The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

This is a fascinating read, but the thing that bugs me about this whole affair is that when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.

The cheating element is only _part_ of it, and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology...like a sacred cow. Litigating "disparate impact" cases across any category became a successful attack vector against capitalist structures, and supported by Democratic leadership.

This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed. Both pieces are relevant.

From an external (not US) PoV, it might also be that DEI was too much of a sacred cow before to call a spade a spade.

> then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda,

I don't know that it is limited to, or even most prevalent, in state-sponsored propaganda. Private individuals, media, etc. do this too without any state sponsorship.

> This isn't "slapping a new coat of paint for propaganda," but rather exposing the rest of the iceberg that was otherwise concealed.

Our Blessed Homeland vs. Their Barbarous Wastes

Maybe! But in this case, the bulk of the mistakes by the FAA happened in the 2012-2014. In the middle of the Obama administration, but well before the bulk of the really controversial post-BLM DEI stuff that the current administration is largely attacking.

Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes

Sure, I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories.

> and the dominant regime at the time downplayed / ignored the DEI elements because that was supported by their ideology

In the eye of the beholder. The current regime is upplaying the DEI elements because of their ideology.

The difference though is, unless everyone involved has a time machine, using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.

It's all connected, DEI(B) is just the latest revision of the beast.

> Taking old, resolved scandals

The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.

The Brigida lawsuit, from which we get a lot of the documents in the article, was filed in 2016 and has framed this as a DEI discrimination issue from the get-go.

That's a misreading of the article. This scandal was not just "cheating and recruitment" but forcing "Diversity" with a side of "Equity". To quote the facts:

> The NBCFAE continued to pressure the FAA to diversify, with its members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push for increased diversity among ATCs. After years of fiddling with the research and years of pressure from the NBCFAE, the FAA landed on a strategy: by using a multistage process starting with non-cognitive factors, they could strike “an acceptable balance between minority hiring and expected performance”—a process they said would carry a “relatively small” performance loss. They openly discussed this tension in meetings, pointing to “a trade-off between diversity (adverse impact) and predicted job performance/outcomes,” asking, “How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?”

This was DEI before it was called DEI. The label changed, the spirit did not.

That spirit, of sublimated racial grievance, metastasized everywhere in our society. It went from quiet, to blatant, and now to a memory hole.

Framed as a cheating and recruiting scandal by who? Is it truly resolved if the racial discrimination element was never addressed?

I don't think I even know what "DEI" is anymore. Political pundits have turned it into a generic slur, a boogeyman that vaguely means "I have to work with minorities now??"

I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out." At least that's how all of my training sessions at work frame it. But, like everything, the term has become politically charged, and everyone now wants to overload it to mean all sorts of things they simply don't like.

If I had to blame anything on the Democrats it is this:

Valuing competence is one thing. Valuing diversity is another thing. You can have neither, either one, or both. The democrats make a conspicuous show of not valuing competence in addition to making some noises about diversity.

Nobody said Barack Obama was an affirmative action case, no, he was one of the greatest politicians of the first quarter-century. On the other hand I feel that many left-leaning politicians make conspicuous displays of incompetence, I'd particularly call out Karen Bass, who would fall for whatever Scientology was selling and then make excuses for it. I think they want donors to know that whatever they are they aren't capable, smart and ambitious like Ralph Nader but rather they don't connect the dots between serving donors and what effect it has on their constituents.

When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. in a contested election for which she had to serve the whole community she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it", all the duckspeak aimed at reconciling a lefty constituency and rightist donors went away.

Nowhere is this disregard for competence more conspicuous in the elections where a senile or disabled white man is running against a lunatic. Fetterman beat Oz (they said, it's nothing, he just has aphasia, except his job is to speak for Pennsylvania) but they held on to Biden until the last minute against Trump and his replacement lost.

Democrats need to make it clear that you can have both, but shows of competence increase the conflict between being a party that is a favorite of donors and being a party that has mass appeal. Being just a little sheepish and stupid is the easy way to reconcile those but we see how that went in 2024.

Worse, it doesn't prove what it asserts. The assertion is that the quality of hires obviously got impacted. But, not once does it look at performance of hires.

This narrative also doesn't expand the look at hiring numbers over the years, where it would be seen that the last 4 years are the only growth years in the organization going back even before this scandal.

Nor does it look at any other problems. Sequestration is mentioned in passing, but the impact it had was sizeable. By the numbers, it is almost certainly more impactful than even the scandal that is focused on.

What this does is appeal to the public court for justice on an old scandal. And right now, the public court is dominated by Trump and his supporters. One can try and couch ideas by "guys, I'm not an extreme Republican" all one wants, but that doesn't change that this feeds their narrative far more than it does to help any progress on the actual court case that is ostensibly being highlighted.

So, now instead of getting quantitative analysis in a rigorous court with investigations, we get people carrying water for Trump as he blames DEI.

DEI quotas have been around for decades. We just used to call it affirmative action and it was far less aggressive and blatant.

> using current cultural agenda items and going back in time and attributing them to people is always going to be wild speculation.

I'm as blue as they come, but let's not mince words.

This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.

Much like the elite college admissions lawsuit, we don't need to guess at people's ideology - they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants and so a biographical questionnaire was needed to re-advantage them.

When Trump opened his mouth to blame DEI for the crash, about 95% of what he said was hateful, totally-made-up bullshit. Despite that and speaking practically, DEI had a significant role to play in the ATC understaffing during the crash.

I really wish that our party was better at calling out crazy people within our ranks, ESPECIALLY when they do stuff that's guaranteed to alienate a solid chunk of the country just based on if "their worst subject in school was science" or whatever other deranged, racist proxy for race they come up with.

> when this came to light many years ago it was treated as a cheating and recruitment scandal. But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Respectfully, thats not accurate.

The article actually shows that dei considerations were central to the original changes, not just recent framing. The FOIA requests show explicit discussions about "diversity vs performance tradeoffs" from the beginning. The NBCFAE role and the "barrier analysis" were both explicitly focused on diversity outcomes in 2013.

The article provides primary sources (internal FAA documents, recorded messages, investigation reports) showing that racial considerations were explicitly part of the decision making process from the start. This is documented in realtime communications.

The scandal involved both improper hiring practices (cheating) AND questionable DEI implementation. These aren't mutually exclusive; they're interrelated aspects of the same event.

> Taking old, resolved scandals

In what way do you consider this resolved?

The class action lawsuit hasn't even gone to trial yet (2026).

The FAA is still dealing with controller shortages. (facilities are operating understaffed,controllers are working 6-day weeks due to staffing shortages, training pipelines remain backed up)

The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.

It was MORE blatant and transparent, which IMO is the bare minimum for government-sanctioned racism. If we are going to do AA, we owe it to EVERYONE to make it clear exactly how and when we will do it. Sneaking it in disingenuously will rightfully piss people off.

The problem is it hasn’t been resolved, there is a big lawsuit about it still working its way through the courts.

> to call a spade a spade

intentional? one of the dumber virtue-signaling "no-nos" from the worst of DEI.

DEI: Diversity Equity Inclusion

Diversity of race (encouraging racism), equity of income (encouraging envy), inclusion of "the marginalized" (discouraging free association)

Except, as a government program, this turns from mere encouragement to forcing the issues, under threat of fines, imprisonment, and ultimately death.

In the words of famous actor Morgan Freeman; "If you want to end racism, stop talking about it." (1)

1) https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/06/16/morgan-freeman-doubl...

>including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out

I think that is the crux of the issue right there. It's taken as a "sky-is-blue" level fact that everyone is equal in all regards, and therefore any inequality in outcome is a function of bigoted policy at some level. This is despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, which kind of elevates DEI to an ideological position rather than a logical one, and arguably undermines the confidence of people who would ostensibly be considered "DEI Hires".

Companies have largely side-stepped this however, because underneath it all, they still want the most productive workers, regardless of their labels. So they implement a farcical DEI to keep up appearances, while still allowing hiring of whoever is deemed the most productive for a team.

I'll try to assume good faith, but this is the sort of framing often used in the waning days of unpopular ideas.

That's not what DEI ever was. It fundamentally came down to evaluating disparate impact and then setting targets based on it. The underlying idea is that if a given pool (in the US, generally national- or state-level statistics) has a racial breakdown like so:

  10% X
  30% Y
  60% Z

But your company or organization had a breakdown of:

  5% X
  25% Y
  70% Z

You are institutionally racist and need to pay money to various DEI firms in order to get the right ratios, where 'right' means matching (or exceeding) the population for certain ethnic minorities. The 'certain ethnic minorities' value changed over time depending on who you would ask.

The methods to get 'the right ratios' varied from things like colorblind hiring (which had a nil or opposite effect), to giving ATS-bypassing keywords to minority industry groups (what the FAA did here).

Right, if you look at the documents there was clear racial discrimination involved.

It's bizarre to see people say that since the media initially didn't report on the full story, telling people the full story is similar to "state-sponsored propoganda." That mindset appears to be saying that once the media has made up a narrative for the story, people should be hostile to other pertinent information, even when it's uncovering major aspects of the story that the media didn't report on.

That kind of attitude runs counter to anyone interested in finding out the truth.

Edit: Also worth pointing out the author's original article on this scandal was written a year ago, and a followup was recently written to clarify things in response to increased discussion about that article. They're a law student who initially wrote about it after coming across court documents and being surprised that there had been almost no coverage regarding what actually had happened.

