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1. was designed to statistically select for members of favored identity groups and against members of disfavored identity groups, and not in any way to measure ATC job aptitude, resulting in highly-scored questions like "The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was" where the only correct answer was "Science", and failing the test disqualified you permanently
2. then-current FAA employees distributed the exact answer key to outside racial identity organizations to give to their members
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/139/24/brigida-...
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Example questions with the score given for each answer:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.182...
15. The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
A. SCIENCE (+15)
B. MATH (0)
C. ENGLISH (0)
D. HISTORY/SOCIAL SCIENCES (0)
E. PHYSICAL EDUCATION (0)
16. Of the following, the college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
A. SCIENCE (0)
B. MATH (0)
C. ENGLISH (0)
D. HISTORY/POLITICAL SCIENCE (+15)
E. DID NOT ATTEND COLLEGE (0)
29. My peers would probably say that having someone criticize my performance (i.e. point out a mistake) bothers me:
A. MUCH LESS THAN MOST (+8)
B. SOMEWHAT LESS THAN MOST (+4)
C. ABOUT THE SAME AS MOST (+8)
D. SOMEWHAT MORE THAN MOST (0)
E. MUCH MORE THAN MOST (+10)It's like any large org. Except it is probably one of the largest large orgs.
And seeing as these orgs need to provide regulated services to 330 million people, the nature of the beast is it must be a large org.
Is your argument that this is a bad goal to have, or a bad method of approach, or that the quiz created cannot possibly achieve this goal?
The answer key wasn't provided to _any_ black candidate. It was provided to National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees. Members of that group had an advantage while black candidates not of that group didn't.
corruption is still bad but much like if I stab you it's not a mugging unless I also steal something (both still crimes).
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Also, are they using an AI image? The woman's head in the bottom left table is like exploded (and DALL-E in the URL)?
https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/1f146012-d119-44df-9fea-5cb...
My understanding is that people complained a) because it did not meet that goal of all acceptances going to qualified applicants, but I certainly haven't read enough to judge that and b) the rollout sounds like a chain of poor decisions - even just splitting it into two separate result steps was guaranteed to raise ire from people who got rejected at that new first step, which would have been reduced if they'd simply made it an internal factor calculated at the same time as the exam result.
edit: but I take it that your argument is "that's a bad goal to have"
Your task is to fix your process so the proportions of green and blue are closer to those of the general population.
How?
You can probably come up with a better design. But I'm not sure that, at core, it would be much different from this.
No, your task is to ensure airplanes don’t collide.
I guess what you're trying to say is that you don't consider it a problem if the hiring process is biased towards one group.
There's lots of terrible personality tests in recruitment and they're sometimes abused for various purposes. This one is just mildly bad compared to for example corpos hiring people to analyse the signature/writing style of the candidate. But handing out the key to that test was just terrible.
Then there's another one where people reacted strongly to someone handing out highly scoring words for the resume... where the words would be included in any basic coaching like "leader", "ownership", "delivered", etc.
It's hard to even talk about this when people have kneejerk response to a few key phrases here.
Worse: Making it a pass/no-pass test where if you get any "wrong" answers, you are permanently ejected from the hiring process regardless of education, skill, or in-person interview results.
Egregious: Distributing the answer key by phone to members of a specific DEI action group and telling them to keep quiet about it.
This is not "overblown," it's literally what happened to the FAA hiring process. Some of the most outspoken critics of this scheme are members of that DEI group who were told to cheat on the test, refused to cheat, didn't get the job due to not cheating, and now have little hope of ever landing the job they trained for.
You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.
The fact is though, that the Biographical Questionaire affected hiring. Did it make a noticeable difference though? Who knows. We just know for certain that people who studied for this job didn't get in.
I agree that op thought: > [that] there's [no] debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals
Grandparent only said that there is clearly debate over this.
To say that no-one can disagree with op, or point out an opposing point of view, because is their opinion, is not furthering discussion.
