The truth is that the nation lost its will

Thursday, December 12th, 2019

In There Will Be War Volume II, Jerry Pournelle introduces Eric Vinicoff’s “‘Caster” with a short essay about Vietnam:

Just under 50,000 died in the entire Vietnam War: about one year’s traffic fatalities.

[...]

Battle deaths in 1961-1964 were negligible (except to those killed): a total of 267 for all four years. Compare this to the 12,000 per year who died of accidents and suicides in that same period.

By 1965, though, battle deaths had reached 1,369, and the number rose steadily until it peaked at 14,589 in 1968. At that time we had 500,000 soldiers in Southeast Asia, so that the death rate among young men in Vietnam was about 27 times that of the population as a whole; definitely frightening for those involved.

On the other hand, the war did no more than double the death rate among young men as a class, even in that peak year. In 1968, young men had about equal chances of being killed by being in Southeast Asia, or while driving on the highways in the United States.

By 1969, battle deaths had fallen to 9,414. This is a large number, but by that time, the civilian violent death rate had risen to 130 per hundred thousand, so that nearly 24,000 young men died in the United States that year. After 1969 the battle deaths fell off rapidly; civilian accidental and homicide death rates continued to rise.

Thus: if the War “devastated a generation”, then we continue to devastate each generation through accidental deaths; and if the Vietnam War served no useful purpose—and perhaps, given that we eventually abandoned those we had sworn to protect, it did not—neither do the accidental deaths and suicides.

[...]

Vietnam fell in 1975, and it fell to four army corps of regulars, employing more armor than the Wehrmacht sent into France in 1940.

When the North invaded in 1975, the Democratic Congress of the US refused any assistance to South Vietnam. After spending billions on the war, our military aid to South Vietnam was cut to $700 million.

[...]

The truth is that the nation lost its will. The United States withdrew, the dominoes fell, and the blood baths began. It is no good our telling ourselves anything different.

No savant has ever been known to become a “Big-C creator,” who changed their field

Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

When we know the rules and answers, and they don’t change over time — chess, golf, playing classical music — an argument can be made for savant-like hyperspecialized practice from day one, David Epstein argues (in Range), but those are poor models of most things humans want to learn:

Chris Argyris, who helped create the Yale School of Management, noted the danger of treating the wicked world as if it is kind. He studied high-powered consultants from top business schools for fifteen years, and saw that they did really well on business school problems that were well defined and quickly assessed. But they employed what Argyris called single-loop learning, the kind that favors the first familiar solution that comes to mind. Whenever those solutions went wrong, the consultant usually got defensive. Argyris found their “brittle personalities” particularly surprising given that “the essence of their job is to teach others how to do things differently.”

[...]

Psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrated a similar, learned inflexibility among experienced practitioners when he gave college students a logic puzzle that involved hitting switches to turn light bulbs on and off in sequence, and that they could play over and over. It could be solved in seventy different ways, with a tiny money reward for each success. The students were not given any rules, and so had to proceed by trial and error.* If a student found a solution, they repeated it over and over to get more money, even if they had no idea why it worked. Later on, new students were added, and all were now asked to discover the general rule of all solutions. Incredibly, every student who was brand-new to the puzzle discovered the rule for all seventy solutions, while only one of the students who had been getting rewarded for a single solution did. The subtitle of Schwartz’s paper: “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”—that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions.

[...]

As psychologist Ellen Winner, one of the foremost authorities on gifted children, noted, no savant has ever been known to become a “Big-C creator,” who changed their field.

[...]

When experienced accountants were asked in a study to use a new tax law for deductions that replaced a previous one, they did worse than novices.

Your strength grows but your options become ever more limited

Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

P.W. Singer’s Ghost Fleet — co-written with August Cole — describes itself as a novel of the next World War. The story starts three years after Dhahran:

When the nuke — well, more technically, the radiological dirty bomb — went off, it made the Saudi house of cards fall down. Between Dhahran glowing and the fights over who comes in after the Al Saud family, the world economy’s still reeling from the hub of the global oil industry effectively going offline.

The renewed push toward alternative energy sources has caused more conflict than cooperation:

Technologies like solar and deep-cycle batteries depend on rare-earth materials, rare being the operative word.

