Live data from Hacker News

The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

tracingwoodgrains.com

471–480 of 724 posts

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#471

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.

Wow, how can anyone take that test and defend FAA hiring practices. This is dystopia level nonsense

I learned about the opportunity to apply for an Air Traffic Control Specialist (ATCS) job through:

A. A PUBLIC NOTICE OR MEDIA ADVERTISEMENT +5 B. A FRIEND OR RELATIVE 0 C. COLLEGE RECRUITMENT +3 D. WORKING IN SOME OTHER CAPACITY FOR THE AGENCY +3 E. SOME OTHER WAY 0

Wow … I get points for this. No surprise, that this is going south. I m shocked.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#472
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the criticism was intended to be constructive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

There's zero difference between this memo and what is frequently said by people who just don't like black people (because it's too bad optics to say "I just don't like black people").

[flagged]

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#473

DEI is simply a framework. Like Agile, it can be well implemented if the person implementing it understands the problems it is trying to address, along with its limitations. And just like Agile, it can be poorly implemented when the person implementing it does not understand its purpose, or hates the framework and cynically implements it under protest. In both cases, the poor implementations should not justify throwi…

Are people still using Agile?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#474
America should help its poor and underprivileged groups through stuff like progressive taxation, better social service, and extra resources for schools in poor areas. It’s not perfect, but kind of works. It helps people to achieve better educational outcomes already in their childhood.

Discriminating against everyone else in school or work application processes is just wrong and insane way to handle things.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "eliminated the privilege of" some kind of dogwhistle for being racist against white people? You're intentionally using circuitous language but that appears to be the message. People are individual human beings, discrimination on the basis of skin color is evil. Not sure why this is so hard to understand for some people.

[flagged]

I feel like often people in your position don't have a basic undestanding why racism is wrong. You don't have a concept or any empathy for how racism affects individual people, all you see is the broad identity group itself. You don't understand the individual core experience of what racism does to people, dehumanizing them, prejudicially dismissing their life and individuality on the basis of skin color. Or at least, you don't doesn't appear to, given that you are guilty of doing this.

Not every white person has "privilege", the advantages typically referred to by this word is about heavily overlapping normal distributions between racial groups. We see statistical level differences in these overlapping curves, but people can be on opposite ends of the curve and that width is greater than the width between races. Ultimately when you boil things down the issue is individuals within systems discriminating against other individuals. In addition, skin color is one axis, there are literally thousands of axes in which one may be privileged, just to name a few examples, how many medical issues you have, the quality of your parents friends, the quality of your early school friends and teachers, whether you're attractive or ugly, many of these things are out of the control of a child and in many cases have a much bigger impact on the quality of your life than skin color, or even the big obvious ones like sex and sexuality.

It's becoming really common for advantaged people to feel justified in being a racist towards disadvantaged people, because the disadvantaged people are white. When this happens i'm not sure how you can see this as a good thing. By assuming every white person has "privilege" to be taken away you are committing racism against individual human beings with complex lives and life experience. Basically, stop! You can fight racism without devolving into racism yourself. I still remember the MLK era speeches about how fighting racism with more racism was unacceptable, we are all human beings with individual humanity, not our skin colors. Not sure what happened that so many people lost the plot.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't completely understand it but Republicans manage cognitive dissonance better. Around 1994 I was interested in Trotskyism and Anarchism and wasn't sure if we needed to get the 4th international back in the US or start a 5th international. I believed in this really stupid kind of vanguardism where if you put up the biggest and most radical flag you would get everyone to rally behind it. I reformed because I got…

> manage cognitive dissonance better. what on earth does this mean?

It means he's neck deep in outgroup homogeneity.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#477

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…

Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly resolved if the racial discrimination element was never addressed?

[flagged]

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spending any tax money on programs designed to only help "DEI" causes is racist. DEI has only one cause, and that is avoiding discrimination on non-germane axes, particulalry by subtle, non-obvious means, such as relying on biased funnels.

This does not align with any published goal of a dei program, or the actions of people who are saying "I am doing DEI".

This is (anti)-wishful thinking.

The goal of the DEI program in my company was along the lines of:

"Last year, 20% of all PhDs in areas we hire for were women. Yet only 7% of our actual PhD hires were women. Why?"

Whether the actual implementation solved this problem is a different matter. The goal, however, was to reduce bias.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#479
post #397
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is forcing you to read this or comment. Go find a local news website if you're so displeased with the US content.

Not every forum needs to be an arena for your polarized world views. This used to be a place where all types of scientific and tech related content was posted. Not so much right now, everyone is just throwing shit at each other but with nicer choice of words than on Twitter.

Sure not every needs it but this is US page so it is more likely to discuss US related things here.

As someone who is not from English speaking country, I get that you may expect forum in English language to be neutral / international, but usually (as with any other language) it is not.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#480
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation. I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words. This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists. Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disad…

The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student. The situation here was the ATC was chronically understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort for them to boost applications makes sense even under non-DEI principles.

> The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.

I know this is a tangent, but in case people read this, they may get the wrong idea. While some elite universities like Harvard have a cap on how many people they admit (leading to the displacement you refer to), the vast majority of universities (including probably all top public universities) do not have a cap. Simply put, if you met the (academic) criteria, you got admission. That they also admitted people who did not meet that criteria had no impact on your admission.

(Sorry - just hear this complaint too often from people who did not get into "regular", non-elite universities. No, affirmative action isn't the reason you did not get admission. You just weren't good enough).

Post reply on HN