Culturalism, Gladwell, and Airplane Crashes

http://askakorean.blogspot.hk/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html

by jpatokal • 13 years ago

84 83 13 years ago

askakorean.blogspot.hk

danso3• 13 years ago

The title of the OP makes it sound like a ripoff of The Onion, but it's an incredibly indepth criticism of Malcolm Gladwell's much-cited essay on cultural causes airplane crashes...a case study of how a well-regarded author can be very misleading with the facts.

edit: Here's a key rebuttal:

"Gladwell also notes that Korean manner of speaking is indirect and suggestive, requiring the listener to be engaged and applying proper context to understand the true meaning...And the transcript reveals a striking fact that Gladwell never mentions: 90 percent of the conversation among the three pilots is in English. In fact, the only part of the conversation that happens in Korea is idle banter, talking about how the company does not pay them enough or how Guam's airport must be staffed by former U.S. soldiers who were stationed in Korea."

If the premise of Malcolm's chapter is how culture/ethnicity can be related to operational catastrophes, particularly in language, then the power of the assertion is significantly undermined if language wasn't much of a factor in the actual incident.

jmngomes• 13 years ago

I think Gladwell arguments about the "manner of speaking", not the language used. Some countries/cultures are way more deferent than others and view "powerful" people as someone to (almost) worship. Feeling confortable about saying "no" or disagreeing with those above you is tied to your cultural background, not the particular language you use.

briandon3• 13 years ago

The linked article is indeed long but I'm not sure how much merit there is in the poster's arguments.

He contends that 90% of the conversation between the pilots was conducted in English and then, a bit later, quotes a multi-line dialogue between the captain and first officer that was completely in Korean and which he had to translate.

In making the case that the rigidly hierarchical nature of Korean society wasn't a factor in a crash, he describes multiple, conflicting axes-of-respect (age, experience, training) that would've existed and weighed on the crew members' thoughts and actions.

At another point, he seems to be saying that an airline isn't accident-prone if some (not all) of its crashed/destroyed planes were downed because the crew flew them off course and into hostile territory. How many other passenger planes were downed by the Soviets during the same period? Apparently none: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inci...

I'm no fan of Gladwell and the "Igon Value" fiasco should have clued people into the fact that they should be wary of science popularizers, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Especially if it's just repeating aspects of what other clocks have been saying.

danso3• 13 years ago

Well, I would argue that the OP is not contradicting himself, but tackling the instances (since at least 10% of the dialogue is in Korean) in which the dialogue is Korean. And he is directly challenging a passage from Gladwell (I can't recall off-hand how many Korean dialogue examples Gladwell actually sites, so it may be that the OP is cherry picking).

Anyway, the OP's intent is to show that in these Korean passages, Gladwell apparently cherry-picks and edits the otherwise innocuous dialogue in a misleading way:

-----

There is the sound of a man shifting in his seat. A minute passes. 0121:13 CAPTAIN: Eh... really... sleepy. [unintelligible words]. FIRST OFFICER: Of course. Then comes one of the most critical moments in the flight. The first officer decides to speak up: FIRST OFFICER: Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here? The first officer must have thought long and hard before making that comment . . . [W]hen the first officer says: "Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?" we know what he means by that: Captain. You have committed us to visual approach, with no backup plan, and the weather outside is terrible. You think we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway. But what if we don't? It's pitch-black outside and pouring rain and the glide scope is down. There is no nice way of saying this: this portion of Gladwell's writing is ridiculous in several ways.

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.

ghshephard9• 13 years ago

The entire premise, re: Great Golf Players, is off. The vast majority of golf players make bad shots most of the time, and, are a function of individual performance.

Landing a Plane is not like a golf tournament. Every trained and qualified pilot should be expected to safely land the plane. While not a trivial task, and one requiring significant experience and training, it is not so inordinately difficult that only a very few people alive can perform the task.

With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them, that the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual.

Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines.

