

Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety - collision
http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

======
Elepsis
I just read _Outliers_ yesterday, conveniently enough, so the chapter is fresh
on my mind. While Greenspun certainly refutes _a_ thesis quite effectively, I
don't think it's actually the thesis of the chapter he's discussing.

First of all, Gladwell does not at any point claim that American or Canadian
pilots are "the best" due to the power distance index--in fact, he doesn't
claim that at all. If you look at the book, the U.S. has the fifth-lowest
index (lower being "better" for these purposes), behind New Zealand,
Australia, South Africa and Ireland, and he never says anything in the chapter
that even implies that American pilots are best.

Nor does he say anywhere that the power distance index is the primary cause of
plane crashes. Indeed, he explicitly says that any accident is caused by 6-7
small mistakes building on one another without being caught--something that
could quite possibly be caused by inexperience, as Greenspun notes--but which
can be exacerbated by two people in the cockpit unable to communicate in a
direct way.

So while I think the article is a useful and interesting theory about
differences in rates of crashes (though it should be noted that U.S. airlines
do not have an overwhelmingly better safety record than, say, major European
ones [1]), it is ultimately another in a series of "hey, let me overgeneralize
what Malcolm Gladwell is saying and back it up with minor factual gaffes I
found in the book" articles.

[1] <http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm>

~~~
jseliger
I was just going to post something to this effect: Greenspun is busily
refuting a claim that Gladwell never makes, which is that American pilots are
somehow better, or that they're better because they have more experience. In
fact, IIRC, Gladwell takes pains to point out that some of the South Korea
crashes had very senior pilots flying.

Gladwell's larger point is that a) modern crashes are composed of a large
number of crashes on planes and that b) cultural inhibition of direct
communication can contribute to crashes to the extent that a more junior
position feels unable to speak directly to the pilot.

I have my reservations about Gladwell, as described here:
<http://jseliger.com/2009/07/28/outliers-and-blink> , but the pilot chapter
isn't among his weaker so far as I can tell.

------
credo
The misrepresentations in the first paragraph show that the writer's primary
objective was to bash Gladwell and he doesn't seem to care much about the
facts.

To say "Gladwell comes to the conclusion that foreigners are unsafe because
they are ... foreign." and "If only everyone were American or Canadian, the
world would be a better and safer place." is absurd.

It is true that Gladwell talked about low power-distance-index (PIDI) cultures
and how pilots from low-PDI cultures were likely to act differently from
pilots from high-PDI cultures. However, he didn't say that American pilots
were superior to "foreigners". On the contrary, Gladwell mentions a study
showing that countries like Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa etc. had a
lower PDI than the US. He also mentioned a study showing that Jamaica,
Singapore, Sweden, Denmark etc. cultures were better able to tolerate/manage
ambiguity than America.

As for Canada, I don't think Gladwell even mentions Canada in that chapter.

It is funny that the guy should have written a whole post to attack Gladwell
and started the post with a blatant misrepresentation of what Gladwell wrote

------
pc
Though the overall point may be correct, it weakens philg's argument to claim
that a non-US pilot may become "Captain at Major Airline" after just 20 hours
of pilot-in-command time: that's just not true for any jurisdiction I'm aware
of (the article claims it's "typical"), and I'd love to know of even _one_
such case. (I'm an occasional pilot, with both US and "foreign" licenses.)

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yes, even knowing nothing about the subject at hand this argument looked a wee
bit exaggerated. If the situation were truly so astonishingly extreme,
wouldn't the USA become a major net exporter of airline-pilot talent?

Come to think of it, _is_ the USA a major net exporter of airline-pilot
talent? And if not, why not? Is the fix in, as it is with doctors and lawyers?
(Getting a medical degree is one thing, moving to the USA is another, but
getting licensed to practice medicine in the USA without a _US_ medical degree
is, alas, a third.) Or is the language and cultural barrier too high? (I was
under the impression that international airline pilots all spoke at least
enough English to communicate with air traffic control, which is to say:
pretty decent English. You'd think that you could have a pretty decent life as
an expatriate American airline pilot.) Or would it just cost more than folks
are willing to pay?