The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.

The situation here was the ATC was chronically understaffed and unable to fill positions. So an effort for them to boost applications makes sense even under non-DEI principles.

No, but the problematic assessment in question was eliminated by congress in 2016. That would not explain the FAA's current recruitment problems.

Hiring people who are responsible for the safety of people lives on anything but merit is a problem no matter how you frame it. Not only is it racism, it is dangerous.

>>I've always thought it simply meant "drawing from the widest possible candidate funnel, including instead of excluding people who have traditionally been shut out."

I don't think anyone objects to that, but the unspoken part that seemed to be enforced was "...even if it means lowering standards and overlooking the best qualified candidates for the job, as long as we get kudos for meeting our diversity targets."

Yes. It was also often career suicide to criticize DEI indicatives.

> How much of a change in job performance is acceptable to achieve what diversity goals?

The key part though is that the FAA was worried about the job performance of diverse candidates they brought in. They did not see a trade off between their staffing levels.

There are two separate arguments happening:

Did changing their application process create less qualified ATC controllers? Maybe! But no one seems to be arguing this.

Did changing their application process create a shortage of ATC controllers? Probably not! If anything, the evidence points to the FAA being worried they were going to get too many mediocre candidates.

ATC training and dropout rate is so long and high, that mistakes made 8-9 years ago could still be impactful.

A thing I wonder about like the nature of government and power is why does it feel like going back and forth between ridiculous policies. Like I’m sure 10 years from now, we’ll be uncovering crazy things the Trump administration did that were racist or sexist or whatever and it won’t make any sense! You’ll look at it and go why would a reasonable person have decided that approach! Talk about a footgun. And then maybe there’s a New Democrat administration that creates a new catchphrase that replaces DEI and we get familiar excesses again.

I would more likely say that the qualities that make one popular or wanting to deal with the bullshit of managing Americans disputes are in opposition to the qualities that make one qualified. See: almost every politician that’s not a Democrat. Incompetence is staggeringly bipartisan.

I think it’s helpful to distinguish between botched DEI efforts and the broader intent behind DEI. Just because certain organizations implement it clumsily or rely on simplistic quota-filling doesn’t mean the entire idea is inherently flawed—any more than a poorly executed “merit-based” system would mean all attempts at measuring merit are invalid. If anything’s really losing credibility right now, it’s the myth of a pure American meritocracy.

At its best, DEI is about recognizing that systemic barriers exist and trying to widen the funnel so more people get a fair shot. That doesn’t have to conflict with a desire for genuinely skilled employees. Of course, there are ham-fisted applications out there (as with any policy), but that doesn’t negate the underlying principles, which aren’t just about numbers—they’re about improving access and opportunity for everyone.

> be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.

I'm wary of all stories. This is Hacker News. Why wouldn't "critical analysis" be the default?

With a grain of salt - any hiring lawsuit by its nature is going to be a discrimination case.

The fact that everyone is really quick to just throw around DEI = discrimination is kind of my point. Even the text of the Brigida lawsuit clearly points out that nobody would have a problem with the FAA increasing minority representation in other ways.

The thing I keep looking for is dropout/failure rate. If their change in hiring procedure resulted in higher dropout/failure rate, then yes, this impacting ATC staffing but it would have been slow burn.

ATC staffing is bottlenecked by the training dropout/failure rate. 1000 people a year go in, pretty sizable dropout or fail so you are left with 500. If 700 are retiring, that's -200 overall. At some point, that -200 year over year becomes impactful.

So, if you need more people, you have two options. Increase the class size but obviously that's expensive and makes the problem slightly worse up front as you are pulling qualified people into instructor roles.

Or try to filter out those who will drop/fail in hiring process so they don't occupy class slots. One of the ways FAA had done that is CTI college courses because those graduates had lower drop/fail rate.

From the article:

> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes.

This was a terrible conclusion. Ask any ATC person what's up with staffing and "COVID training and hiring disruptions" will be in the first few sentences they say.

The fact this article goes on and on without a single mention of the impact COVID has had gives me all the stock I need to place in it.

Some folks may find it hard to believe, but the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.

Slapping a DEI strawman up and trying to tie it to a tragedy reflects on the changes some seek.

You are begging the question that they were hired on anything other than merit. Do you have hard evidence that the people that were hired did not pass qualifications?

The main evidence of the scandal is that the recruitment funnel prioritized on things that were bad. And, make no mistake, that was a scandal. It does not, however, even attempt to show that recruitment forced hiring to accept people that lacked merit.

That is, it does show there is a good chance RECRUITING rejected qualified people. But that is not enough to show that HIRING was necessarily lowering the bar.

There is a begging of the question where we assume that they must have. But show the performance numbers! Without those, you don't know.

And again, in context of the current debate, realize that the last 4 years are the only growth years in that agency. Such that the last 4 years are the only ones that made ANY progress on helping understaffed towers.

Can you provide an example of what you would consider a good implementation of DEI efforts, as opposed to a "botched" one?

In 2021, the Al Jezeera documentary on Boeing’s airframes was commented in Yt as a DEI scandal.

Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem.

Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.

Resolved? By whom?

The part that always made this obviously insane for any systems-thinking person is as follows:

For the sake of the argument, assume that X, Y, and Z all have ~100% equal preference for positions A, B, and C at a given company or organization, and assume that it is merely “historical/institutional discrimination” that has led to X, Y, and Z percentages of A, B, and C failing to match X, Y, and Z population percentages at any given company or organization.

If both of these suppositions were 100% verifiably true, then it would stand to reason that, due to historical/institutional reasons, there would not be equal percentages of X, Y, and Z people who are competent at A, B, and C positions, relative to X, Y, and Z population percentages—because competency at a given position at a given company/organization is not generally something you are born with, but a set of skills/proficiencies that were honed over a period of time.

Therefore, the solution in this scenario should be to solely focus on education/training A, B, and C skills/proficiencies for whichever X, Y, and Z populations are “underrepresented”—plus also, presumably, some sort of oversight that ensures that a given person of equal competency/proficiency is given equal consideration for a given position at a given company/organization, regardless of whether they are X, Y, or Z.

But this would necessarily mean that, for some period of time until sufficient “correction” could occur, X, Y, and Z percentages for positions A, B, and C would continue to fail to match X, Y, and Z population percentages… because one doesn't simply become proficient at A, B, or C overnight, in the vast majority of cases.

However, the “DEI” proponents wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to claim that not only are the preceding assumptions regarding equal population group preferences completely, verifiably, absolutely true—but also, that this problem should be solvable essentially overnight, such that, in short order, one could casually glance at a given slice of employees/members of a given company/organization and see a distribution of individuals that maps ~1:1 with the breakdown of the population.

Any systems-thinking person could (and did) rather easily realize that this is just not how systems like these work—you cannot “refactor” society so easily, such that the “tests” (output) continue to “pass”, simply by tweaking surface-level parameters (“reverse” hiring discrimination). If the problems are indeed as dire as claimed, then instead, proper steps must be taken to solve the root causes of the perceived disparities—and also, proper steps must be taken to ensure that the base assumptions you started with (~100% equal career preference between population groups) were indeed correct to begin with.

This is not to say that things were and are perfect, or as close to perfect as we can get—nor that attempts to improve things and reduce and remove bias and discrimination as much as possible are anything but noble goals.

But if you want to solve a problem, you have to do so correctly, and that is quite clearly not what has been done—therefore, perhaps it's time to take a few steps back and reconsider things somewhat.

If they wanted more applicants, then they shouldn’t have been disqualifying good applicants on the basis of their biography.

This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever given the facts on the facts on the ground. Have you read the article at all?

What we are talking about here is people who already finished the ATC school and aced the technical aptitude test, but got filtered out by the incoherently test which was explicitly designed to filter out people of undesirable race at higher rates. It would make no sense to filter out if they needed to cast wider net due to being short staffed. Rather, it’s more likely they are understaffed precisely because they filter out eligible and eager people in order to meet race quotas.

It’s hard to get across to people the mechanicsof DEI policies as actually practiced, because it sounds too insane to be real, so people (like probably you) dismiss it as just another instance of crazy Republican screeching.

For me, the best DEI successes are the ones that reduce bias without relying on clumsy quotas. Blind auditions in orchestras led to a big jump in women getting hired. Intel’s push to fund scholarships and partner with HBCUs broadened their pipeline in a real way. And groups like Code2040 connect Black and Latino engineers with mentors and jobs, targeting root causes instead of surface-level fixes.

I think the vast number of small and medium sized companies who quietly opened their hiring funnel up to a wider audience, would be considered good implementations. Not all companies reached for quotas and other hamfisted efforts that detractors constantly point to.

> "... slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal..."

Astounding level of misdirection/cope here, bordering on non-factual. Did we just read the same article? This is the textbook example of a DEI scandal and was so from the very beginning. I mean the "textbook" part literally, employment discrimination law textbooks will dedicate whole chapters to this scandal for decades at a minimum.

Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?

Even if the criticism was intended to be constructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

if this question is in good faith, you can read about this ideology by looking up Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi, who are experts on the pro-DEI academic theory that answers your question.

It seems that the American voter disagrees with Kendi et al

> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.

- Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

COVID would likely have a bigger hand in the current issues than mistakes from 10-15 years ago though.

