Comment by sillysaurusx
18 hours ago
I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44546377 that this is mistaken and why. Dehumanizing someone because they have suicidal ideation is exactly the kind of attitude that puts people at higher risk.
You’re forcing people to pretend like they don’t have suicidal thoughts. That doesn’t work. Attitudes that it somehow does work are backwards.
It's not dehumanizing them. It's depiloting them. Not everyone should be a commercial airline pilot, no matter how much they may want to be one.
It is explicitly dehumanizing them by saying they’re not allowed to be pilots despite having issues. Claiming that it’s not is again part of the problem.
You can’t imagine what it’s like to worry about losing your career because of something you’re forced to keep secret, and is entirely treatable. That’s the kind of barbarism that future generations will look back on us and shake their heads at.
I hope you never have to worry about being de-yourjob’d. In the meantime, let the people who are worried about it campaign for change.
I imagine women had to face similar discrimination when campaigning to be allowed to fly. There were likely a bunch of people saying that the current system was fine, and besides, they didn’t trust a woman to do the job. Just because we’ve moved from discrimination against sexes to those with mental health issues doesn’t mean the system is perfect.
Without necessarily taking a side (I don't know enough about the specifics of the FAA policy or the various incidents over the years) I'd like to suggest that you are rather missing the point of the person you are responding to.
Take your argument to the extreme. Suppose someone has a physical or mental issue that renders them unable to reliably judge a certain type of situation or undertake some action that must be made consistently and repeatedly for safe flight. Presumably such a person has no business in a cockpit, let alone on a plane with hundreds of passengers on board?
The above clearly demonstrates that there are certain minimum requirements for practical reasons and that not everyone in the population is necessarily expected to meet them. It isn't a value judgment but rather an observation about the reality of the world we inhabit.
So the person you are responding to here is suggesting that suicidal ideations might be incompatible with the safety expectations of piloting a passenger airliner. Meaningful disagreement would need to somehow address the practical concern as opposed to deflecting with an appeal to emotion.
A related example that might be worth considering would be someone who suffered from severe and debilitating panic attacks. Or someone deemed to be at particularly high risk of having a heart attack. Or any number of other potentially debilitating conditions that can have sudden and unpredictable onset.
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