I completely agree with the OP that it's absolutely premature to be making any conclusions regarding impact of culture on the Asiana airlines crash, but, the nature of the crash, in great weather, suggests that there will be some systemic failure (Training, Over-reliance on Automation, poor maintenance, overly complex modal-auto-throttle) that turns out to be the cause of it.

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

The vast majority of golf players make bad shots most of the time, and, are a function of individual performance.

Sure, but if you took an untrained, unskilled person and had him flying a trans-Pacific jet, you'd see more crashes. This isn't done, for obvious reasons. A terrible golfer who shoots a 173 just annoys people who have to wait behind him. With an unskilled pilot, the stakes are higher and great efforts are made to prevent one from flying a passenger jet.

Good golfers, on the other hand, don't make terrible shots most of the time (although horrible shots are more common than plane crashes).

Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines.

OP's argument is that this isn't specifically a Korean or East Asian problem, and I agree. Most people are-- except when they perceive a life-threatening crisis (and that point of perception may be too late)-- deferential to authority. It's not limited to one culture.

algorias• 13 years ago

Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a poor safety record with some korean airlines.

identified by whom? with what credibility? The whole point of the article is refuting that hypothesis. You've done nothing but restate that thought, without adding any more weight to it.

ghshephard9• 13 years ago

Some citations regarding cockpit culture issues - I recall reading about them before Gladwell's book. Gladwell just put his own (somewhat hyperbolic) twist on them.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/new-standards-mea...

Here is an excellent article on the safety issues with Korean Airlines in the 1990s - much of it, btw, conflicting with the OP's description.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB933090613281869060-search.ht...

notahacker• 13 years ago

Identified by both the (US) National Transportation Safety board and Korean Air themselves, both of whom have considerably more credibility than Gladwell or Korean bloggers who get their accident stats wrong when trying to put him right (two passengers died on Flight 902, not "nearly half")

Here's a article about how bad the situation was in the late 1990s, published nearly a decade before Gladwell got in on the act. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/575544.stm

It's generally believed that South Korean airlines have addressed a lot of those problems through changes to the organisational culture and better training, but after a crash which initially looks like a significant error by the flight crew, it's not wholly unreasonable to ask if the pattern is re-emerging.

alanctgardner22• 13 years ago

If you think that's the entire premise, you didn't read much of the article. Keep scrolling, it's a well well reasoned discussion of why Malcolm Gladwell's commentary on previous KA crashes was misinformed and possibly even distorted to prove his point. Gladwell's book was the source of the "Korean culturalism is incompatible with emergencies" myth you cite.

With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them

Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year when there are thousands of planes in the air. This has everything to do with individual decision making on the part of the pilots, which will necessarily be faulty occasionally. It's basically just random chance that some planes every year will crash because of pilot error.

the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual.

What sounds better in an NTSB report: "the pilot fucked up and flew into the ocean, whoops" or "we recommend adjusting the height of the foo so the pilot can better see it while barring"? Obviously everyone wants actionable outcomes from post-crash investigations, even when they're just trying to explain away a random accident. Y

gizzlon2• 13 years ago

Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year

99.9% success would mean ~475 plane crashes during take-off and landing on Heathrow alone each day =)

ghshephard9• 13 years ago

re: "Entire Premise" - sorry, I didn't mean to say that was the "Entire premise" of the article, I was just trying to say that his "entire premise regarding the golf game analogy" was off. Landing Planes is systemically guaranteed to be safe, it's no longer a function of individual performance, whereas there is nothing systemic about golf games - it's all about individual performance.

The OP was trying to compare and contrast a "System"'s behavior with an "Individual's" behavior, which was where the article went awry.

Re: Gladwell - Gladwell was most definitely not the source of "Korean Culturalism" regarding Air Safety. He simply wrote a popular chapter on an issue that already well documented.

The cause of any pilot error is not law-of-large numbers - pilot error has been, for the most part, systemically eliminated from flying. What's left now is system-flaws.

