Culturalism, Gladwell, and Airplane Crashes
askakorean.blogspot.hk
askakorean.blogspot.hk
By the end of the article, you realize that the whole point is about the negatives of "culturalism". He says:
> Like racism, culturalism distracts away from asking more meaningful questions, and obscures pertinent facts.
> Like racism, culturalism puts a large group of people beyond rational understanding.
> like racism, culturalism destroys individual agency.
> Culturalism causes real harm. It obfuscates the truth.
But he hasn't backed this up at all, except for a single lengthy anecdote about Gladwell's chapter. Speaking as someone who has lived in in several different countries besides the US (including 8 years in one), cultural attitudes are extremely important everywhere you go and can explain lots of important things.
Just look at Geert Hofstede's "Cultures and Organizations" if you want empirical data for it.
Seeking cultural explanations for things is no different from seeking any other kind of explanation. Even if it winds up not being true, it's perfectly valid to wonder if cultural things are at work. Looking for cultural explanations is not a distraction, and it does not put anyone "beyond rational understanding" -- to the contrary, it tries to explain things rationally.
I understand that the author is bothered by speculation about Korean culture, but honestly, that's just silly. It's not emblematic of some kind of anti-Korean attitudes in US media or anything, and the author's done nothing to show that it is.
I'd say that it's worth discussion that the cultural differences cited by Gladwell about Korea are the same as 150 year old stereotypes of Chinese culture.
The other part is that I don't believe it's fictitious pilot folklore about the specific training to deal with the cultural issues that had to take place. Not just Korean, I've heard similar things about Vietnamese pilots too.
One example - Germany has a reputation as being a rule oriented/structured country, so taking an extra few days of preparation prior to deployments, was very much appreciated there, and we went to the extra effort to do so (and totally enjoyed having an appreciative audience for our wonderfully laid out test plans).
We also discovered in Brazil, that if the customer showed up 5 or 6 minutes late for a conf call, that we shouldn't stress or be concerned that there was a problem - but that culturally, meetings/calls don't always start exactly on the minute. We also learned to be careful to leave an extra 30 minute window for meetings to end a little later than they were scheduled.
Contrawise, We were always careful to dial in within a 30-45 second window at the start of a call when working with the UK. And those meetings (almost) always ended precisely on time.
These are things that you need to be aware of if you want to work effectively in different countries. Don't always expect that other people's expectations of what's appropriate are the same as yours.
And no, you can't have a clear understanding of the culture by having someone tell you a couple of things before meetings - most people have no idea how a different subculture in their own country is like, let alone having a reasonable picture of the national culture. A foreign culture with which you have a brief contact? Clear understanding? Get out of here.
You can certainly have variability around an average, but, it's also certainly the case that average norms for various countries can be (dramatically) different.
And, as one who has travelled quite a bit, I can tell you German Culture and (for instance) Hong Kong Culture, around things like queues/rules, are so different as to make your head spin. The meeting thing in Brazil is really true. And, if you come out to Silicon Valley, 90+% of engineering companies are fine with you wearing a T-Shirt. Strongly suspect that's not the ratio you would see in London. Culture is real.
If someone tells you, in our country, people are like this, the chance is that you're being mislead. Lots of people tell me that in their country of origin, there are no gay people or something along those lines. People have a very narrow view of what constitutes their own national culture, largely oriented around their own peculiar and individual experience.
If Correlation does not imply causation, then what does? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6030627
There's nothing wrong with looking for cultural explanations, but as the OP points out, there could be perfectly valid non-cultural reasons, such as the economic and technological history of Korean industry.
The problem with cultural/ethnic explanations, in general, is that they are so strongly rooted in our psychology...a big part of that is influenced, of course, by our culture. Ask anyone who works in casting for ad campaigns.
And that they come first. To look for an individual explanation involves studying an individual or an incident in detail. Resorting to a handy stereotype is far easier. I've never run an airline or been a pilot, but I may have met a Korean or two, and have an easily accessible array of stereotypes about Asians.
TheKorean understands the tricks of rhetoric. He wrote an essay on it on his blog. He did not write this article in an attempt to consider an issue in the spirit of open minded inquiry. He did it to discourage you from making judgements of other cultures in all cases.
