ABSTRACT
I would not be here today talking about naturalistic decision making and models of expertise if it were not for Gary Klein. Not just for the obvious reason that he invited me to give this talk, but rather because he got me involved in thinking about expertise in the first place. About 20 years ago Gary was called for advice by an Air Force Captain named Jack Thorpe. Thorpe was a psychologist battling his superiors over whether pilots should be trained to cope with emergencies by memorizing a set of rules as they had always done, or be given what he called situational emergency training. Gary suggested Thorpe read my recently published book, What Computers Can't Do, and I soon received a call from the Air Force saying they wanted to sponsor me to do research on skill acquisition. Because I had no knowledge of pilots or of skill acquisition I suggested we involve my brother, Stuart, who taught Operations Research at Berkeley and who at least had begun to question the adequacy of formal models of decision making.