I found it somewhat puzzling we discuss ATC staffing and don't mention it:

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2024-0...

> When training at the academy resumed in July 2020, after the four-month shutdown, class sizes were cut in half to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines.

> The pandemic hit controller hiring and training hard with on-the-job training for developmental controllers significantly dropping at facilities, resulting in delayed certification. In fiscal year 2021, the controller hiring target was dropped from 910 to 500.

> Since then, the FAA has been working to restore the training pipeline to full capacity. The agency’s Controller Workforce 2023/2032 Plan had a hiring target of 1,020 in FY 2022 (actual hires were 1,026) and 1,500 in FY 2023. The is set to increase to 1,800 in the current fiscal year.

This is not a serious answer. IMO the fairest but not necessarily most accurate characterization for Ibram X. Kendi would be charlatan (others could say he's deliberately inducing racial hatred and stoking division). Additionally, according to recent news Boston University fired him and closed down his "antiracist research" center.

How is re-weighting the AT-SAT so that >80% of applicants pass (vs. ~60% previously) not “lowering the bar”?

"One method of measuring test validity (job-relatedness) is to correlate test scores with job performance. After reweighting, the AT-SAT validity co-efficient went from .69 to .60..."

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1849&co...

That was the recruitment pipeline. You still had to pass the hiring one.

This is akin to schools that got rid of testing requirements. Agreed it was a terrible choice that should get reversed. But, to say that standards went down on graduates of the schools, you would look at the scores of graduates from said schools.

And to be clear, the expectation of lowering standards for admits to a school would be a higher dropout rate. More stress on the school and testing protocols. But this is not, itself, evidence that graduates are worse.

DO you have examples of companies whose funnels were not open to "wider audience" prior to DEI? Lets say this century.

Tech has been meritocratic for decades with few exceptions.

Yep, COVID didn't help either.

However, I'll note that hiring != actual ATC controllers because drop/fail rate which for some insane reason is so hard to find.

Examples are going to be hard to come by. No company is going to publicly admit that they used to be limiting their hiring pipeline in such a way. Admittedly, this also means that I'm speculating that the number of companies are "vast". Surely many have quietly made the change.

Sample size of one, I worked in the past for a company whose entire staff was white men, 100%. Except for a single role: the receptionist at the front desk. There is no reasonable biological explanation for this extreme distribution.

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

DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce. There's nothing that implies exclusion unless you are intentionally bad faithing the meaning.

Imagine the FAA was only attending job fairs in white parts of the country. Then they decide to attend job fairs in more diverse parts of the country. No one would suddenly decide they were prejudiced against white people!

There's a difference between forcing a white person to give up a seat, and letting a black person sit anywhere on the bus. But both of these are being labelled "DEI" in this thread.

Again, nobody is arguing that the FAA didn't shoot themselves in the foot by introducing a dumb assessment that threw out good candidates. But I think there should be nothing scandalous or wrong with the FAA trying to be available to more candidates.

>Probably not!

The linked article explicitly disagrees with this opinion. In fact it comes to almost literally the opposition conclusions:

>Not only that, it shattered the pipeline the FAA had built with CTI schools, making the process towards becoming an air traffic controller less certain, undercutting many of the most passionate people working to train prospective controllers, and leading to a tense and unclear relationship between the FAA and feeder organizations.

>Did anyone truly unqualified make it all the way through the pipeline? There's no reason to think so. Did average candidate quality decrease? There's every reason to think so. Would that lead to staffing issues? Unambiguously yes.

That's not to say that you are wrong and the article is correct, but in a discussion that is started by an article, and when the article addresses exactly the points you are making, I feel that it is helpful to give explicit reasons why you think the article is mistaken.

He's an academic with multiple publications in the field. How am I, a lay person, supposed to tell if he's a charlatan? He certainly takes himself seriously and has a successful academic career.

Any example could be a false Scotsman. If my example is bad, please provide some that are better. I tried to educate myself on this five years ago and I looked up the people who were recommended to me by DEI practitioners. At the time, Kendi and DiAngelo were held up as icons of the movement.

In American public school twenty years ago we also read Why Do All The Black Kids Sit Together In The Cafeteria. That would also be a good place to start learning about this ideology. Or is that book written by a charlatan, too?

This kind of goalpost moving is as predictable as it is disappointing. You cannot argue with an ideology if it can't be defined, so the practitioners of this one -- descended from Deconstructionism so no wonder they are happy to play word games -- won't allow opponents to define the ideology in the first place!

Well good job, folks, because the reaction to this movement is MAGA.

This is where the "critical mass" argument comes in: you (allegedly) need people who superficially look like you in the roles to inspire you to learn the skills needed for that position. Thus, working to correct poor education due to systemic racism isn't enough, you need to also temporarily fill role-model positions with less-qualified candidates.

Yeah nobody is arguing it because even the FAA admits it's true. When you talk about a "tradeoff" between quality and diversity that is an admission that DEI lowers quality.

Hilarious that you mentioned the blind auditions in orchestras because now the DEI goons want to get rid of them! They say it hasn't got enough minorities in. Absolute proof that these people care only about race and don't give a damn about fairness. Source https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...

The problem here is that the notion that "DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce" is always hidden behind by people who want to use it for more forceful discrimination.

It would serve those who truly just want to make sure our society all starts from the same starting line to come up with a new term, one that encompasses meritocracy as the goal along with generous helping hands along the way (training programs, tutoring programs, outside-the-class mentorship opportunities). And to focus on helping lower _class and income_ folks get a leg up, not on including or excluding people by characteristics that are a circumstance of birth (skin color).

I'll never find it, but a few days ago someone here posted an anecdotal story that class sizes were between 10-20 and failure/drop rate was ~50%.

From an internal US pov, yes you are correct that's exactly what the culture is here. Call out the obviously lowered standards for women and minority candidates and expect severe consequences to your career.

Not yet. The SC has ruled it illegal for university admissions but it somehow still remains allowed for corporate hiring. Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop. The DEI people are snakes and will continue to find more sneaky ways to implement their illegal racist quotas and more newspeak to describe it in a "legal" way.

> The part that always made this obviously insane for any systems-thinking person is as follows [...] if the problems are indeed as dire as claimed, then instead, proper steps must be taken to solve the root causes of the perceived disparities—and also, proper steps must be taken to ensure that the base assumptions you started with

That's why a smart systems-thinking person kept it to themselves.

It's a funny thing. It's one of those issues where everyone in the room will publicly always nod and agree with at the time, yet everyone thinks "this is not going to lead to a good outcome".

So basically everyone could see the train crashing at some point but nobody would say anything.

An evidence of this is as soon as the "floodgates" opened, all these companies started dropping DEI initiatives and closing departments like that. If their bottom lines clearly showed they had improved their financials due to it, they would adamantly defend it or double down. But they are not:

Boeing:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/boeing-quietly-dis...

Meta:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/10/tech/meta-ends-dei-progra...

Not sure how you'd call this phenomenon? Ideological prisoner's dilemma? It should have a name, I feel.

DEI started as exactly what the original poster stated. It then has transformed many times, including through quotas (ruled unconstitutional in the 70s), and something similar to what you're talking about, to the more modern notion which is more about getting the best candidates from all populations.

Is there an example where colorblind hiring had a nil or opposite effect? In places I've seen, the opposite has happened. For example, https://www.ashkingroup.com/insights-media/the-power-of-blin...

The only place I can think of where the opposite is with college admissions, but college admissions is a weird thing in general in that I've never understood why admissions is tied to a stronger academic record (ties into, what's the goal of a given college). In areas such as sports, the impact has been even greater -- and there it's not even colorblind, but simply opened up the pool, and is more metrics driven than just about any profession.

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

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.

If I deliberately hire whites more than other races nobody would deny that is discrimination. If I deliberately hire more minorities than whites, that is not discrimination?

The DEI label has indeed been placed on overtly discriminatory practices. At 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at carried out explicit discirmination under the banner of DEI. One such DEI policy was reserving a segment engineering headcount for "diverse" candidates. Quite literally forcing white and Asian men to give up their seat.

You're not in the position to unilaterally declare what DEI is and is not. I don't deny that there are plenty of non-discriminatory DEI programs that genuinely do aim to reduce discrimination. I don't think it's a good move to try and deny that DEI encompasses exclusionary and discriminatory practices, when so many people have witnessed exclusionary and discriminatory DEI programs firsthand.

Looks like you've been getting downvoted, but I think you raise perfectly valid points -- and I say this as a proponent of DEI, but not of quotas (or this type of population matching).

I believe that the best solutions occur when we try to address root causes -- sincerely attempt to address them. The problem is that even in doing that, you often have to introduce inequality into the system. For example, mortality rates for black females giving birth are multiples higher than white females. To address this will likely mean spending more money on black female health research. The question is where is the line. Is prenatal spending inequality OK? Is early childhood development inequality of spending OK? What about magnet HS? What about elite colleges? What about entry level jobs? Executive positions? Jail sentencing? Cancer research? Etc...

The other thing we can do is simply say, "This is too much. Lets just assume race doesn't exist." This is almost tempting, except outside of government policy race is such a big factor in how people are treated in life -- it seems like we're just punting on a problem because its hard.