The old Chinese Communist Party has been replaced:

When the world economy cratered after Dhahran, the old Chinese Communist Party couldn’t keep things humming. Their big mistake was calling in the military to put down the urban workers’ riots, thinking that the troops would do their dirty work for them, just like back in ’89. They failed to factor in that a new generation of more professional military and business elite saw the problem differently than they did. Turned out the new guard viewed the nepotism and corruption of those ‘little princes’ who had just inherited their power as a bigger threat to China’s stability than the rioters. They booted them out, and instead you’ve got a Directorate regime that’s more popular and more competent than the previous government, and technocratic to the extreme. The business magnates and the military have divided up rule and roles. Capitalism and nationalism working hand in hand, rather than the old contradictions they had back in the Communist days.

The Americans face a classic problem:

How do you police an empire when you’ve got a shrinking economy relative to the world’s and a population no longer so excited to meet those old commitments?

Neither the Chinese nor the Americans have fought a major war since the 1940s. But they wouldn’t go to war with a major trading partner, would they?

Well, who was Britain’s biggest trading partner before World War One? Germany. Or if you prefer World War Two as a comparison, Germany’s biggest trading partners just before the war were the very neighbors it soon invaded, while the U.S. was Japan’s.

A Chinese admiral explains their situation:

Indeed, the Americans had an apt phrase to describe a situation like ours, where your strength grows but your options become ever more limited: Manifest Destiny.

Destiny drives you forward but ties your hands. Indeed, their own great naval thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan foretold how their rise to great power gave them no choice. As their economy and then their military began to grow to world status, he told his people that, whether they liked it or not, “Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.”

[...]

America’s rise came first with its ensuring control of its home waters and then extending its global economic presence. And then the country had no choice but to assume its new responsibilities, including protecting the system from the powers of the past that would threaten it. I mentioned their thinker Mahan. Soon after he laid out the new demands upon the United States, war with Spain followed, as you remember, and the Americans reached across the Pacific, thousands of miles beyond their home waters, extending to the Philippines, patrolling not just our ports but even our very rivers.

The mightiest German noble who ever lived has his work to do

Tuesday, December 10th, 2019

A while back Neovictorian shared a list of five books he loved as a kid. The fourth book was The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenhiem. The story takes place just before the Great War, when a dissolute English aristocrat meets up in Africa with an old schoolmate, a not-at-all dissolute German who had come to England for his education years before. They were lookalikes then, but their divergent lifestyles have left their marks:

“The difference between us,” Von Ragastein pronounced, “is something which is inculcated into the youth of our country and which is not inculcated into yours. In England, with a little money, a little birth, your young men expect to find the world a playground for sport, a garden for loves. The mightiest German noble who ever lived has his work to do. It is work which makes fibre, which gives balance to life.”

When the dissolute Englishman returns to England, he seems a new man.

I was immediately reminded of Ian Fleming’s third James Bond novel, published in 1955, Moonraker, which features an English rocket scientist who returned from World War 2 badly scarred from a car-bomb attack by German saboteurs — working for the infamous Otto Skorzeny.

Goodyear Inflatoplane

Monday, December 9th, 2019

Designed and built in 12 weeks in 1956, the Goodyear Inflatoplane could be dropped in a hardened container behind enemy lines:

The 44 cubic ft (1.25 cubic meter) container could also be transported by truck, jeep trailer or aircraft. The inflatable surface of this aircraft was actually a sandwich of two rubber-type materials connected by a mesh of nylon threads, forming an I-beam. When the nylon was exposed to air, it absorbed and repelled water as it stiffened, giving the aircraft its shape and rigidity.

Goodyear AO-3 Inflatoplane in air

Structural integrity was retained in flight with forced air being continually circulated by the aircraft’s motor. This continuous pressure supply enabled the aircraft to have a degree of puncture resilience, the testing of airmat showing that it could be punctured by up to six .30 calibre bullets and retain pressure.

The best hard science fiction he’d read in decades is a techno-thriller

Sunday, December 8th, 2019

Travis Corcoran (The Powers of the Earth) recently called Daniel Suarez’s Delta V the ”best hard science fiction [he'd] read in decades,” and I replied that ”You need to dip your toes into the thriller genre to get hard science fiction.” Since I listened to the audiobook version of Delta V, I have no quotes to share, but I can add that another techno-thriller bordering on hard science fiction is P.W. Singer’s Ghost Fleet.

