Posted to Entropy Arbitrage: The Barnes & Noble “Diverse Covers” Thing https://john.colagioia.net/blog/media/2020/02/09/afam-lit.html #books #diversity #blackhistorymonth #publicdomain #readinglist

I can’t believe I have to say this, but ‘polarization’ and ‘diversity’ are not synonyms.

Double Standards and Diverse Media - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__ctRfI7cuM

How capitalism reduced diversity to a brand - Vox https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/2/11/18195868/capitalism-race-diversity-exploitation-nancy-leong

Trendism follows the logic of capital. The more capital you have, the less risk any investment is & the more you stand to gain from it. Given a diverse portfolio, a large investment will grow while a small one disappears: capital’s gravity at work.

Hot take: anything with more than 200 people in it is necessarily too diverse and internally schismatic to be called a ‘community’ – if it has shared norms, it’s at best a ‘subculture’, & if those norms are being imposed by a corporation, it’s not even that.

I feel like I’m repeating myself when I say: knowing the ideological diversity of your enemy is TACTICALLY USEFUL because, when observed closely, any group large enough to be politically powerful is full of hidden fault lines and tense cease-fires

Hot take: the ‘great books’ model of liberal education is insufficiently liberal, not because the ‘great books’ are insufficiently diverse but because the canons students engage with are insufficiently different from each other.

Algorithmic glass ceiling in social networks: the effects of social recommendations on network diversity | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/05/24/algorithmic-glass-ceiling-in-social-networks-the-effects-of-recommendation-on-social-diversity/

What’s Really at Stake in the Battle for “Ideological Diversity” at Elite Media Outlets https://theintercept.com/2018/04/10/kevin-williamson-atlantic-ideological-diversity/

the society for topological diversity admits earthers of all convictions: round, flat (all projections), ovoid, piroid, potatoid

USA PATRIOT Act
A lot has been said and written about the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act”, commonly known as USA PATRIOT Act, but they are quite diverse interpretations —some biased—, mainly because the whole Act is written on 300 pages of legalese. Recently I found the Electronic Frontier Foundation page about such Act, which sums it up in the following points (as far as why should … ⌘ Read more