I think when we as humans can say, "Hmm... there is someting impacting this subset of humans that seems like it shouldn't. I'm OK overindexing on it." then we will make progress. But I think while we view things as "this is less good for me personally" it will always be contentious.

I probably read the same thing, the most galling to me wasn't the failure rate it was that once you've failed you can never reapply.

And this argument reveals the grotesque truth of the matter: it's not actually about ensuring that everyone is treated equally and fairly—it's actually about socially engineering segments of the population other than one's own, to act in accordance with one's wishes, such that one feels good about oneself. This is all done utterly selfishly and self-servingly, regardless of not only whatever said population segments actually desire for themselves, but also regardless of potential nth-order consequences of these actions for the rest of society.

Additionally, in acting this way, one unwittingly (I hope!) infantilizes these other population segments, robbing them of agency and self-determination in the process!

The whole thing is a complete mess, top-to-bottom—and, as a society, we are long overdue in reevaluating this entire line of thinking and how willfully we accept it at face value.

Sometimes people share a tech thing they thought was interesting

That depends: Are you underpaying them? The question, "why" matters here a lot.

"I tend to prefer minorities because I can underpay and get away with more" is a thing that exists in the real world. See: Immigrant farm workers and H1B visa holders.

Is that discrimination against white/majorities or is it a kind of discrimination against minorities? It's injustice, for sure but I point it out because DEI policies, discrimination, racism, and sexism come in many, many forms. There's a ton of nuance and grey areas.

Yes, the scandal is not over because the FAA continued to conflate diversity with performance.

In 2023, the FAA set several, major goals for DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/FY23%20OSI-M%20and%2...

Or from 2021, where they wrote "Diversity + Inclusion = Better Performance" https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...

Too many examples. Compared to 2016, the FAA of the 2020s was better at hiding their written bias. Nonetheless, they failed to attract the talent they needed.

The article you linked discusses how problematic the other non-blind parts of the audition are: leaving people out ahead of the blind audition, pre-advancing people, and so on. One of the conclusions was that if the whole process was actually blind, the outcome would be better.

> If anything’s really losing credibility right now, it’s the myth of a pure American meritocracy.

It only became a myth when we were forced to consider factors beyond merit in hiring.

It's valuable to note that this paper is from 2006, and states:

"Reweighting was based on data collected from incum- bent ATCSs who took AT-SAT on a research basis; some of these employees achieved overall scores less than 70 (that was one of the reasons for the reweighting effort – a belief that incumbent employees should be able to pass the entry-level selection test)"

For some jobs, your aptitude should matter. If a test has some discriminating power between people with aptitude and those without aptitude, then perhaps failing that test should really matter. For ATC staff perhaps OCD-adjacent traits are good and ADD-adjacent traits are bad. Maybe you don't want someone with epilepsy in ATC even though that's unfair.

Maybe we all want to be Olympic athletes and a few work hard to become so, but what should happen if we lack some necessary skill?

> An evidence of this is as soon as the "floodgates" opened, all these companies started dropping DEI initiatives and closing departments like that. If their bottom lines clearly showed they had improved their financials due to it, they would adamantly defend it or double down.

Just looking at the Meta article: The article cites "pressure from conservative critics and customers" as the reason, not financial performance. The Meta representative was quoted pointing to "legal and policy landscape" changes. Nothing about if or how the initiative affected the company's bottom line.

That article is not “absolute proof” of anything, it’s just a discussion if blind auditions are the be-all end-all. Your comment is very low quality and unnecessarily hostile. Referring to Black people discussing how to get more minorities interested in orchestras as “DEI goons” is one step removed from a slur.

> Likely yes.

Love the in-depth analysis they use to answer that question...

This article is not talking about COVID, it's talking about the absurd changes to the hiring process that disadvantaged qualified candidates in favor of people who said science was their worst subject in high school (15 points). How could this not have an impact on hiring?

As soon as they "fired" him he was hired by Howard to direct a new institute there.

Not really. Everything is downstream of the pressure on organizations to address disparate impact. Some examples:

When a company is under pressure to boost the number of X engineers, they quickly run into the 'pipeline problem'. There simply isn't enough X engineers on the market. So they address that by creating scholarship funds exclusively for race X.

When a school is under pressure to have the racial makeup of it's freshman class meet the right ratios, it has to adjust admission criteria. Deprioritize metrics that the wrong races score well on, prioritize those that the right races score well on. If we've got too many Y, and they have high standardized test scores? Start weighing that lower until we get the blend we're supposed to have.

The goal of the college is not to get the students with the strongest academic record: it's to satisfy the demand for the right ratios.

Repeat over and over in different ways at different institutions.

> Is there an example where colorblind hiring had a nil or opposite effect? In places I've seen, the opposite has happened. For example ...

The study underlying that post is a great example of another downstream effect of DEI efforts. That study did _not_ show what the headline or abstract claimed.

When you hide the gender of performers, it ends up either nil or slightly favoring men. That particular study has been cited thousands of times, and it's largely nonsense.

http://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/blindaudi...

> Just looking at the Meta article: The article cites "pressure from conservative critics and customers" as the reason, not financial performance. The Meta representative was quoted pointing to "legal and policy landscape" changes. Nothing about if or how the initiative affected the company's bottom line.

Of course they won't say it doesn't work. They'll cite external pressure or other reason. But they get pressure from customers for privacy and other issues, yet that doesn't phase them much. So if they saw clear advantage to the policy, say it just improved their bottom line, stock price, etc, they would have easily brushed away the "pressure" and said "sorry, we're here to make a profit and this makes us a profit, tough luck".

That just leads to an endless cycle where each group tries to avenge discrimination by the other group.

If your candidate pool is 80% white and you hire 25% minorities, is that discrimination? I have seen people argue (rabidly!) both ways on that question.

If the real reason these companies dropped the policies was that they were unprofitable, and their bottom lines showed it, then why did they wait until exactly November 2024 to all drop them at once? Surely they could have discovered this many quarters ago. Did the policies just suddenly become unprofitable right as the next political administration was decided? Why would company directors across entire industries just sit there nodding their heads, as you say, voluntarily not making more profit for shareholders? It doesn't seem like the bottom line was the real reason in this case.

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?

It’s also still deeply embedded in education. DEI might be less popular in the workforce but in primary and secondary education stuff like lowering standards, ignoring test failures, removing gifted classes, merging special needs classes in mainline, changing classroom conflict resolution to not remove disruptive kids from classrooms, etc are all still going strong and increasing in prevalence. That will have a ripple effect in the workforce for decades after the Overton window has shifted back.

And in the US the federal government can’t stop it as it’s mostly defined in local and state gov (which is many times larger than the federal workforce). Dept of Education would only have limited influence there.

> The problem here is that the notion that "DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce" is always hidden behind by people who want to use it for more forceful discrimination.

Nah. The problem is dishonest hucksters who want to broadly label everything, regardless of applicability, as bad in an effort to provide their supporters with an easy “anti-X” bumper sticker.

DEI advocates came up with DEI to do precisely what you suggest - the right wing rebranded it as “everyone hates white men” and “be afraid of black pilots”. Almost like they just did the same thing with “woke” and “CRT” before it.

It’s extremely tiring to have people like you waltz into conversations to complain about terms you’re busily redefining, being used in their original context, because you don’t like what your own redefinitions imply.

> _class and income_

Yes, part of my company’s DEI effort was to ensure that a JD didn’t, for instance, specify a college degree if it wasn’t really needed. Thank you, again, for restating things that are already occurring because you’re not a part of those conversations or are unaware of those conversations.

Because COVID happened much sooner and has likely had a bigger impact than the hiring practices from a decade ago - notice we don't have a concrete number of "disadvantaged qualified candidates" from this article. Whereas, I can point COVID with actual numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42952695

If we're going to say "Did that contribute to a shortage of qualified ATC..?" then you have to considering all inputs into what is a current conversation rather than extrapolate your already asserted points from the article.

DEI was the reason GitHub was forced to remove its meritocracy rug. Do you remember that? People questions whether it was a meritocracy based on disparate impact[1].

It has almost never been about widening the size of the funnel, and almost always about putting the thumb on the scales for chosen people.

[1] https://www.creators.com/read/susan-estrich/03/14/whats-wron...

That is the frustrating part - the article had it's lane and just had to stick in it.

Instead, we get someone extrapolating and guessing when we have actual data from COVID on class delays/size reduction(as well as more controllers retiring earlier) coupled with lower training intensity while air traffic was depressed.

Yes, famously the Australian Government tried that and undid it as pesky white men were being hired at a greater rate because of them[1].

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...

That isn’t what happened though. What happened was they intentionally turned down highly qualified white applicants. It wasn’t like they found new “diverse” applicants — they actively didn’t hire people that were qualified and happened to be white. They weren’t being “available” to more applicants, they became outwardly hostile to white applicants. They didn’t grow the pie, they moved the pie.

Huge difference.

It wasn’t “Covid” — it was the vaccine mandate.

Discrimination involves deliberately factoring the applicant's class into hiring decisions.

Discrimination isn't determined by looking at single digit percentage differences in aggregate statistics.

But you also have MTG who literally believes “they” control the weather so I’m not sure exactly why you single democrats out here or even the it to any kind of ideology specific consequence.

Athletes are the original DEI. And Trump (the president!) didn’t have good grades.

There are tons of studies that have shown that if your name is sounding like you're from a minority your chances of being invited for an interview are significantly lower. Similar if you include photos.