Domes are overrated

Sunday, December 8th, 2019

It is an unwritten rule of space journalism that any article about Moon or Mars bases needs to have a conceptual drawing of habitation domes, Casey Handmer notes, but domes are overrated:

Domes feature compound curvature, which complicates manufacturing. If assembled from triangular panels, junctions contain multiple intersecting acute angled parts, which makes sealing a nightmare. In fact, even residential dome houses are notoriously difficult to insulate and seal! A rectangular room has 6 faces and 12 edges, which can be framed, sealed, and painted in a day or two. A dome room has a new wall every few feet, all with weird triangular faces and angles, and enormously increased labor overhead.

Domes

It turns out that the main advantage of domes — no internal supports — becomes a major liability on Mars. While rigid geodesic domes on Earth are compressive structures, on Mars, a pressurized dome actually supports its own weight and then some. As a result, the structure is under tension and the dome is attempting to tear itself out of the ground. Since lifting force scales with area, while anchoring force scales with circumference, domes on Mars can’t be much wider than about 150 feet, and even then would require extensive foundation engineering.

Once a dome is built and the interior occupied, it can’t be extended. Allocation of space within the dome is zero sum, and much of the volume is occupied by weird wedge-shaped segments that are hard to use. Instead, more domes will be required, but since they don’t tesselate, tunnels of some kind would be needed to connect to other structures. Each tunnel has to mate with curved walls, a rigid structure that must accept variable mechanical tolerances, be broad enough to enable large vehicles to pass, yet narrow enough to enable a bulkhead to be sealed in the event of an inevitable seal failure. Since it’s a rigid structure, it has to be structurally capable of enduring pressure cycling across areas with variable radii of curvature without fatigue, creep, or deflection mismatch.

Cheerleaders are their number-one worshipers, high priestesses to the cult

Saturday, December 7th, 2019

American schools are uniquely focused on athletics, sociologist Randall Collins notes:

Murray Milner (University of Virginia sociologist) did a massive study of prestige hierarachies at high schools across the country. He went on to develop an explanation of why jocks and cheerleaders are at the top, and serious students near the bottom. Games by a school team are the one activity where everyone is assembled, focusing attention on a group of token individuals who represent themselves. Games also have drama, plot tension, and emotion, thus fitting the ingredients for a successful interaction ritual. Predictably, they create feelings of solidarity and identity; and they give prestige to the individuals who are in the center of attention. Jocks are the school’s heroes (especially when they are winning). Cheerleaders are their number-one worshipers, high priestesses to the cult, sharing the stage or at least the edge of it. And they are chosen to represent the top of the sexual attractiveness hierarchy, hence centers of the partying-celebration part of school life — out of the purview of adult teachers, administrators, and parents.

In contrast, outstanding students perform mostly alone. They are not the center of an audience gathered to watch them show off their skills. There are no big interaction rituals focusing attention on them. Their achievement is for themselves; they do not represent the school body, certainly not in any way that involves contagious emotional excitement. The jocks-&-partying channeling of attention in schools devalues the intellectuals. When it comes to a contest between the two, the athletic-centered sphere always dominates, at least in the public places where the action is. The social networks of intellectual students are backstage, even underground.

I wouldn’t disagree with that, but we should admit that being athletic is naturally more attractive than being studious.

I think he really misses the boat here, though:

This is why the average scores on American students in international comparisons of skills in reading, math, and other subjects tend to be at the bottom, far below countries in east Asia and in Europe. It is not a matter of talent, and certainly not a deficiency in school facilities, but a problem of social motivation.

European-Americans do about as well as Europeans, and Asian-Americans do about as well as Asians.

The super-rich love South Dakota

Friday, December 6th, 2019

Money has poured out of traditional offshore jurisdictions, such as Switzerland and Jersey, and into a small number of American states, such as Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and, above all, South Dakota:

A South Dakotan trust changes all that: it protects assets from claims from ex-spouses, disgruntled business partners, creditors, litigious clients and pretty much anyone else. It won’t protect you from criminal prosecution, but it does prevent information on your assets from leaking out in a way that might spark interest from the police. And it shields your wealth from the government, since South Dakota has no income tax, no inheritance tax and no capital gains tax.

A decade ago, South Dakotan trust companies held $57.3bn in assets. By the end of 2020, that total will have risen to $355.2bn. Those hundreds of billions of dollars are being regulated by a state with a population smaller than Norfolk, a part-time legislature heavily lobbied by trust lawyers, and an administration committed to welcoming as much of the world’s money as it can.

[...]

At the heart of South Dakota’s business success is a crucial but overlooked fact: globalisation is incomplete. In our modern financial system, money travels where its owners like, but laws are still made at a local level. So money inevitably flows to the places where governments offer the lowest taxes and the highest security.

