271–280 of 724 posts
For those curious, you can try the FAA's air traffic controller test for yourself here: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/ After trying it, I recommend reading the article for yourself.
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You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications? The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit.…
How is re-weighting the AT-SAT so that >80% of applicants pass (vs. ~60% previously) not “lowering the bar”? "One method of measuring test validity (job-relatedness) is to correlate test scores with job performance. After reweighting, the AT-SAT validity co-efficient went from .69 to .60..." https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1849&co...
This is akin to schools that got rid of testing requirements. Agreed it was a terrible choice that should get reversed. But, to say that standards went down on graduates of the schools, you would look at the scores of graduates from said schools.
And to be clear, the expectation of lowering standards for admits to a school would be a higher dropout rate. More stress on the school and testing protocols. But this is not, itself, evidence that graduates are worse.
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Can you provide an example of what you would consider a good implementation of DEI efforts, as opposed to a "botched" one?
I think the vast number of small and medium sized companies who quietly opened their hiring funnel up to a wider audience, would be considered good implementations. Not all companies reached for quotas and other hamfisted efforts that detractors constantly point to.
Tech has been meritocratic for decades with few exceptions.
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ATC training and dropout rate is so long and high, that mistakes made 8-9 years ago could still be impactful.
COVID would likely have a bigger hand in the current issues than mistakes from 10-15 years ago though. I found it somewhat puzzling we discuss ATC staffing and don't mention it: https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2024-0... > When training at the academy resumed in July 2020, after the four-month shutdown, class sizes were cut in half to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social d…
However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so hard to find.
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I think the vast number of small and medium sized companies who quietly opened their hiring funnel up to a wider audience, would be considered good implementations. Not all companies reached for quotas and other hamfisted efforts that detractors constantly point to.
DO you have examples of companies whose funnels were not open to "wider audience" prior to DEI? Lets say this century. Tech has been meritocratic for decades with few exceptions.
Sample size of one, I worked in the past for a company whose entire staff was white men, 100%. Except for a single role: the receptionist at the front desk. There is no reasonable biological explanation for this extreme distribution.
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…
> 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. Respectfully, thats not accurate. The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role…
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With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case. The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.
Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?
Imagine the FAA was only attending job fairs in white parts of the country. Then they decide to attend job fairs in more diverse parts of the country. No one would suddenly decide they were prejudiced against white people!
There's a difference between forcing a white person to give up a seat, and letting a black person sit anywhere on the bus. But both of these are being labelled "DEI" in this thread.
Again, nobody is arguing that the FAA didn't shoot themselves in the foot by introducing a dumb assessment that threw out good candidates. But I think there should be nothing scandalous or wrong with the FAA trying to be available to more candidates.
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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 NBCFA…
> How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals? The key part though is that the FAA was worried about the job performance of diverse candidates they brought in. They did not see a trade off between their staffing levels . There are two separate arguments happening: Did changing their application process create less qualified ATC controllers? Maybe! But no one seems to be argui…
The linked article explicitly disagrees with this opinion. In fact it comes to almost literally the opposition conclusions:
>Not only that, it shattered the pipeline the FAA had built with CTI schools, making the process towards becoming an air traffic controller less certain, undercutting many of the most passionate people working to train prospective controllers, and leading to a tense and unclear relationship between the FAA and feeder organizations.
>Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so. Did average candidate quality decrease? There's every reason to think so. Would that lead to staffing issues? Unambiguously yes.
That's not to say that you are wrong and the article is correct, but in a discussion that is started by an article, and when the article addresses exactly the points you are making, I feel that it is helpful to give explicit reasons why you think the article is mistaken.
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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 qu…
He was a major in the US Army, typically leading a battalion, and while not a government department, saying he has “no experience” is false. What does a battalion leader need? Organizational ability, the ability to motivate. He is preceded by a guy who decided to hide a serious health issue from his own boss (must have though nobody noticed Biden’s issues, so no biggie), to the point he was unreachable for days . So…
> “Effective management of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion, and alliances and partnerships around the world is a daily test with staggering consequences for the security of the American people and our global interests,” McConnell said in the statement. “Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been.”
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Why are you (and many others) just assuming the black candidate is less qualified?
That’s literally what this whole article was about. Removing a high correlation performance test, that black candidates didn’t pass as frequently, and replacing it with a very low correlation questionnaire that provided a more diverse applicant pool while weeding out highly qualified individuals.