Malcolm Gladwell On Culture and Airplane Crashes 423
theodp writes "While the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 pilots' lack of communication puzzles crash investigators, readers of author Malcolm Gladwell are likely having a deja vu moment. Back in 2008, Gladwell dedicated a whole chapter of his then-new book Outliers to Culture, Cockpit Communication and Plane Crashes (old YouTube interview). 'Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s,' Gladwell explained in an interview. '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, back to root cause (Score:5, Interesting)
Is the 777 one of those planes which cannot be landed fully automatically? What are the current FAA rules about auto-landings? I thought planes were generally supposed to use manual landing only under severe weather or other concerns.
Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
But in Indian culture the hierarchy is class based, not age based. Thus, two pilots are always equal (or at least close to it) by the fact that they are both pilots, irrespective of whether one is much older than the other.
Re:I remember being puzzled by that chapter (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a Western tendency, it's more an American tendency.
I remember one time driving through the Indian part of town in the UK with my American girlfriend and saying something about how they drive like they're still in Bombay as a car on the wrong side of the road barely missed us. Any local would have agreed since it was completely true, but she was absolutely shocked by my EVIL RACISM.
Learning to Fly in Korea (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the late 80s, I worked in Korea, and obtained my private pilots license at the Osan air base aero club. I flew off and on for several years between '87 and 94, with an instructor who had left the club to work for KAL, and returned a year later. He raised this exact issue as one of the reasons for his departure. Respect for elders is deeply engrained in Korean cultural. So much so, that younger pilots were unwilling to point out errors to older ones. While I wish we had a bit more respect for ours in the U.S., this has no place in a cockpit.
Disclaimer: This is in no way meant as an offense to Koreans (I was married, and have a kid with one).
Re:I remember being puzzled by that chapter (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what conservatives actually think!
He could not get away with that, no president could. He simply has not done anything worse than most presidents. I would not put him at the top of my list, but if they did not impeach reagan for Iran Contra Obama is pretty safe.
Folks like you sure do like to imagine some crazy crap though.
Re:I remember being puzzled by that chapter (Score:5, Interesting)
In this case, his analysis is correct, however. OP assumed that HIS VALUES were more inherently correct than the other guy's values.
Yes, all of us who grew up in "Western" cultures would agree with OP.
Alas, some of us (Koreans, for instance) did NOT grow up in"Western" cultures, and do not, necessarily, assign their priorities the way a "Westerner" would.
Re:I see some similarities (Score:2, Interesting)
The hospital I worked at a couple of years ago sent around the no-holding-doors policy after a spate of office thefts and so I quizzed a woman who was following me in a side door really closely, asking her to show me her badge.
She was real nice about it. Did you know women could be rabbis? I never knew that.
Had she been a doctor I bet it would not have gone so well.
Re:I see some similarities (Score:5, Interesting)
We took our son to the nursery for a standard test, and on the way out, a man tried to enter when we opened the door to leave. I had no doubt that the man was there to see his infant (who I could assume is in bad shape since it was staying in the nursery). When my wife stopped him and told him that he couldn't use her door opening to enter, that he needed to have one of the nurses open the door for him, it almost came to blows. No doubt he was under stress, but he simply did not comprehend that letting him in when we left was breaking the security designed to protect his own child.
Re:I remember being puzzled by that chapter (Score:5, Interesting)
It's true, I cannot personally compare "before" and "after" experiences. And I'm not particularly pro-male-circumcision; however, I understand that my parents did this to me in good faith, on the basis of "best practices" medical advice they would have heard at the time, and I don't feel that I've suffered any for it. In the absence of direct comparison from personal experience, what can be noted is that both circumcised (at birth) and uncircumcised males generally enjoy the sensations of penile sex, and are capable of reaching orgasm, in nearly equal self-reported numbers. In comparison, females who have suffered clitoral removal are nearly certain to report finding vaginal sex to be somewhere between uninspiring and painful, and are much less likely to ever experience orgasm, than un-mutilated females. Thus, the impact of female circumcision is nearly incomparably worse than the effects of foreskin removal.
Note that later-in-life circumcision may have different impacts on sexual enjoyment: when your brain has already been "wired" to associate one type of stimulation with sexual pleasure, and then you significantly change your body, then I'm sure a lot will feel "missing". However, the developing brain is quite plastic, and can adapt to provide equal levels of pleasure/pain for varying raw stimulus --- so a male circumcised from birth isn't necessarily missing out on enjoyment even if the brain has to provide more "amplification gain" to the raw signals arriving from more de-sensitized nerves.
Re:I remember being puzzled by that chapter (Score:4, Interesting)
Apparently, blind adherence to the rule that age and wisdom are directly related can have negative affects as well.
Sure, I did not mean to suggest Confucianism always provides optimal results (for whatever optimum one may be seeking). I only meant that misunderstanding deference to one's elders may not be an issue of hate.
That said, my experience with this aspect of Confucianism--of being deferential to one's elders--has little to do with wisdom. It's simply the way hierarchy is established and observed among Koreans. Many times, younger Koreans will complain to their same-age peers when selfish, greedy, and foolish elders are not present to be offended.
For example, when an elder asks juniors to work with little to no compensation, the younger group may (will!) grouse about how greedy and insufferable the elder is (a direct confrontation is likely to cause drama and this, too, happens very frequently). Confucianism can "prescribe" roles for both inter- and intragenerational behavior, in this case bonding members of one group while enabling the "superior" to extract a profit.
Not to say such roles are good or bad. My take is that Confucianism produces a different set of cultural effects than, say, Western Individualism. Declaring one approach to be "better" than the other is not the same as trying to understand and describe how different ideologies condition cultural behavior.