This is the same person who said it was perfectly ok in Korea for a woman to walk up to a girl on the subway and _slap_ her because the woman believed the girl was disrespectful.
Why was it ok? According to TheKorean, because by the cultural standards in Korea say it is ok. He is wrong.
He is not a rational open minded thinker. He is using rhetorical tricks (appealing to your skepticism to convince you that judging cultures is wrong) in an attempt to protect his own people.
This board has smart, rational people. Let's look at motives and not just arguments.
Landing a Plane is not like a golf tournament. Every trained and qualified pilot should be expected to safely land the plane. While not a trivial task, and one requiring significant experience and training, it is not so inordinately difficult that only a very few people alive can perform the task.
With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them, that the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual.
Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines.
I completely agree with the OP that it's absolutely premature to be making any conclusions regarding impact of culture on the Asiana airlines crash, but, the nature of the crash, in great weather, suggests that there will be some systemic failure (Training, Over-reliance on Automation, poor maintenance, overly complex modal-auto-throttle) that turns out to be the cause of it.
Sure, but if you took an untrained, unskilled person and had him flying a trans-Pacific jet, you'd see more crashes. This isn't done, for obvious reasons. A terrible golfer who shoots a 173 just annoys people who have to wait behind him. With an unskilled pilot, the stakes are higher and great efforts are made to prevent one from flying a passenger jet.
Good golfers, on the other hand, don't make terrible shots most of the time (although horrible shots are more common than plane crashes).
Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines.
OP's argument is that this isn't specifically a Korean or East Asian problem, and I agree. Most people are-- except when they perceive a life-threatening crisis (and that point of perception may be too late)-- deferential to authority. It's not limited to one culture.
identified by whom? with what credibility? The whole point of the article is refuting that hypothesis. You've done nothing but restate that thought, without adding any more weight to it.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/new-standards-mea...
Here is an excellent article on the safety issues with Korean Airlines in the 1990s - much of it, btw, conflicting with the OP's description.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB933090613281869060-search.ht...
Here's a article about how bad the situation was in the late 1990s, published nearly a decade before Gladwell got in on the act. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/575544.stm
It's generally believed that South Korean airlines have addressed a lot of those problems through changes to the organisational culture and better training, but after a crash which initially looks like a significant error by the flight crew, it's not wholly unreasonable to ask if the pattern is re-emerging.
> With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them
Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year when there are thousands of planes in the air. This has everything to do with individual decision making on the part of the pilots, which will necessarily be faulty occasionally. It's basically just random chance that some planes every year will crash because of pilot error.
> the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual.
What sounds better in an NTSB report: "the pilot fucked up and flew into the ocean, whoops" or "we recommend adjusting the height of the foo so the pilot can better see it while barring"? Obviously everyone wants actionable outcomes from post-crash investigations, even when they're just trying to explain away a random accident. Y
99.9% success would mean ~475 plane crashes during take-off and landing on Heathrow alone each day =)
Was going off this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_a...
Edit: Silly me, the stats are by year not by day as I was expecting. Guess it means only ~1.3 crashes at Heathrow each day
The OP was trying to compare and contrast a "System"'s behavior with an "Individual's" behavior, which was where the article went awry.
Re: Gladwell - Gladwell was most definitely not the source of "Korean Culturalism" regarding Air Safety. He simply wrote a popular chapter on an issue that already well documented.
The cause of any pilot error is not law-of-large numbers - pilot error has been, for the most part, systemically eliminated from flying. What's left now is system-flaws.
One of the obvious flaws at SFO was it's GlideScope Indicator was out of service. I have to believe that this will turn out to be a major contributor to the accident, and, in the future, Airport's may be much more cautious about disabling such safety equipment unless absolutely unavoidable.
When you design a system where errors can cause a large number of deaths (airplanes, trains, nuclear reactors,...), your objective is to have very few accidents (nobody can guarantee zero). Having someone to blame when an accident happens -- the pilot did not follow procedure -- is not enough.
Your system design must be human error tolerant, because you know these will happen. To take an extreme example, if a drunk pilot error causes an accident it's not only his fault, but there probably also is a systemic error which caused this criminal behavior (which is a possibility you expect) to cause an accident: maybe the cockpit culture was such that the co-pilot was frightened to stand up to the drunk pilot.
