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Nobody falls into being a doctor either, yet you'd probably prefer to be treated in a majority-white hospital to a majority-black hospital.
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-kdday1dec05-story.html
If the administration of airlines, air traffic control, pilot training and so on was ruthlessly meritocratic, then I'd agree with you that there'd be no difference in skill between black or female pilots and white male pilots, since they would all have passed the same tests and be above a certain benchmark. But this isn't so, not informally and now not even formally. If it were meritocratic, then we wouldn't see DEI rules and so on.
And the only reason we'd depart from formal meritocracy is because influential decisionmakers don't want meritocracy. Presumably they've already been informally advising on hiring decisions and making their expectations known. I have a friend who did anti-plagiarism work at a university. There are strict de jure rules against plagiarism, academic integrity is supposedly very important. De facto students=money and so they were told to slow down, don't be too efficient, make sure to let them appeal (and so be it if we can only do one or two such appeals per day, the other 90% of cases will be deferred into the never-never). Hence the anti-plagiarism unit has been churning through staff for some time, nobody seems to want to half-do their jobs.
The RAF and USAF seem eager to lower the number of white male pilots via an informal hiring freeze and 'aspirational' diversity goals, respectively. Informal methods already do a lot of work.
Are you making the HBD-IQ('skill')ish argument, or the Damore difference-in-interest one? I think the latter is non-applicable and readily shown to be non-applicable, at least for current numbers of pilots. The former... I could be more persuaded for doctors, though I'll caution that places like King/Drew or individual cases like Patrick Chavis run into trouble isolating or controlling other variables, and the data may simply not exist.
((In turn, though, one of the other variables for King/Drew and Chavis was/is lack of willpower to enforce against bad actors when such enforcement would bring accusations of racism. Which leads to problems even presuming equal capability on average.))
But I think airline pilots run into, or at least close to, the same issues as I listed for the continent-level scale question:
Are airline memory items closer to free recall or serial rote learning? Reading landing charts closer to symbolic manipulation or to reading symbols? Reading an weather radar as pic-vocab or inspection time? Not getting overwhelmed by alerts or alarms closer to odd-man-out or reaction time? You can come up with a hundred combinations, and there's certainly some number that will have a racial component in some studies simply by chance, but it's easier to come up with ones that are either nonsensical or wrong or both.
You can have a pass-fail test and still some subgroups that are more skilled than others, even if they're all above a certain benchmark, though as long as that benchmark is set reasonably it is less concerning, as others have already gone deeper into the math. And while aviation has (thankfully!) moved away from the sort of heroics that saved part of UA232, there are still a lot of incidents and near-misses with current (and I'd argue pretty aggressive!) benchmarks.
But I don't find any of that nearly as disturbing as people who believe, enough to say publicly, that ability won't make a difference.
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Actually, even with the same minimum standard for each race you would expect the white to be better on average.
If X is N(100,15) and Y is N(85,15) then E(X|X > 120) > E(Y|Y>120)
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Nitpick - this still won't be true as long as there is noise in the tests or variability in skill above the bar. The groups with higher average performance before the cutoff will also dominate the top percentiles after the cutoff, and be less likely to be a false positive under noisy tests.
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