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Comment by shadowsun7 | Hacker News Reader

If you want alternatives to DP that work much better, it might be worth it to take a look at:

1. The Tacit Knowledge Series (which argues that methods from Naturalistic Decision Making are more useful when you are in a skill domain with no good pedagogical development) https://commoncog.com/blog/the-tacit-knowledge-series/

2. Accelerated Expertise — which covers methods from the military to accelerate expertise acquisition (and, yes, some of it uses DP principles, but it isn't really DP) https://commoncog.com/blog/accelerated-expertise/

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Not to bring politics into a HN discussion, but based on their recent outcome in Afghanistan, I'm not sure if the US military is an organization I would currently turn to for insight.

Most of these techniques are co-developed in industry applications, and are seeping out from military research into business. In tech, John Allspaw has done a huge amount to take these training methods and skill-extraction techniques and adopted/applied it to resilience engineering. (https://twitter.com/allspaw and https://www.adaptivecapacitylabs.com/)

Not paying attention to research with military provenance seems rather silly. What matters more are the questions: does this work? Where has it been tried? And can I apply it to my company or career?

Military itself should seldom be judged by the decisions of the government. The entire mission in Afghanistan has long stopped being military oriented, and military was present to preserve some semblance of US control.

One could argue that there is sufficient proof now that US application of military in attempting to "democratize" nations has so far failed, but that should not come as a surprise since military is, by definition, not "democratic". Democracies deploy military exclusively to preserve peace (by discouraging invasion, for instance). This is still not a slight against US military, but against US foreign policy instead. Whether that makes it a net win in other (economic, geopolitical) measures for USA is another matter altogether.

As such, I do not think you should discount US military as a top-notch organization with a lot of know-how in building up expertise.

Do you think I get an incomplete picture by reading Accelerated Expertise (the actual book, not just the summary) before the Tacit Knowledge series? I like reading books more than blog posts.

I would recommend the series first — AE assumes familiarity with the recognition primed decision making model (or RPD) which I cover in the series.

If you want to read books to prepare yourself, read:

- Sources of Power by Gary Klein

- Power of Intuition by Gary Klein

Before AE.

And then be prepared to download LOTS of papers to read concurrently while reading the book. AE is not written for the layperson.

I have at least a passing familiarity with recognition primed decision making, although I haven't specifically read Klein beyond his adversarial collaboration with Kahneman. Maybe I could benefit from a perspective that is purely Klein's.

I do enjoy a good not-for-laypeople book. Thanks for the information!

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