War on the Rocks is just a great blog, which I will be adding to my regular round. I used to read it but stopped for some reason. I have no idea why I stopped. They have a great series discussing how the Air Force has essentially been gutted. Simply put, the Air Force doesn't have enough planes, the planes it does have are too old, and it's 2,000 fighter pilots short. The higher ups in the Air Force made so questionable decisions. Please consider reading the series.
I watched part of a interview with Michael Lewis today. He's the author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, and The Big Short. I really enjoy his books, but I haven't gotten around to reading Flashboys or The Undoing Project, until today. In the interview, Michael Lewis mentioned how the Israeli army tasked Danny Kahneman with the task of developing an algorithm for assessing potential officers. Intrigued, I decided to dig into the book to find out more.
I've always been interested in this sort of thing. I've read quite a few comparative studies of the American Officer Corps and the German Officer Corps. I confess, I haven't read much about the IDF. I have The Walls of Israel and a few other books on my Kindle, but I haven't really dived into them yet.
As a young officer, Kahneman found himself as the only actual psychologist working in the IDF's Psychological Unit. One of his tasks was assessing officer candidates. They were given a team task, and then observed as they attempted to overcome the challenge, and Kahneman used the challenge to observe personality and make predictions. He felt very confident in his predictions, but he compared his predictions to actual outcomes and realized his predictions were worthless.
So he tried to come up with a better way. In the end he designed an interview that assessed recruits on: pride, punctuality, sense of duty, sociability, and capacity for independent thought. Interviewers rated each of these factors on a 1 to 5 scale, based on the examples the interviewees provided. They were then added together to produce he Kahneman score. Something the Israeli military still uses to this day.
I suppose there must be a bit more to it than that. The order the questions is important, and the questions were designed so it wasn't clear what sort of information the interviewer was trying to gather.
Tellerson has been fired. Pompeo will replace him. I guess this explains why Tellerson and the White Houses were sending mixed messages about the attack on Sergei Shapoval.
The United Kingdom has issued an ultimatum to Russia. Explain the nerve agent attack by midnight or expect a retaliation. Russia has countered by saying, let us examine the nerve agent. Britain has refused their request. It is approximately 3 p.m. at time of publication.
No comments:
Post a Comment