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The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

tracingwoodgrains.com

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Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#681

Post by kshahkshah »

hyeonwho4 wrote: post #624
soared wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extra resources for schools = free breakfast, lunch, afterschool activities = kids cost less money = parents can work less demanding/normal hour jobs = more parental involvement. That’s a lot of logic, but resources for schools is a lot more than free food, better books, etc. schools are one of the best ways to distribute community resources. The alternative (read: kids who got expelled from normal schools) near me h…

I agree that free healthy food for all kids is a great idea. Unfortunately, I have very little trust in US school administrators and school districts to provide healthy meals which nourish children instead of food industry espoused slop which sets them up with an unhealthy eating habits for life. Here's a comparison of school meals in Korea vs. the US. There are similar comparisons with Japan, France, and Germany. So…

Same, that'd be my worry. I'd rather have my state or municipality implement this than choose some terrible Sysco style vendor and just feed them slop

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#682

Post by TraceWoodgrains »

clutchdude wrote: post #650
TraceWoodgrains wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really helpful. I take something different from it than you do (it looks like attrition starkly increases after 2014, in ways I'd strongly argue it's reasonable to attribute to the new hiring methods), but I'm grateful you posted it. Do you know if more complete/precise numbers are available anywhere (hiring counts, hiring+attrition, etc? I'm aware of this but it leaves attrition to be inferred. https://www.n…

I'm going to assume you mean "academy" attrition for sake of conversation. You have a wave of much higher attrition after 2013 because....You have a lot more trainees on fewer trainers. That means more load is placed on fewer trainers resulting on page 45 where you spike from 20% to 25% ratio. Combine that with the very valid point that this is not CIT folks but qualifying citizens being admitted, you can see the imp…

When the methods of selection aren’t selective at all (the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT only eliminated some 5% of candidates), “qualifying citizens” is a bit misleading.

Yes, academy attrition.

I don’t disagree that the 2013 sequester played some role, but to radically change hiring practices in the wake of the sequester and then blame radically higher washout rates primarily on the sequester doesn’t pass the sniff test.

My basic case is simple: when articles and reports considering the reasons haven’t even mentioned this massive change in hiring practices as one contributing factor, shifting to including this as a contributing factor is a genuinely major change, and while it would be convenient for people if it didn’t impact anything I don’t think you can disrupt the pipeline that much and then shrug and attribute all issues to other things. That just doesn’t make sense.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#683

Post by SR2Z »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #445
SR2Z wrote: 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…

> they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants Which would mean entirely different things if (a) that were true (b) that were not true. It sounds as if you are completely convinced that it is not true, but what is your conviction based on, and why do you think they believed the opposite (or perhaps you take the position that they did not, in fact, believe this) ?

My position is that whether or not this is true, this is not the basis for sound and equitable policy. If I were black, I would probably be a little offended at the insinuation.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#684

Post by SR2Z »

davorak wrote: post #556
SR2Z wrote: 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…

I agree with calling people out. > This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists. So a policy can be labeled an 'equity policy' and have nothing to do with equity in either intent or result, which is what I would expect from an 'equity policy' written by a racist. Call it corruption, call it fraudulent activity, but it does it seems like there was only lip service to eq…

> So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?

Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example). I don't care that the outcome did not increase DEI; I care that the justification did.

There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept. I was watching an official video from LAFD where a firefighter said "people want first responders that look like them" and then later in the video said "it doesn't matter that I can't carry an adult man out of a fire because they shouldn't have been there in the first place."

This is absolutely deranged; the entire Democratic party needs to either boot out the DEI crusaders or we will continue to seem out of touch and untrustworthy.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#685

Post by Xelynega »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #573
Xelynega wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The question is whether or not the results are biased. Maybe the best musicians tend to be male? It is hard to argue bias in a blind musical audition.

And it's hard to argue that your method you "thought" would eliminate bias actually does eliminate the bias you set out to eliminate.

The only way to do that is compare results with expectations, no?

