Lack of intellectual diversity leads to systemic incompetence and failure

Take China, for instance.

This past week's headlines were dominated by a Chinese spy balloon that was belatedly shot down by our military with a quarter-billion-dollar F-22 Raptor and a quarter-million-dollar AIM-9 Sidewinder missile after transiting Guam and all of the continental United States.

I got sentenced to Facebook purgatory for suggesting that it would have been far more productive (not to mention less expensive) just to shoot the balloon with a bullet, allowing gas to slowly escape and bringing it gently down to earth. This would have also allowed it’s payload to be recovered intact.

Facebook considers anything with bullet and shoot in the same post as inciting violence. This is yet one more reason that social media companies are the last people I want to decide what is good information and what is not.

The thing that has interested me about the balloon saga the most is our response to it. After several more balloons of unknown origin were subsequently shot down over the sea ice north of Alaska, over the Yukon, and over Lake Huron, speculation commenced on whether these might be of extraterrestrial origin—something that the media had no problem hyping.

The idea that unmaneuverable low-altitude balloons are more likely to be of extraterrestrial origin than the result of some terrestrial science project gone awry is complete dumbassery. ET don't need no stinking balloon. The fact that this flight of fancy gained so much traction is more evidence our scientific illiteracy (not to mention ignorance of assessing probabilities) as a culture.

I taught university astronomy and astrophysics for decades, and in that time I'm reasonably sure that very few of the thousands of students who passed through these courses left with any doubt of the low-probability that UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin. The Drake equation, which is commonly trotted out to support the notion that ET's should be practically everywhere, is based almost entirely on optimistic speculation supported by scant evidence.

The Universe is probably teeming with life. I'm betting that when we finally send a probe to Europa, a moon of Jupiter, in a few years, we just might find simple organisms living in the warm ocean of liquid water beneath it's icy surface.

But that's about all that I would expect to find. Beings capable of solving the immense problems involved in crossing the vast gulfs of space between star systems are likely to be rare. There are relatively few places throughout the entirety of the cosmos which are stable enough to grant such advanced lifeforms the time they would have needed to evolve. In this regard, our own existence is the result of an extraordinary and unlikely series of circumstances. You should be really happy to be here. I sure am.

There is also time to consider. Our solar system is about 4.5 billion years old. The Universe is around 12 billion years old. We’ve existed as a technological civilization, capable of travel and advanced communication, for less than a millennia—a blink in the cosmic time scale. There's an excellent chance that even if another civilization managed to evolve in a nearby system, we missed them by millions, if not billions, of years.

None of this is privileged information. Even if you never spent a semester with a professor laying out, in detail, the case against an ET driving every UFO, it just takes a few hours of reading to edify yourself.

Do extraterrestrial organisms exist? Almost certainly. Are they advanced enough for space travel? In a few cases, almost undoubtedly yes. Are they all around us? Almost undoubtedly, no. The Universe may favor the creation of organisms, but most of them are probably slime on the bottom of epeiric seas in distant worlds.

Thank you for your indulgence with the science lesson. Old habits die hard. It was my lengthy way of arguing for the proposition that most of the people out there acting as gatekeepers of information generally have no idea of what they are talking about. The three balloons shot down in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon are as likely to be of extraterrestrial origin as I am of being able to ride a Pogo stick to the moon.

Every reporter, anchor, politician or social media guru who speculated that ETs might be behind the balloons ought to be ashamed, though that's actually more unlikely than ETs attempting to drive low-tech balloons around in our atmosphere.

I recently discussed this with a friend who opined that surely the U.S. Government, with all of it's resources, knew what they were doing in response to the Chinese spy balloon. I might have subscribed to that theory a decade ago, but not now. There's just too much evidence to the contrary. And the reasons behind this incompetence are not overly difficult to discern.

Our government, especially under the auspices of the current administration, goes through hype by the barge load to promote diversity, equity and inclusion—to the near exclusion of all else. To the Biden administration, DEI is the end-all and be-all of government accountability. Not the penultimate responsibility (that happens to be promoting the green agenda), the ultimate responsibility.

It's daft and crazy and completely irresponsible, but that's how it is. Elections, even those with only awful choices, have consequences.

The tragedy in all of this is that actual diversity in leadership would fix a lot of what ails us. But to our government, diversity is based solely in appearance; it's the superficial diversity of people who don't look alike rather than the substantive diversity of people who don't think alike.

Why is this? Well, the last thing that any DEI-obsessed bureaucrat, administrator or politician wants is someone who fundamentally challenges their way of thinking, with the goods to back it up. In the modern world of government, academia and much of business, original thinking just won't do. The idea behind supporting DEI is to virtue-signal about the value of diversity without actually having to deal with it. That's why the halls of power in our society are filled with people who may not look alikea bargeload of but repeat the same silly policy nonsense verbatim.

I'm reasonably sure that our government, at some level, did know about the existence of the Chinese balloon before it traversed most of North America. I'm also reasonably sure that once a small town newspaper in Montana published a photo that thrust it into the national spotlight, we could have taken the balloon down safely and intact before it leisurely floated across the entire country at an altitude of 60,000 feet.

The reason that none of this happened is that the military and intelligence communities, at least above a certain rank or GS level, know that the route to career security and advancement lies in keeping your head low rather than in challenging developing narratives from higher-ups. And I guarantee that no one wanted any responsibility should things go awry. Ask retired General Stanley McChrystal how all of that works.

The triumph of group-think over intellectual diversity has occurred to our considerable detriment. Our government is vastly incompetent and the progenitor of bad outcomes because political parties and the federal bureaucracy each rely on only their own corrals of acceptable thought. You may be incompetent (see Pete Buttigieg), you may be of any race, creed, or sexual orientation, you may even identify as a puppy and still get a seat at the table with the big kids, as long as you don't object to the orthodoxy du jour. Do that, and you are out.

About the only thing that makes me feel better about any of this is the fact that our chief geopolitical adversary (and originator of clumsy spy balloons), China, has a worse problem with diversity of thought than we do.

China is what happens when group-think triumphs over thought diversity behind the barrel of a gun. I'm as sure as I need to be that Xi Jiping, China's entrenched communist leader, is paying attention to our obsession with trigger warnings, safe spaces, the identity movement and other social contagions because it's how he laughs himself to sleep each night.

China's particular brand of group-think, foisted on a billion and a half people by the Chinese Communist Party, has led their country to the brink of catastrophe. Thanks to state-imposed family-planning policies, China has close to 200 million citizens over 65, with a declining younger population. The Chinese economy is in great peril. The Chinese military is writing checks that that the CCP probably can't cash.

In the middle of all this, Chinese leaders are doing what their American counterparts do when they get called out for their own failed policies—gin up a new crisis to distract from their incompetence in dealing with the existing crisis, for which they were all-in until it blew up in their faces. Hence, Taiwan and spy balloons.

The formula for fixing top-down incompetence is not overly difficult to discern—welcome actual diversity. Use a variety of ideas from a truly diverse sample of people to forge solutions informed by a variety of perspectives. This is a practice that would have helped mitigate the worst effects of mistaken policies during the Covid pandemic. And it will help if we can ever get to where we need to be with everything else that vexes us as well.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth