupiaq, have a bunch of words for snow and ice, and like different textures of it. I'm trying now to find Basque words for rain so I can remember some of them. Yeah. Lambró is drizzle or mist. I know zirimirí is like a light rain. It's like the noise it makes. I always thought that was a really sweet one. I had some fucking throwback. A Cornish anarchist who spoke cornish right one of the languages that is not hegemonic and it's probably relatively endangered even as a european languages go right i think it's probably having a better time now than it was when i was younger but it was relatively rare to encounter a cornish speaker **Andrew Sage:** cornish that's cornwall right **James Stout:** correct yeah. It was teaching me all these beautiful words for like different wildlife and different like natural phenomena that sort of have an onomatopoeic quality to them. But like for some reason, just like the sort of beautiful way that they showed of relating. I don't want to like noble, savage Cornish people, right? But I just thought that they showed a different way of understanding the world and our relationship with it and these animals and like how they appear. And like it struck me as really special that that person was like, like kept that knowledge and that that person shared that knowledge with me. And this was at some like event in Barcelona when I'm like, know 21 years old 19 years old something like that and it just really struck me that uh like there was so much beauty in seeing the world through the lens of that language and it would be a real shame if we ever lost that yeah --- ### [Language Loss Shrinks Humanity’s Library](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c216aa73-4910-40e4-94b3-b8f47dc8b6ea) 🎧 30:27 - 32:31 (02:03) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/5ea51a11-4cab-4a74-acd6-132d886e91ac" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Nation-building and economic pressure have concentrated billions of people into a small number of dominant languages. - Losing a language also loses distinctive categories, meanings, and cultural knowledge that translation cannot fully recover. #### 💬 Quote > We all lose when we don't have that diversity. > — James Stout James Stout on linguistic diversity #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** You know, I'm glad all the languages that still exist and still give us you know these words for things because if nation states had their way there would be like 10 languages left on earth yeah **James Stout:** i'm **Andrew Sage:** being dramatic but you know right now most of humanity speaks a relatively small number of languages the 23 most spoken mother languages account for like four billion people somewhere around there wow and then the 200 most spoken languages are over 88 percent of the world's population that's **James Stout:** crazy and **Andrew Sage:** this is of course due to nation building due to economic pressures, you know, globalization, basically everywhere, the pressures of the status quo have led to indigenous and regional languages, minority languages disappearing. And if not for the concerted efforts of these language communities to maintain their way of speaking and to pass it down we would have lost so many more as it is yeah **James Stout:** definitely as **Andrew Sage:** you mentioned by the way the the words that you've picked up over over the years from different languages and your attempts to explain those words to me i was reminded of a book of fiction that i'd read i think, about two years ago. It's a book called Babel by R.F. Kuang. And it's kind of like a fantasy historical fiction where a Chinese student goes to this school in England and the magic of that world is translation. The sort of energy that gets picked up the magic that they're able to wield is through the translation from one language to another. And the fact that because translation is not a one-to process, the kind of nuances and, you know, meanings and subtexts and connotations that they get lost or gained in the process are potent. --- ### [Consumer Choice Can Hide Cultural Erasure](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5ae790b9-22a8-4a23-80cb-1c264cfde3b3) 🎧 36:11 - 37:31 (01:20) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/f2304d9a-cbb6-408a-8d7f-2224a3f6030d" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Colonialism, state-building, and market globalization standardize cultures through assimilation, industrial efficiency, and manufactured consumer tastes. - Supermarket variety can disguise deeper losses as minority cultures, languages, and practices disappear. #### 💬 Quote > There are cultures that are literally going extinct. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on globalization and cultural homogenization #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** When it comes to cultural diversity and its losses, which, you know, coincide with the losses of biodiversity, we see the impact of colonialism destroying societies through conquest and genocide and assimilation and the very same environmental changes. We've seen an ethnician building try to forge a single national identity at the expense of regional and minority cultures. And then of course with globalization, not in the sense of cultural exchange across distances, as that has always existed, but specifically the kind that has been driven by markets and state power and industrial efficiency, which enforces standardization across places. You know, it's easier for these capitalists, for these multinationals to manufacture the same products and market the same brands and basically flatten language and flatten cultural expectations across places. So they even would manufacture consumer tastes in a way that benefits their bottom line. You know, now you get to pick between streaming services or, you know, you have a whole bunch of different varieties of cereal in your supermarkets, and that is what is counted as economic freedom. --- ### [Connectivity Can Expand And Flatten Culture](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7eabcf7b-f889-43d3-8199-2676b395343c) 🎧 41:44 - 46:36 (04:52) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/447e8567-0573-4dc1-8137-73246ea8c687" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - James Stout has watched smartphones, Starlink, and social media make even remote communities engage with a highly hegemonic internet. - He wants people to access the