~~~
jrockway
_Come to think of it, is the USA a major net exporter of airline-pilot
talent?_

Dunno, but I have a hunch the answer is yes. (Not "net", but we probably do
export.)

I was very surprised when I was flying from Hong Kong to Shanghai on Dragonair
a few months ago; both the captain and first officer were white guys with
American accents. Not what I expected from an airline that only flies from
mainland China to Hong Kong. (I also flew on Cathay Pacific on that trip, and
the flight crew had British accents. They were not Chinese, which is what
surprised me.)

So I assume there are some pilots that choose to work for a foreign carrier
rather than a US carrier. It makes sense, because English is an important
skill, and the pay must be about the same. If my work life would become less
stressful by moving to Hong Kong, I would gladly do it. I don't see why pilots
would be any different.

~~~
yters
Alot of them probably come from the Air Force, and pilots in the Air Force
basically just fly all the time.

------
viraptor
It's a bit hard to believe that training programs can be split into US and
foreign. There are many countries in the second category and it's very
probable that most of them have their own requirements. I'm not an expert, I
may be wrong. But every sentence comparing country X to "the rest of the
world" activates my BS detector.

And this "Unless the country is very large, there won't be any regional
airlines." seems silly. I haven't heard of any European country with no
regional airline. Even Iceland has their own with only 2 "real cities".

There's a lot of hand-waving in the post. I'd really like to stick some
[citation needed] in there.

------
larsberg
Gladwell's books are not scholarly research. They're more like hipster coffee
shop conversations, and should be taken with a healthy dose of rigorous
skepticism, even though they are usually quite enjoyable.

~~~
tokenadult
_Gladwell's books are not scholarly research. They're more like hipster coffee
shop conversations, and should be taken with a healthy dose of rigorous
skepticism, even though they are usually quite enjoyable._

I think Gladwell would largely agree with this description of his writings, or
at least with the part that says that his writings should be approached
skeptically and that they don't purport to be scholarly. From the article
"Malcolm Gladwell's Method" in the Wall Street Journal on November 15, 2008,

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html?mod=...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122671211614230261.html?mod=article-
outset-box)

an interview by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg:

"[Q:] Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little?

"[A:] No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation. These books
are playful in the sense that they regard ideas as things to experiment with.
I'm happy if somebody reads my books and reaches a conclusion that is
different from mine, as long as the ideas in the book cause them to think. You
have to be willing to put pressure on theories, to push the envelope. That's
the fun part, the exciting part. If you are writing an intellectual adventure
story, why play it safe? I'm not out to convert people. I want to inspire and
provoke them."

~~~
camccann
So basically, sometimes he says things that are flat-out wrong, and he doesn't
care as long as they're _thought-provoking_ falsehoods, and people read it
anyway because it's fun and engaging and thought-provoking in a way completely
unrelated to accuracy.

In other words, he's basically an entertainer. Debunking Gladwell is like
"debunking" the historical accuracy of _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_.

