Gladwell's Culture & Air Crashes Analysis Badly Flawed

Koreantoast writes "As a recent Slashdot article showed, interest in Malcolm Gladwell's theory on the impact of culture on airline crashes has come up again following the tragic accident of Asiana Flight 214. Yet how good was Gladwell's analysis of the Korean Air Flight 801 accident which is the basis of his theory? A recent analysis by the popular Ask a Korean! blog shows serious flaws in Gladwell's presentation: ignorance of the power dynamics amongst the flight crew, mischaracterizations of Korean Air's flight accident record (three of the seven deadly incidents characterized as 'accidents' were actually military attacks or terrorism) and manipulative omissions in the pilot transcripts to falsely portray the situation. 'Even under the most kindly light, Gladwell is guilty of reckless and gross negligence. Under a harsher light, Gladwell's work on the connection between culture and plane crashes is a shoddy fraud.' Perhaps Gladwell should have asked a Korean before writing the chapter."

Comments

Yeah but it makes a good story

[Sir or Madman]

Same happened after the Tenerife crash, with people characterizing one of the crashing captains as an unchallengeable authority and trying to blame the crash on that. And yeah, not true it turns out. Whoda thunk it!?

Re:Yeah but it makes a good story

[RaceProUK]

And we all no they never make mistakes, nor do the people who build them and write software for them.

A point worth making for sure, but remember that avionics software is held to a much higher standard than most software. Because the software is directly responsible for human life, and the developer held accountable for failures, they test the shit out of it before even thinking about possibly building a release at some point int he future. But only after more testing.

Re:Yeah but it makes a good story

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Malcolm Gladwell. Can you really take seriously, the man who claims that Steve Jobs will be forgotten by history, while Bill Gates will be revered like Pasteur and Oskar Schindler ?

Gladwell's been savaged enough for his whole "Tipping Point" pseudo-mathematical twaddle. As a columnist for the NYT, he's a perfect Tweedle-Dum to Thomas Friedman's Tweedle-Dumber.

What's less apparent to people is that Gladwell is a stooge, and lickspittle lackey to big industry.

Dissident Voice has a great article on how he's used his podium to Astroturf for denial of benefits to the insured.

"Gladwell has yet to disclose a list of his corporate clients and how much they pay him. Here is a partial list compiled from various publicly available sources:"

• Philip Morris
• Lehman Brothers
• Microsoft
• AHIP (health insurance lobby)
• Bank of America
• SHRM (union-busting lobby group)
• Genentech
• PricewaterhouseCoopers
• Hewlett-Packard
• Retail Real Estate Industry

Look into Project S.H.A.M.E., to fully expose the depth of this fraudulent, pseudo-intellect.

Re:Yeah but it makes a good story

[Anonymous Coward]

You're off by an order of magnitude.

No virtual memory machines. No dynamic memory allocation. Every single line of code is directly traced to a requirement, and each requirement traces directly to the code that accomplishes it. Each possible code path tested against the range of plausible inputs. Each input to each function sanity checked, each error path validated against all identified triggers. Strong preference for a pure Harvard architecture, occasionally done in FPGA just so that you can't screw that up. Document each use of a pointer with justification for the deviation from programming standards.

It goes through robust hardware in the loop (iron bird) testing for a year or 3 before it gets into an aircraft. Prayer is not part of the test flight; that's so fuckign boring and routine that I've never wondered what will happen in flight test. I pray through audit and have only been surprised twice by the iron bird.

Re:How can this be?

[Shortguy881]

Gladwell has never been one to adhere to scientific principles, he just spits out theories he likes and finds the evidence to support them:

Criticism of Gladwell tends to focus on the fact that he is a journalist and not a scientist, and as a result his work is prone to oversimplification. The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking".[56] Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions.[57] Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach.[58][59] Even while praising Gladwell's attractive writing style and content, Pinker sums up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning," while accusing him of "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in his book Outliers. Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake, Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: "I will call this the Igon Value [sic] Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong."[58][n 1] A writer in The Independent accused Gladwell of posing "obvious" insights.[60] The Register has accused Gladwell of making arguments by weak analogy and commented that Gladwell has an "aversion for fact", adding that, "Gladwell has made a career out of handing simple, vacuous truths to people and dressing them up with flowery language and an impressionistic take on the scientific method."[61] Gladwell's approach has been satirized by the online site "The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator".[62]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell

Re:That's ok, because...

[Plumpaquatsch]

Let's not forget that the "military attack" which was supposedly not an "accident" happened because KAL Flight 007 was hundreds of miles off course (ignoring conspiracy theories of why this happened).

Does anybody take Malcom Gladwell seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Philip Greenspun pretty much systematically took apart the aviation section of Outliers back when it was published:

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

Re:That's ok, because...

[tlhIngan]

(a) forced them to speak English well (because air traffic controllers speak English worldwide, apparently),

At civil airports, English is mandatory. It's an ICAO requirement, actually, that all communications take place in English using standard phraseology.

In fact, the requirement has gone up to require ALL pilots and controllers be tested for English proficiency - even if you're in an English-speaking country and speak it natively. Yes, you have to submit to a (relatively simple) English proficiency test as part of your license.

Apparently, native speakers who score the max (Expert) are exempt from future tests - those who score one below (Operational) must re-take the test yearly. Operational is the minimum required to pass.

Note this only applies to civil aviation. Military airports and airfields are completely different beasts.

And in Canada, Quebec likes to be different so all their controllers tend to greet initially in French and grudgingly speak English to Canadian aircraft. (International aircraft they'll happily speak English to).

An example set of questions and responses:
http://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/civilaviation/standards/general-personnel-test_taker_guide-2296.htm

Re:Comment on Korean pilots

[Anonymous Coward]

The original post is from pprune.org, dipshit. You know, the professional pilots forum. If you knew as much as you think you do, you would have known that.

Re:Comment on Korean pilots

[Mysticeti]

More on this topic here: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2013/0712/Asiana-flight-214-Was-the-pilot-training-program-to-blame