wider world without abandoning Kurdish, Indigenous, or other local ways of seeing. #### 💬 Quote > I wish they could engage with the world in Embara. > — James Stout James Stout on technology and cultural preservation #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** Now, I had a question for you about this subject, because you are admittedly a bit older than me. It's **James Stout:** true. And sadly. **Andrew Sage:** Right. But I'm curious, have you witnessed like in real time the loss of this kind of diversity through globalization? So I see like for me, I remember having like copies of older magazines and I could, I could see through those that, you know, the world was, the places genuinely felt very different, very unique. And as I've come up with social media, I've seen places have kind of homogenized. Everything was starting to look the same. And let's not even talk about the impact of like ai slop oh yeah but yeah what have you seen yeah **James Stout:** like it's one of those things that like you do see the like the impact of the smartphone is huge right at a second level the impact of starlink is massive much more than I think most people living in the colonial core would realize, right? Like more people have access to the internet through smartphones and have electricity in their homes. And like the internet is a very hegemonic place, right? Like there are probably seven or eight languages the internet's really good in that like you could really access the internet in and that really has made a difference with the way young people engage with the external world right right **Andrew Sage:** i **James Stout:** guess i've also seen like a uh a reclamation of some of that and it's a thing that's largely happened like within uh the colonial core to the greatest extent right like the um the so-called the europe of nations hypothesis right like one of the languages i can uh speak and read and and write in is catalan and like this is an example of a language that like was ruthlessly suppressed by the Francoist regime. Same with Basque, same with other like non-Spanish languages in Iberia. Right. And like now that is a primary language of instruction for most Catalan students. Like in my lifetime, my time spending time in Catalonia, I see infinitely more people speaking Catalan than I used to. I remember, there's like an anecdote about this in my dissertation, but some young Syrian kids who would always speak to me in Catalan. They played football outside my archive, right? Like, so we'd be kicking the football around. And it's cool that this language that had once very nearly been destroyed is now like hegemonicic it was cool at the time catalan nationalism but like every other nationalism has some qualities which i don't like but like it was cool that at the time there was a an acceptance of people especially like these kids who spoke catalan happened to have been born in syria right but like they were catalan as much as anyone else like it wasn't a uh an ethnic definition of nation right but at the same time yeah i've definitely seen that diversity lost in terms of so many things like foods yeah i **Andrew Sage:** feel like there has been a marginalization of palates as well 100 right especially with the proliferation of fast foods yeah **James Stout:** yeah exactly like fast cheap high calorie food that stores easily i mean the example i guess is like look at what they've done to bread over the time of my life right like uh look at how like sliced white what we would have called american bread is now like the global standard, right? But like all those other bread products that people used to make, like it can be very hard to get like freshly made tortillas. It's possible where I live, right? But it's not, I imagine if you live in like Minnesota, just like the little moments of beauty that they gave you in your day that are gone. But yeah, also the big things. Like I watched kids watching TikTok in the Darien Gap. That wouldn't have been possible seven or eight years ago. Right. Wow. I don't quite know when Starlink was widely distributed, but that makes a difference to people, right? Like their cultural world is, they're now engaging with the external world, not just through their own culture, through the internet. And I want those people to have everything I have, to be clear, right? Like I want them to be able to see the whole world. **Andrew Sage:** Yeah, you don't want to like seal them, vacuum seal them as some kind of museum exhibit of what once it was. **James Stout:** Exactly, yeah. But like, I also wish that they could have it the way I have it, which is that like, I was born in England and I engage with the world in English. I wish they could engage with the world in Embara. I wish Kurdish people can engage with the world in whichever type of Kurdish they speak. --- ### [Diversity Creates Resilience And Possibility](https://share.snipd.com/snip/038fbf53-02ce-491b-8c7c-491406231b29) 🎧 47:57 - 51:03 (03:06) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/9f682e55-5e37-479a-9996-3b604cff0a5e" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Diverse ecosystems, immune systems, and cultures remain resilient because variation supplies alternatives when conditions change. - Every culture represents generations of experiments, giving humanity more creative and scientific material than a single standardized worldview. #### 💬 Quote > Every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on cultural diversity as accumulated knowledge #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** we've already sort of hinted at some of the reasons why i think we should care about this loss of diversity you know and I could even spot off a few more. And diversity makes our living systems more resilient. I think it's a very key one. In our ecosystems, every species has its niche and they can compete and cooperate and recycle nutrients. And everything is just part of one larger network. And the more diverse that network is, the more it has to respond to disruption. Diversity gives ecosystems options. We see that in comparison to the monocultures, the monocultural approach to farming that has dominated much of the world and the economy inputs that approach requires. We look at how vulnerable that approach is to disease and changes in climate conditions. In terms of genetic diversity, we can point to the fact that, you know, if every human immune system works in exactly the same