8 ms·

Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.

by alcima 2y ago

aesh2Xa1 2y ago
The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI. For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"): https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.
- intended 2y ago
  I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope over the zero sum game being fought here. If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity was not between undeserving candidates and ideal candidates (the second band section of the article) Is the third variable at play here a lack of funding from congress for recruitment?
  - skellington 2y ago
    If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize it as much as possible. Math.
    - intended 2y ago
      Yeah but thats not how any quota based system works. Thats the strawman of quota systems. The article itself showed that the quota is some fraction of total applicants that results in minimal impact to performance. Also I heard "math" with a youtube overlay.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can. So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. Worse, if you hire based on highest test scores you'd only hire 2 of the black applicants and end up with 99.6% white hires. The obvious thing to do to improve the optics is to figure out how to hire all 10 of the qualified black applicants, which is the thing that would have "minimal impact to performance", but you have two problems. First, picking them explicitly because of their race is illegal, so you have to manufacture some convoluted system to do it in a roundabout way. Second, even if you do that you're still screwed, because even hiring all 10 of them leaves you with 98% white hires and that's still bad optics. Their workaround was to use a BS biographical test to exclude most of the white applicants while giving the black applicants the answers. If you do that you can get 90 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. That'll certainly improve the optics, but then you have 400 unfilled slots.
        PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        There seems to be implication of confusion of what a qualified applicant means in your example above. If there's a test used as the basis of consideration, and some process has decided that any score over X makes the candidate qualified, but then you are later going to claim that actually, given that there were candidates with a score of X+Y, a score of just X does not really constitute "qualified" and the higher scoring candidates should have been chosen, then the whole nature of the test and the ranking becomes rather suspect. So either everyone who is judged to be qualified really is qualified, and it makes no difference that they were not necessarily the highest scoring candidates ... or ... the test for "qualified" is not suitable for purpose.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Suppose you have a test which is a decent proxy for how well someone will do a job. The median person currently doing the job scored 85 and their range is 70-99. If you put someone who scored a 4 in the job, people will die almost immediately. If you put someone who scored a 50 there, people will be at a higher risk of death and you'd be better off passing on that candidate and waiting for a better one. From this we might come up with a threshold of 70 for the minimum score and call this "qualified". Then if you have to fill 5 slots and you got candidates scoring 50, 75 and 95, you should hire the latter two and keep the other slots unfilled until you get better candidates. But if you have to fill 5 slots and you have 10 candidates who all scored above 70, you now have to choose between them somehow. And the candidates who scored 95 are legitimately expected to perform the job better than the ones who scored 75, even though the ones who scored 75 would have been better than an unfilled position.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > AND you are hiring traditionally And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring process to screen against the White applicants. The way they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people, btw.
    - drjasonharrison 2y ago
      By "hiring traditionally" they may have meant "posting a job description and application instructions". They definitely didn't continue to interact with the CTI schools. What they didn't appear to do, at least it is not discussed, is targeted advertising towards underrepresented groups.
    - sneedle 2y ago
      [flagged]
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  The answer to the question you've quoted is important, since it could be "none", "a little bit", "a lot", "any amount", each of which has very different ramifications. There is no answer on the slide ...
  - varloid 2y ago
    They decided that at least some amount was acceptable - the minimum score on the AT-SAT was changed so that 95% of test takers would pass because the original threshold where 60% passed excluded too many black applicants. This was despite previous studies showing that a higher score on the AT-SAT was correlated with better job performance.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      No, that's not an answer to that specific question. Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance. If you have a qualification test that feels useful but also turns out to be highly non-predictive of job performance (as, for example, most college entrance exams turn out to be for college performance), you could change the qualification threshold for the test without any particular expectation of losing job performance. In fact, it is precisely this logic that led many universities to stop using admissions tests - they just failed to predict actual performance very well at all.
      - varloid 2y ago
        > 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://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA566825.pdf https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/0106.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 high as possible, especially given that the ATC system has been understaffed for decades.
- alcima 2y ago
  Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.
  - like_any_other 2y ago
    "Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
    - th0ma5 2y ago
      ... You concede that it was cronyism here. Unless you want to expand on what you are saying.
      - XCabbage 2y ago
        He concedes no such thing. Reserving jobs for members of a "black coalition" that any black person can join is obviously DEI, not cronyism. It's a de facto race-based filter, not one based on favour-trading or past links to the applicant.
        lazide 2y ago
        Why not both? Near as I can tell, Cronyism goes hand in hand. Someone has to gatekeep who counts in what bracket, someone has to represent the bracket, etc. And the beauty is, the more brackets, the more true this is, and the more can be extracted from the system.
        handoflixue 2y ago
        You're asking the wrong person there. "Both" concedes that it was "DEI" But to actually answer the question: while it can absolutely be both, you need to provide proof of the additional claim. "People cheated for DEI reasons" and "People cheated for cronyism reasons" are two separate claims. The article provides plenty of evidence for the former and not much for the latter.
snailmailstare 2y ago
If we step away from the traffic controllers nonsense for a moment, the actual problem sounded like a military pilot to me. It's my understanding that people who have a family line of pilots go into that funnel knowing a specific nepotism related result occurs such that when it comes time to become a commercial pilot you are probably from such a family. I have no idea if helicopter pilots work the same way or are starting to work the same way, but whenever I see a BS move like this I think that there's probably an opposite interpretation that doesn't fit what their demographic wants to hear.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Robust systems are designed to avoid single points of failure. Humans are fallible. So, for example, both the pilot and the air traffic controller are intended to be paying attention so that if one of them makes a mistake the other can pick it up. If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct. If air traffic control is under-staffed, now the warning the pilot gets might come a minute later than it would have otherwise, and already be too late. Then you no longer have a robust system and it's only a matter of time before one of the pilot errors the system was designed to be able to catch in time instead results in a collision.
  - snailmailstare 2y ago
    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.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      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.

Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.

by alcima 2y ago

Was deeply aware of it at the time - was not really a DEI issue even then - it was pure cronyism.

The source article includes primary material that strongly contradicts your anecdote. The policy change arrived in 2013, and there are materials from that same year indicating DEI. For example, here's an FAA slide from 2013 which explicitly publishes the ambition to place DEI as the core issue ("- How much of a change in jo performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?"): https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 https://archive.ph/Qgjy5 The evidence in this source does not discuss cronyism, although I believe you that it could have been relevant to your personal experience; it's just false to claim the issue as a whole was unrelated to DEI.

intended 2y ago
I found one thing odd, which was outside of the scope over the zero sum game being fought here. If you are understaffed, AND you are hiring traditionally, it would make sense that recruiting people would go up. That would mean diverse hires anyway - based on the article, it seems that even increasing diversity was not between undeserving candidates and ideal candidates (the second band section of the article) Is the third variable at play here a lack of funding from congress for recruitment?
- skellington 2y ago
  If you are trying to reach race/gender based quotas, you simply cannot hire white men anymore when they are 90% of the applicants. Or at least, you must attempt to minimize it as much as possible. Math.
  - intended 2y ago
    Yeah but thats not how any quota based system works. Thats the strawman of quota systems. The article itself showed that the quota is some fraction of total applicants that results in minimal impact to performance. Also I heard "math" with a youtube overlay.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The quota issue isn't that you have an explicit hiring quota for each race -- which might even be illegal. It's that if, at the end of the year, the number of people you hired had a large racial disparity, that's bad optics and you'll get in trouble, which you know so you fudge things to change it however you can. So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. Worse, if you hire based on highest test scores you'd only hire 2 of the black applicants and end up with 99.6% white hires. The obvious thing to do to improve the optics is to figure out how to hire all 10 of the qualified black applicants, which is the thing that would have "minimal impact to performance", but you have two problems. First, picking them explicitly because of their race is illegal, so you have to manufacture some convoluted system to do it in a roundabout way. Second, even if you do that you're still screwed, because even hiring all 10 of them leaves you with 98% white hires and that's still bad optics. Their workaround was to use a BS biographical test to exclude most of the white applicants while giving the black applicants the answers. If you do that you can get 90 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants. That'll certainly improve the optics, but then you have 400 unfilled slots.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        There seems to be implication of confusion of what a qualified applicant means in your example above. If there's a test used as the basis of consideration, and some process has decided that any score over X makes the candidate qualified, but then you are later going to claim that actually, given that there were candidates with a score of X+Y, a score of just X does not really constitute "qualified" and the higher scoring candidates should have been chosen, then the whole nature of the test and the ranking becomes rather suspect. So either everyone who is judged to be qualified really is qualified, and it makes no difference that they were not necessarily the highest scoring candidates ... or ... the test for "qualified" is not suitable for purpose.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Suppose you have a test which is a decent proxy for how well someone will do a job. The median person currently doing the job scored 85 and their range is 70-99. If you put someone who scored a 4 in the job, people will die almost immediately. If you put someone who scored a 50 there, people will be at a higher risk of death and you'd be better off passing on that candidate and waiting for a better one. From this we might come up with a threshold of 70 for the minimum score and call this "qualified". Then if you have to fill 5 slots and you got candidates scoring 50, 75 and 95, you should hire the latter two and keep the other slots unfilled until you get better candidates. But if you have to fill 5 slots and you have 10 candidates who all scored above 70, you now have to choose between them somehow. And the candidates who scored 95 are legitimately expected to perform the job better than the ones who scored 75, even though the ones who scored 75 would have been better than an unfilled position.
- cyberax 2y ago
  > AND you are hiring traditionally And the FAA stopped doing that. They revamped the hiring process to screen against the White applicants. The way they did it, is also highly insulting to Black people, btw.