One of the obvious flaws at SFO was it's GlideScope Indicator was out of service. I have to believe that this will turn out to be a major contributor to the accident, and, in the future, Airport's may be much more cautious about disabling such safety equipment unless absolutely unavoidable.

alphaBetaGamma• 13 years ago

It's basically just random chance that some planes every year will crash because of pilot error.

When you design a system where errors can cause a large number of deaths (airplanes, trains, nuclear reactors,...), your objective is to have very few accidents (nobody can guarantee zero). Having someone to blame when an accident happens -- the pilot did not follow procedure -- is not enough.

Your system design must be human error tolerant, because you know these will happen. To take an extreme example, if a drunk pilot error causes an accident it's not only his fault, but there probably also is a systemic error which caused this criminal behavior (which is a possibility you expect) to cause an accident: maybe the cockpit culture was such that the co-pilot was frightened to stand up to the drunk pilot.

mikeash• 13 years ago

Actually, air travel doesn't really fall prey to the law of large numbers.

Air travel in the US is so safe that it's actually getting difficult to measure it and difficult to identify problem areas. The last fatal airline crash before Asiana 214 was years ago. Some people are most emphatically not dying every year anymore, despite thousands of planes in the air. We go years at a time without a single airline fatality in the US.

And yet, those few accidents that do happen all have identifiable causes with clear remedies. This Asiana crash may have been pilot error, but it was definitely not just random chance. Pilots letting their airplane get too low and too slow on landing with no adverse factors is a clear failure of training and proficiency. One fairly obvious remedy for this one would be to require all airline pilots to hand-fly a purely visual approach at least X times per year to ensure that the skill stays fresh.

I dare you to find a first-world airline crash from the past couple of decades that has no actionable outcomes from the investigation. Shouldn't take you too long to go through all the crashes, since there won't be many to look at in the first place. I guarantee you that every one had actual, useful recommendations come out of the accident investigation, not just bureaucratic CYA "recommendations".

rmah2• 13 years ago

Wow, talk about missing the point.

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them, that the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual.

That's a weird assertion. Generally, that events are extremely rare outliers in a system is an indicator they are the result of unique special circumstances applicable to that event (of which, the combination of involved individuals would certainly be a plausible candidate for an event where a small group of individuals had a major direct role the way the flight crew does in aircraft operations), rather than systemic problems. This is pretty much the basis of statistical process control.

It turns everything on its head to consider that extremely rare outliers in a process are a particular indication of systemic problems rather than special causes.

msandford2• 13 years ago

It's systemic because the whole point of procedures and policies is to avoid the failure of any one part of the system.

Imagine the power going out at your company's data center and then one of the generators doesn't turn on, and as a result your website goes down and you lose $10k/hour. Would management suggest that the generator is an individual and an outlier and we'll just hope it doesn't happen again? My guess is that a set of policies would go into place such that even if a single generator did fail, the website would not go down. You now have a systemic fix to what was entirely likely a very rare systemic problem. Just because it's rare doesn't mean it's not systemic.

Gigablah• 13 years ago

I've also noticed increased scrutiny in the media of the behaviour of the passengers who carried their cabin luggage with them as they evacuated the plane. Much emphasis was placed upon their race -- the majority of the passengers were Chinese.

It feels really tasteless how rapidly the discourse shifted towards criticism of the victims.

briandon3• 13 years ago

Cultural differences do exist, even though discussing differences that have negative consequences or are viewed negatively tend to make many of us uncomfortable.

"The Pedometer Test: Americans Take Fewer Steps" http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/the-pedometer-test-...

Does reading that article or even its title make you angry?

Would you disagree with the results of the study on which it was based? If so, on what grounds? Do you believe that it is wrong in some way to even conduct such a study?

rmah2• 13 years ago

The behavior of grabbing their bags has been observed on numerous occasions in commercial aircraft evacs across many cultures, including western ones. It is a real problem and a concern. But it's one that no airline or regulatory body has really done anything about for 50 years.

barry-cotter2• 13 years ago

I highly recommend living abroad to anybody who does not find the above amusing[0]. People from different cultures really are different.

