Asiana Flight 214

Patrick Smith of Ask the Pilot  fame provided an informed critique of many of the hasty judgments people grasped at wildly after Asiana Flight 214 crashed at SFO. Among those:

Lastly, we're hearing murmurs already about the fact that Asiana Airlines hails from Korea, a country with a checkered past when it comes to air safety. Let's nip this storyline in the bud. In the 1980s and 1990s, that country's largest carrier, Korean Air, suffered a spate of fatal accidents, culminating with the crash of Flight 801 in Guam in 1997. The airline was faulted for poor training standards and a rigid, authoritarian cockpit culture. The carrier was ostracized by many in the global aviation community, including its airline code-share partners. But Korean aviation is very different today, following a systemic and very expensive overhaul of the nation’s civil aviation system. A 2008 assessment by ICAO, the civil aviation branch of the United Nations, ranked Korea's aviation safety standards, including its pilot training standards, as nothing less than the highest in the world, beating out more than 100 other countries. As they should be, Koreans are immensely proud of this turnaround, and Asiana Airlines, the nation's No. 2 carrier, had maintained an impeccable record of both customer satisfaction and safety.

Whatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly doubt that it was anything related to the culture of Korean air safety in 2013. Plane crashes are increasingly rare the world over. But they will continue to happen from time to time, and no airline or country is 100 percent immune. 

Malcolm Gladwell arguably did more than anyone to popularize the theory that Korean culture lay at the root of Korean Air's poor safety record in the 1980's and 1990's. In this interview with CNN Money, he summarized his theory from his book Outliers:

F: You share a fascinating story about culture and airline safety.

G: Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S.

But Boeing (BA, Fortune 500) and Airbus design modern, complex airplanes to be flown by two equals. That works beautifully in low-power-distance cultures [like the U.S., where hierarchies aren't as relevant]. But in cultures that have high power distance, it's very difficult.

I use the case study of a very famous plane crash in Guam of Korean Air. They're flying along, and they run into a little bit of trouble, the weather's bad. The pilot makes an error, and the co-pilot doesn't correct him. But once Korean Air figured out that their problem was cultural, they fixed it.

A fairly thorough rebuttal to Gladwell's theory was posted at the blog Ask a Korean:

First, the way in which Gladwell quoted the transcript is severely misleading. This is the full transcript, which goes from pp. 185 to 187 of the NTSB report:

CAPTAIN: 어... 정말로... 졸려서... (불분명) [eh... really... sleepy... (unintelligible words)]

FIRST OFFICER: 그럼요 [Of course]

FIRST OFFICER: 괌이 안 좋네요 기장님 [Captain, Guam condition is no good]

FIRST OFFICER: Two nine eighty-six

CAPTAIN: 야! 비가 많이 온다 [Uh, it rains a lot]

CAPTAIN: (unintelligible words)

CAPTAIN: 가다가 이쯤에서 한 20 마일 요청해 [Request twenty miles deviation later on]

FIRST OFFICER: 네 [yes]

CAPTAIN: ... 내려가면서 좌측으로 [... to the left as we are descending]

(UNCLEAR SPEAKER): (chuckling, unintelligible words)

FIRST OFFICER: 더 오는 것같죠? 이 안에. [Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?]

(emphases mine)

Note the difference between the full transcript, and the way Gladwell presented the transcript. Gladwell only quoted the first two lines and the last line of this sequence, omitting many critical lines in the process. In doing so, Gladwell wants to create an impression that the first officer underwent some period of silent contemplation, and decided to warn the captain of the poor weather conditions in an indirect, suggestive manner. 

The full transcript reveals that this is clearly not the case. The first officer spoke up directly, clearly, and unmistakably:  "Captain, Guam condition is no good." It is difficult to imagine how a person could be more direct about the poor weather condition. Further, there was no silent contemplation by the first officer. Nearly three minutes elapse during this sequence, during the captain and the first officer chatted constantly. And it is the captain who first brings up the fact that it is raining a great deal: "Uh, it rains a lot." In this context, it is clear that the first officer is engaged in some friendly banter about the rain, not some indirect, ominous warning about the flight conditions.

To be fair to Gladwell, when asked about whether he thought his theory from Outliers came into play in the case of Asiana Flight 214, he did not bite. 

We asked Malcolm Gladwell for his thoughts on the use of his essay in the particular context of the Asiana crash. "I can understand why my Outliers chapter has been of interest, given how central cockpit communication issues are in plane crashes," Gladwell told The Atlantic Wire in an email, adding, "My sense is that we should wait for the full report on the crash before drawing any conclusions about its cause." As for the applicability of his work to the recent Asiana crash, Gladwell noted that his essay was specific to the problems (and solutions) of one airline — Korean Air, "which I think did an extraordinary job of addressing the cultural issues involved in pilot communication. This was a crash involving a completely different airline," he said. 

The NTSB has yet to issue any formal assessment of what happened that day. I happened to arrive at SFO for a flight to Paris just a few hours after the crash occurred, and we could see the wreckage in the distance from our gate. Our flight was delayed by 9 hours, and we finally took off at around 9pm that night.

Our plane turned onto the runway and accelerated towards takeoff. The moment just before our wheels left the ground, I saw, just out the window to the left, the wreckage of Asiana Flight 214, sitting just off our runway, illuminated by some giant spotlights, like a giant burned out metallic skeleton that had just been dug out of the earth.

Racial diversity in American cities

I killed a good half hour playing with this racial diversity dot map. It visualizes some of the spatial racial distribution of cities that you can only intuit from ground level as a resident. While a city may seem quite integrated and diverse, it isn't until you zoom in that you see that what looks like a diverse blob of people is really a series of segregated neighborhoods. 

One personal hunch, though, is that how diverse a city feels is not just based on how segregated the population is based on their place of residence but how much those populations interact in day to day life, and that is a function of city density and the developmental maturity of the city's public transportation. While New York City looks like Chicago or San Francisco or other big cities in being a collection of segregated neighborhoods, it felt like the most diverse city I've ever lived in because those populations crossed paths on the city streets and subways every day in high numbers. 

Thomas Schelling's Segregation Model, one of the more powerful agent based models I've ever studied, shows how the extreme segregation of American cities might arise from much milder racial preferences. It's a critical model to study, one that is useful to keep in mind when trying to avoid a variant of fundamental attribution error when trying to explain how something that builds over time ended up in a bad state.

This report (PDF) from 2011 studies long term racial segregation trends in America and comes to this conclusion:

The 2010 Census offers new information on changes in residential segregation in metropolitan regions across the country as they continue to become more diverse. We take a long view, assessing trends since 1980. There are two main findings: 1) the slow pace of lowering black-white segregation has continued, but there is now some change in the traditional Ghetto Belt cities of the Northeast and Midwest; and 2) the rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian populations are as segregated today as they were thirty years ago, and their growth is creating more intense ethnic enclaves in many parts of the country.

Plagiarism in the age of the internet

One more case study on the impact of what the internet does best: distribute information. 

Twitter user @prodigalsam  has come under heavy fire for building up his Twitter follower count to over 100,000 by plagiarising the jokes of other comedians. He had reached 130,000 followers, though the recent controversy seems to have pushed that back down under 125,000, still a hefty number.

Given the massive volumes of text being indexed on the internet, plagiarism seems like an increasingly shaky proposition unless you're flying so far under the radar that no one notices.

Not a scientific study, just a hunch: fields where artists depend on originality to make a name for themselves are much more sensitive to enforcing norms around plagiarism. Magic and comedy are two fields where a code of honor is enforced with great intensity by the practitioners themselves.

As an example, read this great article I cited here a year ago in Esquire about Teller of Penn and Teller fame going after magicians who've stolen some of his tricks. 

Your lobster roll is overpriced

A glut of lobster in the ocean has driven its wholesale price down, yet restaurants have kept lobster dishes on the menu at historical high price points. James Surowiecki explains the many reasons why, including this:

Lobster hasn’t always been a high-end product. In Colonial New England, it was a low-class food, in part because it was so abundant: servants, as a condition of their employment, insisted on not being fed lobster more than three times a week. In the nineteenth century, it became generally popular, but then, as overharvesting depleted supplies, it got to be associated with the wealthy (who could afford it). In the process, high prices became an important part of lobster’s image. And, as with many luxury goods, expense is closely linked to enjoyment. Studies have shown that people prefer inexpensive wines in blind taste tests, but that they actually get more pleasure from drinking wine they are told is expensive. If lobster were priced like chicken, we might enjoy it less.

Restaurants also worry about the message that discounting sends. Studies dating back to the nineteen-forties show that when people can’t objectively evaluate a product before they buy it (as is the case with a meal) they often assume a correlation between price and quality. Since most customers don’t know what’s been happening to the wholesale price of lobster, cutting the price could send the wrong signal: people might think your lobster is inferior to that of your competitors. A 1996 study found that restaurants wouldn’t place more orders with wholesalers even if lobster prices fell twenty-five per cent. As the study’s authors put it, “A low price creates suspicion.” This helps explain one of the interesting strategies that restaurants have adopted to take advantage of the lower price for lobster: they keep the price of lobster entrées high, but add lower-priced items—lobster bisque, lobster mac-and-cheese, a lobster B.L.T—to the menu. That way, they can generate more business without endangering lobster’s exclusive image.

I wonder if lobster prices remain high at seafood markets, or even Costco. They don't have to engage is menu price portfolio construction, but the perceptual illusion that higher priced lobster tastes better still exists.

Value of college education

Traditionally, a lot of education's value has been described as a signaling mechanism. As such, it's been analyzed based on ROIC or other such economic terms.

But Tyler Cowen makes a convincing argument that perhaps the value of education is in self-acculturation.

Men are born beasts.  But education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well.  Getting an education is like becoming a Marine.  Men need to be made into Marines.  By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide.  The education itself drums that truth into you.

Similarly, if you become a Mormon or a Protestant in Central America, your life prospects go up.  It is not that Mormons have learned so much more, but rather they have a different sense of self.  They have a positive self-image about their destiny in life and choose a different set of peers.  They also choose not to drink. 

The beasts model differs from classic signaling theory.  If education is pure signaling, just give everyone a standardized test in seventh grade and then close up the schools.  But the process of self-image formation, at least for most people, is far from complete at that point. 

That being said, education will look like what the signaling model predicts.  It will be about subtle brainwashing, image, and learning markers of status.  What the signaling model misses is how important those features are for your subsequent productivity.

Nerds will hate education and tend to embrace the signaling model.  Their sense of self is often formed quite early, and they do not why so much time should be wasted in school.  This is one reason why the signaling model is so popular in economics.

I remember dropping one of my cousin off at a school in Seattle. It was some school for training people to program videogames (the name eludes me), not a traditional university. He was headed there for his first year of schooling.

I didn't know him that well as we'd lived on opposite sides of the country most our lives, but on the ride over to the school, I chatted with him a bit about his interests in videogames. Like many boys, we'd both enjoyed playing videogames, but he'd taken it to a much greater degree, choosing to make that his life's work.

In one way, I envied him. To know what you want to do in life that young and to just go for it seemed liberating. On the other hand, I'd already graduated from college, and I couldn't help but feel concerned, even nervous, as we neared the campus.

I entered college with no clear idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I exited the same way. It felt like a feature, not a bug. I've always seemed to value entropy more than the next guy, and perhaps that's led me to chase novelty more than I should have. It remains what it is even today. That day, as I pulled into the campus and drove towards his dorm (it was more of a multi-room apartment), it was the certainty of what I expected to find there that scared me. 

I walked him into his dorm room to meet his roommates. They were as I expected. Not the way they looked or dressed, though as soon as I saw them they were as I'd always imagined they might be.

Nerd isn't the right word, though it's not far off. Nowadays, we might give it a more positive spin: otaku. At Comic Con this year, Wil Wheaton was asked, by someone in the audience, to explain to her newborn Violet why it's awesome to be a nerd. He gave a great off the cuff answer, with this punch line:

Being a nerd is not about what you love. It's about how you love it. 

My cousin loved video games. Maybe what I was really worried about the acculturation effects of what I imagined to be the homogeneity of attending what amounted to a trade school at such a young age. 

Maybe I envied him for his certainty. I wonder what he's up to now.