There was absolutely corruption in the application/hiring process. That corruption was built on top of a (flawed, but well intentioned?) DEI program. But, as you note, did it materially impact the overall quality of the hiring pipeline? Maybe, but I don't know that we know for sure.
Fascinating. It sounds like the miscommunication happens because there is two different ways "I don't think there's any debate that X" is used.
One is used to communicate a fact. The fact that X is so uncontroversial that nobody debates it.
The other one seems to be using "I don't think there's any debate" as a kind of emphasis. It's a bit like double underscoring X and writing three exclamation points around it. It doesn't change that you are still just saying X but with more élan.
And if different people use it differently then of course they won't understand each other. One would be confused that their strongly held opinion has been declared false without the conversation partner even addressing X. The other would be confused how something so easily disproven (by the presence of a debate) can be maintained.
But of course I can be wrong.
Given the strength of the posted article (by Tracing Woodgrains) I cannot see the debate either. It is airtight. Non partisan. Nuanced. Stone uncovering. Dozens of references. Led to real world change (albeit unfortunately not in the best way due to politics). It's an A+++ article. I need heavy convincing that it is flawed.
Forget how many HN comments because who cared. Is there any debate that Steve Jobs died? No. That got 1000s of comments. Yes I papermanned your paperman there see!
Rather than point to an irrelevant factoid, what is the factual issue in that article, if any?
> Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike. But that's just my opinion, you know, maybe airplanes got too woke.
So when the grandparent quoted
> maybe airplanes got too woke
and THEN says "I don't think there's any debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals", what does that quote add?
I read an implicit statement that the commenter is siding with this as the cause of the industry problems: "I don't think there's any debate that" [it is, in fact, wokeness that has caused the industry problems]. And I don't think their linked article does make an airtight argument for this.
Perhaps you think the steelman version of the comment simply treats the quoted fragment as an accident, or irrelevant to the rest of it, but I disagree.
It's like pointing out a joke someone made, implying it wasn't a joke (you then have to imagine what airplane now means) and then switching to a sorta-sequitir.
That’s some new term for an effort to create more inclusive institutions, nearly unavoidably at the expense of the traditionally privileged - inevitably it’s taken too far, it crosses a line, even if the cross and the line itself must be manufactured by the resident reactionaries - and it becomes yet another rallying, cry for conservatives, another neat little entry in the portfolio of pogroms against progress.
[0] In the US air traffic controllers usually work a relatively unique rotating shift schedule, called the 2-2-1. Working the 2-2-1 means rotating between two afternoon shifts, two morning shifts and a midnight shift over the course of a week.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_traffic_controller#Work_pa...
It was an underhanded way to do favoritism (by giving out the answers to the associations whose back you want to scratch) not a complex way to do equity.
* applicants are heavily penalized if they took 1 music class in college (whereas 0 or 2 classes is treated as a good thing)
* Applicants are penalized if science.wasn't their worst course in high school. However they're also penalized if science was their worst course in college.
* It seems wrong that the way you heard about the job is directly used to determine whether or not you'll get it
So why is this specific case something that seems to get people out with pitchforks? There are thousands of other cases and they should've been all laughed at until nobody proposes a personality test again. It's all bad and the attention on this one case makes me doubt people genuinely care about profiling and broken hiring in general. (Rather than joining the dei-bad bandwagon)
People don't like corruption. Which is good, because corruption is bad.
The ATC shortage is not in the pipeline of candidates, so this is irrelevant - in fact there's a backlog of people who have been accepted. It's in the training of those candidates - because it's an intensive training there isn't enough staff to increase the amount of people being trained at the same time, which is very insufficient. Furthermore, after finishing their training, folks are posted randomly and some refuse (and thus leave the ATC job) because they don't want to move them and any potential family to the middle of nowhere.
One video by a reliable source (line training captain) on the topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jqa83PrZSVE