[0] No, your semester abroad during college does not count.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

I highly recommend living abroad

I agree with the overall suggestion. Where have you lived abroad?

waylandsmithers• 13 years ago

Well, that does it for me as far as non-fiction goes. Is it so much to ask to just be able to be a LITTLE bit lazy and believe something I read, without having to stay on the lookout for a complete tear down from an expert in the subject matter?

Maybe I'm just being naive, but I honestly feel betrayed by how badly one of my (perhaps now former) favorite writers twisted or conveniently ignored facts to make one of his essays more interesting.

ghshephard9• 13 years ago

Ah, welcome to the world of "Gladwell Deconstruction" - It's a pretty well known meme on HN - Calling out just how badly Gladwell distorts everything he writes just to make an interesting story/theme.

He does it so well, though, that he's still one of my favorite writers.

And, much like Wikipedia has taught us to realize that anything written down could be something totally bogus thrown up by a vandal, and therefore we should challenge (and look for citations) for everything, everywhere - Gladwell has taught us that just because something sounds good - doesn't really mean it actually is accurate/truthy.

minikites• 13 years ago

Don't worry, there is a single study on literally this that confirms that everything is actually okay. Just blink for 10,000 hours and it will solve all your problems.

I agree with Merlin Mann's thoughts on Gladwell:

http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/205874392/surprise-surprise

Robin_Message• 13 years ago

Personally, I despise Gladwell for making me look like an idiot whenever I have quoted him.

I came here just to find a place to post my standard Gladwell disclaimer:

I can not anti-recommend Gladwell enough. He is anti-knowledge, convincing you that you know something when you actually understand it less well after reading than before.

dobbsbob3• 13 years ago

Korean/asiana airlines pilots were banned for 12 mos by the airport authority where i worked over a decade ago pending pilot training and english review due to numerous incidents of pilot error and communications problems. Those two airlines managed to ram the jetway 3 times, and even rammed the maint hanger causing millions in damage. One pilot tried to take off with the fuel truck still attached, one pilot had poor english ordering fuel be halfed instead of extra fuel and had to fly back because the pilot only noticed 1hr after takeoff, and two (yes, two) Korean reg'd AC tried to land on the highway instead of the runway.

Another Korean air flight misunderstood the tower and tried to land at the same time as an another plane almost causing a crash, which was only noticed by the other pilot who got out of there. I was there when they asked the pilot about it who was completely clueless he had almost killed everybody on both flights.

I dont know whats up with Korean pilot training but talk to anybody who has worked in a tower and they will tell you horror stories. Theres also the 911 incident where they broadcasted a hijack code for some reason and were almost shot down over the Yukon.

EliRivers2• 13 years ago

It's my understanding that Korean pilots did deservedly have a bad reputation in the late nineties, but got their act together and in 2008 came top of the ICAO league in aviation safety (including pilot training).

dobbsbob3• 13 years ago

I thought they fixed all these problems too then SFO happens, which is yet another training mistake no other pilots would make even on a flight simulator.

markdown• 13 years ago

Citations needed.

JamisonM• 13 years ago

I lived in South Korea and I met some folks working at Berlitz there who apparently won the contract to do English language upgrades for Korean Air. It was soon after 9/11 and they said that after the first class they all looked at each other in silence. Finally one of them said, "Now that is why people thought they were hijacked." They said that 6 months later the difference was absolutely amazing, they were all great students with very few exceptions and all working under the threat of losing their jobs.

I worked with highly educated Koreans when I was there and what the OP says is true about using English words and phrases for highly-technical things I found little to no relationship between that use and a high level of English language competency. If you look at the quoted transcript you see that the item that is "off-script" is in Korean: "Captain: Glide scope 안 돼나? [Isn't glide scope working?]" while all the routine OK checks are in English, following training. For this reason I find elements of his arguments not much more convincing than Gladwell's. (That and the tendency of Korean airliners to drift into Soviet airspace he dismisses seems to support Gladwell's thesis more than his.)