As a side note, it's quite ironic that engineers often tend to complain about performance metrics and that they are being gamed, not really a good measure of merit..., but the same people turn around and argue that the everything should be a meriocracy.

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.

> DEI advocates came up with DEI to do precisely what you suggest - the right wing rebranded it as “everyone hates white men”

Ironic that you're posting this on a story that shows DEI was applied in exactly the opposite way you're claiming, because certain people passed the AT-SAT at higher rates so they had to be eliminated from consideration before they could even take it.

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.

They may have feared the negative PR of dropping the policies would be more costly than the policies themselves.

That is not deliberately hiring whites? That is just hiring whites by happenstance. I am talking about choosing the white candidate because he is white.

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.

I think specifically hiring somebody because of their race is not just problematic but outright racist. I don't care if you are doing it because you want to underpay them or because you just dislike their race.

If somebody decided he wanted more white people because he prefers whites, that would be discrimination. Nobody denies that, but when the races are swapped, suddenly it is nuanced? Give me a break!

They couldn't drop it as it would have affected their ESG rating, which impacts the ability to get loans and raise capital, etc.

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.

> 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.

Affirmative action is strictly _better_ than some of the DEI nonsense. With affirmative action, you just reserve a bunch of positions for minorities, and then give them out based on merit.

With most of DEI, you either tweak the criteria to make job positions easier to get for minorities, or you lower your standards.

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.

I don't completely understand it but Republicans manage cognitive dissonance better.

Around 1994 I was interested in Trotskyism and Anarchism and wasn't sure if we needed to get the 4th international back in the US or start a 5th international.

I believed in this really stupid kind of vanguardism where if you put up the biggest and most radical flag you would get everyone to rally behind it. I reformed because I got tough love from black nationalists who told me in no uncertain words they wanted to decide things for themselves and not get bossed around by some white guy.

A modern form of this involves the adding of random stripes to the rainbow flag which means that when you really do put that flag up you won't have anybody under it, at least not when the going gets tough, when it rains, etc.

For one thing left-wing movements have this divergent character where they feel they have to follow all these people who are subaltern for different reasons. Right-wing movements have this convergent character that moves towards something which makes it much easier form them to manage inconsistencies.

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.

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.

The FAA worked with a race advocacy group to create a screening test blatantly calculated to give preferences to that race. That’s not an isolated incident. Harvard was smacked down by the Supreme Court for racially discriminating in admissions. Biden was smack down by courts for racially discriminating in small business loans. A court just smacked down NASDAQ for diversity quotas on corporate board. Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.

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.

The conundrum is that by thinking this way about population groups that are not your own, and imposing your will—no matter how well-intentioned—upon them, you are undermining the agency and self-determination of said population groups.

I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined—and while this is certainly possible in theory, it's essentially impossible to do under the auspices of what currently qualifies as “political correctness”.

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 ...

The study did show it. The author of this critique properly notes that Table 4 is not an apples to apples comparison. The author of the study notes that expanding the pool of women as used in Table 4 likely brought in less talented musicians disproportionately.

Table 5 does the more apples to apples comparison. The critique notes that sample size is too small, but it captures 445 blind women, 816 blind men, 599 non-blind women, and 1102 non-blind men auditions. That's certainly sufficient for a study like this.

The study also does reflect how when a population feel like there is less bias against them in a system they are more likely to participate -- even if that means on average the level of "merit" might go down, but those that make it through the filter will better reflect actual meritocracy -- and that's what this study showed as well.

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.

> they WROTE DOWN that the cognitive test "disadvantaged" black applicants

Which would mean entirely different things if (a) that were true (b) that were not true.

It sounds as if you are completely convinced that it is not true, but what is your conviction based on, and why do you think they believed the opposite (or perhaps you take the position that they did not, in fact, believe this) ?

> manage cognitive dissonance better.

what on earth does this mean?

like the n word?

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants

What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.

> I believe that in order to actually enact meaningful change, even deeper-rooted causes must be discovered and examined

How do you discover deeper-rooted causes if you can't be provided resources to study the distinction? How can you understand why black women are 3x more likely to die at child birth than white women if the funding agencies don't care about the answer?

There's zero difference between this memo and what is frequently said by people who just don't like black people (because it's too bad optics to say "I just don't like black people").

I intend to slur the DEI goons. My opinion of the DEI bureaucracy is such that there is no way to express it politely. 'Contempt' and 'hate' would be such an understatement as to be dishonest.

[Edit] From what you are saying, if someone is looking to be in a tribe, I would agree the American right is a good fit for that.

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.

That sure is a topic that is well outside the purview of this discussion. But for what it's worth, I generally don't place a lot of stock in studies that report such findings anymore—their methods don't usually hold up to much scrutiny, in my experience.

Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.

There are only so many black people in the country. Every skilled job has this problem; poaching can make you look slightly better but it does nothing overall and will make wherever you poached your qualified black applicants from look worse.

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.

Ah yes, but that isn't guaranteed to work, and if someone is going to get in trouble if they don't make their numbers then they start making contingencies.

It means he's neck deep in outgroup homogeneity.

> The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.

I know this is a tangent, but in case people read this, they may get the wrong idea. While some elite universities like Harvard have a cap on how many people they admit (leading to the displacement you refer to), the vast majority of universities (including probably all top public universities) do not have a cap. Simply put, if you met the (academic) criteria, you got admission. That they also admitted people who did not meet that criteria had no impact on your admission.

(Sorry - just hear this complaint too often from people who did not get into "regular", non-elite universities. No, affirmative action isn't the reason you did not get admission. You just weren't good enough).

Assumptions:

1. there is a test that is a decent proxy for job performance

2. the relationship between job performance and test score above some passing score is linear

These both sound "common sense", but I suspect fail for a huge number of real world scenarios.

According to the article they actually tested the first assumption and it was true.

The second assumption is not required. If people who score a 95 are only 5% better at the job than people who score a 70, all else equal you'd still pick the person who scored a 95 given the choice.

Using race as a metric in your hiring decisions, for any reason at all, is illegal. You simply cannot do it. Not as a tie breaking point, not a plus factor-- nothing at all.

The law is crystal clear on this:

https://x.com/andrealucasEEOC/status/1752006517761421719?t=v...

> When Bass was running for mayor of L.A. ... she went through a stunning transformation and really seemed to "get it"....

This is what always happens to politicians. Their mumbles become coherent. Shyness fades. Vague dithering words transform to bold calls to action. Infirm display vitality.

This is what politicians do. Otherwise they would be school teachers and programmers.

Having contradictory beliefs that don't really make sense if you look at them together but still listening to The Rush Limbaugh Show, still showing up and really voting Republican consistently, etc.

On the other hand leftists are always telling Hispanic people that they have to have solidarity with black people, telling trans people they have to have solidarity with animal rights people (or the animals?), etc. And... crickets. The people never quite tell you that they don't agree with you but they don't really give money, they don't really listen to you, they don't really turn out at your march, they don't really vote for you, etc.

I've been there, done that, and lived it. If you listen to people you make a little more progress than you make by just flying a really big flag. The antipattern is common in articles from Trotskyite papers which you will find collected here:

https://www.wsws.org/en?redirect=true

Often there is some issue that the people involved see as an isolated issue, but the Trotskyite always wants to smack it together like a Katamari Ball [1] with other issues and conclude a socialist revolution is necessary and the answer from most people is [2] [3] [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(Beatles_song)

[3] "But if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao: You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow"

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLGzRXY5Bw

Weren't you the one who said ...

> the 1-2 year interruption in hiring pipelines can cause large ripples that take years-to-decades to resolve.

Looking at [1], the difference between planned and actual hires in 2013–2015 was 1362, much higher than during 2020–2022 when it was just 384 (and this is using the pre-COVID target).

I don't know what happened in 2013–2015, but whatever it was, it seems to have had a 3.5 times bigger impact than COVID.

Well, we do know one thing that happened: this scandal.

[1] https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FY23-Staffi...

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.

A group that wants to privilege winners is more likely to win than a group that wants to privilege losers, for one thing.

I was shocked at how long it took Labour to beat the Tories in the the UK in the last decade. I mean the Tories kept screwing up over and over and it had to go really far before voters finally gave up on them.

It's easy to conclude that politics in the US are like professional wrestling and the Democrats are getting paid to lose.

People who just don't like pakistani people spend a lot of time talking about pakistani child rape gangs. Does that mean we should ignore the pakistani child rape gangs?

What grandparent said wouldn’t lead to people dying though.

> Even then, just because the court has ruled on it doesn't mean it will actually stop.

See California public universities still practicing affirmative action despite it being made illegal decades ago for a good example of this

Non-linear doesn't mean "still monotonic". My experience has been that beyond a certain threshold on a given test, job performance is essentially uncorrelated with test performance.

As for the article, it's not given me particular solid vibes, a feeling not helped by some of the comments here (both pro and con).

> Non-linear doesn't mean "still monotonic".

Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".

Also, if you had a better test then you'd use it, but at some point you have 10 candidates and 5 slots and have to use something to choose, so you use the closest approximation available until you can come up with a better one.

> 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://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.

It’s about things that may have impacts on future outcomes with discrepancies based on race. Probably some correlation with child outcomes and their mother dying at birth.

