The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

> I know, I know. The evidence is unambiguous that the bar was lowered, deliberately, over many years and with direct knowledge. The evidence is unambiguous that a cheating scandal occurred. The whole thing is as explosive as any I’ve seen, and it touches on a lot of long-running frustrations.

This is likely the most common complaint about DEI, it provides grounds for race based discrimination and lowers the bar. I am sure this was not the only government agency that did something like this and it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future. Their core messaging has really boiled down to "black and brown people, women and LGBTQ are our constituency" and predictably this has turned a lot of people off the party. Especially since they haven't really delivered much even for these groups.

I don’t think DEI itself provides the grounds. It’s simply a case of DEI either being implemented in a lazy or stupid way to tick boxes OR it being used as cover by a small number of activists to engage in discrimination of their own. If DEI didn’t exist, the above things would still happen, just for a different reason and possibly different group of activists.

How is this not DEI? This was a deliberate and conscious attempt to create a test that would pass DEI candidates at higher rates, with question that had nothing to do with the actual needed skills.

And they did it because they were pressured to "increase diversity".

As I’ve said twice now: it was the actual thing that was done (in this case, lowering standards and throwing qualified people to the wolves) that was lazy and stupid, not the umbrella “DEI” itself. That’s because the actual work to get more candidates from diverse backgrounds is difficult and takes time. It’s things like outreach, financial support, changing societal attitudes. Instead of that, they took the lazy option and just threw out white candidates from the pipeline. I also include “setting hiring targets” as a lazy and stupid way of “achieving DEI,” just for clarity.

This is kind of like the argument that communism is great but no one has been able to implement it correctly yet. "Setting targets" having highly paid DEI consultants, and identity based hiring is what DEI is. Lowercase diversity and inclusion are good ideals, which I think is what you are saying. Uppercase DEI are the exact policies we are talking about here.

I’ve provided a list of DEI hiring policies that don’t fit into your list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302

I said at the top of my thread that the refusal of people in power to engage with criticisms like this thoughtfully has allowed the far right to toxify these debates and I think the downvotes and responses to my comments are minor, but perfect, examples of my point. Instead of discussing the issues and how they should be fixed, the “debate” breaks down into “DEI bad” on your side and “saying DEI bad is racist/sexist/etc.” on the other side.

Blind reviews (and even interviews) are great ways of making hiring more fair. They are explicitly the inverse of DEI approaches. DEI is predicated on outcome diversity, rather than treating applicants equally irrespective of background. That's the E and I part. The entire premise is that certain groups require special support (fair - e.g.: blind people, wheel chair users), and have been historically excluded because of bias (sometimes true, often wholly false - much of the time differential hiring is path dependent with fewer qualified applicants from a given group).

> They are explicitly the inverse of DEI approaches.

This is essentially a No True Scotsman fallacy. If it's DEI, it's bad so any good approach is, by definition, not part of DEI.

> DEI is predicated on outcome diversity, rather than treating applicants equally irrespective of background.

The first part of this is incorrect. Good DEI is about creating a level playing field (as you correctly point out for blind people or wheelchair users). Obviously, this isn't possible in all cases: I think everyone agrees we wouldn't want a blind taxi driver.

> The entire premise is that certain groups require special support

This is correct. Fair criticism of DEI initiatives can be levied at those which don't do this effectively and instead shortcut by using, say, hiring quotas. I've said multiple times that things like this are lazy and stupid because they don't address the lack of opportunity for disadvantaged backgrounds.

> and have been historically excluded because of bias (sometimes true, often wholly false

This is an inaccurate stating of the situation. Some groups (e.g. black people in the USA) are excluded due to bias. Some have been excluded due to situational factors (young white men in the UK have worse outcomes due to poverty). Good DEI initiatives attempt to counter these, with varying levels of success.

Let me take the article as an example. They identified an advantage for people on CTI programmes, which also happened to turn out good ATC operators. This may have advantaged people who could afford to attend the programmes, which could have skewed white male. A good DEI initiative might have been to put the work into outreach in under-represented areas to get more people of colour into CTI programmes. Instead, the FAA banned CTI programmes, threw the students there to the wolves, and seemed to sneak in a test designed to hit hiring quotas. Not only was this discriminatory, it also actively reduced the number of qualified ATC operators.

Nowhere in this scenarios did I need to fall back on "DEI bad," because I tried to discuss the specific issues within the article.

These are really good points, it's depressing as hell to see the the quality of discussion around this stuff. Obviously DEI is great when it's trying to fix things on the input side.

Perhaps I can simplify this argument. If you have a lift heavy things job, which we can agree that women on average are worse at, you shouldn't hire more women by quota, but you could provide free weight training for women. Both things are DEI, the latter is the kind of DEI we want.

The problem is both are still sexist; where is the money to pay for training coming from?

If it's a government initiative then it's taking from all to only give to women.

If it's a publicly owned company, then can you actually make a convincing case that it's a benefit to stockholders?

Only in the case of a private company does this lack ethical issues, but at that point it's just some billionaires whim.

Yes we actually want to take from everyone and give to disadvantaged people, we should do this as a society because even crudely implemented it is a good first approximation of capturing externalities shareholder value fails to.