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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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141–150 of 724 posts

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#141

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be…

> Taking old, resolved scandals

The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#142
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are explicitly the inverse of DEI approaches. This is essentially a No True Scotsman fallacy. If it's DEI, it's bad so any good approach is, by definition, not part of DEI. > DEI is predicated on outcome diversity, rather than treating applicants equally irrespective of background. The first part of this is incorrect. Good DEI is about creating a level playing field (as you correctly point out for blind people…

These are really good points, it's depressing as hell to see the the quality of discussion around this stuff. Obviously DEI is great when it's trying to fix things on the input side. Perhaps I can simplify this argument. If you have a lift heavy things job, which we can agree that women on average are worse at, you shouldn't hire more women by quota, but you could provide free weight training for women. Both things a…

I think in your example, you shouldn't hire by quota, but you also shouldn't exclude women or introduce obstacles that exclude them. It's so weird that this has turned into such a controversial statement!

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#143

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the i…

The E in DEI stands for Equity, not Equality. The explicit, stated goal is not to remove discrimination it's to discriminate in order to reach Equity.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#144

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be…

The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#145

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue. Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be…

That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts:

> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”

This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.

That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#146

Instead of bickering over who gets a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people. Or at least uses automation for 95% of the job and delegates to a person only when rare exceptions arise. ATC is ripe for disruption from AI, and now that we have LLMs and speech models on par with human ability, its a short walk in the park to imagine a fully…

Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation. Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.

> Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation.

Everything is easy when you don't know about it.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#147

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the i…

>There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice.

Yes! Build a robust economy so that everyone can have dignified work that pays a living wage, rendering any kind of hiring preferences moot.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#148
I'm fairly certain this was an example of overfitting and Freedman's Paradox, not deliberate cheating.

Let's say you have a completely random data set. You generate a bunch of random variables x1 through xn and a random dependent variable y. Then you poke around and see whether any of the x variables look like they might predict y, so you pick those variables and try to build a model on them. What you end up with is a model where, according to the standard tests of statistical significance, some of the xs predict the y, even though all the data is completely random.

This is a much more likely explanation for why the answer weights on the biographical assessment were so weird than some conspiracy between the contractors who developed the test, the FAA staff, and the black employee organization.

They had a dataset that was very skewed because historically there have been very few black controllers, and so was very prone to overfitting. The FAA asked the contractor to use that dataset to build a test that would serve as a rough filter, screen in good candidates, and not show a disparate impact. The contractor delivered a test that fulfilled those criteria (at least in the technical sense that it passed statistical validation). Whether or not the test actually made any sense was not their department.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#149
post #122

[flagged]

Least qualified according to who? The Democrats? It’s politics. These are political roles. It’s organizational leading and having people in place who are aligned with your goals, not splicing DNA. And we’ve had the qualified one who got 90 Senate votes in confirmation and what did that get us? The Iraq War and the Afghan departure with abandoned locals falling off airplanes. It’s laughable when the idea of checking t…

He has zero experience running a large organization. The Secretary of Defense, while a political appointee, also requires some ability to manage a large organization, which again, he doesn’t have. And suggesting that we didn’t get the desired outcomes from another qualified candidate doesn’t mean we should switch to literally unqualified candidates. Take your partisan hat off for a few minutes and think about what qualities are necessary in a SecDef, and think about whether Hegseth meets them or not.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#150

There's a simple fix to removing discrimination in hiring practices that no one seems to notice. Remove all demographic questions from the application. Hide the name and gender and attach a applicant ID. It's as easy as that. Every job should be looking for the most qualified individual regardless of race, nationality, religion, and sex. Demographics in the application are a recipe for disaster on both sides of the i…

This assumes that the hiring managers or whoever are honest people who are not racist or bigoted in any manner and only display incidental racism or subconscious bias. If I see a HBCU as an applicant's alma matter, it's almost certain that they are black.
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