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.

and yet Labour in less than a year in office have manage to underperform the Tories to a disasterous degree for the UK

You know what also happened in 2013?

> The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed a hiring freeze to help blunt the sequester’s impact, but that threatens to disrupt the pipeline of new air traffic controllers needed to replace the thousands of workers eligible for retirement.

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/air-controllers-caugh...

We know that happened as well.

> 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.

They did.

Pretty sure military aircraft just don’t have to listen to them.

Here ya go:

Academy attrition on page 38.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

> Satisfying the first assumption means "still monotonic".

Sorry, but I just don't agree. There are "qualifying tests" for jobs that I've done that just do not have any sort of monotonic relationship with job performance. I'm a firefighter (volunteer) - to become operational you need to be certified as either FF I or FF II, but neither of those provide anything more than a "yes, this person can learn the basic stuff required to do this". The question of how good a firefighter someone will be is almost orthogonal to their performance on the certification exams. Someone who gets 95% on their IFSAC FF II exam is in no way predicted to be a better firefighter than someone who got 78%.

That is NOT what the first study you've cited says at all:

> "The empirically-keyed, response-option scored biodata scale demonstrated incremental validity over the computerized aptitude test battery in predicting scores representing the core technical skills of en route controllers."

I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.

The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.

US lawyers get multiple attempts to take the bar exam, as an example. Should they?

"Friends" here means members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

What part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Cham...

serves the role of "pakistani child rape gangs"? Right now the analogy does not makes sense to me. "pakistani child rape gangs" are reprehensible, nothing that extreme comes to mind when I think of James Damore's memo or similar.

... You concede that it was cronyism here. Unless you want to expand on what you are saying.

I think might be misreading the article.

It says the answers were sent from the FAA to members of the "National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees". It went to all of them, not just friends. It was DEI, not cronyism.

Soon, though, she became uneasy with what the organization was doing, particularly after she and the rest of the group got a voice message from FAA employee Shelton Snow:

You might be confused by this line:

As the hiring wave approached, some of Reilly’s friends in the program encouraged her to join the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees

That may or not be cronyism, but once she joined, the whole org got the answers, so clearly it was aimed at getting more Blacks through the process.

Depends if you are able fill the slots, and how quickly.

> Maybe we can acknowledge that there is a real problem that people were responding to.

I am not seeped in all the cases you mention here. You have not drawn a picture for me though to see that all of these are the same issue and that should all be treated the same way rather than be dealt with individually.

> I wasn't even insinuating that this was state-sponsored, just highlighting that it's known to be a super effective way to manipulate stories

And yet, although this is a fact, the choice and the phrasing paints a particular story.

Figure, it was in a PDF that search engines had trouble scraping. I feel like FAA is burying this data on purpose because it looks terrible.

Reading deeper, on page 40 that has historical data, starting FY14 when this survey had been implemented and initial class hired, Academy Training Attrition appears to be much higher though all I can base this on is comparing bar graph sizes. So yes, this change to hiring process did impact staffing levels because academy attrition was higher.

The difference was within the margin of error (only a 3% change), which is very inconclusive. That's fine. Making the world a more inclusive place is hard. There's lots of people (see this thread) who clearly believe that certain races and genders are biologically superior.

No, it doesn't. This is a dramatic reach and complete misunderstanding of the stats. The data in table 5 is not statistically significant.

If you go down to table 6 (which is also incredibly weak), it shows the opposite: men are advancing at a higher rate than women in blind auditions.

Andrew Gelman reviewed the link as well and agreed:

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-...

So what do you think of all the "DEI" hires in the Trump administration? Or do you think a second-rate alcoholic domestic abusing Fox News host is the best individual on the merits to run the DoD?

> There are only so many black people in the country.

The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a good outcome.

If 1/8 of the population is black and someone is trying to get 1/4 of air traffic controllers to be black, that seems like a mistake.

> I.e the aptitude test battery is WORSE than the biodata scale.

You're mistaken, it's the opposite. The first one found that AT-SAT performance was the best measure, with the biodata providing a small enhancement:

> AT-SAT scores accounted for 27% of variance in the criterion measure (β=0.520, adjusted R2=.271,p<.001). Biodata accounted for an additional 2% of the variance in CBPM (β=0.134; adjusted ΔR2=0.016,ΔF=5.040, p<.05).

> In other words, after taking AT-SAT into account, CBAS accounted for just a bit more of the variance in the criterion measure

Hence, "incremental validity."

> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

You're right, and I can't remember which study it was that explicitly said that it was the best measure. I'll post it here if I find it. However, given that each failed applicant costs the FAA hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can safely assume that there was no better measure readily available at the time, or it would have been used instead of the AT-SAT. Currently they use the ATSA instead of the AT-SAT, which is supposed to be a better predictor, and they're planning on replacing the AT-SAT in a year or two; it's an ongoing problem with ongoing research.

> I'd also say at a higher level that both of those papers absolutely reek of non-reproduceability and low N problems that plague social and psychological research. I'm not saying they're wrong. They are just not obviously definitive.

Given the limited number of controllers, this is going to be an issue in any study you find on the topic. You can only pull so many people off the boards to take these tests, so you're never going to have an enormous sample size.

Possibly but I'd argue it's far from a smoking gun.

The sequester of 2013 did a number on things and they hired to maximum capacity in the years after to make up for lost time. It stands to reason that by filling training to the max, they'd have more washouts due to lack of more attention during training.

> The sequestration in 2013 and subsequent hiring freeze resulted in the FAA not hiring any new controllers for nearly 9 months across FY 2013 and FY 2014. The effects of this disruption on the hiring pipeline, as well as the FAA Air Traffic Academy’s operations, were substantial.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

I agree with calling people out.

> This was a racial equity policy. Like a lot of them, it was designed by idiots and/or racists.

So a policy can be labeled an 'equity policy' and have nothing to do with equity in either intent or result, which is what I would expect from an 'equity policy' written by a racist.

Call it corruption, call it fraudulent activity, but it does it seems like there was only lip service to equity. So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?

Company A: Our equity policy is to only hire white men! We are proud of how we are striving towards equity with our new DEI policy.

observer: Damn those DEI policies ruining everything.

To me it is obvious you do not blame 'DEI policies' but the leadership and corruption in Company A.

> Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black.

It doesn't mean that at all.

Well, depending on what you mean. It could just be that your premise is known to be false.

Yep, hmmm. It just sucks that this data which should be easy to find is not and FAA clearly has since they put out the report with it.

The "nuanced" argument you're responding to at least gives a window into why LLMs all talk about this same sort of nonsense and have this same bias. This kind of thinking is absolutely rampant these days -- especially on Reddit, which makes up a large portion of the training data.

> The second citation you offered merely notes that the AT-SAT battery is a better predictor than the older OPM battery, not that is the best.

How is that a criticism? It is always possible that someone could invent a better test.

In any case, the second citation directly refutes your point in another sub-thread with AnthonyMouse, the assertion that higher-performing applicants above the cutoff do not perform better on the job:

"If all applicants scoring 70 or above on the AT-SAT are selected, slightly over one-third would be expected to be high performers. With slightly greater selectivity, taking only applicants scoring 75.1 or above, the proportion of high performers could be increased to nearly half."

Also:

"The primary point is that applicants who score very high (at 90) on the AT-SAT are expected to perform near the top of the distribution of current controllers (at the 86th percentile)."

Across 2023 and 2024 the en route academy pass rate was ~66% and terminal pass rate was ~73%. Of that, ~25% of en route trainees fail at their facility and ~15-20% of terminal trainees fail at their facility. There are ~2 en route trainees per terminal trainee.

Table 5 is stat sig. There’s not a p-value given but the effect sizes are large. The knit place it’s not is the semi-final and final rounds with their smaller sizes.

And table 6 shows blind auditions significantly increased the chances of women advancing from the preliminary round and winning in the final round. However women were less likely to advance past semifinals when auditions were blind. But still a net win.

Gellman is focused on the “several fold” and “50% claims” it made. But the paper shows 11.6 and 14.8 point jumps, which are supported by the paper.

The ATC academy can only handle ~1800 students per year. The issue is high failure rates at the academy and then at the facilities graduates are sent after graduation; increasing the quality of applicants should be the FAA's #1 goal.

Re-read the original link, posted again below. The claims you're making are specifically addressed and are wrong.

There are multiple critical reviews of this paper. It is well-known to be largely nonsense.

http://www.jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/blindaudi...

What’s up with the hostility? You doing ok?

It's not entirely fair to choose this flight as a random sample, but assuming for a moment that it is.. The pilot has a 85% or lower, how many 9s on the controller fix that?

If controllers were like traffic cops they would take time to raise or remove that 85% when they caught it and pay limited attention to current traffic to take actions to reduce future traffic risk. But they are not that as you just explained again.

> But only recently has it been reframed as a DEI issue.

Did we read the same article? I didn't see this as a "reframing" but rather an investigative expose into the history and most importantly "why".

And it's pretty clear that at the time the cheating scandal came out, the FAA wasn't interested in implicating themselves.

"The FAA investigated, clearing the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong in an internal investigation."

I’ve read it and the author doesn’t address them. Unless they have access to additional data, such as their claims about the standard errors in Table 5 (only the Finals result has large enough errors to possibly discount). The original paper is pretty clear.

It looks like the thing that stopped the slot filling was funding, not a dearth of candidates.

