I’ve got 450+ textbooks in LibraryThing, each of which represent a point in my travelling-as-far-as-I-can-through-topics-via-textbooks thing and, thinking I might have enough data to do some basic analysis, I looked at what LibraryThing recommends for “books I would like”. It recommended a book from 1988, “Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein”. Ok, never heard of it. I found a copy. So far, finding out that when there’s less than a minute to decide, people don’t decide. They recognize a solution. This model they came up with, they called “recognition-primed decision model” or RPD model. SO far he’s going through firefighter and firechief interviews – they all were like, “of course this is how it works” which was good confirmation for them.

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” One area of cognition is the study of how people use categories. In our early interviews with firefighters, we tried to see if they would categorize fires in terms of the structure (e.g., single-family residence, apartment, factory). Instead, we formed the impression that they were categorizing fires in terms of what they had to do (e.g., search and rescue, interior attack, exterior attack, prevention of spread to other structures). In other words, the firefighters seemed to be using functional categories rather than structural categories. They were organizing their world on the basis of the response patterns called for. ”
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 Function categories > form categories. Fascinating!

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 I share my notes publicly as I go. So if it’s on Facebook, that’s my notes. I keep a backup copy of my notes on my own site too.I don’t really have goals when researching but sometimes ideas present themselves.

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