way, a pathogen that evolved to bypass one person's immune system could bypass everyone's. And so our biological differences create the variation in how diseases spread and keep us as a whole safe, keep our existence as a whole secure. Even within my own family, I've noticed that some people are more susceptible and others more resistant to different diseases. You know, when a virus passes into my household, there are some people who get sick and some people don't. And it changes each time, despite the fact that we are so close genetically. And so again, we see that diversity creates resilience. And even if we wanted to take it from like a coldly utilitarian perspective, that resilience is a value. It has utility, you know, and an individual instance of a species or of a culture might have value in a way that we don't realize until it's gone. We become poorer as a whole. We lose possibilities when we lose languages, when we lose cultures, when we lose species. Every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being. We may like some more than others, you know, I'm not a relativist in the sense that I will turn a blind eye to things that I find morally objectionable in Sydney cultures. But I can recognize that every culture has something that adds to our library of experiences. And I would rather have that full library than a single shelf of books. It's a really good **James Stout:** way of saying it. **Andrew Sage:** Having that full library gives us more raw material to think with, to create art with, to do science with. If you like the arts, you know, you will like diversity because that innovation in the arts and in the sciences emerges from everything that came before. Diversity is a foundation for future creativity and innovation. --- ### [Different Minds Solve Harder Problems](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc9ac907-7bb8-49f8-abc1-faa6cf240603) 🎧 51:47 - 54:45 (02:58) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/5d0f2b25-78df-42a4-ad2e-f0e0fc36a119" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Scott Page’s research suggests cognitively diverse groups can outperform uniformly brilliant groups on complex, experimental problems. - Identity diversity often expands cognitive diversity because different social experiences produce different tools, heuristics, and models. #### 💬 Quote > Getting a group of people who approach a problem differently will outperform a group of people who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on Scott Page’s research #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** I'll add that, you know, we were speaking about biodiversity and cultural diversity, what Harman goes, biocultural diversity, but there's also the value of cognitive diversity. You know, we have different opinions, but we might also perceive and categorize and solve problems in generally different ways. And having different perspectives, different interpretations, different heuristics, different predictive models, what Scott E. Page calls cognitive toolboxes in his book, The Difference. You know, these give us an opportunity to solve problems in unique ways. You know, we're not all going to have the same tools and what tools I may lack another person may have. And it's not always necessarily a requirement that you just get the smartest person to solve the problem. In fact, as Page's research suggests, getting a group of people who approach a problem differently will outperform a group of people who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way. Now, Page's make the bold claim that cognitive diversity is always the best approach because he does distinguish between, you know, routine, regular tasks and tasks that require like more experimentation and creativity and multiple competing ideas. So in those cases where you need that diversity of ways of thinking to solve complex problems in transportation, in dealing with climate change, in developing medicines. You know, we don't want everybody to be thinking alike. Another thing that Paige points out is that while cognitive diversity and identity diversity are not one-to there is overlap between the concepts because people who grow up in different environments and have different experiences and opportunities and social positions are more likely to develop different ways of seeing the world. So if we recognize that cognitive diversity is valuable for solving complex problems, then prejudice is a practical failure as well as a moral failure. One of the things that I wanted to address, and I kind of alluded to it earlier when I said that I'm not really a relativist, is that while I do value diversity, I definitely don't think that every form is worth celebrating. You know, I believe a healthy society should have space for different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves. But that does not mean this kind of liberal tolerance that would put up with mindsets and practices of domination that would eliminate that very freedom. --- ### [Protect Diversity From Those Who Erase It](https://share.snipd.com/snip/97e8b6f8-5adc-45d6-90e7-e117d8ae0dbb) 🎧 54:07 - 55:43 (01:36) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/e1be8da1-03e6-4853-81af-b6f54b8c0b93" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Valuing diversity does not require accepting domination, coercion, or practices that would eliminate others’ freedom. - The goal is a world where many worlds can coexist, rather than liberal tolerance that merely permits difference from a position of superiority. #### 💬 Quote > We want a world where many worlds can exist. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on diversity and freedom #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** One of the things that I wanted to address, and I kind of alluded to it earlier when I said that I'm not really a relativist, is that while I do value diversity, I definitely don't think that every form is worth celebrating. You know, I believe a healthy society should have space for different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves. But that does not mean this kind of liberal tolerance that would put up with mindsets and practices of domination that would eliminate that very freedom. At the end of the day, though, want to retain the capacity for diversity because i think it gives us a capacity for freedom and i want as you know subcommandante marcos put it a world where many worlds exist yeah even **Andrew Sage:** as i reject certain forms that the world has taken and certain manifestations of diversity any clues and thoughts like **James Stout:** the world where many worlds can exist is i think the perfect way of looking at this right like we therefore don't want people who would create a world where the worlds cannot exist right but we gain so much from having and respecting and cherishing diversity rather than treating it through that tolerance framework which we both talked about like tolerance seems to imply like well we're doing it best but we'll let you do it your way as opposed to like genuinely cherishing diversity yeah --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts # Snips updated after 2026-09-24T14:23:14 ### [Diversity Is More Than Representation](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d63ae8ec-f462-49ca-97b7-cf70774164c7) 🎧 04:24 - 06:22 (01:57) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/61a7fe7c-1b95-4529-b207-72553d294759" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Diversity includes biological life, languages, cultures, and ways of organizing—not merely demographic representation. - Andrew Sage frames it as a condition that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible amid the sixth mass extinction. #### 💬 Quote > Diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on why diversity matters #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** I find that the word diversity has become so politically charged nowadays. You know, as a buzzword, as a dirty word. You know, we see it caught up in terms like DI, in the debates around immigration and representation, and all the culture wars that have captured so much of the attention as of late. But what has my attention recently, the kind of diversity that I want to focus on, is the diversity that we are losing, that we are critically losing. Right now we're living through what many scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction. Species are disappearing at a rate driven overwhelmingly by human activity. Languages are dying, indigenous knowledge is disappearing, and entire cultures have been erased, assimilated, or reduced to museum visas. We are, in our lif witnessing a profound loss of what author David Harmon calls biocultural diversity, the combined diversity of life and human culture. And all of this is happening at the same time that diversity itself has become so politically controversial. So the question I want to talk about today is why we should even care about diversity in the first place. Why does it matter that thousands of languages exist? Why should we care for species disappears? Why does it matter whether there are countless different ways for people to live and think and create and organize themselves? Typically we speak of diversity as an unquestioned value, as something that some people like or dislike, are opposed to or are in favor of politically. But I want to make a deeper argument that diversity is one of the fundamental conditions that makes life, creativity, and freedom possible. --- ### [Markets Cannot Price A Living Forest](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5fdc6126-2d09-4eb0-8816-fae824c5f74e) 🎧 08:15 - 09:58 (01:43) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/90e37c19-3c2d-448a-9706-cfae453ccf02" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Capitalism can price timber and road construction but cannot adequately value forests’ beauty, insects, plants, and noncommercial relationships. - What markets cannot quantify often receives insufficient protection, even when communities deeply depend on it. #### 💬 Quote > Because capitalism can't ascribe value to them, it sometimes fails to protect them. > — James Stout James Stout on capitalism and ecological value #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** I think that a lot of times as well, the conversation is really focused on diversity as it relates to people. But, you know, even before we get to diversity within our species, there is the diversity that, you know, transcends our species, the diversity of all the species of planet Earth. You know, the variation as a feature of the world we live in. Yeah, **James Stout:** I think that's also like super valuable, right? And in a way that we can't... I was thinking about this this morning, I was hiking this morning, and capitalism lacks a means to ascribe value to that kind of thing, right? Like I was thinking about that in the US, they've proposed to rescind the roadless rule, which allows you not to build roads into national forests in certain infantry roadless areas. And there is a way of ascribing value to timber, right? You can talk about board feet of timber, like, there is a way of ascribing cost to roads, right? We can estimate how much it will cost to build roads into this area. But like, isn't a way of ascribing value that works to the forest being there, to all the things in the forest that are not commercial timber being there, right? The plants, animals, **Andrew Sage:** the insects. It's like the quantifiable value versus like the unquantifiable value, basically. Yeah, **James Stout:** like they're not productive to capital, but they do give us something that is valuable. And because capitalism can't ascribe value to them, it sometimes fails to protect them, right? --- ### [Conservation Should Not Freeze The World](https://share.snipd.com/snip/24089459-5faa-4443-8a7a-b3b73e1fc1dd) 🎧 14:00 - 16:10 (02:09) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/5cfdbbb0-dd25-4d4c-a67d-dbdf1a3651e0" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Preserving diversity does not mean freezing ecosystems or cultures in place; change has always shaped both. - The better target is balance, rejecting the false choice between untouched wilderness and unrestricted exploitation. #### 💬 Quote > The correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special is like just fucking leave it, and the correct way to deal with everything else is just fucking pillage it. > — James Stout James Stout on rejecting the wilderness-or-exploitation binary #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** and you know as we speak of preserving preservation conservation i think there's a tendency within those who value diversity that can lead to a sort of a misdirection or it can lead to maybe a misplaced aspiration, I would say. Because obviously, change itself is not bad. You know, change