[milliondollar]

Absolutely stunning example of work by some folks in DoD who clearly have "bullshit jobs." This includes diagrams and descriptions of how eyeballs work, quotes from Hemingway, and case studies of WWII operations. Can anyone imagine actually trying to train Joe based on this manual? A shining example of BS at its peak!

[bovermyer]

Yes, I can. Having gone through military training, it taught me things that I didn't understand before, or only had an intuitive understanding and not a full understanding.

If you're going to call a reasonable document bullshit, then I might be inclined to say you have a somewhat skewed lens on reality.

[milliondollar]

Each fact in the document may be true, but the document is so overbroad as to be useless. Who is it intended for? I mean, it is almosth philosophical in starting from how senses actually work from science.

Each lesson included could / should be broken out for Joe to make the desired outcomes practical and achievable.

[djrogers]

This document is the foundation for a month-long training course for the Army [https://www.benning.army.mil/Armor/316thCav/ASA/index.html], and likely others in other branches. If you look at it as a textbook, it seems quite a reasonable document.

You seem to be making assumptions about how this is intended to be consumed.

[NikolaeVarius]

Why do we assume the everyman is unable to do the most basic of rational thought.

[lazide]

If you have a group of 10 random people, you'll have to count on 1-2 of them not knowing something important you think everyone knows (if you're lucky).

If you have a group of 100 random people - that's now 10-20 people. A whole team, maybe two if the cards are particularly bad.

The Army has 479, 000 people. They also have significant, predictable turnover, so if they teach everyone all those things once, in 4-5 years no one in some military specialities will know it again. Based on the average time in service (6.7 yrs) data I can see, even if they teach literally everyone everything they might not know that is considered essential, in ~ half a decade at least 1/3 of the people in the Army won't know some or most of it again.

Add in that people can only pay attention to and retain so much, and you have to repeat things a lot, explain things from a bunch of different angles, and then test and validate on top of that before you can assume they know it.

Even then, they might forget in a week.

It's law of large numbers and people.

[kahmeal]

present day

[tryauuum]

present time

[bovermyer]

That manual is not meant as a pedagogical tool. It's meant as the source of truth to build those tools from.

[kube-system]

This criticism could just as easily apply to my entire college career. That doesn't mean that the things I learned weren't of any use. Understanding beyond simple application has value.

[neatze]

This is BS for you because you never faced reality where you simply cannot make assumptions, but must use references (this how knowledge is built over generation) such documents establish clear shared understanding to avoid situation like 10 people have 10 different opinions; what is or what is not an specific thing.

[jordache]

more BS than another CRUD app?