GARY KLEIN STUDY FIRE COMMANDER TRIAL

They don’t adjust for biases, they don’t do appropriate search-inference thinking and they don’t use a ‘latticework of mental models from other fields’ to draw inferences.Īnd yet, despite a lack of grounding in the ‘best practices’ of decision science, they appear to perform remarkably well in the real world. They don’t do expected utility calculations. Many experts, in many fields, don’t do the sort of thinking we have explored in our previous part. This is where my views begin to diverge from Farnam Street’s. In Part 4, we will explore the idea that expertise leads to its own form of decision making.

GARY KLEIN STUDY FIRE COMMANDER TRIAL

We also took a quick detour to look at optimal trial and error through the eyes of Marlie Chunger. In Part 3, we were introduced to the search-inference framework for thinking, and discussed how mental models from instrumental rationality may help prevent the three errors of thinking as prescribed by the search-inference framework. We learnt that Farnam Street’s list of mental models consists of three types of models: descriptive models, thinking models concerned with judgment (epistemic rationality), and thinking models concerned with decision making (instrumental rationality).

In Part 2 I argued that the study of rationality is a good place to start for a framework of practice. In Part 1 I described my problem with Munger’s approach to mental models after I applied it to my life. This is Part 4 of a series of posts on putting mental models to practice.

Gary klein study fire commander