is inevitable. Extinction has always been part of the history of life. Ecosystems have always been in flux, always evolving. The borders of, you know, ecosystems have been moving throughout deep time. Similarly, cultures have always evolved and mixed and some have faded away. So we can't necessarily reject change, right? And reject the processes by which cultures and environments may change, even in response to human intervention. You know, we look at the forests of North America, since we've been focusing on that example, and many of those forests were engineered, you know, by human activity, right? So the Amazon rainforest also shows some evidence of human engineering in terms of the terra preta, you know, the soils being this very rich soil that was deliberately designed by the indigenous peoples. Yeah. The **James Stout:** same with like, I've been reading a lot on indigenous cultural use of fire **Andrew Sage:** for **James Stout:** the last few weeks here since I got back from Spokane and thinking a lot about like how it's a very western perspective right to be like the wilderness is the thing that humans don't touch and have no engagement with and then everything else humans use as they wish like to create it as this binary distribution right of like the correct way to deal with places that are beautiful or special is like just fucking leave it and the correct way to deal with everything else is just fucking pillage it like there's a way to find balance that they're like we struggle with it under capitalism right like capitalism has struggled to provide us with that. --- ### [Speed Turns Ordinary Change Into Crisis](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a00b0970-4dce-4552-a414-c35f8adbf6cc) 🎧 16:39 - 18:10 (01:31) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/127cbb9f-5923-42ec-a8bc-d12e3ab262f9" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Human activity is dangerous less because change exists than because industrial change operates at unprecedented speed and scale. - Removing one foundational species can trigger cascading ecosystem effects, often before people recognize the danger. #### 💬 Quote > What is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place. It is the speed and the scale of that change. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on accelerating ecological loss #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** What is alarming about our current situation is not the change that is taking place. It is the speed and the scale of that change. You know, we don't know exactly how many species we are losing or have lost. We don't even know how many species currently exist. We could even talk about the definitions of species and how that taxonomic system has evolved with time. But for that discussion, I leave it to a book that I read on the subject that I quite enjoyed, which was In Light of Our Differences by David Harmon. But regardless, we are still talking about thousands to hundreds of thousands of species lost each year. And these are losses that are not happening in isolation because we know that every ecosystem is made up of relationships. They remove one species and you can risk disrupting everything connected to it. Thankfully, these systems are typically quite resilient. So a species loss doesn't have to lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem, but there are species that are foundational. You know, then the disappearance of that single species can trigger cascading effects that threaten the entire ecosystem. There's also often a lag between our realization that a species has fallen below its minimum viable population and the death of the final individual of that species. As you mentioned, the last passenger pigeon in the zoo, I was reminded of that. --- ### [A Language Opened A Different World](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e167ca74-350c-4e01-bf4f-ad4d5cd76d46) 🎧 25:04 - 28:00 (02:55) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/b1a5eea1-8b57-462c-badb-eae1c1194905" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - James Stout describes learning Cornish words for wildlife and natural phenomena from a Cornish anarchist. - The language’s sounds and categories offered a beautiful, intimate way to perceive relationships with animals and landscapes. #### 💬 Quote > There was so much beauty in seeing the world through the lens of that language, and it would be a real shame if we ever lost that. > — James Stout James Stout on learning Cornish #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** As you were mentioning, there are like, according to the ethnologue, at least 7,170 living languages in the world today. Our lowest underestimations of the amount of cultures, that is an accumulation of knowledge, values, customs, technology, social practices. Our lowest estimate of the number of cultures on earth is like 4,000. There are definitely, certainly more than that. Especially if we are using language as a proxy for cultural diversity right and even within languages there's tremendous cultural diversity yeah **James Stout:** biologically **Andrew Sage:** we have a lot of diversity as well neglected to mention you know blood types heights hair textures all of these have emerged across the continents we've spread out across. I mean, obviously the concentration of the diversity is in Africa where we began, but even our adaptations to different environments is a form of diversity that is necessary, you know, to maintain us. I'll get into some of the arguments for why later on. But, so I didn't know that Basque had all the different words for rain, but I am reminded, I think that there are different words in Inuit languages for describing snow. Yeah, **James Stout:** like the, I think it's in Yupiaq, have a bunch of words for snow and ice, and like different textures of it. I'm trying now to find Basque words for rain so I can remember some of them. Yeah. Lambró is drizzle or mist. I know zirimirí is like a light rain. It's like the noise it makes. I always thought that was a really sweet one. I had some fucking throwback. A Cornish anarchist who spoke cornish right one of the languages that is not hegemonic and it's probably relatively endangered even as a european languages go right i think it's probably having a better time now than it was when i was younger but it was relatively rare to encounter a cornish speaker **Andrew Sage:** cornish that's cornwall right **James Stout:** correct yeah. It was teaching me all these beautiful words for like different wildlife and different like natural phenomena that sort of have an onomatopoeic quality to them. But like for some reason, just like the sort of beautiful way that they showed of relating. I don't want to like noble, savage Cornish people, right? But I just thought that they showed a different way of understanding the world and our relationship with it and these animals and like how they appear. And like it struck me as really special that that person was like, like kept that knowledge and that that person shared that knowledge with me. And this was at some like event in Barcelona when I'm like, know 21 years old 19 years old something like that and it just really struck me that uh like there was so much beauty in seeing the world through the lens of that language and it would be a real shame if we ever lost that yeah --- ### [Language Loss Shrinks Humanity’s Library](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c216aa73-4910-40e4-94b3-b8f47dc8b6ea) 🎧 30:27 - 32:31 (02:03) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/5ea51a11-4cab-4a74-acd6-132d886e91ac" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Nation-building and economic pressure have concentrated billions of people into a small number of dominant languages. - Losing a language also loses distinctive categories, meanings, and cultural knowledge that translation cannot fully recover. #### 💬 Quote > We all lose when we don't have that diversity. > — James Stout James Stout on linguistic diversity #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** You know, I'm glad all the languages that still exist and still give us you know these words for things because if nation states had their way there would be like 10 languages left on earth yeah **James Stout:** i'm **Andrew Sage:** being dramatic but you know right now most of humanity speaks a relatively small number of languages the 23 most spoken mother languages account for like four billion people somewhere around there wow and then the 200 most spoken languages are over 88 percent of the world's population that's **James Stout:** crazy and **Andrew Sage:** this is of course due to nation building due to economic pressures, you know, globalization, basically everywhere, the pressures of the status quo have led to indigenous and regional languages, minority languages disappearing. And if not for the concerted efforts of these language communities to maintain their way of speaking and to pass it down we would have lost so many more as it is yeah **James Stout:** definitely as **Andrew Sage:** you mentioned by the way the the words that you've picked up over over the years from different languages and your attempts to explain those words to me i was reminded of a book of fiction that i'd read i think, about two years ago. It's a book called Babel by R.F. Kuang. And it's kind of like a fantasy historical fiction where a Chinese student goes to this school in England and the magic of that world is translation. The sort of energy that gets picked up the magic that they're able to wield is through the translation from one language to another. And the fact that because translation is not a one-to process, the kind of nuances and, you know, meanings and subtexts and connotations that they get lost or gained in the process are potent. --- ### [Consumer Choice Can Hide Cultural Erasure](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5ae790b9-22a8-4a23-80cb-1c264cfde3b3) 🎧 36:11 - 37:31 (01:20) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/f2304d9a-cbb6-408a-8d7f-2224a3f6030d" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Colonialism, state-building, and market globalization standardize cultures through assimilation, industrial efficiency, and manufactured consumer tastes. - Supermarket variety can disguise deeper losses as minority cultures, languages, and practices disappear. #### 💬 Quote > There are cultures that are literally going extinct. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on globalization and cultural homogenization #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** When it comes to cultural diversity and its losses, which, you know, coincide with the losses of biodiversity, we see the impact of colonialism destroying societies through conquest and genocide and assimilation and the very same environmental changes. We've seen an ethnician building try to forge a single national identity at the expense of regional and minority cultures. And then of course with globalization, not in the sense of cultural exchange across distances, as that has always existed, but specifically the kind that has been driven by markets and state power and industrial efficiency, which enforces standardization across places. You know, it's easier for these capitalists, for these multinationals to manufacture the same products and market the same brands and basically flatten language and flatten cultural expectations across places. So they even would manufacture consumer tastes in a way that benefits their bottom line. You know, now you get to pick between streaming services or, you know, you have a whole bunch of different varieties of cereal in your supermarkets, and that is what is counted as economic freedom. --- ### [Connectivity Can Expand And Flatten Culture](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7eabcf7b-f889-43d3-8199-2676b395343c) 🎧 41:44 - 46:36 (04:52) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/447e8567-0573-4dc1-8137-73246ea8c687" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - James Stout has watched smartphones, Starlink, and social media make even remote communities engage with a highly hegemonic internet. - He wants people to access the wider world without abandoning Kurdish, Indigenous, or other local ways of seeing. #### 💬 Quote > I wish they could engage with the world in Embara. > — James Stout James Stout on technology and cultural preservation #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** Now, I had a question for you about this subject, because you are admittedly a bit older than me. It's **James Stout:** true. And sadly. **Andrew Sage:** Right. But I'm curious, have you witnessed like in real time the loss of this kind of diversity through globalization? So I see like for me, I remember having like copies of older magazines and I could, I could see through those that, you know, the world