by Scott E. Page
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In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup. Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Diversity Makes a Difference, 2008-08-02
In his latest book, "The Difference", Scott Page does a magnificent job of tackling the issue of whether or not there are any real benefits to having a diverse and inclusive learning or workplace environment; or is it all about political correctness. Page takes a scientific approach to showing how and why it is important to have people teamed together who see things differently and process information differently. He defines, models, and links both identity differences and cognitive differences. He shows how diverse teams often come to more creative and effective solutions than teams composed of people who all have similar backrounds,education and experiences. This book takes a complex subject and turns it into easy reading.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Cognitive Diversity (Not Identity Diversity Per Se) Helps in Solving Difficult Problems, 2008-07-17
This remarkable book is chock-full of insights and surprising implications, but precisely for this reason it also runs the risk of being misinterpreted in various ways, especially by those who read it through ideological lenses or, more commonly perhaps, read it too casually. For example, some readers might get the impression that Page is not playing fair with his assumptions, that he is "rigging the game" to push an egalitarian, antielitist agenda--specifically, that he deliberately populates his models with agents whose abilities are defined so as to guarantee that diversity trumps ability.
The attentive reader will appreciate, however, how carefully Page qualifies his conclusions; in point of fact, he does not maintain that diversity always trumps ability. There are two issues here, one logical and the other empirical. Page clearly explains that the diversity-trumps-ability conclusion holds only if the problem is difficult--that is, a problem for which no individual problem solver always locates the global optimum. As a matter of logic, the "rigging-the-game" argument does no damage to the model because it allows one to define ability so as to make the problem nondifficult. However, as a matter of practicality, the extent to which diversity actually trumps ability is an empirical question, which Page confronts head on.
Throughout the book, Page offers anecdotal evidence of diversity's value, but in a chapter aptly titled "The Empirical Evidence" he reviews more systematically the academic research into the effects of diversity. The literature is voluminous, and he presents a fair and balanced overview. The evidence essentially shows that diversity does bring expected benefits, but not always and not always very strongly when it does. Diversity's power depends in part on the situation. If we look exclusively at firms that innovate, we do find returns from diversity, but there is no evidence and no reason to expect that diversity behind the counter at Burger King leads to a better way to slice onions or spread ketchup. Page concludes, fairly I believe, that the benefits of diversity are real in no small number of situations and that they are worth pursuing within a reasonable cost-versus-benefit framework.
Does Page advocate the "diversity" of political correctness? Here again, the casual or the ideological reader might be given to false inference. As usual, Page treats the issue with caution, fairness, and a much needed dose of clear thinking.
Diversity in the context of political correctness means different things to different people, of course, but those who equate diversity with feel-good notions of inclusiveness and sensitivity or "payback" affirmative-action policies should pay special attention to Page's discussion of identity diversity, which refers to differences related to the racial, cultural, religious, gender, and other "identities" into which we sort ourselves (and each other). This type of diversity is not, strictly speaking, the sort of cognitive diversity formally modeled in the logic of diversity. Page carefully points out that for identity diversity to operate positively in his analysis, it must correlate with cognitive diversity. Whether identity diversity thus results in better group performance is another one of those empirical questions. Across many studies, the evidence is that on average the performance of identity-diverse groups and that of homogeneous groups is roughly the same. However, studies also show that in situations where creativity and innovation are especially important, identity-diverse groups do often excel.
But the ledger has two sides, and there must be offsetting entries in the negative column if average performance turns out to be no better for identity-diverse groups. Identity diversity sometimes leads to problems with group dynamics to the detriment of group performance. Studies have shown that mixing identity groups can lead to uncooperative behavior, communication problems, and other unintended consequences that swamp any gains owing to cognitive diversity.