[...]

When Citibank based its credit card business in Sioux Falls, it could charge borrowers any interest rate it liked, and credit cards could become profitable. Thanks to Janklow, Citibank and other major companies came to South Dakota to dodge the restrictions imposed by the other 49 states. And so followed the explosion in consumer finance that has transformed the US and the world. Thanks to Janklow, South Dakota has a financial services industry, and the US has a trillion-dollar credit card debt.

Fresh from having freed wealthy corporations from onerous regulations, Janklow looked around for a way to free wealthy individuals too, and thus came to the decision that would eventually turn South Dakota into a Switzerland for the 21st century. He decided to deregulate trusts.

Trusts are ancient and complex financial instruments that are used to own assets, such as real estate or company stock. Unlike a person, a trust is immortal, which was an attractive prospect for English aristocrats of the Middle Ages who wished to make sure their property remained in their families for ever, and would be secure from any confiscation by the crown. This caused a problem, however. More and more property risked being locked up in trusts, subject to the wishes of long-dead people, which no one could alter. So, in the 17th century, judges fought back by creating the “rule against perpetuities”, which limited the duration of trusts to around a century, and prevented aristocratic families turning their local areas into mini-kingdoms.

[...]

Then Governor Janklow came along. In 1983, he abolished the rule against perpetuities and, from that moment on, property placed in trust in South Dakota would stay there for ever.

[...]

In most jurisdictions, trusts have to benefit someone other than the benefactor – your children, say, or your favourite charity – but in South Dakota, clients can create a trust for the benefit of themselves (indeed, Sun Hongbin is a beneficiary of his own trust). Once two years have passed, the trust is immune from any creditor claiming a share of the assets it contains, no matter the nature of their claim. A South Dakotan trust is secret, too. Court documents relating to it are kept private for ever, to prevent knowledge of its existence from leaking out. (It also has the useful side effect of making it all but impossible for journalists to find out who is using South Dakotan trusts, or what legal challenges to them have been filed.)

[...]

When a whistleblower exposed how his Swiss employer, the banking giant UBS, had hidden billions of dollars for its wealthy clients, the conclusion was explosive: banks were not just exploiting poor people, they were helping rich people dodge taxes, too.

Congress responded with the Financial Assets Tax Compliance Act (Fatca), forcing foreign financial institutions to tell the US government about any American-owned assets on their books. Department of Justice investigations were savage: UBS paid a $780m fine, and its rival Credit Suisse paid $2.6bn, while Wegelin, Switzerland’s oldest bank, collapsed altogether under the strain. The amount of US-owned money in the country plunged, with Credit Suisse losing 85% of its American customers.

The rest of the world, inspired by this example, created a global agreement called the Common Reporting Standard (CRS). Under CRS, countries agreed to exchange information on the assets of each other’s citizens kept in each other’s banks. The tax-evading appeal of places like Jersey, the Bahamas and Liechtenstein evaporated almost immediately, since you could no longer hide your wealth there.

[...]

But the US was not part of CRS, and its own system — Fatca — only gathers information from foreign countries; it does not send information back to them. This loophole was unintentional, but vast: keep your money in Switzerland, and the world knows about it; put it in the US and, if you were clever about it, no one need ever find out. The US was on its way to becoming a truly world-class tax haven.

The Tax Justice Network (TJN) still ranks Switzerland as the most pernicious tax haven in the world in its Financial Secrecy Index, but the US is now in second place and climbing fast, having overtaken the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong and Luxembourg since Fatca was introduced.

Swedish conditions reach Norway

Thursday, December 5th, 2019

This year, for the first time, Norway’s statistical agency reported on the relationship between crime and country of origin:

Immigrants from certain backgrounds—particularly Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghanis—were many times more likely to commit violent crimes than other Norwegians (including other immigrant groups). In 65 out of 80 crime categories, non-Norwegians were over-represented. The largest discrepancy was in regard to domestic violence: Immigrants from non-Western countries were found to be eight times more likely to be charged for such crimes. Rape and murder were also heavily skewed toward these immigrant groups. Worryingly, the figures showed that second-generation immigrants were more likely to be criminals than their parents.

These are svenske tilstander — Swedish conditions.

You’ll be accused of some form of heresy

Wednesday, December 4th, 2019

If you discover something new, Paul Graham says, there’s a significant chance you’ll be accused of some form of heresy:

To discover new things you have to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious. If an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it.