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#686

Post by immibis »

lazide wrote: post #609
amluto wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are only so many black people in the country. The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a…

Only if black candidates meet the criteria equally, are as interested to work as air traffic controllers as anyone else, have equivalent lifestyles and family support to allow them to do the job as effectively as anyone else, etc. There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes? As t…

Then keep chasing the symptom backwards until you find the root cause. It's standard troubleshooting, not rocket science.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#687

Post by davorak »

SR2Z wrote: post #684
davorak wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with calling people out. > This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists. So a policy can be labeled an 'equity policy' and have nothing to do with equity in either intent or result, which is what I would expect from an 'equity policy' written by a racist. Call it corruption, call it fraudulent activity, but it does it seems like there was only lip service to eq…

> So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar? Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example). I don't care that the outcome did not increase DEI; I care that the justification did. There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid…

> Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example).

I would never have thought of this as DEI. I normally only think of DEI in terms of jobs, hiring, and similar. Though I can see how someone might try and fit it under Inclusion.

> There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept.

I agree there is too much of people not being able to communicate and talk things out. Any sort of patience and willingness to talk things out can be exploited by bad actors to waste your time energy and effort, especially online conversations, and that results in people shutting down conversations as a defense mechanism. The end result is some amount of tribalism where people talk to protect and promote their tribe instead of communicating. Community standards need to improve for that to get better though and that takes time.

The above communication issue as far as I can tell is not directly connected to DEI and would still exist if everyone was focusing on some other topic.

The approach that I thinks works with one on one conversation, but may not scale well to groups, is to take on topics individually. DEI, is to big and too broad and means different things to different people. Cheating on an FAA test, corruption, failure of leadership, those are easier to get broad agreement on topic by topic.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#688

Post by davorak »

rayiner wrote: post #678
davorak wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. I draw a line between "need explicit racial references in hiring" and the "biographical questionnaire" in the article. The later was explicit deception, what I want to call fraud though maybe dose not fit the technical definition, and was correctly labeled cheating since the…

Read Tracing Woodlines’ articles. The biographical questionnaire was a means to achieve indirectly what the FAA couldn’t achieve directly (explicit racial preferences). I’m not oversimplifying it. A lot of people want explicit racial preferences to achieve racial diversity. That’s both unpopular and (now) illegal, so you get lots of different workarounds. Not everyone who supports DEI programs wants explicit racial p…

> Not everyone who supports DEI programs wants explicit racial preferences. But in practice DEI programs turn into racial preferences and quotas because those people won’t stand up to the ones who want preferences.

I see leadership wanting to move with current politic climate and when they go to implementing things not really caring who they hire other than who is going to make their lives easier. That then results in hucksters, con artists, selling their services, quick fixes, cookie cutter solutions, to those leaders who then get what they wanted, fitting in with the current political climate, not real fixes which are often hard, can have unknown risks and timelines.

Blame bad leadership, blame hucksters, and con artists, that is where I lean.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#689

Post by lazide »

immibis wrote: post #686
lazide wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if black candidates meet the criteria equally, are as interested to work as air traffic controllers as anyone else, have equivalent lifestyles and family support to allow them to do the job as effectively as anyone else, etc. There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes? As t…

Then keep chasing the symptom backwards until you find the root cause. It's standard troubleshooting, not rocket science.

If your problem is who to hire this week, root causing back to someone’s childhood conditions 20 years ago does absolutely fuck all for you.

Re: The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

#690

Post by sneedle »

kenjackson wrote: post #450
adamrezich wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conundrum is that by thinking this way about population groups that are not your own, and imposing your will—no matter how well-intentioned—upon them, you are undermining the agency and self-determination of said population groups. I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined—and while this is certainly possible in theory, it's essentially…

> I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined How do you discover deeper-rooted causes if you can't be provided resources to study the distinction? How can you understand why black women are 3x more likely to die at child birth than white women if the funding agencies don't care about the answer?

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