We had 500 open positions. We filled 100, and argued over 10.

That’s still a gap of 400 positions. We have only 110 qualified applicants.

The Math is missing a third variable.

Thanks for asking, I think I do, yes. I'm not sure what you find particularly hostile about it - they edited out what they originally had to say, but even then, I'm not saying anything extraordinary.

Telling people they're acting childish and are not bringing anything to the table argumentation wise I think is pretty low on the hostility scale.

The irony of being called out as hostile after confronting someone that they're just asserting their opinions is definitely not lost on me. What a thread...

Spot on for this guy.

It's not about a particular pilot, it's about the system as a whole. As long as 99.9% of aircraft don't require any remediation, the air traffic controllers have the bandwidth to catch the few that do. Until you don't have enough air traffic controllers.

They did after it was too late, because the crash happened. Unless the crash was intentional (and I'm not aware of any evidence of that), getting the warning sooner could have given the pilot more time to correct.

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.

The problem, of course, is that due to "disparate impact" doctrine, this (and colourblind hiring in general) is de facto illegal, and DEI scale-tipping is de facto mandatory (even though it's almost always de jure illegal).

Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.

There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.

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.

Having been on the (explicit) receiving side of this - you just don’t fill the other positions until you find the right candidates (where right is whatever criteria you can’t say out loud - though has been said out load often in the last few years).

Alternatively, this is a way for your boss to meet budget targets while not explicitly laying people off, and giving hope to people that help is coming.

The pilot is an example consistent with no actions to correct pilots. Double controllers and these pilots can now fly twice as many missions before they kill someone.

Controllers talk like an extra 9 for them is the focus and it is for them, the public acting like their ceremonies are about fixing the majority of the problem is a bold faced lie.

Which part of setting up a stall in a job fair in a more diverse part of town is "forcing blacks into the job"?

Advertising your jobs to more people (including black ones) might help you find more candidates. If you're not finding enough candidates AND you're only finding white candidates, something is wrong, innit? There are all those people who aren't white who might be candidates who for some reason you're ignoring.

Add to that the effort to repeal California’s ban on affirmative action: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/prop-16-failed-in-californ...

It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs. This is a deeply unpopular idea, so it gets hidden behind various labels. Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).

How long do you go before you call it quits, and how many white candidates do you need to pass over before you find ‘enough’ black candidates? What consequences need to happen with all those unfilled roles before it is ‘enough’?

Especially since the market of people willing to work the job AND take the pay AND work in the area is not infinite.

We’re talking about a group which went out of its way (apparently) already to recruit folks with the specific colors they wanted + these other criteria.

Don’t forget, everyone else in the country has been having similar constraints and has been trying to do the same thing near as I can tell.

Why do you think they were sharing test answers (it seems), and still only got x candidates in?

And also, doesn’t this entire thing seem actively unfair and racist (albeit to everyone except the chosen minority) instead of what at worst was perhaps a passively unfair and racist situation before? (Albeit to everyone except the majority)

How is that actually any better, except that it pisses off the majority instead of the minority?

Seems like a good way to lose elections, frankly. Or have a majority of the population angry at every minority out there.

Only if black candidates meet the criteria equally, are as interested to work as air traffic controllers as anyone else, have equivalent lifestyles and family support to allow them to do the job as effectively as anyone else, etc.

There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes?

As to if they are fair or not? Probably not. are you going to fix it, and if so, how?

We can argue about theoretical from birth path differences all we want, but no one on the hiring side has the time to deal with those or to control them - and if looking at things from a coarse population level - it just doesn’t reflect actual reality right now, yes?

Why would a person misrepresent the memo when the file is there for anyone to read?

The article specifically talks about how the college courses were in community colleges, not bastions of privilege of any kind.

"Students understood that the FAA hired virtually everyone who completed the program and passed the assessment."

It sounds like they couldn't hire enough people to fill vacancies. The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.

It’s more of a “yes, and…” comment. Namely, both are relevant, but previously only one side was highlighted.

It can be both.

If you look at the articles on this blog, it’s clear the author has an agenda. The site is filed away as “view with suspicion” for me

Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality. This doesn’t mean that the FAA should mess with its hiring process in an ill-conceived and very likely illegal attempt to make it look like the problem doesn’t exist.

But, to me, it would be absurd to suggest that the air traffic controllers should be “diverse” in the sense that a “minority” group should be represented in excess of its representation in the overall population, that there aren’t enough black people the US for a fair hiring process to achieve this, and that therefore an unfair process should be used to increase this sort of “diversity”. That’s all kinds of wrong!

Bar exam is different because it's just taking a test. Testing is really easy to scale.

This is more not allowing something who dropped out of law school due to academics to be readmitted because law school slots are precious if your goal is to make X amount of lawyers per year.

give up. you won't convince anyone. if corruption have any minority scape goat, it's "them".

From what I saw, people did that years and years ago. What happens when that isn’t sufficient?

Yet it is impossible to implement Affirmative Action without discriminating based on race.

And no one is going to care if some farmer won’t hire white people for his farm.

> It’s all the same issue and has been since the 1970s. Many people believe you need explicit racial references in hiring, government programs.

I draw a line between "need explicit racial references in hiring" and the "biographical questionnaire" in the article. The later was explicit deception, what I want to call fraud though maybe dose not fit the technical definition, and was correctly labeled cheating since the answers were apparently handed out. I can not lump all this activities together and label it as one thing at least due to the line I drew above and likely other lines I would draw as digging in to more details.

> Though there was a “masks off” moment starting in 2020 when people were openly subscribing to Ibram Kendi thought (who lays out his view clearly that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination).

I think you are simplifying too much here. The way this reads is that everyone on the other side of the issue to you is either masks off and is like Ibram Kendi, or is masks on and hiding it how they are like Ibram Kendi.

I do not buy it is that simple, the world is more complex than that with people that have a wide variety of motivations and goals.

Neither are "relevant" in my opinion, not yours, not theirs. Both are inflammatory, subjective characterizations from different ends of the horseshoe. These are never productive or insightful, and that's why I brought up "Their Blessed Homeland vs. Our Barbarous Wastes".

This is really helpful. I take something different from it than you do (it looks like attrition starkly increases after 2014, in ways I'd strongly argue it's reasonable to attribute to the new hiring methods), but I'm grateful you posted it. Do you know if more complete/precise numbers are available anywhere (hiring counts, hiring+attrition, etc?

I'm aware of this but it leaves attrition to be inferred. https://www.natca.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/FY23-Staffi...

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.

> The diversity push could have been an attempt to encourage a wider range of people to consider the occupation.

Except it was demonstrably of the opposite of this. The bigraphical questionnaire rejected 90% of applicants for no justifiable reason.

In practice, diversity is much easier to achieve by reducing the opportunities of the undesirable demographics. This is one such example.

What do you consider cronyism except ‘members of this organization share cheats and get each other in’?

> Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality.

No, this is false. You don't appear to know what you're trying to postulate.

Curious to see if "disparate impact" criteria gets softened, i.e., impose requirement to find "intentional bias" (c.f. status quo)

What I think is weird is how many firms have this reason, but do it for other stated reasons and don't simply state this compliance nuance. I figure more people would accept your "paragraph three strategy" as an acceptable means to a required end. Maybe this threat is more of a "what if" that has lower probability of enforcement so in practice, getting hunted for this is not that likely.

I'm going to assume you mean "academy" attrition for sake of conversation.

You have a wave of much higher attrition after 2013 because....You have a lot more trainees on fewer trainers.

That means more load is placed on fewer trainers resulting on page 45 where you spike from 20% to 25% ratio.

Combine that with the very valid point that this is not CIT folks but qualifying citizens being admitted, you can see the impact of having a 56% higher attrition rate!

Here's a bunch of plans to comb through for the full numbers. I don't have a spreadsheet off hand.

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2021-11/FAA-Controll...

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/controller_staf...

Alas - my key point is this: the statement

> Has this had a long-term impact on aviation safety and air traffic controller shortages? Likely yes."

may have been highly attributable in 2018 timeframe but the real culprit is just as likely the 2013 sequester - I'd caution to say any one cause is the reason but rather there is a combination between a shift in applicant pool, having to deal with a slight burst in retirements, recovering from sequester and revamped training processes. Heck - maybe even not having an administrator from 2017-2018 might have caused issues.

In the cold light of 2025 with impacts from COVID still reverberating, I'd doubt hiring practices as much as any other arbitrary reason.

I get that you’re trying to contribute to the conversation, but you do realize that what you’re saying sounds racist?

In addition, this is a diversion from the elephant in the room, which is that right after some dramatic executive action, many people died within a short amount of time due to a crash that had nothing to do with race and everything to do with chaotic governance.

"Cronyism (noun, derogatory): the appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications."

Cronyism is advancing the interests of your personal connections. Friends and family. If you want an explicit cutoff, the Dunbar Number suggests this group should have 100, maybe 150 people in it.

Conversely, there's 40 million black people in the US, and I really doubt anyone is even associated with all of them, much less calling them one of their friends.

You can change who you're friends with a lot easier than you can change your skin color, so the two result in different problems. They're both bad, of course. Similar to how "wage theft" and "shoplifting" are different crimes, even though both of them involve taking money from someone else.

Associates. You know like people who literally belong (aka associate) to the same organization?

Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism, and is the same problem.

