Comment by wand3r
3 months ago
> 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.
> I don’t think DEI itself provides the grounds... it being used as cover by a small number of activists to engage in discrimination of their own.
That's exactly what providing the grounds means. It's like how the no-fly list provides a convenient way to trap your estranged wife outside the country. You can do a whole lot of racism, call it a DEI initiative and use the right terminology, and no-one bats an eye.
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.
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> it will really hurt the Democrats chances of success for the future
"Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Nevermind all the people who wanted and invested in attaining this seemingly awful but crucial job and got the shaft.
I’m in two of those groups and I feel like they ignore me and take me for granted.
It's a myth that the bar is lowered for DEI hires.
You should RTFA before making such an obviously disprovable assertion.
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You should listen to what Harj, a YC partner and former CEO of TripleByte an objective software engineer competency test for hiring, has to say about what many companies were trying to do in lowering the bar. He only admitted companies were doing this in the past week.
https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560
As someone who works in software, companies in general are not great at selecting software talent. The idea that there is some movable bar by which applicants are selected is clearly silly.
There are methods of practicing DEI that don't lower the bar. There are methods of DEI that do lower the bar. There's no single answer to that question, it depends on how DEI is implemented in that particular case.
And you are backing this claim up with what exactly?
It isn't possible for you to know this.
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Why are you (and many others) just assuming the black candidate is less qualified?
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The bar wasn’t lowered at all. What happened was that the FAA stopped giving preferential treatment to a separate group—namely, CTI graduates—by replacing their streamlined path with a flawed biographical screening. Every candidate still has to pass the same rigorous training and certification.
That's not an accurate way of describing this.
The biographical screen was not flawed, it was designed to try to pass minority students at higher rates than non minority (for example that question on "your hardest topic" needing to be science). And it did exactly what it was designed to do.
Which had the effect of dramatically reducing the available candidates.
CTI never had preferential treatment, they simply were students who learned the skills needed to pass the actual ability test. That's not preferential treatment, that's exactly what school is meant to do.
CTI graduates had a much better rate of actually becoming ATC professionals. So why should the FAA ignore that instead of spin one up at Howard?
Well, the FAA also leaked the official answers to the biographical screen to black interest groups so that they could teach black applicants to cheat on the screen.
That’s not exactly what happened. The article shows that an FAA employee leaked guidance on answering the biographical questionnaire to members of the NBCFAE. This wasn’t an official FAA policy but a rogue action.
Every candidate still had to pass the same rigorous training and certification process, which is extremely difficult and selective.
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You created this account 1hr ago, and are already 3 comments in on this topic. In all your comments you're doing mental gymnastics on a pretty clear-cut case. they have tapes.
Imagine, for a second, having tapes on someone saying "Our organization, he said, “wasn’t for ~~Caucasians~~ <insert minority here>, it wasn’t for, you know, the ~~white~~ <insert minority here> male, it wasn’t for an alien on Mars,” and he confirmed that he provided information “to minimize the competition.”
Would you still argue this the way you are doing? Would this still have been buried? Are you actually trying to argue this isn't a blatant case of racism?!
Let's focus on the article and evidence rather than personal details or dismissive labels. Personal attacks don't add to the discussion and go against HN guidelines for civil and substantive debate.
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