mnhn1

It sounds like you're skeptical about the business case, I was just pointing out that article did provide you with one.

I don't know the answers to your questions. Though I agree the article doesn't back up the claim that layoffs are reducing diversity, except possibly indirectly by references to Twitter, where there are claims layoffs disproportionately affected women.

Maybe we should read it and find out, I haven't, was just quoting the article.

> The causality could easily be the other way around.

Of course it could, though I've come to find this critique pretty weak when two people discuss a study that neither of them has read. You can say it about any topline conclusion about things that are correlated.

The driving factor could be something else - profitable companies could be more attractive to a diverse workforce.

Probably we oughta read the study. I was just pointing out that parent was looking for a business case for diversity in and of itself and seemed to have missed the one the article attempted to provide.

> According to a McKinsey report, nurturing organizational diversity leads to higher profit margins. The most diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% in profitability.

>"DEIB leads to employee retention, which means there are actually savings on keeping employees in the company longer versus spending money on recruitment to fill those roles..."

These are two points contained within the article, in the paragraphs leading up to the conclusion.

HR is not there to solve your problems. HR is there to protect the company.

It's fine to be friendly with HR (some wonderful people work there), but remember who is paying them and whose interests they are supposed to look out for first. Definitely not yours.

HR wants all the info they can get from you. They will cheerfully listen to everything you tell them. And then they will do their job, which is to analyze the situation for potential risks around legal exposure, and take steps to mitigate those risks.

I would basically never bring HR in to a problem unless you are very confident that solving your problem and the goal of protecting the company are truly in alignment. Maybe retraining the manager is better for the company, but who knows. They can also solve their problem by removing the new employee who is being treated badly.

These contexts don't change the idea in rule 1, but they do change the definition of what is "necessary". There are words that "dilute" a message and are not necessary to convey the literal meaning. But usually we don't want just the literal meaning of things, we want a certain level of dilution. Without it, prose can be clear and specific, but at the same time becomes dense and unreadable. Lots of academic writing is like that.

There are words that are necessary for the _overall effect_, even if not necessary for the literal communication goal of a set of words.

People don't consume healthcare "all the time" the same way they do food, housing, water. Preventive healthcare is cheaper/less work than treating illnesses that have gotten more serious, leading to less total consumption of healthcare (and those other downstream resources impacted by people avoiding preventive care). Also "Free healthcare available to all" doesn't preclude a private market. The Govt Healthcare is not always timely, may not cover treatments people want, or cover certain elective surgeries. Some people will always choose to participate in a private insurance market that provides value above a baseline govt health plan.

I don't think it's inconsistent. The people who advocate for free healthcare would probably also advocate for other parts of a social safety net, like food banks, food stamp programs, free access to water, temporary housing for the homeless and programs to get them to permanent homes, etc.

And indeed the US has many such services, though they are often overwhelmed, or performed through a complex set of nonprofits combining govt funds with donor money as best they can to provide good support. Sometimes they are overwhelmed specifically because of externalities related to the for-profit insurance healthcare system. The high and often unpredictable cost of any medical situation, means people with tight budgets become sicker before getting care, if they ever get it, leading to a higher percentage of bad outcomes, up to and including job loss and homelessness for the individual, and knock-on effects for the rest of their family. This puts extra pressure on the parts of the support system that do exist - those already mentioned, and, of course, the police, who end up getting called to many situations that could have been prevented by the people involved having better services to begin with, to meet their health, food, and housing needs.

Sure. There's also the converse situation where people who speak in tonal languages might not develop associations with melodic patterns in speech and any strong meta-meaning, since in those languages, pitch is actually carrying top-level meaning.

People who have congenital amusia, iirc, also tend to struggle with understanding tone languages. It seems true that if you aren't able to distinguish pitch well, you aren't good at encoding/decoding messages that are present through the medium of pitch differences.

I didn't mean to suggest above that this is a general thing for all humans. Like every other recreational stimulate-the-senses activity, some people don't actually care for it/aren't affected by it anyway.

> people never musicalize conversational speech

I found this assertion confusing. Speech in say, English (just to narrow it down), is musical inherently. The pitch and rhythm of a speaking voice, especially how they change while an individual is speaking, is meaningful meta-information about what is being said, and how the speaker feels about it, or what they mean by what they say.

We _absolutely_ use the music of everyday speech to create emphasis, for example, and in many other ways. Actors use pitch and rhythm when speaking to convey emotions. It is often the musical content of speech that makes or breaks the performance. Mismatching speech melodies with the dialog sounds all wrong.

I dunno, 10 years or so ago I wrote a whole MA thesis on this exact subject. It's long enough ago (and I've not stayed in the field I was in) that I've long forgotten many of the sources, but there is plenty of stuff out there that deals with speech and music.

To veer off into pure opinion: I definitely think music gains some of its emotional impact by virtue of its relationship to speech, given that we can interpret so much from the music of speech itself, and if that kind of metadata is presented _independently_ of natural speech, there's often something pleasing or interesting about about that. We also are super good at listening for other meaningful sounds though, like things that might kill us.

My two cents is that music, like other art and things like sports or games, leverages senses, instincts, and skills that evolved initially for other purposes, and uses them recreationally, playfully. To varying degrees, humans seem to like stimulating and playing with their senses in different ways.

I'm not convinced that the attempt to explain it the way the author does is worthwhile. Parts of it ring true and parts of it (like the role of discerning truth and the claim that people don't musicalize their speech) I think are off track, and maybe also constrained by a far too limited perspective of what music is in the first place.