Tracing Woods

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…

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-admin

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.

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.

> 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-overview).

> 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.

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