Air travel in the US is so safe that it's actually getting difficult to measure it and difficult to identify problem areas. The last fatal airline crash before Asiana 214 was years ago. Some people are most emphatically not dying every year anymore, despite thousands of planes in the air. We go years at a time without a single airline fatality in the US.
And yet, those few accidents that do happen all have identifiable causes with clear remedies. This Asiana crash may have been pilot error, but it was definitely not just random chance. Pilots letting their airplane get too low and too slow on landing with no adverse factors is a clear failure of training and proficiency. One fairly obvious remedy for this one would be to require all airline pilots to hand-fly a purely visual approach at least X times per year to ensure that the skill stays fresh.
I dare you to find a first-world airline crash from the past couple of decades that has no actionable outcomes from the investigation. Shouldn't take you too long to go through all the crashes, since there won't be many to look at in the first place. I guarantee you that every one had actual, useful recommendations come out of the accident investigation, not just bureaucratic CYA "recommendations".
That's a weird assertion. Generally, that events are extremely rare outliers in a system is an indicator they are the result of unique special circumstances applicable to that event (of which, the combination of involved individuals would certainly be a plausible candidate for an event where a small group of individuals had a major direct role the way the flight crew does in aircraft operations), rather than systemic problems. This is pretty much the basis of statistical process control.
It turns everything on its head to consider that extremely rare outliers in a process are a particular indication of systemic problems rather than special causes.
Imagine the power going out at your company's data center and then one of the generators doesn't turn on, and as a result your website goes down and you lose $10k/hour. Would management suggest that the generator is an individual and an outlier and we'll just hope it doesn't happen again? My guess is that a set of policies would go into place such that even if a single generator did fail, the website would not go down. You now have a systemic fix to what was entirely likely a very rare systemic problem. Just because it's rare doesn't mean it's not systemic.
I can see that point and agree with it. (Well, I'd say the point is to prevent the failure of any one part of the system from producing unacceptable outcomes rather than preventing the failure of any one part of the system, but that's a minor quibble.)
I think my more significant disagreement with the original post is more with the description in that post that it is systemic and little to do with the individual. I'll agree that the fact that the system allowed the individual problem to produce a catastrophic undesired outcome is a systemic problem that (provided a reasonable correction is available) ought to be addressed, but that doesn't mean that the problem had little to do with the individual(s) involved, the fact that it is an outlier means that you aren't dealing with the normal behavior of the system, and that if you are going to address this kind of outlier event, you need to understand the contribution of special circumstances (of which, again, the contributing features of the individuals involved are quite likely relevant components) that produce the outlier event. You can't effectively address the systemic issue if you view it as unrelated to the individuals.
That's effectively what I was trying to say. I didn't get all the way there, though, and you've stated it quite nicely.
I guess part of the reason that people are suggesting this is indicative of systemic problems is that there's very little in the way of compounding factors. Yes the glide path indicator was non-operational, but that didn't cause 20 crashes that day. It had been out for quite some time (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-equipment-out-of...). Many other planes landed safely. From what I understand (http://www.weather.com/news/san-francisco-plane-crash-weathe...) the weather was fairly clear so that didn't play in.
A lot of the analysis I've read seems to indicate that this was basically a rookie-esque mistake and that there's no possible way such a thing should have happened. That there should have been 20 checks to make sure that this guy wasn't authorized to fly the plane, but that for whatever reason, none of them were acted upon. At that point it's a systemic problem.
I would be looking at this very differently if there were a bunch of bad circumstances beyond his control that converged in ways completely unforseeable and as a result of that there was a crash. But from what I can tell, this was a very nice day to be flying around SFO.
EDIT: I just realized that I got really off-topic. Whoops!
Another Korean air flight misunderstood the tower and tried to land at the same time as an another plane almost causing a crash, which was only noticed by the other pilot who got out of there. I was there when they asked the pilot about it who was completely clueless he had almost killed everybody on both flights.
I dont know whats up with Korean pilot training but talk to anybody who has worked in a tower and they will tell you horror stories. Theres also the 911 incident where they broadcasted a hijack code for some reason and were almost shot down over the Yukon.
