A few weeks ago I wrapped up a short series on sensemaking. The explicit goal of that series was to give you better methods to make sense of a potentially disruptive new technology — which at the time of publication (and probably for a few more years yet) will be about AI. But the series was about sensemaking in general, and the ideas we explored together are applicable whenever you have to make sense of new developments in investing or business. This means that the methods may be adapted to make sense of politics, or social change, or — god forbid — war.
All Navy aircraft train at NAS Fallon — where Top Gun really is. For months we train every mission. The whole air wing in the air at once. 20 to 30 aircraft, each flying its piece of the plan. Usually a strike package going in-country to hit a target and come home. Simulated enemy aircraft. Real bombs.
The real training is the debrief. Every pilot who flew, in one room, for three hours. Sometimes until 1 AM. Often times over a beer or two.
There’s a giant screen showing every airplane and missile in the sky. The replay runs minute by minute.
“Stop frame. Eagle 13, what was the call you made here? What did you see?”
The pilot stands up in front of everybody and repeats the call. Even if it was wrong. Even if it got a plane killed. He says what he saw. Then the weapons tactic instructor walks through what he saw. No judgment, just the expert explaining what he was looking at.
It’s brutal. Every mistake, every missed recognition, every bomb dropped is critiqued in front of all your best friends.
But this is what learning from expertise actually requires.
State what you saw. See the outcome. See what an expert saw that you missed. Update your model.
I’m looking for ways to teach this to my kids. It’s applicable to investing, business, art, music, science. Our education system offers no opportunities to learn it.
Thanks for the shout out. I think it was the best training I’ve ever had (and that includes SERE school, which is it’s own kind of training). I assume that training style was probably learned from some of the NDM literature Jared. I don’t think Naval Aviation built that on its own.
Spend some time searching around for a top-tier player you enjoy watching who talks through decisions as they go. This lets you pause, predict what you would do, and immediately compare your thinking to theirs. That instant feedback—“I would do X, they did Y”—will help you quickly build an intuition that matches that of a top player.
This form of practice is also more time-efficient than playing. All games will have some downtime. Whether it’s time spent looking for a match, unskippable animations, or going through the motions of finishing a game that’s already decided. You can skip right through these when reviewing VODs.
YES! I was just reading that yesterday, and noticed that bit immediately.
I had a similar experience to this recently — I’ve been playing Slay the Spire casually ever since my daughter was born, a habit I picked up during my paternity leave. But a few months ago @DRMacIver blew my mind when he told me: “Novices try to build the best deck they can given the cards that they win from battles. Expert players build the deck they need to complete the level, and pick their path through the map accordingly.”
This is going to make zero sense to anyone who doesn’t play Slay the Spire, and I’m a little lazy to explain what this means … but David had apparently picked this up from watching a lot of skilled players on YouTube, and then managed to synthesise it down to a simple principle.
Which … wow. Talk about sensemaking as the heart of expertise — this totally changed the way I approached the game, and the way I approached getting better for the game!
Of course there is an overlap of Slay the Spire enjoyers and Commoncog people! The entire roguelite genre is built on making good choices from limited options, in the face of uncertainty about what challenges await you. And roguelites are more fun because there’s limited possibilities and you get to keep retrying if you fail.
I’ll take a stab at it: Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding game with a series of battles. After each battle you have the option to add one of three cards to your deck. Over the course of the game, you pick your cards and try to assemble a good-enough deck to win all the battles along the way.
At the higher difficulty levels, it’s easy to pick cards to win earlier battles, and end up building a deck that has zero chance to beat the final boss (and so, you ultimately lose). Winning decks tend to be ones where all the cards reinforce a common strength - which usually means deciding not to take “good” individual cards if they don’t play well with your deck → skipping card rewards often, and removing cards that don’t fit in well.
And then the rest of the game is map path decisions (picking a path with more battles for more rewards, vs. one with more healing for safety); knowing what possible enemies exist and how to beat them; and then the actual in-battle decisionmaking.