Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

And somehow all the replies are blaming DEI or affirmative action. Twitter's really gone off the rails.

Somehow the "anti-DEI" people really latched on to Boeing. Not just Boeing themselves but also pilots for some reason... maybe spurred on by the fact that the pilots of the Alaska flight were both women? Not that the pilots did anything wrong in that incident, of course.

I can't really tell if the fact that Elon's been very active in this... let's call it "discourse," is a cause or symptom of it being so oddly widespread. Probably both: a vicious circle.

As yes, it was the female pilots who made MCAS and forgot to put the bolts on the door...

Like, I get that people have always been dumb, but man are they loud and aggressive about it these days

The left and the right live in completely separate bubbles. You may not be aware of this story, but the right is.

See https://www.faa.gov/pwdp . The Federal Aviation Administration has set a target of hiring people with "severe intellectual disability".

> The Secretary of Transportation has set a hiring goal of three (3) percent per fiscal year for individuals with targeted (severe) disabilities.

> Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring. The targeted disabilities are:

    Hearing (total deafness in both ears)
    Vision (Blind)
    Missing Extremities
    Partial Paralysis
    Complete Paralysis, Epilepsy
    Severe intellectual disability
    Psychiatric disability
    Dwarfism

Edit: If you're into podcasts, listen to this (partial) episode of Blocked and Reported about a different FAA scandal about flight controllers training (the tests were changed to promote trainees who hate science and love risk): https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-the-faas-bizarr...

Surely the FAA has plenty of roles where people with those disabilities could work. It's not like they are trying to add a deaf person to be ATC communication coordinator or a paraplegic to be an emergency firefighter.

By posting this policy you're implying it's obviously a problem... mark me down as undisturbed that there's a light thumb on the scale in favor of hiring blind/deaf/etc/etc/etc employees for what I'm going to reasonably presume are overwhelmingly office jobs sitting at a computer. To the extent they're even getting hired at all.

Of course the disabilities you'd primarily draw attention to would be instead "severe intellectual disability" and "psychiatric disability," I imagine. This program doesn't remove the qualifications for jobs: blind people are not flying planes. People with severe intellectual disabilities are not inspecting them.

Speaking of left/right divides, it seems to me that taking these kinds of policies at or beyond face value is another one of those. The anti-DEI crowd has also decried Boeing having a target to hire more black employees, a policy from 2021 that's resulted in the share of black employees rising from 6.4% to... 7.1%. Definitely a smoking gun. I can go on Twitter to hear about how that 0.7% combines with the lower IQ of HBCU graduates to explain the company's problems.

You're wrong about the left and right being in bubbles. I read commentary, thinkpieces, and yellow rubbish from both. This isn't the first time I've seen mention of that hiring goal, but I will note that comments like yours are typically the setup for a motte & bailey. But let's assume good faith.

Tell me. Of the targeted disabilities you have listed, which do you think employers should discriminate against, when it does not interfere with a qualified candidate's bona fide job requirements?

> maybe spurred on by the fact that the pilots of the Alaska flight were both women? Not that the pilots did anything wrong in that incident, of course.

Witchcraft!

(But yeah, blaming the _pilot_ for the door plug falling out seems particularly perverse.)

Twitter artificially promotes bluetick replies, and most people who pay for Twitter are... a bit odd. I expect if you were to filter out the bluetick replies this effect would diminish a bit.

They don't like the optics of directly calling women and minorities inferior anymore, DEI is just a dogwhistle.

Well, fortunately Twitter doesn't show replies anymore. Not to me at least.

assuming there's a statistically significant increase in these kind of accidents: what's your theory on why this is happening? what has change since e.g. 5-10 years ago?

My personal theory would be that the change in Boeing management is catching up to them. But like the anti-DEI folks, all I have to base that on is rough correlation. I certainly wouldn't try to make a case based on that alone.

I 100% believe that there is a sizeable contingent of people that pay (more) attention to these things than they usually would. I am a tiny bit of a plane nerd. Weird shit happens with planes regularly, and not just Boeing ones. These events are increasingly making it to HN, and when they do, they’re getting far more traction than they usually do.

There is undoubtedly something fishy going on at Boeing, but that doesn’t mean that more commonplace accidents aren’t being comparatively overpublicised, or that they aren’t getting more traction than usual because there are now far more people waiting with baited breath to jump on anything that portrays Boeing negatively.

All I’m really saying that Boeing hate is now undoubtedly trendy, and that communities like HN are filled with people that have bought into the software engineer God complex enough to think that they can just intuitively understand something as complex as aviation. I’d barely consider myself anything more than a layperson but these Boeing incident threads are increasingly filled with people spouting BS. Again, there is certainly something going wrong at Boeing, but we are well into the territory where there’s a real need to separate signal from noise.

Well, first of all I don't actually think there is? It's clear that the 737 MAX is a particularly problematic design, but industry-wide incidents and accidents vs distance flown continue to fall, and have for decades; even _absolute_ numbers of deaths are falling, despite vastly more planes in the air.

As to the problems with Boeing in particular, they mostly look like cost-cutting and short-termism; the 737 MAX, for instance, is transparently an attempt to squeeze a few more years out of an ancient no-longer-fit-for-purpose design. And the decisions that lead to that were probably made more like _20_ years ago; Boeing should have started developing the 737 replacement quite a while ago. This would suggest that Boeing has poor leadership.

(You could also argue that some of it's the unfortunate reality of the markets; the markets _might_ punish Boeing for making necessary investments with very long pay-off times.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com