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.

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.

So, a carefully designed and managed system is capable of determining whether your life is not worth living? Presumably they will also find that some people are wrong in wanting to die, otherwise they wouldn't need a system at all.

Which lives are worth living or not sounds to me like the kind of question it's maybe not right to set an official answer to.

I have sympathy with people who feel life isn't worth living. But I wish they would not demand that others validate their choice by killing them.

If you don't comply with a lawful order, you're taking a pretty big risk.

Remember the thing they say about loans? If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, they're pretty damn important to the US economy. Also, unrestricted executive power isn't entirely unopposed in government. If

The point of this is also that these orders, even if "lawful", give government a headache about how to enforce compliance. You can't just send Tim Cook to jail without an explanation. If Jeff Dean mysteriously turns up dead in a ditch somewhere, lots of people are going to get cold feet, and start asking themselves whether they want to be part of this anymore. The silicon valley elite have a lot of power to say no, more than they probably admit to themselves. Yes, there are risks, but it's not nearly as bad for them as less powerful people (e.g. Ladar Levison) face.

I agree with your point, but Jim Henson was also an writer, and if you ask me a highly original and talented one. The actual performance with the puppets was a small thing of what he made.

Oh, the vast majority of music scores and poetry would benefit from the makers thinking of it more as skill, and less as art,

The spice girls weren't the only or the first, but one of the most clearly and well-executed "music group" concoctions (cynically) aimed at a specific demographic.

Oh, they weren't remotely the first. A really old example is the Comedian Harmonists, formed in 1928. It was assembled after a newspaper ad calling for auditions, and the plan was explicitly to create a German equivalent of a foreign group that had impressed the originator, namely The Revellers. That was exactly how Boyzone was formed too, only there the foreign group was Take That.

Village People was also formed after a newspaper ad and auditions. There, the purpose was maybe not so much to make a localized version, as a subculture-inspired twist on an established concept.

That's how Spice Girls were formed too, as an obvious twist on the well-established concept of a boy band. But they didn't succeed in the market they were formed to target, which was teenage boys! Luckily for them, they were surprised by the emerging market of pre-teenage girls.

All these bands were formed after ads and auditions, but some of them - perhaps the most deserving of being called "boy bands" - were formed by managers or other people who weren't themselves performers.

A way to give them a headache, is just to quietly not comply. Not post the national security letter, not shout anything from the rooftops, just refuse to do as you're told. They either have to punish you openly, drawing attention to what they were trying to do, or go full criminal and "cause something bad to happen to you" (which has risks of its own for them).

I have argued that once several, actually important people started to do this (e.g. silicon valley tech sector employees, or even execs), the government would quickly find out the headaches weren't worth it, and change policy - either to the better, or at least to more visible aggression. Don't underestimate the power of sand in the machinery.

This is par for the course for chess programs of that generation, though. I remember an old DOS chess program that would allow "castling" by just switching the king and rook, regardless of whether there were pieces between them. One Win 3.11 chess program I remember, was ridiculously easy to break if you used the take back a move function. Some sort of internal data structure wasn't properly cleaned if you did that, so the computer would start making illegal moves, randomly putting pieces on the board, etc.

It's chess more or less as it was played 100+ years ago. It's not FIDE chess, that's true.

Who the hell wants to watch other people sing at the opera when you could be singing yourself?