One way for an idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to. Anything you discover from working on such an idea will tend to contradict the mistaken assumption that was concealing it. And you will thus get a lot of heat from people attached to the mistaken assumption.

[...]

So it’s particularly dangerous for an organization or society to have a culture of pouncing on heresy. When you suppress heresies, you don’t just prevent people from contradicting the mistaken assumption you’re trying to protect. You also suppress any idea that implies indirectly that it’s false.

[...]

There is a positive side to this phenomenon though. If you’re looking for new ideas, one way to find them is by looking for heresies. When you look at the question this way, the depressingly large dead zones around mistaken assumptions become excitingly large mines of new ideas.

There’s a simple rule of simul-climbing

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

Rock-climber Emily Harrington was making a one-day free attempt on the 5.13 Golden Gate route up Yosemite’s El Capitan, when her foot slipped, and she fell:

Having Honnold on board as a belay partner was only one part of a strategy that would need to work perfectly in order for Harrington to become the first woman and fourth person to free climb Golden Gate in a day. She’d been working through the moves of the route for years. In 2015, she freeclimbed it in six days. And on November 7 of this year, she came heartbreakingly close, climbing all but the last 30 feet of the final 5.13 pitch before exhaustion overtook her. “It’s not about the hard pitches,” she explains. “It’s about the accumulation of fatigue. Even the 5.10 pitches are really physical, so it becomes this huge endurance challenge that a lot of climbers don’t quite grasp.”

[...]

To stack the deck in her favor, she and Honnold planned to use a technique called simul-climbing, a time-saving high-risk endeavor in which the leader and follower both advance at the same time. The leader places gear sparingly, “running it out,” as they say, while the follower cleans the gear. By leaving huge gaps between placements and climbing simultaneously, a team can cover four pitches with the amount of gear and time that it typically takes to finish one. The tradeoff is, of course, safety. If the follower slips, he pulls the leader off with him. If the leader falls, she takes an enormous fall that must be caught by a belayer who is focused on climbing.

“You have to conserve your gear,” says Harrington. “Instead of climbing the Freeblast in 12 pitches, we planned to climb it in four pitches.” The Freeblast, for people who remember the movie Free Solo, is the lower, less-than vertical-section of Freerider/Golden Gate where the climbing isn’t technically as difficult as the upper sections, but it’s slabby, slippery, and what Harrington generally characterizes as “insecure.”

“It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s easy for your fingers and feet to be numb and to slip unexpectedly,” says Honnold. When he made his abortive attempt on Freerider early in Free Solo, it was the Freeblast section that turned him around rather than the most difficult sections up high. Harrington is a 5.14 climber. When she slipped, she was making the last move of a 5.10c pitch while navigating a pair of twin cracks. Just a few feet above her was a fixed bolt she could have clipped for ultimate safety.

About 150 feet below, Honnold was belaying Harrington when he heard her scream. “I was sitting on the ground tying my shoes, getting ready to start simul-climbing,” says Honnold. “Tons of slack just pools on the ground, which is consistent with huge falls.” The phenomenon occurs when the leader is falling but still above her last piece of gear. “The rope is falling at the same speed as the climber,” says Honnold. “It’s just physics.”

Honnold was belaying with a gri-gri, a mechanical device that’s a little bit like the cams in a car seat belt. Its mechanism allows the rope to slide smoothly through it at low speeds but locks down tight if you try to pull the rope through it with any kind of jarring motion. But the energy of the fall never actually reached the gri-gri. In most circumstances, a belayer’s hand is never supposed to leave the rope. But at the highest echelons of simul-climbing, that’s just not an option. The follower has to climb and remove gear from the wall while also belaying the leader. That’s why there’s a simple rule of simul-climbing: don’t fall.

[...]

At the hospital, her injuries proved to be gruesome but largely superficial. Most shockingly, Harrington had somehow managed to get her neck caught in the rope during the fall and was left with a long bruise that made it look like she’d been strangled. Ultimately she was able to walk out of the hospital a day later.

[...]

Honnold, who is famously dry when it comes to assessing risk, doesn’t view it as a cautionary tale: “In a lot of ways, this shows that the techniques actually work,” says Honnold. “She took one of the worst possible falls on the whole route and still wound up basically fine.”

[...]

Ultimately, though, Harrington herself sees the accident as a validation, if a painful one: “The system worked. The rope caught me. My gear held,” she says. “I’ll try again in spring.”

