gwern

@gwern I agree wholeheartedly. They can be demoralizing though. I once went down the rabbit hole of beginning to view everything as a series of checklists and they lost their salience.

I think I may have done that too. Also, not sure if it's the same problem, but I went through the GTD rabbit hole too of spending way too much time optimizing my todo lists. Where did you come out on this? Curious to know whether, and how, you were able to find the sweet spot.

Moderation in all things... Like automation in general, I am suspicious of any formalism. I usually follow a 'rule of three': if I've explained something 3 times, forgotten it 3 times, or made a mistake 3 times, time to write it down/SRS/checklist it.

Interesting. Why three? If you're juggling many things-to-remember at once, do you not fear that you're loading your working memory in some way with things to be remembered or count of things forgotten?

1/ All the more surprising that there is so much pushback to adoption of checklists. @RogerBohn has written a fantastic working paper examining the slow adoption of checklists in military aviation. Even when it was OBVIOUS that it would save many lives -- adoption was still

2/ astonishingly slow "Despite the benefits of Standard Procedure Flying for both safety and efficiency, by the end of WW2 only a few air forces had fully embraced it. This paper describes the highly varied adoption patterns of different forces"

While reading https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2004-previc-spatialdisorientationinaviation.djvu … https://www.gwern.net/Scanners  , I was struck by how in early aviation in the 1910s/1920s, there apparently was huge resistance to 'instrument flying' and spinning chairs demonstrating inability to orient oneself. So pilots kept dying like flies.

1/ If you haven't read it already, I commend @RogerBohn's paper to you as it seems right up your alley. Among other virtues, he discusses the role of cultural differences between different air forces seemed to play an important role.

2/ E.g. IIRC, (and hope he can correct me if I am oversimplifying) the use of checklists (which for him is only a part of what he calls "standard procedure flying") seemed to be adopted much more quickly in the new Army Air Corp than in the tradition-bound navy.

Foreign pilots were even worse. In 1955 when German aces taught to fly jets in US, they had culture shock. One ace with 150 kills was told that he was a lousy pilot!