Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

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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 scandal with hiring and the FAA

What I have read so far about this situation is outrageous. My understanding is that in 2014, Obama appointed a head of the FAA who wanted to diversify the workforce.

They introduced a biographical questionnaire which had rather arbitrary criteria for passing. It appears to have been explicitly designed to fail people that do not know the magical answers. The failure rate was 90%.

This is not the only example, but perhaps the most egregious questions: you are asked what your best subject was in highschool. If you answered science, you get 15 points (a substantial amount). No points for any other subject. Next, you're asked your best subject in college. If you answer history, you get 15 points. No points for any other subject.

Here is an alleged recreation of the test: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

There are supposedly voicemails in which they helped select candidates pass this biographical questionnaire by providing their preferred race/gendered candidates with the answers. I haven't been able to find a voice mail online, but Fox Business reported that these voicemails exist.

Per a 2016 Yahoo Finance article, an internal FAA report falsely cleared the employee of wrongdoing.

It's my understanding that there is currently a lawsuit making its way through the courts regarding this. It's also my understanding that some allege that the problems are not all resolved yet with hiring, despite the questionnaire being withdrawn in 2018. I'm not sure of the specifics of how there may still be problems with hiring and the FAA.

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471

From the website "The FAA has discontinued use of this Behavioural Assessment since 2018."

That was 7 years 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?

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.

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.

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.

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