This is a non-fiction
book about critical thinking: how to assess incoming information and other data. It’s an unusual way of looking at data
analysis.
It caused me an epiphany. That’s happened before where I re-digested
facts and came up with new conclusions.
In this case Mudd is espousing Right
to Left thinking rather than is common in most European cultures. He’s saying: think of the question before you
start analyzing the data.
Reading the first few chapters took
me back to post-college, pre-Army days, I was getting drafted: what could I get
out of the deal? I would enlist, if I
could get the Monterey Language School.
Who even knew what the Language
School was? Or did? I didn’t think very
deeply. It was what I knew, languages,
grammars, logic.
The NSA knew. What sort of idiot would enlist, just to get
a year of Russian or Japanese? -duh- Our NSA[1] kind of
guy.! They gave me a languages test with
made-up languages; one of them read right to left. I had to define the grammars and structure in
order to answer the questions. It was a
tough test; the kind that I liked. I was
sure I had done really well. Now I
realize it was a code-breaking test. But
when basic was over, my CO said they were not going to send me to Monterey, my
language skills were already good enough.
I just now saw the connection; there’s no language test for the Monterey
Language School. I’d said no to the NSA,
so they just sent me to Germany.
The decision-process analysis
proposed by author Mudd is valuable and worth considering. I am using it to reconsider my approach to “How
do we fund the Library System in Sonoma County?” and also to the question, “How
do we reduce summer Latino drownings in the Russian River?”
[1]
In our
third week of the two-month boot camp, I was called aside from early morning
formation. I was given a building
location and told to report there at 9 am.
You don't ask questions in the Army, and whenever you get out of a days'
training, it is a pleasant relief, so I went along happily. When I got to the location there was another
trainee there already, Bob Rivera was in "A" company and I was in
"C." We discussed why we were there
but neither of us understood what it was all about. When he had knocked on the door a few minutes
earlier, he told me, someone had poked his head out and said to wait a few
minutes outside.
At
9 am sharp, a man in civilian clothes opened the door and asked us to come
in. The room was like a swank apartment,
split-level with a sort of mezzanine above and to the side of us. The main room had twenty foot ceilings and
was spacious, just a few pieces of furniture, but what was there was
plush. "Would you like a
drink?" he began. "No thank
you, Sir," came our reply, almost in unison. "Sit down and relax," he said.
"I've got some questions to ask you and maybe a proposition, but you're
free to leave at any time you wish."
We were puzzled, not understanding what this was about.
He
probed our backgrounds, whatever had been written down so far in our
records. He asked for more detail about
legal or criminal trouble we might have been in at any time in our lives. Hackles went up, this was a sensitive area
for me. When I was a kid of 13, I had
been to court on a shop-lifting charge from a stamp dealer I used to buy from on
Saturday mornings. I'd also stolen some
stuff while in college that no one had ever caught me at, but everyone I knew
had knowledge of these offenses.
He
explained that he worked for an especially sensitive area in the military and
that they lived a pleasant life, as we could see. But to get into this group, it was required
to have the FBI totally scour our past and we would have to write down
everything that might possibly come up in a thorough background check. He said they would talk to every one of our
teachers and friends going back to Kindergarten. Worse than what we might have done would be
to lie about it and not write it down in advance. He praised our educational backgrounds and
our Army test scores so far. This all
took about two hours. I opted to say no
and left the building, never to hear from him again. Bob, however, stayed and apparently filled
out all the paperwork.
In
the seventh week of training, I was over in "A" company's barracks
visiting a buddy and I asked where I could look up Bob Rivera. "Ooh, the MPs hauled him away last
week!" came the answer. "Apparently,
he was wanted in Fresno on a car theft charge," my buddy continued. "He used an alias when he enlisted, I
don't know how the Army found out."
I didn't say anything. I had
figured out by this time that my friendly chat had been with the NSA.
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