Naturalistic decision making

What Hacker News says

1. itamarstJan 2018
   Gary Klein wrote a great book about how to learn from experience, based on research in naturalistic decision making, kinda stuff firefighters and NICU nurses do, but also e.g. design engineers for many decisions (https://www.amazon.com/Power-Intuition-Feelings-Better-Decis...).

   His advice for learning from mistakes is basically to look for the cues or patterns you missed that caused your mistake. That way you find the hints that would've helped you catch it in time.

   I've been doing this myself, and writing up results in a weekly email (https://codewithoutrules.com/softwareclown/) and it really improves how much I learn from mistakes. As in, I go from "well that was stupid of me" to "ohhhhh, I should've noticed that."

   Example: early in career I submitted code with bad variable names (foo, bar) to customer who requested I write a library. She pointed that out as bad practice, I was super embarrassed over my bad code. My takeaway in one of initial emails was obvious one of "write readable code."

   But later I revisited using the cues/patterns approach, and realized deeper mistake was not listening to what she wanted—in this case, source code. If deliverable wasn't source code then variable names wouldn't have mattered and it would've been fine.

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2. itamarstNov 2017
   A lot of the way experts think is actually very domain-specific. So if you want to be good at thinking about a specific domain, might be worth reading one of Gary Klein's books about naturalistic decision making. https://www.amazon.com/Power-Intuition-Feelings-Better-Decis... is the most practical of the ones I've read.

   More generically: learn how to write. Most hard problems won't fit in your head. Most of the ways we think are too vague and fuzzy. Writing things down and working through something in writing can help find the limits of your thinking process, and help you find solutions. I review a book that explains this very well here: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/06/15/writing-book/

   (You could alternatively take a good academic writing class at your local university.)

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3. rramadassJun 2024
   I recognized from your comments that you were already familiar with the works of Edward Deci and just wanted to recommend this book as a must read for the "general public" who might be interested in the subject of Motivation and how best to cultivate it.

   IMO in today's world, Deci's SDT on Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) and Gary Klein's NDM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_decision-making) and RPDM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition-primed_decision) should be a must study (just understanding the basics/overview is often enough) for everybody in any organization.

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4. billbrownNov 2023
   I suggest you check out the work of Gary Klein and the Naturalistic Decision Making community, as the Vicennes work was one of the founding projects. He features it in his 1997 book _Sources of Power_.
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5. rramadassAug 2021
   This article suffers from the same shortcomings like many others on the subject (including the books quoted by the author) i.e. trying to reduce the Decision-Making process into a prescriptive bullet point list. This methodology doesn't work.

   IMO, the "correct" way to study it is through Gary Klein's Recognition Primed Decision Model (RPDM) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_primed_decision) and the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) Framework (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_decision-making).

   For a comprehensive overview of various approaches/models see Thinking and Deciding by Jonathan Baron and The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making by Scott Plous.

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