5 ms·

Based on the signed executive orders yes.

anonymars 1y ago
What about the signed executive order promoting diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce? https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-diversity-and-inclusion-federal-workforce https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-... It is okay to admit that leaders you agree with are also imperfect. Of course Obama didn't deliberately want to destroy the ATC pipeline, but clearly it was an unintended consequence. I think it's important to understand where people who disagree politically are coming from. Believe me, when Trump spouted all that schlock after the crash, it was humbling to find the element of truth to it. I don't think it caused that crash: it was a disaster waiting to happen in that airspace. But when I saw in black and white a slide from the FAA discussing how much performance they were willing to sacrifice for diversity, do I really disagree with those who think the answer should be "none"?
- rainsford 1y ago
  "Promoting diversity" only equates to "sacrificing performance" if you accept the premise that white men are by default the most qualified for everything. Or maybe to be slightly more generous, the premise is that the prior state of affairs where mostly white men were being hired was colorblind and based on merit, so anything else must be sacrificing merit based hiring. I see no reason to buy that framing though and plenty of reason to think it's bunk. Even liberals can fall into the trap though, because policies to promote diversity are explicitly stated while it's been a bit (although not all that long in the grand scheme of things) since the biases that can lead to prioritizing white men are actually written down. That's how the "tradeoff" ends up in things like the FAA slides. It's unclear what factual support that slide had, but clearly the author just took it as a given, as do a lot of other people.
  - anonymars 1y ago
    I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring?comments=true&commentId=91046659 https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...) The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions > Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9 See also e.g. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132 https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132
    - rainsford 1y ago
      > I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content I don't think that's a wild take at all and actually agree with you. But I also don't think it's a wild take to think there may be barriers to attracting or hiring good minority candidates independent of whether or not there is also a pipeline problem, and there is no reason you'd have to pick just one or the other. The water pressure analogy only works if you presuppose the water pressure issue is exclusively upstream, and of course in the real world faucets can be the source of waterflow problems as well. I should also add that I'm not defending the particular case discussed by the blogger, although I'm less sold on the idea that it was clearly bad than a lot of other people seem to be. But even a bad example would not strongly support the idea that an EO or other push to promote diversity and equal opportunity must inevitably lead to lower performance.
      - anonymars 1y ago
        I agree: I don't think it's inevitable; I think this was an unfortunate unintentional side-effect of well-intentioned policy. I was primarily responding to the question of whether it was "absurd" to blame Obama. Life would surely be easier if we were judged only on our good intentions and not their unintended consequences. But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs. There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize? I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job... *If, like me, you find this astonishing and question the legality -- apparently it's the "neutral" policy that may be discriminatory! Because of the base rate: https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diversity-and-disparate-impact-liability/ https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diver... By the way, short story by Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron

What about the signed executive order promoting diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce? https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-diversity-and-inclusion-federal-workforce https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-... It is okay to admit that leaders you agree with are also imperfect. Of course Obama didn't deliberately want to destroy the ATC pipeline, but clearly it was an unintended consequence. I think it's important to understand where people who disagree politically are coming from. Believe me, when Trump spouted all that schlock after the crash, it was humbling to find the element of truth to it. I don't think it caused that crash: it was a disaster waiting to happen in that airspace. But when I saw in black and white a slide from the FAA discussing how much performance they were willing to sacrifice for diversity, do I really disagree with those who think the answer should be "none"?

rainsford 1y ago
"Promoting diversity" only equates to "sacrificing performance" if you accept the premise that white men are by default the most qualified for everything. Or maybe to be slightly more generous, the premise is that the prior state of affairs where mostly white men were being hired was colorblind and based on merit, so anything else must be sacrificing merit based hiring. I see no reason to buy that framing though and plenty of reason to think it's bunk. Even liberals can fall into the trap though, because policies to promote diversity are explicitly stated while it's been a bit (although not all that long in the grand scheme of things) since the biases that can lead to prioritizing white men are actually written down. That's how the "tradeoff" ends up in things like the FAA slides. It's unclear what factual support that slide had, but clearly the author just took it as a given, as do a lot of other people.
- anonymars 1y ago
  I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring?comments=true&commentId=91046659 https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...) The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions > Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9 See also e.g. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132 https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132
  - rainsford 1y ago
    > I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content I don't think that's a wild take at all and actually agree with you. But I also don't think it's a wild take to think there may be barriers to attracting or hiring good minority candidates independent of whether or not there is also a pipeline problem, and there is no reason you'd have to pick just one or the other. The water pressure analogy only works if you presuppose the water pressure issue is exclusively upstream, and of course in the real world faucets can be the source of waterflow problems as well. I should also add that I'm not defending the particular case discussed by the blogger, although I'm less sold on the idea that it was clearly bad than a lot of other people seem to be. But even a bad example would not strongly support the idea that an EO or other push to promote diversity and equal opportunity must inevitably lead to lower performance.
    - anonymars 1y ago
      I agree: I don't think it's inevitable; I think this was an unfortunate unintentional side-effect of well-intentioned policy. I was primarily responding to the question of whether it was "absurd" to blame Obama. Life would surely be easier if we were judged only on our good intentions and not their unintended consequences. But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs. There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize? I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job... *If, like me, you find this astonishing and question the legality -- apparently it's the "neutral" policy that may be discriminatory! Because of the base rate: https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diversity-and-disparate-impact-liability/ https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diver... By the way, short story by Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron