> I'm a little uncomfortable with how quickly you decided to label these thoughts racist/xenophobic; but I'd like to better understand where that comes from.

Right, and that's totally fair!

I don't know that Lynn is racist or xenophobic, and I'm unsure whether I believe that he is for sure. But I find his statement to be... curious, to say the least.

My point was that this kind of rhetoric — "Diversity isn't that important"; "Diversity doesn't lead to anything particularly good"; "Diversity doesn't do XYZ thing that people says it does" — is often common amongst racists/xenophobes who are attempting to hide their true opinion (that non-white people are inherently lesser or worse than white people). It's a way of phrasing their thoughts in a way that's not obviously offensive. People think "Yeah, I guess that makes sense!" and suddenly diversity is valued less than it ought to be.

You said that "Lynn's stating that he hasn't seen any clear examples of where diversity led to innovation", and this is definitely true on a factual level — Lynn is merely stating that he hasn't seen such evidence. But I would argue that he may not have been looking for such evidence. Here's a hypothetical scenario: perhaps Lynn was a developer who worked in a company where the vast majority of developers and employees in general were straight white males. The products they produce are good stuff, and seem innovative enough. Therefore, Lynn concludes that "innovation [doesn't necessarily] come from diversity."

Lynn could very well just be another guy blinded by what is now commonly described as "white privilege" — essentially he is unable to see the positive effects that his being white has granted him compared to non-white people because the situations he exposes himself to do not exemplify anything else. Or he could be a racist/xenophobe who is relying on people like you to say "Well he probably didn't mean it that way" and give him a free pass.

The reason I lean towards the latter is because of his choice to utilize this opinion to then build a political platform. It seems unlikely that someone would both (a) feel that diversity is not really that important because of their background but also (b) choose to use that opinion to build a political platform. The people who build political platforms have strong convictions, more often than not. And what kind of person has strong convictions about diversity not being important?

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Here's something else to think about. A common opinion of people like Lynn (based on what little I know from the article) is that all hiring decisions should be 100% merit-based.

At first glance, this seems totally reasonable, right? Why would we not want a meritocracy?

Consider the IQ test as a counter-example. The stated purpose of an IQ test is to measure a person's intellectual capabilities relative to an average baseline. The stated purpose has nothing to do with race or culture or anything like that.

And yet... IQ tests are almost all inherently prejudiced against large groups of people. If we go back to some of the earlier tests, they're really essentially racist. That's because the tests were written by smart white males to measure the capabilities of other people relative to those same smart white males. They gave English grammar tests to non-native English speakers. They gave math tests to people who had never been taught math. And then they passed off the results in a way that indicated that other people were less than they were.

I readily admit that in a field like computer science, it's a little easier to come up with more fair measures of ability. But I think that the current mentality is very similar to that of the "scientists" who gave IQ tests back in the day, and that concerns me greatly. I think we should focus more on inclusivity and diversity in the short-term and restore meritocracy in the future when there are fewer historical prejudices at play.

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Sorry I wrote so much, and sorry it took me so long to respond! I always forget to check my comments on HN. Is there no way to get notifications for responses like I get on Reddit? Kind of a pain haha.