Discrimination is a good thing

When I was young “wicked” was a word applied to evil things, a lack of morality. Then sometime in the late 1980s, it acquired a positive slant, at least in youthful slang.

At one time, being called discriminating was a compliment, someone that knew the difference between high quality and shoddiness, a connoisseur. My Oxford English Dictionary (1988 edition) shows:

Today’s online dictionaries mostly show a negative meaning: “the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, sex, or disability.”

I would venture that discrimination is good and necessary; what we must avoid is inaccurate and/or ill-intentioned discrimination.

Humanity depends on understanding the differences between things:

You won’t live very long.

 If you’re an incident manager it helps to discriminate:

If you have an incident like “Citrix issues”, it makes a big difference whether you see:

A ) “After between 30 and 60 minutes, my Citrix session freezes, and I cannot close and restart it.”

or

B) “When I login, I enter my password successfully, but then my homepage doesn’t load.”

When you’re a developer, it makes a big difference when you discriminate between different aspects of “user experience”. No one can design for user friendliness. You can however look for a better description:

A) “As a service desk agent, I want to be able to search or knowledge base directly from the short description field.”

or

B) ”As an incident manager, I want to be able to reorder fields on the Incident page to mirror my normal problem solving style.”

Being able to differentiate or discriminate is about the most useful trait we have as humans. Without it, you simply cannot solve any problem.

When people talk about discrimination in a negative sense, what they mean is the unhelpful (and justly illegal) treating of a person or group as inferior, based on their looks, ethnicity, gender or religion.

When we lump people or ideas or problems together, that is precisely a lack of discrimination.

If you cannot discriminate, you cannot see diversity and cannot value diversity, and so stop the advance of humanity.

Discriminate, and do it well: Distinguish hard data from ideas, assumptions and guesses. Recognise kindness wherever you see it. Reject baseless generalisation. Welcome other opinions and look for what’s new and different in them.