A training mistake no other pilot would ever make, even in a simulator? Surely the whole point of putting a pilot under training in a simulator is because they will make mistakes, they're expected to make mistakes, learning from mistakes is a part of learning, and they're doing it in a simulator because they need to learn.
If we have a supply of pilots who don't make mistakes as they learn, why do we bother training them at all? Surely we can put these magic trainees straight into the cockpit.
It wasn't just one pilot's error, we have 2 pilots that ignored protocols.
If you want some more Korean pilot hijinx look up Korean Air Lines Flight 769 in 2007 that decided not to land on the runway and instead where they taxi planes. How do you make that mistake: giant landing strip, or tiny strip right beside it obviously not for landing. Hmm I'll land on the tiny strip
I worked with highly educated Koreans when I was there and what the OP says is true about using English words and phrases for highly-technical things I found little to no relationship between that use and a high level of English language competency. If you look at the quoted transcript you see that the item that is "off-script" is in Korean: "Captain: Glide scope 안 돼나? [Isn't glide scope working?]" while all the routine OK checks are in English, following training. For this reason I find elements of his arguments not much more convincing than Gladwell's. (That and the tendency of Korean airliners to drift into Soviet airspace he dismisses seems to support Gladwell's thesis more than his.)
I generally think the "culturalism" thing is a dangerous excuse to engage in a kind of casual racism, but I also think that dismissing culture as an element of any task where humans have to communicate and cooperate is also incorrect.
The tendency of Korean airliners to drift into Soviet airspace had much more to do with Korea's location on the globe than anything else.
edit: Here's a key rebuttal:
> "Gladwell also notes that Korean manner of speaking is indirect and suggestive, requiring the listener to be engaged and applying proper context to understand the true meaning...And the transcript reveals a striking fact that Gladwell never mentions: 90 percent of the conversation among the three pilots is in English. In fact, the only part of the conversation that happens in Korea is idle banter, talking about how the company does not pay them enough or how Guam's airport must be staffed by former U.S. soldiers who were stationed in Korea."
If the premise of Malcolm's chapter is how culture/ethnicity can be related to operational catastrophes, particularly in language, then the power of the assertion is significantly undermined if language wasn't much of a factor in the actual incident.
He contends that 90% of the conversation between the pilots was conducted in English and then, a bit later, quotes a multi-line dialogue between the captain and first officer that was completely in Korean and which he had to translate.
In making the case that the rigidly hierarchical nature of Korean society wasn't a factor in a crash, he describes multiple, conflicting axes-of-respect (age, experience, training) that would've existed and weighed on the crew members' thoughts and actions.
At another point, he seems to be saying that an airline isn't accident-prone if some (not all) of its crashed/destroyed planes were downed because the crew flew them off course and into hostile territory. How many other passenger planes were downed by the Soviets during the same period? Apparently none: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inci...
I'm no fan of Gladwell and the "Igon Value" fiasco should have clued people into the fact that they should be wary of science popularizers, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Especially if it's just repeating aspects of what other clocks have been saying.
Anyway, the OP's intent is to show that in these Korean passages, Gladwell apparently cherry-picks and edits the otherwise innocuous dialogue in a misleading way:
-----
There is the sound of a man shifting in his seat. A minute passes. 0121:13 CAPTAIN: Eh... really... sleepy. [unintelligible words]. FIRST OFFICER: Of course. Then comes one of the most critical moments in the flight. The first officer decides to speak up: FIRST OFFICER: Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here? The first officer must have thought long and hard before making that comment . . . [W]hen the first officer says: "Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?" we know what he means by that: Captain. You have committed us to visual approach, with no backup plan, and the weather outside is terrible. You think we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway. But what if we don't? It's pitch-black outside and pouring rain and the glide scope is down. There is no nice way of saying this: this portion of Gladwell's writing is ridiculous in several ways.
