Tracing Woods

A couple of well researched examples https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashes-mao https://archive.ph/ZqHRu To be clear, I'm sure anyone who wants to can dig up examples of other types of bias, and of course, truly excellent articles on non-political topics. If you restrict your reading to avoid anything related to contentious political narratives, you'll probably do ok. It just seems like the organization as a whole tilts in one particular direction, and this seems bad for something that is supposed to be a neutral source of knowledge.

Here's a good writeup of why the FAA has had so much trouble in the past, hiring air traffic controllers: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring It's a pretty crazy story, involving an assesment with most questions worth zero points, a cheating scandal, and the invalidation of credentials that potential employees spent years obtaining. If you don't have time to read it, at least try the selected questions from the assessment, they're pretty crazy: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

The accusations weren’t particularly credible and similar slander campaigns against people like Joe Biden aren’t nearly as prominent. Even notorious dictators like Mao Zedong get treated with kid gloves as long as they’re on the left: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashes-mao

It is by no means a good publication, but at the same time being accepted as a citation on Wikipedia or not is not necessarily a particularly objective measure of quality. I recommend reading https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-adm… for the critical perspective on Wikipedia's integrity in this regard.

1. (2023); also, when this was published (June 3 2023), BTC was up over 60% YTD; also, since then it has approximately quadrupled. What collapse? 2. David Gerard's obsession with these topics is well known and none of this is particularly insightful. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-adm… is an important long-read for anyone unfamiliar with the name. There are any number of better, more respected sources for AI skepticism.

The actual, as another poster provided, was a racist hiring procedure hidden in a test and apparently designed to rug-pull all the trainees paying their own way in training. Apart from that, the intelligence is certainly needed, but with a heavy dose of spatial reasoning. the right kind of 'calm under pressure' is an excellent command of the details of ATC; anything else here is just lethal apathy. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring

This is a great post that lays it out. I suggest putting tribal politics aside and reading it, you can see in black and white that the FAA, under Obama, consciously weighed diversity over performance, and royally screwed the ATC hiring pipeline. "Pobody's nerfect" https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring

A good read https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring

I'm sure this is multifactorial and the other factors are probably as or more important, but especially if you are familiar with the very egregious specifics of the FAA diversity hiring scandal (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-ov… "is unsupportable" here is a strong claim that is playing the classic and well-worn role that "there's no evidence" often does in bad journalism: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag

You might enjoy this story: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-adm… The short version is that you can make Wikipedia report the way you want, but you need to be strategic about it. Wikipedia reports information from "reliable sources", so instead of editing the information directly, you need to insist that the sources that agree with you are reliable and the sources that don't agree with you are unreliable. If you succeed at this, then getting the information you want into Wikipedia is just straightforward following of Wikipedia's written policy.

Wikipedia might be resistant to government capture. But it's rather vulnerable to other forms of capture. See https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashes-mao and https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-adm… Having said that I agree that Wikipedia is a tremendous achievement, and despite the wards it's amazing that it works as well as it does. If you permit me to go on a tangent: Wikipedia is also interesting as a test case for our definitions of (economic) 'productivity'. By any common sense notion of productivity, Wikipedia was and is an enormous triumph: the wiki models harvests volunteers' time and delivers a high quality encyclopedia for free to customers. By textbook definitions, Wikipedia tanked productivity in the encyclopedia sector because these definitions essentially put revenue in the numerator and various measures of resources expended in the denominator---and Wikipedia's numerator is approximately zero dollars.

That book, IMO, reads very much like a smear attempt, and not one done with a good understanding of the target. The premise, with an attempt to tie capital-R Rationalists to the neoreactionaries though a sort of guilt by association, is frankly weird: Scott Alexander is well-known among the former to be essentially the only prominent figure that takes the latter seriously—seriously enough, that is, to write a large as-well-stated-as-possible survey[1] followed by a humongous point-by-point refutation[2,3]; whereas the “cult leader” of the rationalists, Yudkowsky, is on the record as despising neoreactionaries to the point of refusing to discuss their views. (As far as recent events, Alexander wrote a scathing review of Yarvin’s involvement in Trumpist politics[4] whose main thrust is that Yarvin has betrayed basically everything he advocated for.) The story of the book’s conception also severely strains an assumption of good faith[5]: the author, Elizabeth Sandifer, explicitly says it was to a large extent inspired, sourced, and edited by David Gerard, a prominent contributor to RationalWiki and r/SneerClub (the “sneerers” mentioned in TFA) and Wikipedia administrator who after years of edit-warring got topic-banned from editing articles about Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) for conflict of interest and defamation[6] (including adding links to the book as a source for statements on Wikipedia about links between rationalists and neoreaction). Elizabeth Sandifer herself got…