  - drjasonharrison 2y ago
    By "hiring traditionally" they may have meant "posting a job description and application instructions". They definitely didn't continue to interact with the CTI schools. What they didn't appear to do, at least it is not discussed, is targeted advertising towards underrepresented groups.
  - sneedle 2y ago
    [flagged]
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
The answer to the question you've quoted is important, since it could be "none", "a little bit", "a lot", "any amount", each of which has very different ramifications. There is no answer on the slide ...
- varloid 2y ago
  They decided that at least some amount was acceptable - the minimum score on the AT-SAT was changed so that 95% of test takers would pass because the original threshold where 60% passed excluded too many black applicants. This was despite previous studies showing that a higher score on the AT-SAT was correlated with better job performance.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    No, that's not an answer to that specific question. Performance on the AT-SAT is not job performance. If you have a qualification test that feels useful but also turns out to be highly non-predictive of job performance (as, for example, most college entrance exams turn out to be for college performance), you could change the qualification threshold for the test without any particular expectation of losing job performance. In fact, it is precisely this logic that led many universities to stop using admissions tests - they just failed to predict actual performance very well at all.
    - varloid 2y ago
      > 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://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA566825.pdf https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/data_research/research/med_humanfacs/oamtechreports/0106.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 high as possible, especially given that the ATC system has been understaffed for decades.
alcima 2y ago
Actually the source article is quite clear about the implementation of cronyism - friends were emailed the answers to the bizarre hiring test and others were not. It is typical behavior of machine politics - give good jobs to those who support you and block others from having them. Certainly the FAA did have DEI goals, but you can't attribute this patronage to them.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  "Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
  - th0ma5 2y ago
    ... You concede that it was cronyism here. Unless you want to expand on what you are saying.
    - XCabbage 2y ago
      He concedes no such thing. Reserving jobs for members of a "black coalition" that any black person can join is obviously DEI, not cronyism. It's a de facto race-based filter, not one based on favour-trading or past links to the applicant.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Why not both? Near as I can tell, Cronyism goes hand in hand. Someone has to gatekeep who counts in what bracket, someone has to represent the bracket, etc. And the beauty is, the more brackets, the more true this is, and the more can be extracted from the system.
        handoflixue 2y ago
        You're asking the wrong person there. "Both" concedes that it was "DEI" But to actually answer the question: while it can absolutely be both, you need to provide proof of the additional claim. "People cheated for DEI reasons" and "People cheated for cronyism reasons" are two separate claims. The article provides plenty of evidence for the former and not much for the latter.

snailmailstare 2y ago

If we step away from the traffic controllers nonsense for a moment, the actual problem sounded like a military pilot to me. It's my understanding that people who have a family line of pilots go into that funnel knowing a specific nepotism related result occurs such that when it comes time to become a commercial pilot you are probably from such a family. I have no idea if helicopter pilots work the same way or are starting to work the same way, but whenever I see a BS move like this I think that there's probably an opposite interpretation that doesn't fit what their demographic wants to hear.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Robust systems are designed to avoid single points of failure. Humans are fallible. So, for example, both the pilot and the air traffic controller are intended to be paying attention so that if one of them makes a mistake the other can pick it up. If the pilot is making an error, the air traffic controller gets on the radio to tell them they're getting too close to another aircraft, in time for them to course correct. If air traffic control is under-staffed, now the warning the pilot gets might come a minute later than it would have otherwise, and already be too late. Then you no longer have a robust system and it's only a matter of time before one of the pilot errors the system was designed to be able to catch in time instead results in a collision.
- snailmailstare 2y ago
  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.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    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.