The New York Times has on op-ed today (of course, since Fisher v. University of Texas is being argued today) by a couple of social scientists purporting to provide evidence that “Diversity Makes You Brighter.” The “evidence” is a series of experiments where some people had to make calculations in racially homogenous settings and others made calculations in racially diverse settings. And it turns out that the latter’s “answers were 58 percent more accurate.”

Three observations, assuming for the sake of argument that the study’s methodology is sound, that its results can be extrapolated in the way the authors would like, etc.: (1) There’s no reason to think that the same results might not obtain if the “diversity” was of a sort other than racial. (2) This experiment provides no help to the University of Texas in this case, since their argument is that they need more high-income blacks rather than blacks per se. (3) Would any Supreme Court decision that rests on such social-science claptrap deserve to be called “law”?