Living Twice at Once, You’ll Learn…

 It is a given that we never know what is going on. As a fool, I got used to this very early. But as an **intelligence NCO, it was my job to try to identify the most likely futures, as well as how best to prepare for them.

It does not matter that I think that all possible futures are going to happen. It only matters that it appears that I am going to experience only one of those futures at a time, but that I want to survive it. This should be a given, but I actually didn’t get to go to combat the last time because they thought I would not want to come back. Suicide through heroism, you see.

So if I see that the enemy has maybe three* likely courses of action I then Identify which one is most dangerous to us, which one is most likely for them to try, and then we discuss mitigating circumstances. [This is also why defending is easier than attacking, but attacking is more successful.] You see the problem, perhaps. One unit cannot possibly prepare for the entire gamut of possible actions. On top of that, we do not just want to REACT; to try and cover all possible enemy actions leaves us no resources to prosecute our own plan.

Here an understand ding of the band of excellence is useful, for one can apply this principal to other events, and it is a wildly functional heuristic. The band of excellence recognizes Murphy’s 29th Law of Combat, ie that a combat ready unit rarely survives an inspection and an inspection ready unit rarely survives combat. Even an army of One cannot be all things to all people at all times.

The band of excellence says to play the odds, to distribute your skills. It is better to be at 80% proficiency for all skills rather than to waste time trying to get some skills up to 100% before moving on. You can’t count on your medic not getting shot, so you can’t forego basic first aid training, even if you will never be as good as a full medic.

And finally, we come to the concept of high payoff tasks. These are tasks that support multiple missions a unit might be called upon to conduct. For instance, marksmanship is a high payoff task, as so much of what we do requires weapons skills. Fitness is a high payoff task. et al. Identify the high payoff tasks, because they are force multipliers for your time.

So, the point is to make a plan that encompasses the largest number of likely scenarios as possible, then when time permits, fill in the holes.

One can apply this same set of principles to cosmological inquiries. For instance, I was agnostic most of my life, and I always thought Pascal left out a good bit of data in his wager about how to behave vis a vie the question of God and a particular religion. One can look at a rational morality as a high payoff task, since almost every cosmological outlook except sociopathy or MBA curriculum says it is better for us to work together than for me to exploit you simply because I can.

To engineer ones life so that it doesn’t matter what the underlying reality is brings freedom. I’ve walked many miles in many shoes and I can group almost all of them into one overarching morality of ‘don’t be mean’ and ‘tell the truth, but remember rule number one’. I’ve always figured if that wasn’t good enough for a god that gave really bad examples of how to be powerful, then I would just find joy in the other place.

*THIS is a gross misrepresentation of the true number of options, but one must use Bayes’ Theorem to reduce probabilities or else you can never move forward to making a plan. IN the infantry, there is the 25-75 rule: take only 25% of the time before the mission to plan for the mission, at most, before getting movement started on the initial plan. This gives the troops 75% of the time to prepare while you refine the plan.

**merely a role I performed, I was not a spook, just a staff member of an artillery unit