Searching For Red M&M’s

Genius is evenly distributed in society. We just don’t develop it evenly. — Mitch Kapor

Diversity is a very important thing. Not just because it makes us feel good, but also because it’s good for the economy, society, and the world.

Paul Graham wrote an essay arguing for open borders as a way to improve the talent pool of programmers for Silicon Valley companies. This is a generalizable comment about the value of encouraging diversity in organizations[1]. It amounts to this — most of the talented people in your field don’t work at your company. Or more generally, talented people won’t look like any one sub-group.

Here’s a thought experiment to explain what I mean. Imagine you have a million M&M’s and they’re randomly distributed among 1,000 cups. If you love red M&M’s and you want to find all of them you’d obviously look through all the cups. What our current system does is to look at the cups where the red M&M’s make up the top layer and then proposes without verification that these are the only cups with red M&M’s. That’s a bad way of doing things.

If we know that we’re not tapping into the full scope of our societal genius, what should we do? We should search for new, creative ways of identifying hidden talent. Once we’ve discovered that talent we need to nurture and develop it. It’s not only good for the student, it ends up being critically important for society. We’ll need many Albert Einstein’s in the future and they’ll be all different shapes, colors, and genders.

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[1] Actually, the argument that talent is normally distributed across race for instance is stronger than Graham’s argument that talent is normally distributed geographically. You can choose where you live, but you can’t choose how you’re made.