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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
After completing more than two years of basic training, the six women and seven men were chosen from a record-breaking 18,000 applicants representing a wide variety of backgrounds and specialties, from experienced pilots to scientists, engineers and doctors.
The group includes two candidates from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which has participated in a joint training program with the US since 1983. "They are the best of the best: they are highly qualified and very diverse, and they represent all of America," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. They include five people of color, including the first Iranian-American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli who flew combat missions in Afghanistan and holds an engineering degree from MIT.
The group, known as the "Turtles", wore blue flight jumpsuits and took turns approaching the podium to receive their astronaut pins, as one of their classmates paid tribute to their character and shared playful and heartfelt anecdotes.
After being selected in 2017, the class completed training in spacewalking at NASA's underwater Neutral Buoyancy Lab, robotics, the systems of the International Space Station, piloting the T-38 training jet and Russian language lessons.
They are the first to graduate since NASA announced the Artemis program to return to the Moon by 2024, this time on its south pole, as the US plans to place the next man and first woman on lunar soil and set up an orbital space station.
-- submitted from IRC
Related: Eyeing Moon, NASA hosts first public astronaut graduation ceremony
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @06:45AM (4 children)
Choosing to reject a man, or woman, because of the color of their skin is racism. And I do not believe that you can solve racism with racism. In fact that has been tried before, but I'll get into that in a minute. First I want to hit on the #1 vs #100 thing. Here are the bios of two candidates from NASA's most recent class:
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Candidate #1: [nasa.gov] BS in geology from Stanford. PHD in geology from UCLA. Worked as teaching assistant and postdoc in geology. Collaborated as a member of the Science Team for the Curiosity rover. Worked as a volunteer assistance coach of a college basketball team.
Candidate #2 [nasa.gov]: BS In Aeronautics and Astronauts from MIT, Doctorate in Electrical Engineering and CS from Berkeley. Worked as a professor at MIT where he taught courses on Dynamics and Flight Vehicle Engineering. His group produced the open-source GPKit tool for geometric programming which is being used to design NAVY UAVs. Previously worked for Boeing in product development and was a member of Yosemite Search and Rescue.
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The diversity hire's only strength is having collaborated with the Rover team and that was also probably a diversity hire given there are no doubt plenty of #2's who'd love to have such opportunities, but can't because they were born with the wrong skin color. This is not #1 vs #100. This is somebody in the top versus somebody who is not in the top. Obviously #1 is above average, yet you are setting a standard of 'above average' vs 'probably one of the most intellectually successful individuals on Earth'. All because of skin color. This is not smart.
As mentioned we have tried this in the past. There were practically no Jews in America until the late 19th century. Most were dirt poor and few even spoke English. They were, and arguably still are, widely discriminated against. Harvard admittance used to be simply based on an extremely challenging test. If you did well, boom - you were admitted. The 'problem' they came upon in the early 20th century is that in spite of the social obstacles they faced, 'too many' Jews were doing well on it. And so, in a view we now see as clearly regressive, they (among many other schools) adopted the NASA policy. 'We'll solve antisemitism by never admitting more than 15% Jews!' [jewishvirtuallibrary.org]
This is now something looked back at, appropriately, with shame. You don't solve racism with racism. You solve racism by judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. And we're dropping the ball hard there. But it's become so normalized we don't even really appreciate it anymore. Probably similar to how in the 30s in Germany racism against Jews had become so normalized it likely didn't even "feel" like racism.
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Lastly, I would also add one thing on the notion of 'inherent closeness.' It's intuitive that humans run on a pretty smooth curve of capabilities. And so no man or woman is truly head and shoulders above any other. Yet the peculiar thing is when you look at fields where we can measure ability - this turns out not to be true. There are 0 barriers to entry to chess, for instance. Yet we always see the world champion ending up somehow far far ahead of everybody else. And it's not just a consistent small advantage, but a wide margin as can be measured by performance. For instance Magnus Carlsen today is 50 points higher than the #2 player. That's a whole hell of a lot. Yet this is always true. For instance in 1972 Bobby Fischer was 125 points ahead of the #2. To put the numbers in context, a 100 point difference gives an expectation difference of about 2:1. You can also see this performance gap between #1 and #2 in other sports and activities. There is 0 reason to think this does not apply as a general rule, as counter-intuitive as it may be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @08:36AM (3 children)
systems where there can be a single winner are bad systems.
for astronaut candidates I assume there are a bunch of standardized tests that you can pass or fail.
the important bit is to pass.
obviously if you start allocating points to every little detail you'll be able to differentiate between the candidates and some will be better than others.
and if the point is to win a contest, it is entirely possible that one of them will be good enough to always win, even though technically the point difference is small.
for chess the points come from winning games.
so you don't have to be twice as good to win twice as many games.
you just need to be a little bit better to skew the statistics.
dumb example: two men fight to the death to win a woman (yes, in the "woman is property" sense). it doesn't matter whether the winner wins without a scratch, or if he is himself almost dead after the fight and barely recovers. if you are to divide the number of kids of the winner to the number of kids of the loser you get infinity in both cases (assuming that there are no fertility problems with anyone).
if the task is "go to the woods, make a cabin, sustain yourself for a couple of years", then there will be a whole bunch of people able to do it (although many would not succeed). there is no "best", there are just many people who can pass the test.