But a household is just a house if it has no slaves

Monday, December 2nd, 2019

The Roman Guide to Slave Management presents itself as a treatise by Nobleman Marcus Sidonius Falx — with the help of a northern barbarian:

In order to write for a non-Roman audience I have been compelled to use the services of a certain Jerry Toner, a teacher in one of our miserable northern provinces, who knows something of our Roman ways but shares few of our virtues. Indeed a man so soft I have never encountered outside the servile class: he has not once fought in battle, can scarce drink a small amphora of watered wine, and even stoops so low that he himself will clean his baby’s backside rather than leave such foul tasks to the slaves and womenfolk. He is, however, most blessed to be married to a wife of great beauty and intellect (though she is perhaps more forward with her opinions than a woman ought to be), to whom I am most grateful for ensuring that the meaning of my text is clear for you barbarian readers.

Slavery had a competitive advantage over free labor:

And the beauty of it was that none of these slaves was liable for military service, since the army naturally cannot rely on slaves to serve in defence of the state.

[...]

As to the threat of slaves, the worry was not so much that they would revolt, but that they would eradicate the freeborn peasant, on whom the Roman elite relied to serve in the army and keep them in power.

[...]

So it was decreed that no citizen over twenty years of age and under forty should serve in the army outside of Italy for more than three years at a time in order to give them a chance to keep control of their smallholdings at home.

[...]

Thankfully, the slave owner today need not trouble himself with such concerns. The army is now professional and it is many, many years since there has been a great slave revolt.

“But a household is just a house if it has no slaves,” Falx reminds us.

It frequently bred confidence but not skill

Sunday, December 1st, 2019

In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein notes that many different kinds of specialists make high-stakes decisions under time pressure:

Psychologist Gary Klein is a pioneer of the “naturalistic decision making” (NDM) model of expertise; NDM researchers observe expert performers in their natural course of work to learn how they make high-stakes decisions under time pressure.

[...]

Kasparov said he would bet that grandmasters usually make the move that springs to mind in the first few seconds of thought.

Klein studied firefighting commanders and estimated that around 80 percent of their decisions are also made instinctively and in seconds.

[...]

When he studied nonwartime naval commanders who were trying to avoid disasters, like mistaking a commercial flight for an enemy and shooting it down, he saw that they very quickly discerned potential threats. Ninety-five percent of the time, the commanders recognized a common pattern and chose a common course of action that was the first to come to mind.

One of Klein’s colleagues, psychologist Daniel Kahneman, studied human decision making from the “heuristics and biases” model of human judgment. His findings could hardly have been more different from Klein’s. When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.

Kahneman included himself in that critique. He first began to doubt the link between experience and expertise in 1955, as a young lieutenant in the psychology unit of the Israel Defense Forces. One of his duties was to assess officer candidates through tests adapted from the British army. In one exercise, teams of eight had to get themselves and a length of telephone pole over a six-foot wall without letting the pole touch the ground, and without any of the soldiers or the pole touching the wall.* The difference in individuals’ performances were so stark, with clear leaders, followers, braggarts, and wimps naturally emerging under the stress of the task, that Kahneman and his fellow evaluators grew confident they could analyze the candidates’ leadership qualities and identify how they would perform in officer training and in combat. They were completely mistaken. Every few months, they had a “statistics day” where they got feedback on how accurate their predictions had been. Every time, they learned they had done barely better than blind guessing. Every time, they gained experience and gave confident judgments. And every time, they did not improve. Kahneman marveled at the “complete lack of connection between the statistical information and the compelling experience of insight.”

[...]

In those domains, which involved human behavior and where patterns did not clearly repeat, repetition did not cause learning. Chess, golf, and firefighting are exceptions, not the rule.

[...]

Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.

The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.

[...]

Kahneman was focused on the flip side of kind learning environments; Hogarth called them “wicked.”

In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

In the most devilishly wicked learning environments, experience will reinforce the exact wrong lessons.

Hogarth noted a famous New York City physician renowned for his skill as a diagnostician. The man’s particular specialty was typhoid fever, and he examined patients for it by feeling around their tongues with his hands. Again and again, his testing yielded a positive diagnosis before the patient displayed a single symptom. And over and over, his diagnosis turned out to be correct. As another physician later pointed out, “He was a more productive carrier, using only his hands, than Typhoid Mary.”

[...]

Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions.