I understand the logic of the officer/enlisted division, but it's becoming increasingly at odds with the norms of western society. It overlapped perfectly with society circa 1700, gentry or can write a sentence -> officer, commoners -> enlisted. But we've come a ways since then.
It's possible that the fundamental issue is that a rigid separation between officer and enlisted is simply optimal for warfighting, and medieval/early modern society molded itself on its requirements.
Now we managed to shift society towards more egalitarian norms, but we still need to preserve the distinction in the military because it's just the right way to do it. But if the societal division was preexisting, we might be dragging around a vestigial organizational form...
... which is actually detrimental to combat effectiveness. Certainly the widening gap between civilian and military norms restricts the sort of person that the military will be able to attract, and retain. @pptsapper
Certainly one of the dominant trends since WWII has been the rise of the importance of the NCOs. I haven't done a systematic study but by and large since WWII the armies with the best performance have been those with the best NCO corps.
And it's easy to see why. With artillery and air strikes, you can mass formations under the watchful eye of a colonel. Wars will be fought and won by squads actions, led by their LTs and SGTs.
Any country can furnish a bunch of bodies to make privates, and all but a few can spare a few thousand highly educated elites to staff field and flag grade slots. But finding a few hundred thousand NCOs that can read a map and improvise to accomplish commander's intent? Tougher!

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More from @andreamatranga

13 Jul
Back in my Civ playing days,I thought it would be better if there was no "research" per se, but rather you would discover new technologies randomly, but more likely if you did more of certain activities.
In particular say you could build ships object with three levels of quality: basic (does the job but falls apart quicker), medium, and improved. In particular the improved ships would be better than medium, but so expensive as to not be cost effective for most purposes.
BUT building improved ships would drastically increase the likelihood of discovering the next big sea tech.

So, hey, maybe the billionaire space race will be as transformative as personal computers or refrigeration. Still seems a bit of a gamble as a society.
Read 7 tweets
13 Jul
I think part of the (anti- vs CRT) divide could be spanned with an analogy with tourist sites. Some places have great natural or historic significance, but have also dangerous features. We don't wipe them off the face of the map, but we do ensure that dangers are clearly marked.
Take Columbus. He was clearly a wretched man, as his conduct towards indigenous and Spanish alike proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. He was also an awful navigator who would have died with all his crew if there hadn't happened to be an entire continent at the right place.
There isn't really much in him to hold as an example for future generations... "Be wrong, but get lucky, then extremely cruel".

But for other figures, where their achievements were in unrelated fields, and the stains on their legacy largely incidental,...
Read 7 tweets
18 Mar
Honest Referee Report:

Let me first restate the abstract in different words to assuage any lingering doubts somebody might have that I didn't in fact read the paper.
The paper in fact fine. Like stuff like this gets published all the time. Worse than this in fact.
The paper does not in fact start an entirely new field of human endeavor, nor will it represent the final word in a long standing debate. It will win no scientific prose prizes, nor is it a series of incoherent non sequiturs.
It is in fact a competently executed foray into a reasonably interesting topic, which deploys currently accepted methodology. It is in fact logically possible to conjure threats to the ID strategy, none of which would however sustain a paper on their own.
Read 5 tweets
16 Mar
I saw a talk show host in a park here i. Orange playing the drums.
It was the red haired guy. He was playing the congas. Little crowd around him.
Acrually they were a little small to be congas,maybe they were bongos? Where do you put the dividing line between the two?
Read 4 tweets
8 Jun 20
I'm going to tell you a couple of three things about Omertà, since this might come in handy in the next couple of months. I'll use an example from The Day of The Owl by Sciascia, a very interesting detective novel set in a small Sicilian town.
Incidentally AFAIK it's the first novel on the mafia ever, published 8 years before the Godfather, for example.
My copy is in Palermo so I'm going off of memory.

In the opening scene, an intercity bus arrives in the dusty town square, and everybody gets off.
Some have people waiting for them, and there's also a few people milling about or crossing the square on their way somewhere. Suddenly a shot rings out, and a man falls to the ground in a pool of blood.
Read 21 tweets
1 May 20
Let's spare a thought for Carlo Urbani, the microbiologist whose intuition and self sacrifice almost certainly saved thousands of lives in 2003 by first identifying SARS as a deadly new disease, notifying the WHO and persuading Vietnamese authorities to isolate patients.
...and screen passengers. He was called to treat the patient that brought SARS to Hanoi, and realized that the staff at the hotel was already falling sick. His early warning, and successful policy activism with local authorities limited the extent of the outbreak.
Before the WHO, Urbani had been the president of @MSF in Italy, and was part of the delegation that accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999. He was an expert on tropical diseases, and a tireless advocate for universal availability of essential medicines in poor countries.
Read 15 tweets

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