Hi Ken,

Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
I think there's a skill set (and / or a talent... ) block missing; Five blocks are cool but I think the third one might be shown as a hopefully existing and embedded set of skills that may need slight -- and only slight, very slight -- remodeling to be move on to the fourth block and be effective as an advisor.
I think that may work better. I do agree that the block 3 material should already exist in officers and NCOs (Hades, it should be basic training for anyone in a democracy of any form, but that's another rant...). I suspect that a large part of the problem with the block 3 skills goes back to some of the way that Western cultures have parsed out knowledge into specialized segments, and then confused the culture specific knowledge those generate with universal general knowledge.

Let me just take this one "skill" set of "understanding human nature". In the West, we as a culture area, have avoided introspection and relegated it to increasingly marginalized and controllable sub-groups of "professionals" (philosophers, mystics, psychologists, anthropologists, etc.). As a result, most of our "technologies of mind" (yeah, I know, it's a Foucauldian phrase) are quite poor, say about 2000 years behind some of the more focused groups such as Buddhism.

In the West, we tend to "understand human nature" by assertion, rather than by personal experience. This means that a "professional" group will assert a worldview and then look for supporting evidence. This group also controls the definition of what is and is not "true", as well as setting up all of the testing mechanisms for defining a level of skill. Basically, the game is totally rigged against anyone who is outside of the group and, especially, against anyone who disagrees with that groups assertions about "reality". BW's story just hammers home that point in a way .

Now, being a via negativa type of a scientist, I tend to think that that system is bunk; a system designed to inflate the egos of people who cannot stand to deal with reality.