In this case, a criteria for joining this ‘fraternity’ is the color of their skin.

Hence double applicable with DEI.

Why do you keep insisting on ignoring half of what you are pasting?

There are already many actions to correct pilots. But human efforts are never perfect and we don't expect them to be, for both the pilots and the air traffic controllers. Which is why they're designed to backstop one another, and why compromising either one of them increases the probability of a collision.

Congress stopped the shitty behavior quiz 9 years ago

Read Tracing Woodlines’ articles. The biographical questionnaire was a means to achieve indirectly what the FAA couldn’t achieve directly (explicit racial preferences).

I’m not oversimplifying it. A lot of people want explicit racial preferences to achieve racial diversity. That’s both unpopular and (now) illegal, so you get lots of different workarounds.

Not everyone who supports DEI programs wants explicit racial preferences. But in practice DEI programs turn into racial preferences and quotas because those people won’t stand up to the ones who want preferences.

When the methods of selection aren’t selective at all (the “qualified” bar on the AT-SAT only eliminated some 5% of candidates), “qualifying citizens” is a bit misleading.

Yes, academy attrition.

I don’t disagree that the 2013 sequester played some role, but to radically change hiring practices in the wake of the sequester and then blame radically higher washout rates primarily on the sequester doesn’t pass the sniff test.

My basic case is simple: when articles and reports considering the reasons haven’t even mentioned this massive change in hiring practices as one contributing factor, shifting to including this as a contributing factor is a genuinely major change, and while it would be convenient for people if it didn’t impact anything I don’t think you can disrupt the pipeline that much and then shrug and attribute all issues to other things. That just doesn’t make sense.

My position is that whether or not this is true, this is not the basis for sound and equitable policy. If I were black, I would probably be a little offended at the insinuation.

> So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?

Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example). I don't care that the outcome did not increase DEI; I care that the justification did.

There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept. I was watching an official video from LAFD where a firefighter said "people want first responders that look like them" and then later in the video said "it doesn't matter that I can't carry an adult man out of a fire because they shouldn't have been there in the first place."

This is absolutely deranged; the entire Democratic party needs to either boot out the DEI crusaders or we will continue to seem out of touch and untrustworthy.

Then keep chasing the symptom backwards until you find the root cause. It's standard troubleshooting, not rocket science.

> Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example).

I would never have thought of this as DEI. I normally only think of DEI in terms of jobs, hiring, and similar. Though I can see how someone might try and fit it under Inclusion.

> There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept.

I agree there is too much of people not being able to communicate and talk things out. Any sort of patience and willingness to talk things out can be exploited by bad actors to waste your time energy and effort, especially online conversations, and that results in people shutting down conversations as a defense mechanism. The end result is some amount of tribalism where people talk to protect and promote their tribe instead of communicating. Community standards need to improve for that to get better though and that takes time.

The above communication issue as far as I can tell is not directly connected to DEI and would still exist if everyone was focusing on some other topic.

The approach that I thinks works with one on one conversation, but may not scale well to groups, is to take on topics individually. DEI, is to big and too broad and means different things to different people. Cheating on an FAA test, corruption, failure of leadership, those are easier to get broad agreement on topic by topic.

> Not everyone who supports DEI programs wants explicit racial preferences. But in practice DEI programs turn into racial preferences and quotas because those people won’t stand up to the ones who want preferences.

I see leadership wanting to move with current politic climate and when they go to implementing things not really caring who they hire other than who is going to make their lives easier. That then results in hucksters, con artists, selling their services, quick fixes, cookie cutter solutions, to those leaders who then get what they wanted, fitting in with the current political climate, not real fixes which are often hard, can have unknown risks and timelines.

Blame bad leadership, blame hucksters, and con artists, that is where I lean.

If your problem is who to hire this week, root causing back to someone’s childhood conditions 20 years ago does absolutely fuck all for you.

So are we just going to ignore COVID as an impact on the most recent staffing issues?

> Associates. You know like people who literally belong (aka associate) to the same organization?

First, the FAA and the NBCFAE are different organizations.

Second, "Associate" does not mean "employed at the same massive organization". It means someone you actually know, on a personal level. You and I are not "associates" just because we both post on Hacker News.

Third, the question is whether you're associated with the individual, not the organization that they're a part of.

> Only hiring people who belong to the same fraternity is also cronyism

If you only hire from Harvard or some other prestigious university is that also cronyism?

Are all internal promotions cronyism?

If you only hire people who live in your city, is that also cronyism? Keep in mind that there's plenty of rural towns that have fewer people than a big fraternity does. Does this change if all th qualified workers in the town are black, so you're only hiring black workers?

You presumably have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise "only hiring US citizens" is also cronyism. Where, exactly, are you suggesting that line should be?

You're telling me they had this diversity mandate 10 years ago and in the last 10 years all they could think to do was to disqualify white people from hiring and there were absolutely no opportunities to go and encourage people to be air traffic controllers?

Now that's proof that white hiring managers are incompetent! (that's a joke)

You're suggesting DEI wasn't the problem then? Using a new colloquial term doesn't suddenly change the foundation of the concern.

Affirmative Action is racisim. If you don't believe it, find the FAA people (or college students, law enforcement, numerous other recent cases) that were more qualified and excluded and ask them.

It wasn't just white, it was minority groups excluded too to make room for other minority groups. I believe a Native American that scored 100% on the entrance exam, with significant experience is one of the major plaintiffs.

It litterally has plaintiffs that weren't hired with 100% scores, and tons of experience. Not only that, sometimes they were minorities, just not the "in" minority. I believe, the second major plaintiff is a Native American.

> The relationship between the FAA and CTI schools remains damaged, applicant numbers have declined significantly since 2014.

> The lawsuit is still ongoing. The scandal has not yet resolved.

Separate from the above posts, the FAA continued their discriminatory policies. For example, setting several DEIA initiatives and only one target for hiring more Air Traffic controllers. https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/about/office_org/hea...

No? What are you talking about?

I’m saying going out of your way to get people from a specific organization that you are also a member of hired where you work, is cronyism.

Also, going out of your way to hire people of specific skin color where you work, is racism.

Seems like a bunch of folks at the FAA were doing both here, yes?

Affirmative action is racism. So is the lack of affirmative action.

Turns out this is a complex topic. Anyone pushing a simplistic viewpoint either doesn’t understand the topic or has ulterior motives.

Oh no, what he said sounds racist! He shouldn’t contribute to the conversation then.

Holy shit.

You can still delete this.

Totally agreed on this being racist, illegal, and just absurdly unethical. I just think the way you're understanding the word "cronyism" is going to lead to a lot of confusion, because it's not the way most people use it.

I'll offer up the Wikipedia definition, since it is perhaps slightly clearer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronyism defines it as "friends or trusted colleagues".

So what is the answer? Because racism in hiring is illegal.

Why pass over any white candidates?

You have more spots than you have qualified candidates. Even if you take your second band candidates, its still short the number you need.

Of course not. Multiple things can be (and are) factors at the same time. I'm not asking people to ignore COVID, I'm asking them to not ignore this.

Ok-but you make a sweeping statement about the impact to safety and ATC numbers in the wake of an air tragedy - do you expect me to weigh this as heavily as COVID?

While I agree with the surface evaluation(you have likely lower quality initial candidates(not necessarily race induced) = more academy failures = more pressure on upstream DEV/CFC training) - you'd need to identify a few things such as why the spike didn't occur in 2014-2016 in such large #s compared to 2017, what safety data tells us about this time and how number of flight actions per controller has changed over time after this hiring change.

I find it somewhat disingenuous to consider safety and tie it back to this as you present it as the only cause while failing to mention other inputs.

This is NOT TO SAY you do not have a very valid discussion here - I just am frustrated to see it tied into modern day without hashing through other modern causes - folks who want to point a finger at "disadvantaged candidate hiring." get all the hay they need when nothing else is mentioned.

Not a fan

How it's "resolved"? Just because it happened a while ago (and continued in some different form since then pretty much until now - a lot of "we love DEI" stuff from FAA that I've seen are pretty recent) does not make it "resolved". Also, people still remember and discuss stuff that happened decades ago, including on HN, all the time. I don't see why the exception must be made for this story, so that since it started a while ago, it must never be mentioned again.

Your reference to "state-sponsored propoganda" is very strange too - if you accuse the author of being the agent of some state, say it openly - and bring the receipts to prove it. Otherwise, this kind of innuendo should not have a place anywhere.

Because if your hiring numbers (and workforce composition) don’t line up with what the gov’t expects (applies even more to the gov’t itself) then as a hiring manager you’re in deep shit.

Straight from the president up until Trump (for many administrations), affirmative action is required.

And what the gov’t expects is that your workforce composition aligns with the population as a whole, percentage wise.

Again that doesnt make sense.

You have 100 open positions.

You filled 50.

You left the other 50 spots open so that you could have the right composition amongst HALF of the required workforce?

Heck, if you hire everyone, you solve this problem completely.

> With most of DEI, you either tweak the criteria to make job positions easier to get for minorities, or you lower your standards

Do you have a source for this.

I have worked for dozens of enterprise companies with DEI policies and not a single one dropped standards to attract "minorities".

What I said is based on the 14th amendment, as part of the highest law of the land.

Perhaps anyone pushing doubt with ZERO substance behind their claim has ulterior motives.