I've talked to people who hire other people.
good candidates are good in different ways, and it's often the case that you cannot differentiate based on just objective criteria.
especially if part of their future job is not well defined, as is the case with scientific research.
yes, you can tell they will do different things, and they will act differently when faced with the same task.
but there is no easy way to tell how these differences will lead to "better" or "worse" results.
what is your measure of outcome? here are some examples:
number of facebook likes ten years from now.
funding received by NASA next year.
number of satellites that the astronaut will fix in orbit.
think about these questions.
there's no easy answer, especially because it depends on what other people will be doing.
the way I see affirmative action in this context is the following: as a society, the US decided it's important to have members of different communities present in as many roles as possible.
the belief is that the implicit increase of communication channels between the different communities will lead to "good".
where "good" means a combination of things, among which: less tension between the different communities, more opportunities for more people, greater pool of candidates for different critical positions, increased overall integration of the different communities.
I don't know whether this is a good solution to the racism problems that the US has.
I may even have the wrong understanding of what affirmative action is and how it is implemented.
but as a scientist myself, my gut feeling is that he approach I outline would help in my domain, as well as for astronauts.
there are (or there should be) protocols in place to prevent incompetence from taking over.
but there's a big difference between "not the best" and "incompetent", especially since there is no objective "best".
regarding your "no more than 15%jews".
that is racist.
if they had said "no less than 85% white, because 85% of the population is white", I'm not sure I would have argued against it.
I don't have time to look at the link now, sorry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @03:59PM
This comes down to two different and mutually exclusive meanings for equality. There is equality of opportunity and there is equality of result. I am completely and absolutely in favor of the former, but equally strongly opposed to the latter. For affirmative action this was one of the key issues. Quoting Senator Hubert Humphrey (who was a major player in the passing of the LBJ's civil rights act): "...there is nothing in [section of the Civil Rights Act related to employment] that will give power to the Commission to require hiring, firing, and promotion to meet a racial 'quota.' ... Title VII is designed to encourage the hiring on basis of ability and qualifications, not race or religion." Affirmative Action was supposed to be about judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. It's only in recent times we've gone down this really messed up path.
Ending racism is simple, and you tend to hear the same thing from many self made blacks. Here [youtube.com] is Morgan Freeman's take on black history month. He states it is "absurd" for reasons similar to why Neil DeGrasse Tyson also refuses [blackenterprise.com] to partake in black history month. Why? When you invite him to talk during Black History Month you're just doing that because he's black. But what does the color of his skin have to do with what he is? With being an astrophysicist and great scientific communicator? Nothing. It's belittling and denigrating. People didn't want to hear what Carl Sagan had to say because he was a first gen child of Russian emigres, they wanted to hear what he had to say because he was a phenomenal communicator. To end racism just treat blacks like people - no less and no more. Same thing for other identities. I'm only focusing on black here for historical reasons.
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Let's go in a different direction for a minute though. Let's ignore the rightness or wrongness of this all and simply ask, does fighting racism with racism even work? Well first we have to ascertain the goal. And I think that goal would probably be to improve race relations by making normally underrepresented or non-represented groups feel more included and to avoid another 'whitey on the moon'. [youtube.com] The next question we need to ask is when did this begin? That's harder to measure but social media has no doubt played a major role in it. And one of the primary warcries there has been 'why so white.' So let's evaluate!
Here [google.com] is a Google trends for the aforementioned phrase. Other similar phrases seem to show similar time frames. Sometime in late 2011 it peaked and stayed there. Here [gallup.com] is a graph of race relations from Gallup. They start to plummet at just about the same time. One would say this paradoxical, but I think it's to be expected. These actions, again, treat blacks like they're idiots. Do NASA think blacks aren't going to know this is literally 'token black girl'? Do they not think everybody is going to realize they're picking people based on skin color and not merit? Who exactly is this making happy besides the twits on Twitter? This isn't going to do anything except inflame racial tensions.
Again this is why racism is never acceptable. Something we always tend to forget is that literally every single generation makes up their excuses for why their racism is not really racism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @04:59PM (1 child)
Also as one tangent on the chess thing. You don't need to be just a little better to skew the statistics. The ELO is a probabilistic predictor based on relative performance. Here [fide.com] is a list of the top 100 chess players in the world. What you'll find is extremely peculiar, yet repeats constantly in chess in other fields. The #1 player in the world is better than the #2 player in the world by a much larger margin than any other two players in the top 100.
#1 > #2 by 50 points
#2 > #3 by 17 points
#3 > #4 by 28 points
Literally every other player is separated by the next closest player by single digit differences. This is not some quirk in the rating system - it's a quirk in humans. For some reason the best don't tend to be a little bit better than the second best, but way way better. It's dangerous to underestimate how much damage we are inflicting on ourselves by moving away from what was already a meritocracy in shambles to an openly discriminatory system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14 2020, @07:13PM
ok. my comment on chess and "best" wasn't that good.
let me try something else:
please check record sprinters/swimmers etc and compare times. this is very different from comparing number of medals of elite athletes.
check record height jumps (value of height). again very different from number of medals.
what I was trying to say is that in practical situations you don't need the person with the highest number of medals, you just need someone who is very good.