First, the way in which Gladwell quoted the transcript is severely misleading. This is the full transcript, which goes from pp. 185 to 187 of the NTSB report: CAPTAIN: 어... 정말로... 졸려서... (불분명) [eh... really... sleepy... (unintelligible words)] FIRST OFFICER: 그럼요 [Of course] FIRST OFFICER: 괌이 안 좋네요 기장님 [Captain, Guam condition is no good]FIRST OFFICER: Two nine eighty-six CAPTAIN: 야! 비가 많이 온다 [Uh, it rains a lot]CAPTAIN: (unintelligible words) CAPTAIN: 가다가 이쯤에서 한 20 마일 요청해 [Request twenty miles deviation later on] FIRST OFFICER: 네 [yes] CAPTAIN: ... 내려가면서 좌측으로 [... to the left as we are descending] (UNCLEAR SPEAKER): (chuckling, unintelligible words) FIRST OFFICER: 더 오는 것같죠? 이 안에. [Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?] (emphases mine)
Note the difference between the full transcript, and the way Gladwell presented the transcript. Gladwell only quoted the first two lines and the last line of this sequence, omitting many critical lines in the process. In doing so, Gladwell wants to create an impression that the first officer underwent some period of silent contemplation, and decided to warn the captain of the poor weather conditions in an indirect, suggestive manner.
The full transcript reveals that this is clearly not the case. The first officer spoke up directly, clearly, and unmistakably: "Captain, Guam condition is no good." It is difficult to imagine how a person could be more direct about the poor weather condition. Further, there was no silent contemplation by the first officer. Nearly three minutes elapse during this sequence, during the captain and the first officer chatted constantly. And it is the captain who first brings up the fact that it is raining a great deal: "Uh, it rains a lot." In this context, it is clear that the first officer is engaged in some friendly banter about the rain, not some indirect, ominous warning about the flight conditions.
Why did Gladwell make such egregious mistakes and resort to lazy, analysis? Why did most readers lazily accept such explanations without asking relevant questions? Why do journalists immediately jump to cultural explanations in lots of cases without having a strong understanding of the facts, the details and/or actual knowledge of the cultures that they are holding accountable?
Because culturalism makes us feel informed and superior. It allows us to form a sophisticated-sounding opinion that confirms your own cultural superiority without knowing anything. It allows us to quickly come to a wrong conclusion in a lot of different contexts - it's difficult to get to know a specific person, but it's easy to recall a cultural stereotype. We want to feel like we know what's going on, even when we have no idea. Culturalism gives us that feeling. It's knowledge saccharin.
This comes up a lot in technological contexts. for instance, with just programming languages and platforms, we see these (or some politely worded versions thereof) all the time: .NET developers are copy-pasting Microsoft drones who can't solve difficult problems without wizards holding hands, Lisp programmers are non-bathing egotists who can't work with others, Java programmers are cargo-cultists who prefer verbose incantations full of acronym soups and unnecessary hiearchies of meaningless classes to clear code, Perl/Ruby/Javascript programmers can only write short scripts, not maintainable, performant or critical applications.
The lesson here is clear - distinguish between actual knowledge of the world and poor, phony substitutes that merely give us the feeling of knowing. It'll make us better at what we do and incidentally also lead to a better society.
I had a Korean CEO like this once at Noom. The guy constantly fucked up. Forgot to pay employees, paid the wrong amount, forgot to pay gym memberships for months which was supposed to be a benefit, promised to update addresses for immigration paperwork and never got around to it, etc.. Even the CTO admitted numbers were not the CEOs strong point and he was just there to make friendly deals with other business people. If you called the guy out on anything, or setup a meeting to try to address things together, he took you away from his desk where things could be fixed to a meeting room to lecture you for an hour on how you had to respect him.
There are legitimate and complex ways in which culture can influence individual behavior, but in practice, most such arguments come down to just laziness, personal biases or in some extreme cases, a socially more acceptable way to express racial prejudice.
AFTER EDIT: Anyway, the fine submitted article here is an extended rant about Malcolm Gladwell's essays that later get collected into Gladwell's books, but it has too little to say about the latest airline accident with pilots trained by an airline operating in Korea, the FIRST-EVER fatal crash involving the 777 aircraft. When news reports mention that a cockpit command told flight attendants to tell passengers to stay in their seats rather than evacuate the aircraft after it came to rest off the runway,
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23637529/flight-atten...
