Conversation

Situation awareness is not knowledge (some prefer situational awareness). Knowledge is pipes, situation awareness is sensory information flowing through those pipes. If it decays to worthless in any time range from minutes to a few years, it’s probably pure situation awareness.
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Longer than a few years, the medium/message coupling and co-evolution is too strong to be a;proximately separated. If it doesn’t fade to zero value in 3-4 years at most, it’s probably reshaping the knowledge pipes and persistent mental models need to be updated.
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A good example is VC and startups. The time constant is about 3-4 years. I was clued in enough to have true situation awareness for about a year twice in my life: ~2009, and ~2014. I am in a trough now. I can read startup news and parse it, but not really interpret it.
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Jargon like seed/A/B, ‘liquidation preference’, ‘convertible debt’, ‘pari passu’ etc is structural knowledge. It doesn’t decay but is useless without SA. SA: Knowing what they map to in a given year: ranges, which parts are flush versus starved, which firms are leading etc.
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Generalizing, vocabulary elements are knowledge. Proper names, numbers, rankings are situation awareness. They co-evolve. New jargon might emerge (“pre-seed”), universe might expand (Kickstarter). Stuff might go from SA to knowledge if institutionalized, like regulation (GDPR).
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Another example is climate change/action. “Duck curve” is knowledge Is a 3000 MW grid storage battery replacing a canceled gas peaked knowledge routine stuff or a significant thing? Being able to judge that is SA.
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SA is easily recovered if lost. But knowledge decay (pipes rusting and leaking) is not. If you’re out of a game for 3y you can get back in with a few weeks of catching up at most. If you’re out for 10, it might take years to get back in or be impossible. Too much pipe change.
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If you can understand and judge news for important you have K+SA. If you can understand but not judge what’s important, you have K but not SA.
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If you struggle to understand it at all, and too many concepts are new or being used in ways that seem “ungrammatical” with respect to your old mental models, knowledge has decayed. Either K nor SA. To complete the 2x2: is there a SA without K condition? Yes!
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This is how scenesters, wantapreneurs, Trump, PUA types etc operate. They have situation awareness without knowledge, in the form of pure behavior response maps. And it works sorta like a triage. 80% of the time, the blind, blackbox response to a situational stimulus is correct.
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To tease apart knowledge, you have to probe 20% zone, full of exceptions that violate triage blackbox stimulus-response rules. These can’t be memorized or “trained” on like a limited neural net since space of possibilities is too big. You have to apply knowledge. Pipe awareness.
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This thread motivated by interactions with a worrying new class of “OODA bureaucrats” who are sort of literate in the vocabulary and structural/pipe knowledge of this stuff but don’t seem to get that it’s worthless without strong SA, which requires work to keep up to date.
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In fact if you had to pick only one, you’d go for SA without K. At least you can fake it 80% of the time and maybe get lucky.
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Replying to and
Yep! I was focusing on individual knowledge which is constrained by mortality. For potentially immortal institutions, the knowledge vs situation awareness yin-yang is fractally present at all time scales and Stewart’s model is a useful gestalt view of the result
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