was, the places genuinely felt very different, very unique. And as I've come up with social media, I've seen places have kind of homogenized. Everything was starting to look the same. And let's not even talk about the impact of like ai slop oh yeah but yeah what have you seen yeah **James Stout:** like it's one of those things that like you do see the like the impact of the smartphone is huge right at a second level the impact of starlink is massive much more than I think most people living in the colonial core would realize, right? Like more people have access to the internet through smartphones and have electricity in their homes. And like the internet is a very hegemonic place, right? Like there are probably seven or eight languages the internet's really good in that like you could really access the internet in and that really has made a difference with the way young people engage with the external world right right **Andrew Sage:** i **James Stout:** guess i've also seen like a uh a reclamation of some of that and it's a thing that's largely happened like within uh the colonial core to the greatest extent right like the um the so-called the europe of nations hypothesis right like one of the languages i can uh speak and read and and write in is catalan and like this is an example of a language that like was ruthlessly suppressed by the Francoist regime. Same with Basque, same with other like non-Spanish languages in Iberia. Right. And like now that is a primary language of instruction for most Catalan students. Like in my lifetime, my time spending time in Catalonia, I see infinitely more people speaking Catalan than I used to. I remember, there's like an anecdote about this in my dissertation, but some young Syrian kids who would always speak to me in Catalan. They played football outside my archive, right? Like, so we'd be kicking the football around. And it's cool that this language that had once very nearly been destroyed is now like hegemonicic it was cool at the time catalan nationalism but like every other nationalism has some qualities which i don't like but like it was cool that at the time there was a an acceptance of people especially like these kids who spoke catalan happened to have been born in syria right but like they were catalan as much as anyone else like it wasn't a uh an ethnic definition of nation right but at the same time yeah i've definitely seen that diversity lost in terms of so many things like foods yeah i **Andrew Sage:** feel like there has been a marginalization of palates as well 100 right especially with the proliferation of fast foods yeah **James Stout:** yeah exactly like fast cheap high calorie food that stores easily i mean the example i guess is like look at what they've done to bread over the time of my life right like uh look at how like sliced white what we would have called american bread is now like the global standard, right? But like all those other bread products that people used to make, like it can be very hard to get like freshly made tortillas. It's possible where I live, right? But it's not, I imagine if you live in like Minnesota, just like the little moments of beauty that they gave you in your day that are gone. But yeah, also the big things. Like I watched kids watching TikTok in the Darien Gap. That wouldn't have been possible seven or eight years ago. Right. Wow. I don't quite know when Starlink was widely distributed, but that makes a difference to people, right? Like their cultural world is, they're now engaging with the external world, not just through their own culture, through the internet. And I want those people to have everything I have, to be clear, right? Like I want them to be able to see the whole world. **Andrew Sage:** Yeah, you don't want to like seal them, vacuum seal them as some kind of museum exhibit of what once it was. **James Stout:** Exactly, yeah. But like, I also wish that they could have it the way I have it, which is that like, I was born in England and I engage with the world in English. I wish they could engage with the world in Embara. I wish Kurdish people can engage with the world in whichever type of Kurdish they speak. --- ### [Diversity Creates Resilience And Possibility](https://share.snipd.com/snip/038fbf53-02ce-491b-8c7c-491406231b29) 🎧 47:57 - 51:03 (03:06) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/9f682e55-5e37-479a-9996-3b604cff0a5e" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Diverse ecosystems, immune systems, and cultures remain resilient because variation supplies alternatives when conditions change. - Every culture represents generations of experiments, giving humanity more creative and scientific material than a single standardized worldview. #### 💬 Quote > Every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on cultural diversity as accumulated knowledge #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** we've already sort of hinted at some of the reasons why i think we should care about this loss of diversity you know and I could even spot off a few more. And diversity makes our living systems more resilient. I think it's a very key one. In our ecosystems, every species has its niche and they can compete and cooperate and recycle nutrients. And everything is just part of one larger network. And the more diverse that network is, the more it has to respond to disruption. Diversity gives ecosystems options. We see that in comparison to the monocultures, the monocultural approach to farming that has dominated much of the world and the economy inputs that approach requires. We look at how vulnerable that approach is to disease and changes in climate conditions. In terms of genetic diversity, we can point to the fact that, you know, if every human immune system works in exactly the same way, a pathogen that evolved to bypass one person's immune system could bypass everyone's. And so our biological differences create the variation in how diseases spread and keep us as a whole safe, keep our existence as a whole secure. Even within my own family, I've noticed that some people are more susceptible and others more resistant to different diseases. You know, when a virus passes into my household, there are some people who get sick and some people don't. And it changes each time, despite the fact that we are so close genetically. And so again, we see that diversity creates resilience. And even if we wanted to take it from like a coldly utilitarian perspective, that