I generally think the "culturalism" thing is a dangerous excuse to engage in a kind of casual racism, but I also think that dismissing culture as an element of any task where humans have to communicate and cooperate is also incorrect.

duskwuff• 13 years ago

That and the tendency of Korean airliners to drift into Soviet airspace he dismisses seems to support Gladwell's thesis more than his.

The tendency of Korean airliners to drift into Soviet airspace had much more to do with Korea's location on the globe than anything else.

sheri• 13 years ago

Patrick Smith (a former pilot and now author) also criticized Gladwell here:http://www.salon.com/2008/12/05/askthepilot301/

lnanek2• 13 years ago

I don't know, gave up when the article claimed you can't learn from the plane that wandered off into Russian territory and got shot. It's exactly the same situation that needs to be addressed. Senior Korean pilots don't have to legitimately pass training and aren't told by the people they work with when they make mistakes. Wandering off course is the same as forgetting your auto-throttle disables at a certain altitude in this regard. It's something easily caught by a second pair of eyes who, in a more functional culture, could tell the pilot. I don't think the article is even trying to see the argument.

I had a Korean CEO like this once at Noom. The guy constantly fucked up. Forgot to pay employees, paid the wrong amount, forgot to pay gym memberships for months which was supposed to be a benefit, promised to update addresses for immigration paperwork and never got around to it, etc.. Even the CTO admitted numbers were not the CEOs strong point and he was just there to make friendly deals with other business people. If you called the guy out on anything, or setup a meeting to try to address things together, he took you away from his desk where things could be fixed to a meeting room to lecture you for an hour on how you had to respect him.

bjourne• 13 years ago

Come on! You can't seriously try and connect "Korean culture" with the douchebag slacker CEO you are describing.

pessimizer4• 13 years ago

I'm not sure that's functionally any different than what Gladwell did here.

candybar5• 13 years ago

Your second paragraph is, quite unintentionally, a great anecdote for why culturalism is a problem. You've somehow managed to blame your boss's quite idiosyncratic issues on his Korean-ness and connect it to another, completely unrelated incident where Korean-ness was being blamed for failure.

There are legitimate and complex ways in which culture can influence individual behavior, but in practice, most such arguments come down to just laziness, personal biases or in some extreme cases, a socially more acceptable way to express racial prejudice.

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

Actually, as a Canadian and a golfer, there is a factor in why Canada has fewer good golfers - you can't play year round in Canada.

ghshephard9• 13 years ago

Following your logic then, you should have more good hockey players because you have longer winters.

thebooktocome• 13 years ago

And indeed, they do have more good hockey players, per capita.

gdilla• 13 years ago

Annnd, we do. No doubt. But that's cultural too. We love hockey. It's in our bones. You'd think siberia would have the best players by your logic.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Putting aside Gladwell for a moment...

By the end of the article, you realize that the whole point is about the negatives of "culturalism". He says:

Like racism, culturalism distracts away from asking more meaningful questions, and obscures pertinent facts.
Like racism, culturalism puts a large group of people beyond rational understanding.
like racism, culturalism destroys individual agency.
Culturalism causes real harm. It obfuscates the truth.

But he hasn't backed this up at all, except for a single lengthy anecdote about Gladwell's chapter. Speaking as someone who has lived in in several different countries besides the US (including 8 years in one), cultural attitudes are extremely important everywhere you go and can explain lots of important things.

Just look at Geert Hofstede's "Cultures and Organizations" if you want empirical data for it.

Seeking cultural explanations for things is no different from seeking any other kind of explanation. Even if it winds up not being true, it's perfectly valid to wonder if cultural things are at work. Looking for cultural explanations is not a distraction, and it does not put anyone "beyond rational understanding" -- to the contrary, it tries to explain things rationally.

I understand that the author is bothered by speculation about Korean culture, but honestly, that's just silly. It's not emblematic of some kind of anti-Korean attitudes in US media or anything, and the author's done nothing to show that it is.

dll• 13 years ago

I totally agree with you here. Culture != race, and to ignore culture means that you are not seeing the whole picture. Anybody who works internationally and ignores cultural issues is going to have a bad time. Acknowledging cultural differences does not have to be negative, and it certainly does not make someone racist.

pessimizer4• 13 years ago

Citing of cultural differences is often (I'd even say usually) code for citing racial stereotypes as if they were common sense.

I'd say that it's worth discussion that the cultural differences cited by Gladwell about Korea are the same as 150 year old stereotypes of Chinese culture.

kokey• 13 years ago

That's the first thing that struck me, as I have also lived in several different countries and even the ones with a similar Anglo-Western cultures, the differences to the approach of important things like risk, truth, trust, authenticity and authority is significant enough to be dangerous at times.

The other part is that I don't believe it's fictitious pilot folklore about the specific training to deal with the cultural issues that had to take place. Not just Korean, I've heard similar things about Vietnamese pilots too.

ghshephard9• 13 years ago

I completely agree with you - as someone who is deploying the same technology system, with the same team, in eight different countries (USA, Brazil, Luxembourg/Germany, UK, Portugal, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia) - I can tell you that having a clear understanding of the culture prior to engaging with the customer significantly enhances our chances of success in each endeavor.

One example - Germany has a reputation as being a rule oriented/structured country, so taking an extra few days of preparation prior to deployments, was very much appreciated there, and we went to the extra effort to do so (and totally enjoyed having an appreciative audience for our wonderfully laid out test plans).

We also discovered in Brazil, that if the customer showed up 5 or 6 minutes late for a conf call, that we shouldn't stress or be concerned that there was a problem - but that culturally, meetings/calls don't always start exactly on the minute. We also learned to be careful to leave an extra 30 minute window for meetings to end a little later than they were scheduled.

Contrawise, We were always careful to dial in within a 30-45 second window at the start of a call when working with the UK. And those meetings (almost) always ended precisely on time.

These are things that you need to be aware of if you want to work effectively in different countries. Don't always expect that other people's expectations of what's appropriate are the same as yours.

candybar5• 13 years ago

This is what I mean - these are things that completely vary from one person to another and one company to another and somehow this is being attributed to countries. Within any country, there are rule-oriented structured companies and individuals and relatively unstructured companies and individuals. There are companies and individuals who don't care if you're late to meetings and there are companies and individuals who do. If someone is telling you, this is how things work in this country, in regards to this kind of variation, you're being lied to and it would be obvious to you someone tried to tell you the same thing about your own country.

And no, you can't have a clear understanding of the culture by having someone tell you a couple of things before meetings - most people have no idea how a different subculture in their own country is like, let alone having a reasonable picture of the national culture. A foreign culture with which you have a brief contact? Clear understanding? Get out of here.

jrarredondo2• 13 years ago

I recommend this submission:

If Correlation does not imply causation, then what does? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6030627

danso3• 13 years ago

Aren't you asking the OP to disprove a negative? Understandably, the OP has a bone to pick with Asian stereotypes, but it seems more effective to evaluate his critique on its own merits: does it properly represent - and refute - Gladwell's assertions?

There's nothing wrong with looking for cultural explanations, but as the OP points out, there could be perfectly valid non-cultural reasons, such as the economic and technological history of Korean industry.

The problem with cultural/ethnic explanations, in general, is that they are so strongly rooted in our psychology...a big part of that is influenced, of course, by our culture. Ask anyone who works in casting for ad campaigns.

pessimizer4• 13 years ago

The problem with cultural/ethnic explanations, in general, is that they are so strongly rooted in our psychology

And that they come first. To look for an individual explanation involves studying an individual or an incident in detail. Resorting to a handy stereotype is far easier. I've never run an airline or been a pilot, but I may have met a Korean or two, and have an easily accessible array of stereotypes about Asians.

lisper• 13 years ago

http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/07/are-korean-airlines-unsaf...

