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I think it's unfortunate if this is your only take away. Two things can be true at once: A) Diversity hiring is unrelated to the crash B) There is a real sca

• rayiner 2y ago
  What allegedly happened at the FAA wasn’t just “let’s try to have a more diverse workforce.” It was “let’s collide with racial advocacy groups to make a test that would allow us to deny white applicants because they won’t have the secret pass words.” Anybody who was involved in this obviously has severely compromised judgment. Who can trust anything else they did?
  • apical_dendrite 2y ago
    From what I can tell from reading the exhibits in the court case, that's not what happened. This is a case of overfitting, rather than a conspiracy to create a process with "secret pass words". They wanted to create a process that would not lead to disparate impacts, but would also give them competent controllers. So they took the biographical data that they had collected in the 80s and 90s and constructed a test such that the output of the test would give them the result that they wanted. This is clearly dumb, and they ended up with a model that was overfit to the old data and didn't generalize (or even make much logical sense). Likely there were a tiny number of black controllers when they gathered the biographical data, so those few data points, and their idiosyncrasies, had a large impact on the answer weights that they generated, making the model weird and pretty nonsensical. It's not a conspiracy, it's just bad methodology in service of a dubious goal.
    • xyzzyz 2y ago
      This is not just "bad methodology in service of dubious goal". It's blatantly illegal, and not just by weak "disparate impact" standard. According to disparate impact standard, procedures that result in disparate outcomes between protected classes are illegal, even if causing these outcomes was not the intent of the policy. Here, the disparate impact was not just unintended side effect, it was the deliberate goal. They deliberately constructed the test to discriminate based on race. This is even ignoring the alleged cases of insiders leaking answer key to some applicants.
• Eisenstein 2y ago
  Both of those links come from that same person, tracewoodgrains, who links the documents on their google drive. Looking through the documents, it appears there was a case that happened in 2014, which was investigated in 2016. They found an FAA employee in a New York state office held a teleconference about how to apply to the open positions. People asked him questions and he answered them. The investigate was closed noting the following: "OIG reviewed official government emails for the period January 2013 to July 2015 and did not identify any additional matters or information of specific interest to this investigation. AEO-500’s ROI Case Number AHQ20150170 did not develop information that demonstrated HR employees gave improper advantages in processing the applications of ATCS candidates affiliated with the NBCFAE. A review of the ROI did not identify any issues that warranted additional review in this investigation. The findings in this investigation did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor." What exactly makes 'diverse' candidates more likely to answer 'science' and then 'history' on those questions? Are you saying there was a conspiracy to create hard to answer questions on the test and then give out the answers to diversity candidates? Occam's razor says this was a bullshit 'behavioral' test that meant nothing but disqualified a lot of candidates, and someone who knew that gave others a way to bypass it to get their foot in the door in one instance.
• lakis 2y ago
  From the website "The FAA has discontinued use of this Behavioural Assessment since 2018." That was 7 years ago.