This is not to say that affirmative-action policies designed to encourage diversity are necessarily undesirable. Page certainly draws no such conclusion; in fact, he seems to come down on the other side: "[W]e just haven't figured out how to get along . . . and when we do, diversity improves performance. We just have to get on those bikes and learn to ride" (p. 328). Cognitive diversity is presumably then free to work its magic unencumbered by racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and all the other "isms" that undermine the cooperative enterprise. A modicum of empirical support justifies this optimistic presumption. Nevertheless, one wonders if learning to get along implies eventually losing also the cognitive differences we wish to exploit....
THE DIFFERENCE is a very good book. I recommend it to all intelligent readers, especially to those who have not gone beyond the "diversity" of political correctness. As Bill Miller says on the book's dust jacket, "[I]f you haven't read it, you are just talking metaphor." Read this book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Book: The Difference, 2008-02-09
This is an excellent book and should be read by all. This is documentation to support the importance for diversity in everything we do. Thank you, Dr. Page
2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
 Lost Me with the Math, but Important, Very Important, 2007-12-29
There are other great reviews. My focus is on an editorial comment for context, and links to other relevant books, which I am surprised that more reviewers do not provide, making mine the sole structured "web of books" review.
America's strength, despite some violent genocidal and anti-immigrant periods, has always been its ability to assimilate diversity and make the most of it. That ended when America and Europe failed to remember hiswtory (the Spanish Expulsion Edits) and allowed Muslim idiot immams to preach murder and sedition from pulpits in the USA to US citizens. The FBI refused to act, Steve emerson got fired for his 1994 PBS expose, and so we got 9-11 and "closed neighborhoods" far worse than the drug-dealer owned neighborhoods across America. See also my review of The Web of Inclusion: Architecture for Building Great Organizations and the books at the end of this review.
This book is a very important contribution to the somewhat stupid policy platitudes on immigration reform. Immigration reform is NOT rocket science. Here are the key points, richly supported by this book:
1) Diversity trumps individual ability as a wealth generator.
2) Complex systems with diversity are more resilitent and adaptive than those without.
3) Enforce the labor law and demand fair trade (not free trade) with labor standards and anti-toxin standards world-wide.
4) Announce a sniper fence and kill the first hundred that do not turn back after a warning shot at their feet, and that problem goes away overnight. [My CIA Mid-Career Course 101 got a nigh tour of the border--they cross because they know they have a 9 out of 10 chance of making it, and if they get caught, they get released back into Mexico to try again--this is idiocy, and if we can afford an Army, we can afford another 25,000 border guards as Steve Flynn has been saying for years in The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation
5) Make citizenship for those here now contingent on two years of national service for all adults and children as they turn 18 (choice of Armed Service, Peace Corps, or Homeland Servie).
I have an early note on this book, which inspires deep reflection, ""I like the structure of this book very much."
Most interestingly to me, this book tries, generally successfully, to build bridges among scientific and mathematics proofs of diversity's value, social diversity, information diversity, and values diversity. It's tough going, but on balance, I consider the author gifted and the book important.
See also:
A New Kind of Science
The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology)
Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
An important book, 2007-08-26
The Difference is a surprising book in that it is written in a manner that is is approachable by a fairly broad audience, but it does not sacrifice much in the way of the rigor that is expected from a book written for an academic audience. I am glad that this is the case, as this book deserves a wide readership. It provides a systematic case for the practical benefits of diversity. Insofar as we can think of ourselves as facing sufficiently difficult epistemic problems - particularly those of prediction - we can make ourselves better off by ensuring that our groups of problem-solvers are diverse in relevant respects. Page puts forth two major claims in the book, but unlike most, his claims are backed both by computer simulation and mathematical proof. The first claim is that diverse agents can do better in predictive problems than homogeneous groups. The second, far more interesting claim, is that diverse groups can do better than groups comprised of the most "able". Naturally, these claims must be understood within their scope. Page is scrupulous about demonstrating when these theorems obtain and when they do not.
This book is particularly exciting for its potential to change the frame of several large debates. Insofar as his theorems can apply to real social situations, we can see that, for purely epistemic reasons, we all have something to gain from diverse teams and societies.
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