amatheus• 13 years ago

It was my understanding that the author is not disputing that culture is important. What I got he's trying to say is: - Culture is not always the reason something happens - Culture is not used as an explanation when something happens related to some countries. I think this point is valid. I'm reading 'The Second Sex' and Simone de Beauvoir talks about how machism is a way to turn the women into the _Other_, to put men into the center, as something neutral. I think it's the same thing with culturalism; it's not that somethings may be caused by culture but it's turning other cultures into Other, it's putting our culture as if it were something neutral, the standard.

nbn2342• 13 years ago

It is extremely provocative for TheKorean to equate judging a culture with judging someone by their genetics. His goal all along was to persuade you to feel guilt in doing so even when it is warranted.

TheKorean understands the tricks of rhetoric. He wrote an essay on it on his blog. He did not write this article in an attempt to consider an issue in the spirit of open minded inquiry. He did it to discourage you from making judgements of other cultures in all cases.

This is the same person who said it was perfectly ok in Korea for a woman to walk up to a girl on the subway and _slap_ her because the woman believed the girl was disrespectful.

Why was it ok? According to TheKorean, because by the cultural standards in Korea say it is ok. He is wrong.

He is not a rational open minded thinker. He is using rhetorical tricks (appealing to your skepticism to convince you that judging cultures is wrong) in an attempt to protect his own people.

This board has smart, rational people. Let's look at motives and not just arguments.

ivix• 13 years ago

The entire article is undermined by this sentence:

" If you think that a Korean person in a professional setting would show any disrespect to a person who is 14 years older just because he slightly outranks the other, you know absolutely nothing about Korean culture."

Therefore confirming that cultural issues DO have an impact on people's behaviour.

josephers2• 13 years ago

Of course they do, but that's not the entire article.

For much of the article, the author is saying that Gladwell's hypothesis is a big stretch and it displays the Igon Value Problem.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

I have a good friend who is an American who has lived all over the world as an airline industry consultant. He spoke Chinese well when I first met him in the early 1980s (I hired him as a reporter for a trade magazine that published English-language articles based on Chinese-language interviews with sources) and he has since learned a lot of Japanese, at least. One of his lines of airline consulting business over the years was cockpit resources management (CRM) training for airline crews to ensure better communication among pilots in commercial passenger airlines. His statement about his business experience is that cockpit resource management training was most needed among the airlines operating in Korea.

AFTER EDIT: Anyway, the fine submitted article here is an extended rant about Malcolm Gladwell's essays that later get collected into Gladwell's books, but it has too little to say about the latest airline accident with pilots trained by an airline operating in Korea, the FIRST-EVER fatal crash involving the 777 aircraft. When news reports mention that a cockpit command told flight attendants to tell passengers to stay in their seats rather than evacuate the aircraft after it came to rest off the runway,

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23637529/flight-atten...

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/09/world/asia/asiana-flight-a...

we know that that at least one pilot on that flight was using extremely poor judgment even after the plane slammed into the ground. There was a human factor in the most recent crash, and the investigation will have to find out what that human factor was and reduce risk of recurrence of that human factor in the next several hundred thousand passenger airline flights around the world.

natch• 13 years ago

Claims to have coined the term "culturalism" decades after it has been in wide use...

Says "Culturalism is the unwarranted impulse to explain people's behavior with a "cultural difference", whether real or imagined," while running a blog called "Ask a Korean."

Pretends culture has nothing to do with how accidents happen.

all credibility lost.

candybar5• 13 years ago

Most comments seem to be missing the point.

Why did Gladwell make such egregious mistakes and resort to lazy, analysis? Why did most readers lazily accept such explanations without asking relevant questions? Why do journalists immediately jump to cultural explanations in lots of cases without having a strong understanding of the facts, the details and/or actual knowledge of the cultures that they are holding accountable?

Because culturalism makes us feel informed and superior. It allows us to form a sophisticated-sounding opinion that confirms your own cultural superiority without knowing anything. It allows us to quickly come to a wrong conclusion in a lot of different contexts - it's difficult to get to know a specific person, but it's easy to recall a cultural stereotype. We want to feel like we know what's going on, even when we have no idea. Culturalism gives us that feeling. It's knowledge saccharin.

