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Quotes About Diversity

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.
~ Steven Johnson
for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
~ Steven Johnson
Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.
~ Steven Johnson
Like every big idea, Birdseye's breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye's idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.
~ Steven Johnson
Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.
~ Steven Johnson
Ronald Burt, looked at the origin of good ideas inside the organizational network of the Raytheon Corporation. Burt found that innovative thinking was much more likely to emerge from individuals who bridged "structural holes" between tightly knit clusters. Employees who primarily shared information with people in their own division had a harder time coming up with useful suggestions
~ Steven Johnson
Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won't be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there's an entire button-store district.
~ Steven Johnson
where small niches can flourish.
~ Steven Johnson
Build a tangled bank.
~ Steven Johnson
a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
~ Steven Johnson
Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
~ Steven Johnson
The individuals in the high-IQ group might have scored better individually on intelligence tests, but when it came to solving problems as a group, diversity matters more than individual brainpower.
~ Steven Johnson
when we look back to the original innovation engine on earth, we find two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a "randomizing" environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system.
~ Steven Johnson
The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.
~ Steven Johnson
be one of the key functions of the lab conference. In Dunbar's research, outsiders working on different problems were much less likely to dismiss the apparent error as useless noise. Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the "correct" result was supposed to be, allowed them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful.
~ Steven Johnson
good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.
~ Steven Johnson
The flavor is surprisingly poly-tribe, which is new slang for the global mash-up, the hybridization of signs, styles, and meanings that is somehow now: Liberty International Airport, Newark, New Jersey.
~ Steven Kotler
For if I am interesting to you precisely to the extent that I'm not one of you, then your desire to civilize me, to turn me into a good citizen of Nuremberg, can lead to nothing but loss of interest.
~ Steven Millhauser
Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.
~ Steven Pinker
So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species.
~ Steven Pinker
What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.
~ Steven Pinker
The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs.
~ Steven Pinker
Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.
~ Steven Pinker
The final word on the political non-implications of group differences must go to Gloria Steinem: "There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all the other occupations should be open to everyone.
~ Steven Pinker