Indeed, it didn't have race-based questions, which I don't think anyone claimed. Rather it had totally arbitrary questions, not related to merit in any plausible way, and a score cutoff that made it highly likely you'd fail if you hadn't been tipped off with the correct answers. For instance, there is a 15-point question for which you have to answer that your worst grade in high school was in Science, and a separate 15-point question where you have to answer that your worst grade in college was in History/Political Science; picking any of the other options (each question has 5 possible answers) means 0 marks for that question. Collectively, these two questions alone account for one eighth of all the available points. (Many questions were red herrings that were actually worth nothing.) But then the same blacks-only group that had lobbied internally to get the questionairre instituted (the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) leaked the "correct" answers to the arbitrary questions to its members, allowing them to get full marks. Effectively this was a race-based hiring cartel. Non-blacks couldn't pass; blacks unwilling to join segregated racial affinity groups or unwilling to cheat the test couldn't pass; but corrupt blacks just needed to cheat when invited to and they would pass easily, entering the merit-based stage of hiring with the competition already eliminated by the biographical questionairre. (A sad injustice is that blacks who wouldn't join the…

I know this is culture-war stuff, but on the balance I think it's true that the FAA deprioritised applicants from the AT/CTI programmes, that is training courses speficically to become ATCs. My main source is https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring, and I'm assuming in particular that the screenshot of the letter in footnote 1 is genuine. In the section ended by footnote 16, there is a claim than in 2014 the FAA sent out just short of 3k job offer letters whereas in 2019 that had dropped to below 1k. That sounds like cutting off your own recruitment pipeline. It's also evidence that the FAA did not drop the standards for qualification and certification, which is reassuring.

> The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US. The obvious reason that US air traffic control has been understaffed for "a while now" is that, roughly a decade ago, the FAA caved in to political pressure to stop having so many white controllers by decommissioning any hiring practices that posed a risk of hiring white controllers. This meant the size of the workforce froze, stressing the system. Tracing Woodgrains went into a good amount of depth on the scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring

BuzzFeed, Salon and PinkNews being used as reliable sources should be everything you need to know about WP. Or read some of the more critical viewpoints against the Wikipedia editor bureaucracy (that shields itself with a laughable "Anybody can edit Wikipedia! We don't exist! Don't look at the man behind the curtain") like https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-adm… Small aside, it's a fun coincidence I (finally!) saw Brazil for the first time a week ago...

10 years or so ago the controllers got hit with a hiring scandal https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring Wonder how that changed the perception and the desire to become an ATC. Did it have a measurable impact, with folks avoiding that line of work. Or, it hasn't really made much of a difference? The idea is if many are retiring but we're graduating or hiring just as many or more, that's not that bad.

Look at the FAA ATC hiring controversy. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-ov…

Note that Asterisk magazine is basically the unofficial magazine for the rationalism community and the author is a rationalist blogger who is naturally very pro-LessWrong. This piece is not anti-Yudkowsky or anti-LessWrong. Here's a counter-piece on David Gerard and his portrayal of LessWrong and Effective Altruism: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-adm…

Links for the curious - DCCrimeFacts [0] and I assume the FAA case is Tracing Woodgrains [1], though I could be wrong [0] https://dccrimefacts.substack.com/ [1] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-ov…

It gets posted here often, but I think this Tracing Woodgrains article goes a long way to explaining how we got to where we are: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-ov… If the "quick overview" isn't enough background, there is a link to his "full story" treatment at the bottom.

It was just an artificial way to select the 'right' color of candidate. The link has the full details. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring

Not a surprise after the reputation they've built - https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring

> Pronouns and flopsy straws never hurt nobody That's not all wokeness is. There's also the anti-merit stuff, which seeks to e.g. get rid of standardized tests or even remove algebra from school curricula. Then there's racial discrimination in hiring and admissions, which is often so cartoonishly stupid you can't make it up (e.g. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-ov… > Something happened to convince tech folks that "wokeness" was somehow a threat, when it clearly wasn't and never will be People hated wokeness so much they became single-issue voters. That was short-sighted, but it doesn't mean they were wrong to oppose wokeness.

Saw this on Twitter a while ago: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-adm…

Did you read this post? https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-adm…

I disagree with many of the current cuts, but other administrations did the work that got us the plane crashes. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring

This provides a good overview. There are some good sources within if you want to dig deeper. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-ov…

> if you pointed that out before Trump's election This article is an expanded version of the author's reporting a year ago: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-ov… While it didn't make the same splash then, I saw it and didn't see people responding by trying to cancel the author.

Too bad that we have some 2,000+ already-qualified FAA ATC of certain persuasion that are "just sitting" around waiting for their stress-free class-action money in the Brigida vs FAA 2015 reverse discrimination lawsuit. Think they'll now work as ATC after they win? Doesn't help to tie up 900+ more potential qualified ATC (again of certain persuadion) when FAA tried reverse discrimination AGAIN in 2021 in Brigida vs Buttigieg lawsuit. Will they ever learn? Source https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring https://casetext.com/case/brigida-v-buttigieg-1