resilience is a value. It has utility, you know, and an individual instance of a species or of a culture might have value in a way that we don't realize until it's gone. We become poorer as a whole. We lose possibilities when we lose languages, when we lose cultures, when we lose species. Every culture represents literally thousands of experiments accumulated over generations in what it means to live as a human being. We may like some more than others, you know, I'm not a relativist in the sense that I will turn a blind eye to things that I find morally objectionable in Sydney cultures. But I can recognize that every culture has something that adds to our library of experiences. And I would rather have that full library than a single shelf of books. It's a really good **James Stout:** way of saying it. **Andrew Sage:** Having that full library gives us more raw material to think with, to create art with, to do science with. If you like the arts, you know, you will like diversity because that innovation in the arts and in the sciences emerges from everything that came before. Diversity is a foundation for future creativity and innovation. --- ### [Different Minds Solve Harder Problems](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc9ac907-7bb8-49f8-abc1-faa6cf240603) 🎧 51:47 - 54:45 (02:58) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/5d0f2b25-78df-42a4-ad2e-f0e0fc36a119" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Scott Page’s research suggests cognitively diverse groups can outperform uniformly brilliant groups on complex, experimental problems. - Identity diversity often expands cognitive diversity because different social experiences produce different tools, heuristics, and models. #### 💬 Quote > Getting a group of people who approach a problem differently will outperform a group of people who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on Scott Page’s research #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** I'll add that, you know, we were speaking about biodiversity and cultural diversity, what Harman goes, biocultural diversity, but there's also the value of cognitive diversity. You know, we have different opinions, but we might also perceive and categorize and solve problems in generally different ways. And having different perspectives, different interpretations, different heuristics, different predictive models, what Scott E. Page calls cognitive toolboxes in his book, The Difference. You know, these give us an opportunity to solve problems in unique ways. You know, we're not all going to have the same tools and what tools I may lack another person may have. And it's not always necessarily a requirement that you just get the smartest person to solve the problem. In fact, as Page's research suggests, getting a group of people who approach a problem differently will outperform a group of people who are made up of individually brilliant people who all think in roughly the same way. Now, Page's make the bold claim that cognitive diversity is always the best approach because he does distinguish between, you know, routine, regular tasks and tasks that require like more experimentation and creativity and multiple competing ideas. So in those cases where you need that diversity of ways of thinking to solve complex problems in transportation, in dealing with climate change, in developing medicines. You know, we don't want everybody to be thinking alike. Another thing that Paige points out is that while cognitive diversity and identity diversity are not one-to there is overlap between the concepts because people who grow up in different environments and have different experiences and opportunities and social positions are more likely to develop different ways of seeing the world. So if we recognize that cognitive diversity is valuable for solving complex problems, then prejudice is a practical failure as well as a moral failure. One of the things that I wanted to address, and I kind of alluded to it earlier when I said that I'm not really a relativist, is that while I do value diversity, I definitely don't think that every form is worth celebrating. You know, I believe a healthy society should have space for different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves. But that does not mean this kind of liberal tolerance that would put up with mindsets and practices of domination that would eliminate that very freedom. --- ### [Protect Diversity From Those Who Erase It](https://share.snipd.com/snip/97e8b6f8-5adc-45d6-90e7-e117d8ae0dbb) 🎧 54:07 - 55:43 (01:36) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/e1be8da1-03e6-4853-81af-b6f54b8c0b93" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Valuing diversity does not require accepting domination, coercion, or practices that would eliminate others’ freedom. - The goal is a world where many worlds can coexist, rather than liberal tolerance that merely permits difference from a position of superiority. #### 💬 Quote > We want a world where many worlds can exist. > — Andrew Sage Andrew Sage on diversity and freedom #### 📚 Transcript **Andrew Sage:** One of the things that I wanted to address, and I kind of alluded to it earlier when I said that I'm not really a relativist, is that while I do value diversity, I definitely don't think that every form is worth celebrating. You know, I believe a healthy society should have space for different ways of thinking and living and organizing ourselves. But that does not mean this kind of liberal tolerance that would put up with mindsets and practices of domination that would eliminate that very freedom. At the end of the day, though, want to retain the capacity for diversity because i think it gives us a capacity for freedom and i want as you know subcommandante marcos put it a world where many worlds exist yeah even **Andrew Sage:** as i reject certain forms that the world has taken and certain manifestations of diversity any clues and thoughts like **James Stout:** the world where many worlds can exist is i think the perfect way of looking at this right like we therefore don't want people who would create a world where the worlds cannot exist right but we gain so much from having and respecting and cherishing diversity rather than treating it through that tolerance framework which we both talked about like tolerance seems to imply like well we're doing it best but we'll let you do it your way as opposed to like genuinely cherishing diversity yeah ---