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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#581

Post by snailmailstare »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #433
snailmailstare wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's obviously some number of mistakes one party can make in a single incident such that the other has a limited probability of preventing an accident. If flight control is the robustness, it would take flight control with a lot of free time to be reducing those mistakes in pilots by following up on all sorts of errors unrelated to an incident until a pilot rarely makes multiple overlapping mistakes.

You're still going to try to reduce the errors by each party as much as you can. The point is that if they each do the right thing 99.9% of the time, the overlap allows you to prevent a problem 99.9999% of the time. Whereas if you compromise one of them so that it's 80% instead of 99.9%, the chance that something makes it through the net increases by a factor of 200.

It's not entirely fair to choose this flight as a random sample, but assuming for a moment that it is.. The pilot has a 85% or lower, how many 9s on the controller fix that?

If controllers were like traffic cops they would take time to raise or remove that 85% when they caught it and pay limited attention to current traffic to take actions to reduce future traffic risk. But they are not that as you just explained again.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#582

Post by refurb »

legitster wrote: post #83

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…

> But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why".

And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves.

"The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#583

Post by kenjackson »

gr3ml1n wrote: post #576
kenjackson wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Re-read the original link, posted again below. The claims you're making are specifically addressed and are wrong. There are multiple critical reviews of this paper. It is well-known to be largely nonsense. http://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/blindaudi...

I’ve read it and the author doesn’t address them. Unless they have access to additional data, such as their claims about the standard errors in Table 5 (only the Finals result has large enough errors to possibly discount). The original paper is pretty clear.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#584

Post by scott_w »

janalsncm wrote: post #499
scott_w wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put together some more concrete examples here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302 None of them are “programs that discriminate against qualified applicants.”

This works if your demand is small enough. In the case of the FAA they are hiring thousands of ATCs. The fundamental issue is that due to upstream inequalities (e.g. worse schools) there are downstream inequalities you can’t smooth out. There are literally fewer black people who know how to read or have graduated high school. So the correct solution is to concentrate resources upstream.

While I don’t disagree, we should remember a few things:

Diversity isn’t just about skin colour. Getting more women in expands opportunities for women, who still suffer pay gaps, and this would help close that.

Even black people who do have enough education suffer discrimination (conscious or not), so working to improve things is a net good.

That’s not to say the FAA did the right thing (it appears not) but it’s important to not just throw our hands up and keep saying it’s someone else’s problem!

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#585

Post by intended »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #538
lukas099 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What grandparent said wouldn’t lead to people dying though.

Depends if you are able fill the slots, and how quickly.

It looks like the thing that stopped the slot filling was funding, not a dearth of candidates.

We had 500 open positions. We filled 100, and argued over 10.

That’s still a gap of 400 positions. We have only 110 qualified applicants.

The Math is missing a third variable.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#586

Post by int_19h »

Xelynega wrote: post #549
int_19h wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what the outcome is. There has been pro-DEI pushback on blind interviews and auditions when it resulted in fewer minorities being represented. One particularly famous case is when GitHub shut down their conference on diversity grounds after the blind paper review process resulted in a speaker slate that was all male. For another example, here's a pitch against blind auditions for orchestras to "m…

In both those examples, why are you not giving the benefit of the doubt to the failed attempts? If GitHub attempted to anonymize applications and resulted in a biased selection, can that not be a result of them failing to eliminate the bias they set out to? Same with the blind auditions for orchestras, if they found that they weren't actually eliminating bias with the stated methods, why is it bad that they're not do…

If you don't know anything about the other person and are selecting blindly, there's no bias by definition, so that particular selection is not biased regardless of what it looks like.

If the resulting distribution is not what you expected it to be, then there are two simple explanations: either your model was wrong, or the bias that causes the deviation is happening on an earlier stage in the process.

At the same time, if going from non-blind to blind changes the result, it means that there was bias that had been eliminated. The second article pretty much openly admits it and then demands that it be reinstated to produce the numbers that they would like to see.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#587

Post by perching_aix »

Gud wrote: post #577
perching_aix wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What’s up with the hostility? You doing ok?

Thanks for asking, I think I do, yes. I'm not sure what you find particularly hostile about it - they edited out what they originally had to say, but even then, I'm not saying anything extraordinary.

Telling people they're acting childish and are not bringing anything to the table argumentation wise I think is pretty low on the hostility scale.

The irony of being called out as hostile after confronting someone that they're just asserting their opinions is definitely not lost on me. What a thread...

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#588

Post by dqft »

legitster wrote: post #83

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…

Spot on for this guy.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#589

Post by Aloisius »

varloid wrote: post #578
Aloisius wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you think that makes someone 5 times more likely to be a good ATC than having served as an ATC in the military, which would get you 3 points? Or infinitely better than being an active ATC, which earned 0?

Is that the only question that an active military ATC would very likely get points for?

I don't think you can take questions in isolation. Active military ATC would likely pick up full or close to full points on several other questions like recent unemployment (#26), expressing views (#27), formal training (#30), formal suggestions (#36), knowledge of job (#46) and probably coursework (#54).

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#590

Post by gadders »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #354
gadders wrote: post #179

This is so depressing. This is the sort of DEI effort that gives the rest a bad name. It should never, ever be about hard quotas. It absolutely should be about using some contextual information (factoring the person's school environment in) and challenging assumptions about stereotypes so that you are not deciding who is best on assumptions but on evidence.

"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.

Another example is to make your recruiting contextual. How would you rate two candidate - one that grew up dirt poor and when to the worst public schools but gets 90% on your test, vs one that went to the best private schools and got 95%?

You can also do things to remove stereotypes about your industry - "I'm not going to work in industry X because it's all posh people."

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