~~~
jamesbkel
Agreed. The problem is that nobody (or hopefully, very few) people ever took
'MP: Holy Grail' as historically accurate. As someone with a degree in
Decision Science my main issue is not so much with Gladwell, but the fact that
most people I encounter assume since it's in a book which references scholarly
articles that it's true.

~~~
camccann
Yeah, I don't mean to bash Gladwell himself either. At times he indulges in
glib bullshitting[0] but his infectious enthusiasm for exploring neat-sounding
ideas is charming, and refreshing compared to some of the utter tripe that's
out there. And he really _is_ an excellent writer.

The downside is his books ending up in the hands of people whose capacity for
entertaining novel ideas far exceeds their capacity for rational critical
thinking.

[0] "Bullshit" in the sense of H. Frankfurt's technical term for assertions
intended neither to inform nor deceive.

------
JimmyL
For this point:

 _A typical 16-hour day...nowhere for the pilot to rest. He or she will be
sitting near a gate, in uniform...trying to shut out the noise of thousands of
passengers walking by and hundreds of public address announcements._

It seems like a quick-and-easy solution would be to have the Pilots' union
demand access to the airline's network lounges (or better yet, make it an FAA
requirement so that they can get into off-brand lounges at smaller airports)
in their next collective agreement. Union members would commit to not taking
advantage of the free food or the computer terminals, and the airlines would
in exchange let them hang out there as it's quieter and gives them somewhere
to get a bit restful before their next leg.

And if the airlines don't want to fill up their own lounges with free staff
(as opposed to passengers), contract out the problem - give the pilots
PriorityPass memberships, so they'd be going into lounges that aren't their
own, and that are explicitly OK with people paying to get in.

------
po
It is interesting that in the past, Gladwell has talked about how it takes
10,000 hours of real effort for someone to get effortlessly good at something.
Here Greenspun is talking the same point.

~~~
self
The 10,000 hours thing is actually early on in the same book.

~~~
po
Ah, I heard him talking about it in a radiolab episode.

------
IgorPartola
While I find Gladwell's writing stimulating, the man quotes Wkipedia as his
source multiple times. How a New Yorker writer could get away with it, I don't
know.

I think Outliers boils down to "if you have the lucky background at the right
time and the right place, you will be given more and bigger opportunities."
The rest is simply interesting anectdotes.

~~~
nice1
This comes up again and again: the man (Gladwell) is a bullshit artist.

------
tokenadult
<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial
spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

------
defen
Not having read Outliers, I can't really comment on the argument presented
here. However, I found it rather... odd?... that he chose Martha's Vinyard as
his example destination for a private pilot, who would need to "check the
weather, ..., and decide whether the risks are a reasonable match for his or
her skills and equipment", considering that there was a very famous plane
crash under similar circumstances, of which I'm sure Greenspun is aware. It
struck me in an odd way - I guess it just seems a bit callous to throw in such
a veiled reference in an article about airliner crashes.

~~~
JimmyL
I saw that, and was 50-50 if he was referencing JFK Jr. explicitly.

On one hand, Greenspun is a pretty noted Libertarian and not a fan of the
Kennedys. On the other, he often references flying to Martha's Vineyard for
day trips in his other writings about aviation, and it seems like a pretty
sensible place to fly to if you're into civil aviation and looking for a day
flight somewhere from Boston (where I believe he's based).

~~~
gwern
I'd agree; from reading his blog for a long time, he is in fact based out of
Boston, spends a lot of time engaged in small-scale civil aviation, and does
visit Martha's Vineyard more frequently than your average bear. (Check out
[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/08/15/complete-
marth...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/08/15/complete-marthas-
vineyard-vacation-in-one-afternoon/) ).

Nothing says it can't be both - it's a location that naturally comes to his
mind, his point is valid (weather conditions _can_ be dangerous there,
Kennedys aside), and it happens to be a dig at some people he hates.

Packing that much into a short phrase is called good polemic writing, people.

------
nraynaud
Am I crazy to think that cutting the world in "US" and "the rest" is
profoundly dumb?

I mean, putting in the same bag Benin, China and Germany? did anybody loose
his mind?

~~~
jrockway
Did you read his argument, or are you just upset that your favorite country
was lumped in with your least-favorite country? I think, for the very limited
category described in the article, that this is _not_ outrageous.

~~~
nraynaud
I read the article, and I see that number for "the rest of the world" are in
one column.

------
tumult
You don't need to exaggerate the article by calling it a 'debunking,' it
posits another theory and lays out some facts. It's very even-handed and a
good read.

~~~
pgbovine
well he is definitely trying to debunk gladwell, as indicated by him bashing
gladwell's lack of airline pilot and scientific credentials at the end of the
article. it certainly isn't an unbiased alternative theory by an impartial
third-party.

