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A very strange 2,900-word job advert, posted yesterday by top U.K. government adviser Dominic Cummings, has caused quite a stir.
In a key passage, he claims to be looking for “weirdos and misfits" to run the British Civil Service. He then goes on to clarify that people
“talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity.’ They are usually babbling about ‘gender identity diversity blah blah.’ What [we need] is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity. We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university [...] you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news about fake news.”
The ad makes many contentious claims that have attracted lots of pertinent criticisms (it also reads like its designed to attract Bond villains). The issue I want to focus on here regards the importance of cognitive diversity, which has mostly been met with bafflement and ridicule.
On the one hand, the reaction is understandable. Common sense tells us it is bizarre to prefer "weirdos" over Oxford or Cambridge graduates. After all, we are typically told that the best and brightest go to universities such as these; and in turn, that such universities sharpen the minds of these talented individuals, leaving them uniquely well-prepared to join the workforce.
The issue with this apparent common sense is that if you take a group of people who all, say, studied at the same university, or have very similar backgrounds, then they might not be very diverse in how they think. And this might lead to a kind of collective blindness even if each individual is smart and well educated.
This is supported, for instance, by Reynolds et al (2017) who reported in the Harvard Business Review that they found a “significant correlation between high cognitive diversity and high performance” in groups trying to solve complex problems. Likewise, another recent study by Aggarwal et al (2019) found a positive linear relationship between cognitive diversity and collective intelligence. In other words, science strongly supports the notion that cognitively diverse groups perform better than cognitively uniform groups, even if the latter are individually superior by conventional standards.
But where Cummings is absolutely wrong is in his claim that promoting gender diversity is mere "drivel," somehow at odds with promoting a genuine diversity of thought. In fact, gender diversity, just like diversity in class, race, and neurology, is a key contributor to genuine cognitive diversity.
This is explored in Matthew Syed’s recent book Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, where he shows precisely that our more traditional forms of diversity are intimately intertwined with cognitive with diversity. One of his many examples is Bletchley Park, where British analysts worked together during World War II to break Nazi codes. As Syed persuasively shows, key in the success of the Bletchley Park team was that it included many women (by the standards of the day), leading to a wider frame of collective reference from which to decipher coded Nazi messages. By contrast, Nazi code-breakers were far less diverse, and thus far less successful.
The real issue is not, then, Cummings' rejection of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in favour of weirdos and misfits. Rather, it is the false dichotomy he suggests between cognitive diversity and gender diversity. Cummings is trying to use the rhetoric of cognitive diversity to suppress the purported need for gender diversity, but in reality, the two go hand in hand.
