chinook:% echo $0
bash

Now I'm totally confused. Zero dollars equals bash. Bash what? Bash head into keyboard? ORP BASH!

"Judgment" is a weasel word here. In one sense what you say is true, but not if you read that word like most people read it.

It impairs judgment in the sense that it slows your thinking. A slow brain still comes to the same conclusions as a fast brain most of the time - it just takes a little longer.

If it is the sort of judgment that improves with more time thinking about it, then alcohol impairs judgment. But e.g. whether it's a good idea to go for a nighttime swim in the canal, or whether it's a good idea to hit on your boss' wife, are not especially time-dependent judgments. If alcohol makes you do stuff like that, it's social conditioning at work, not brain impairment.

Yes, conditioned response is a factor too, but still that's a conditioned response based on social conditioning, not the biochemical properties of alcohol. Here, anthropological studies are useful to take a look at. Alcohol does not universally reduce inhibitions. In some cultures, they even split up the beliefs about alcohol, so that e.g. liquor from the city makes you aggressive, boisterous and disinhibited, but traditional fermented beverages just makes you calm and mellow.

Something rather important is that all or virtually all of that effect is in your socialization and expectations around alcohol, not the alcohol itself. There are plenty of classic studies showing that people who believe they consume alcohol, behave as if they really did - and conversely, that alcohol does very little to your inhibitions unless you figure out that's what they're feeding you.

So no, it doesn't really make you do things you normally wouldn't do. It just gives you an excuse - one your surroundings believe in, and one you probably believe in yourself.

If we didn't have alcohol, I bet that either we would find something else and ascribe inhibition-reducing properties to it, or we would act slightly less inhibited all week instead of just concentrated to friday night.

The socializing isn't a property of the alcohol. Sure, in a society where everyone drinks alcohol and you are seen as an outcast and weird if you don't drink alcohol, then not drinking means less socialization and less happiness, possibly less lifespan. But if you ask me, the blame for that should be placed on the culture, not the people who refuse to conform to it.

But yes, as Ben Goldacre pointed out long ago, in the UK at least most people drink, and those who don't are probably different in lots of other ways that potentially affect health. That was always one reason to be suspicious of the health benefit claims.

There were others. The argument for health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption was always based on the weakest forms of EBM with blinders on: no randomized controlled trials, and rarely any theories about what would cause the mysterious health benefits at low levels. All which were presented were either discredited, e.g. antioxidants in red wine - or not really a very good reason to recommend drinking when you come down to it (the social benefits you mention).

The OP asked about diversity, not just any specific kind of diversity. But either way, you rarely know beforehand just what sort of diversity will be useful, and just knowing that people are different might affect your decisions.

Suppose you have three new employees, and are sending two of them to work in a team. You have tested them, and you estimate they all have skill level 16 individually (estimating exactly the bit string, exactly which areas are their strong and weak points, your testing isn't good enough to do). Now two of the employees are men, and one is a woman.

In that case, why should you pick the woman and one of the men? Because men and women are slightly different - meaning that you have reason to think they may have slightly different strengths and weaknesses. There might be ever so slightly fewer "collisions" in the bit string in a man/woman pairing compared to a man/man pairing.

Right, annoying that Slashdot has no way of editing posts. Fortunately there are few situations where non-knowledge sabotages knowledge (as it would if it were AND).

Not on the argument that the people studying them are paid, no. Then you have to dismiss regular medicine as well.

And this is something I've always said, Google glass is not something the masses even want right now, however it would be really useful as a work tool. I can certainly see this technology being useful for nurses, paramedics, police, and many other working professionals.

Maybe after people get used to it's abilities at work they'll find a want/need for it outside of work, but that's in the future, the workplace uses could exist right now.

How does being diverse help a company or team?

I have a skill level of 15. My skill is represented by this string:

000000101111100010001101101011001

You have a skill level of 16. It is represented by this string:

111100001110010100100111001001001

Our team's skill is represented by this string:

(bitwise AND of the two above)
111100101111110110101111101011001

As you can see, we have a combined skill level of 23.

This is a very basic answer to how having a diverse team can help.

The anti-science crowd's go-to way to dismiss any science you don't like.

As usual though, this requires more than just wine, it also requires tricking google in to thinking you have windows in the first place just to be allowed to download it. If you go to the site with a linux machine it downloads the normal google earth for linux, and doesn't let you download the PC version. (I'm guessing a user agent change would fix this, but it's yet one more hoop you have to jump through that shouldn't be necessary.)

When the doctor decides whether you are competent to make that decision, they do give an official answer. If a healthy and normal person demanded it, they would probably say he was irrationally depressed.

So they make a value judgment based on the contents of your life, on how much pain you are in, on what your prospects are. etc. Some lives are deemed rational to want to end, others are deemed not rational.

Such as system does not aim to answer the question if a life is worth living

If it tells some people that they are irrational in demanding to die (e.g saying they are depressed), and others that they are rational in demanding to die, then it implicitly does.

They're not demanding anything of you except maybe a little compassion...

Involving other people so they become complicit in your death doesn't sound like demanding nothing to me.

If you know how some people use suicide threats (and even suicide attempts), that "maybe a little compassion" doesn't sound quite so innocent.