My brother in law is a pilot, and has colleagues who were impacted by this. What surprised me is that he blames Obama for this. I typically ignore his blame of Obama as some racist tirade, but this seems to point to Obama pushing these changes?
The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
561–570 of 724 posts
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name." I'd be interested to read about a DEI effort that gives the rest a good name.
Require diversity in the interview pool, not when making hiring decisions. e.g. in a male majority profession, for every two male applicants selected to interview, select at least one female applicant. But once the candidate pool is established, pick the best available candidate for the job.
How long does the checklist need to be? Can I check three boxes if I an interview a gay black jew or do I only get one?
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends: Are you underpaying them? The question, "why" matters here a lot. "I tend to prefer minorities because I can underpay and get away with more" is a thing that exists in the real world. See: Immigrant farm workers and H1B visa holders. Is that discrimination against white/majorities or is it a kind of discrimination against minorities? It's injustice, for sure but I point it out because DEI policies, disc…
I think specifically hiring somebody because of their race is not just problematic but outright racist. I don't care if you are doing it because you want to underpay them or because you just dislike their race. If somebody decided he wanted more white people because he prefers whites, that would be discrimination. Nobody denies that, but when the races are swapped, suddenly it is nuanced? Give me a break!
The "nuanced" argument you're responding to at least gives a window into why LLMs all talk about this same sort of nonsense and have this same bias. This kind of thinking is absolutely rampant these days -- especially on Reddit, which makes up a large portion of the training data.
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. However Progressives argue (wrongly in my opinion) that taking into account a person’s race and gender identity is the only wait to guard against discrimination. They explicitly regard ‘merit’ based hiring as racist and discriminatory.
Who is this "progressive" that for some reason is only allowed to speak in the most general of statements and not make claims backed up with evidence? A lot of people seem to be arguing against caricatures of arguments either they or people theg trust have instilled in them, and not actual points being made by actual people...
I read your post three times and I still can’t parse it. If you’re asking which Progressives are making the arguments I described, go see Ibram Kendi among others. I am not caricaturing their position. This is what they believe.
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this not DEI? This was a deliberate and conscious attempt to create a test that would pass DEI candidates at higher rates, with question that had nothing to do with the actual needed skills. And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".
As I’ve said twice now: it was the actual thing that was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid, not the umbrella “DEI” itself. That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time. It’s things like outreach, financial support, changing societal attitudes. Instead of that, they took the lazy opt…
Complex philosophy has a way of devolving almost inevitably into a kind of "four legs good two legs bad" sort of way a la Animal Farm. In the same way dei seems to inevitably devolve into white people bad non-white people good. It doesn't really matter what it was originally. Philosophies that become popular will always devolve into some easy to understand but wrong version of itself. I personally believe this is the single biggest argument in favor of color blindness since it's relatively unambiguous.
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Maybe you should read this quote from McConnell, arguably the person who did more to defeat the Democrat agenda in the past 20 years than anyone else, who, coincidentally, voted not to confirm Hesgeth. > “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…
The same McConnell who, after being in the Senate for 40 years, was recently praised on 60 minutes with "his greatest accomplishment is funding the Ukraine War"?
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance. No, but it was the best predictor of job performance and academy pass rate there was. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA566825.pdf https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/resear... (page 41) There are a fixed number of seats at the ATC academy in OKC, so it's critical to get the highest quality applicants possible to ensure that the pass rate is as hig…
That is NOT what the first study you've cited says at all: > "The empirically-keyed, response-option scored biodata scale demonstrated incremental validity over the computerized aptitude test battery in predicting scores representing the core technical skills of en route controllers." I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale. The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is…
> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.
How is that a criticism? It is always possible that someone could invent a better test.
In any case, the second citation directly refutes your point in another sub-thread with AnthonyMouse, the assertion that higher-performing applicants above the cutoff do not perform better on the job:
"If all applicants scoring 70 or above on the AT-SAT are selected, slightly over one-third would be expected to be high performers. With slightly greater selectivity, taking only applicants scoring 75.1 or above, the proportion of high performers could be increased to nearly half."
Also:
"The primary point is that applicants who score very high (at 90) on the AT-SAT are expected to perform near the top of the distribution of current controllers (at the 86th percentile)."
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, COVID didn't help either. However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so hard to find.
I'll never find it, but a few days ago someone here posted an anecdotal story that class sizes were between 10-20 and failure/drop rate was ~50%.
Across 2023 and 2024 the en route academy pass rate was ~66% and terminal pass rate was ~73%. Of that, ~25% of en route trainees fail at their facility and ~15-20% of terminal trainees fail at their facility. There are ~2 en route trainees per terminal trainee.
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
The study did show it. The author of this critique properly notes that Table 4 is not an apples to apples comparison. The author of the study notes that expanding the pool of women as used in Table 4 likely brought in less talented musicians disproportionately. Table 5 does the more apples to apples comparison. The critique notes that sample size is too small, but it captures 445 blind women, 816 blind men, 599 non-b…
No, it doesn't. This is a dramatic reach and complete misunderstanding of the stats. The data in table 5 is not statistically significant. If you go down to table 6 (which is also incredibly weak), it shows the opposite: men are advancing at a higher rate than women in blind auditions. Andrew Gelman reviewed the link as well and agreed: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...
Table 5 is stat sig. There’s not a p-value given but the effect sizes are large. The knit place it’s not is the semi-final and final rounds with their smaller sizes.
And table 6 shows blind auditions significantly increased the chances of women advancing from the preliminary round and winning in the final round. However women were less likely to advance past semifinals when auditions were blind. But still a net win.
Gellman is focused on the “several fold” and “50% claims” it made. But the paper shows 11.6 and 14.8 point jumps, which are supported by the paper.
Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those two questions are cherry-picked to imply the questionnaire was specifically designed to only let people pass who preformed badly academically. However there are several other questions that specifically ask for the applicant's average grades and anything less than an A grade will not give you any points. The problem is that the test is completely arbitrary with no rhyme or reason to it, not that it was designed…
To clarify, I picked those two questions not to imply a focus on bad academic performance but because they are both a) absurd/arbitrary and b) the highest-weighted questions by far.
Is it absurd?
The choices for both were Science, Math, English, History/Social Sciences and Physical Education, plus did not attend college for the second.
Math is highly predictive of ATC performance. English is a key requirement due the communication-heavy role. Physical Education is linked to confidence which is a strong predictor of graduation rates.
That leaves History/Social Sciences and Science as oddballs. If you did poorly in Science or History/Social Sciences in high school, that likely didn't change in college, so you would have gotten at least 15 points by answering it the same way for both questions.
I'm not sure there was an expectation that someone would get them both right. Rather having different answers get 15 points ensures people answering both the same way didn't which likely would make the test a bit too easy to pass.
This test just looks like a big five personality test mixed with some socioeconomic and academic questions.