This comes up a lot in technological contexts. for instance, with just programming languages and platforms, we see these (or some politely worded versions thereof) all the time: .NET developers are copy-pasting Microsoft drones who can't solve difficult problems without wizards holding hands, Lisp programmers are non-bathing egotists who can't work with others, Java programmers are cargo-cultists who prefer verbose incantations full of acronym soups and unnecessary hiearchies of meaningless classes to clear code, Perl/Ruby/Javascript programmers can only write short scripts, not maintainable, performant or critical applications.

The lesson here is clear - distinguish between actual knowledge of the world and poor, phony substitutes that merely give us the feeling of knowing. It'll make us better at what we do and incidentally also lead to a better society.

freshfunk• 13 years ago

Incredibly insightful comment!

candybar5• 13 years ago

Thanks!

chaostheory• 13 years ago

Golf is an extremely bad example to compare to flying an commercial airplane. Why? Because it's a single player game and not a team sport. You don't need to work with and communicate with others to win. When you're communicating and working with other people, culture does matter.

pessimizer4• 13 years ago

The flaw in cultural "explanations" is that they are not in any way explanations, but simply associations. Explanations involve cause and effect.

Illustration: The causes of ascribed cultural trait X which has a 75% prevalence in Fooistan may be identical to the causes of that same trait X in Baristan, where it has a 5% prevalence, and the difference may be entirely due to random circumstance and network effects. Explaining why a person in a particular incident acted in accordance with trait X with "He's Fooistani and they are often X" is not an explanation, just an observation, and offers no insight into the 25% of Fooistanis who are not X. The equivalent statement in the latter case is "He's Fooistani, and sometimes Fooistanis are not X" and has equal explanatory power: none.

As a Baristani, though, it is a very comforting "explanation" if trait X is a worrying trait, because being Fooistani is not something that they have to fear.

bengoodger• 13 years ago

"Culturalism" aside, the additional CVR transcript the OP gripes about Gladwell omitting does little to support his claim.

Gladwell's segment: FO: "Don't you think it rains more? [..]" Omitted: FO: "Captain, Guam condition is no good."

Yeah the omitted section is much stronger. But it's wrong to argue that it's direct enough, because it's still not as strong as the FO saying something like:

"I think the conditions aren't good enough for VFR. I think we should change our strategy."

Some of the pilot interviews after OZ214 have stated many airlines have a "no-fault go-around" policy. If anyone in the cockpit has any discomfort with the approach, the rule is that you go around, and make everyone comfortable, with no fault to anyone. This is an environment in which a pilot could be more confident making a direct statement like the one I suggest above.

I don't necessarily believe this is a cultural thing though, just a good idea that airlines should implement.

josephers2• 13 years ago

I think Malcolm Gladwell was suggesting that the first officer wanted to tell him something but couldn't because he couldn't be direct.

But looking at just the transcript, would you really come to that conclusion? By leaving out most lines, the transcript seems to show a FO with an internal struggle to speak out, but I don't think that was what happened at all.

mcguire• 13 years ago

Philip Greenspun on Gladwell and "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes": http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety

In a slightly more serious note, there is a fair chunk of research on this topic[1], showing cultural differences in Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) behavior[2].

On the third hand, making any positive statements about the causes of this crash is totally premature, very likely spewing horseshit, and a serious disservice to the investigation and anyone involved, including the victims.

[1] http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/helmreichlab/p...

[2] http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/31/3/283.short

nbn2342• 13 years ago

Cultural explanations when the group of people make up a statistically small portion of the incidents == bad.

Cultural explanations when the group of people make up a statistically significant portion of the incidents == good.

The question as I see it is : Do Koreans make up a statistically significant portion of near misses and accidents?

From what I have read from various aviation professionals, the answer is yes. What have you guys heard?

Culturalism, Gladwell, and Airplane Crashes

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