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/09/world/asia/asiana-flight-a...
we know that that at least one pilot on that flight was using extremely poor judgment even after the plane slammed into the ground. There was a human factor in the most recent crash, and the investigation will have to find out what that human factor was and reduce risk of recurrence of that human factor in the next several hundred thousand passenger airline flights around the world.
It feels really tasteless how rapidly the discourse shifted towards criticism of the victims.
"The Pedometer Test: Americans Take Fewer Steps" http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/the-pedometer-test-...
Does reading that article or even its title make you angry?
Would you disagree with the results of the study on which it was based? If so, on what grounds? Do you believe that it is wrong in some way to even conduct such a study?
[0] No, your semester abroad during college does not count.
I agree with the overall suggestion. Where have you lived abroad?
Illustration: The causes of ascribed cultural trait X which has a 75% prevalence in Fooistan may be identical to the causes of that same trait X in Baristan, where it has a 5% prevalence, and the difference may be entirely due to random circumstance and network effects. Explaining why a person in a particular incident acted in accordance with trait X with "He's Fooistani and they are often X" is not an explanation, just an observation, and offers no insight into the 25% of Fooistanis who are not X. The equivalent statement in the latter case is "He's Fooistani, and sometimes Fooistanis are not X" and has equal explanatory power: none.
As a Baristani, though, it is a very comforting "explanation" if trait X is a worrying trait, because being Fooistani is not something that they have to fear.
Maybe I'm just being naive, but I honestly feel betrayed by how badly one of my (perhaps now former) favorite writers twisted or conveniently ignored facts to make one of his essays more interesting.
He does it so well, though, that he's still one of my favorite writers.
And, much like Wikipedia has taught us to realize that anything written down could be something totally bogus thrown up by a vandal, and therefore we should challenge (and look for citations) for everything, everywhere - Gladwell has taught us that just because something sounds good - doesn't really mean it actually is accurate/truthy.
I agree with Merlin Mann's thoughts on Gladwell:
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/205874392/surprise-surprise
I came here just to find a place to post my standard Gladwell disclaimer:
I can not anti-recommend Gladwell enough. He is anti-knowledge, convincing you that you know something when you actually understand it less well after reading than before.
" If you think that a Korean person in a professional setting would show any disrespect to a person who is 14 years older just because he slightly outranks the other, you know absolutely nothing about Korean culture."
Therefore confirming that cultural issues DO have an impact on people's behaviour.
For much of the article, the author is saying that Gladwell's hypothesis is a big stretch and it displays the Igon Value Problem.
Gladwell's segment: FO: "Don't you think it rains more? [..]" Omitted: FO: "Captain, Guam condition is no good."
Yeah the omitted section is much stronger. But it's wrong to argue that it's direct enough, because it's still not as strong as the FO saying something like:
"I think the conditions aren't good enough for VFR. I think we should change our strategy."
Some of the pilot interviews after OZ214 have stated many airlines have a "no-fault go-around" policy. If anyone in the cockpit has any discomfort with the approach, the rule is that you go around, and make everyone comfortable, with no fault to anyone. This is an environment in which a pilot could be more confident making a direct statement like the one I suggest above.
I don't necessarily believe this is a cultural thing though, just a good idea that airlines should implement.
But looking at just the transcript, would you really come to that conclusion? By leaving out most lines, the transcript seems to show a FO with an internal struggle to speak out, but I don't think that was what happened at all.
In a slightly more serious note, there is a fair chunk of research on this topic[1], showing cultural differences in Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) behavior[2].
On the third hand, making any positive statements about the causes of this crash is totally premature, very likely spewing horseshit, and a serious disservice to the investigation and anyone involved, including the victims.
[1] http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/helmreichlab/p...
Says "Culturalism is the unwarranted impulse to explain people's behavior with a "cultural difference", whether real or imagined," while running a blog called "Ask a Korean."
Pretends culture has nothing to do with how accidents happen.
all credibility lost.
And, to bring it all home, this feels like the topic of a Gladwell Book (or at least a chapter)
Cultural explanations when the group of people make up a statistically significant portion of the incidents == good.
The question as I see it is : Do Koreans make up a statistically significant portion of near misses and accidents?
From what I have read from various aviation professionals, the answer is yes. What have you guys heard?