(2023-06-23) Brander Tools For Thought In Your Ooda Loop

Gordon Brander: Tools for thought in your OODA loop.

Boyd’s OODA loop.

• Observe: sense your environment
• Orient: make sense of your senses by constructing a world-model
• Decide: translate your model into a plan
• *Act: do something to effect a change

Your actions cause direct changes to your environment, and ripple effects too. This feeds back into observation. A loop.

There are other loops in this diagram, too. Your mental model—how you orient—effects what you observe, and how you act. Through Boyd’s lens, we begin to see a dogfight as a cybernetic system.

For Boyd, the most important factor for survival is your sense-making system. This is the thing that keeps you oriented. There’s a reason that “orient” is the biggest circle on the OODA diagram. We survive by making sense.

What we’re looking at is a general model for how an organism dances within its environment. The OODA loop is a framework for agency.

When orientation breaks down—when you are disoriented—you lose your agency. Your model is wrong. You pay attention to the wrong things, your actions stop making sense, you flail.

The timescale at which you can make sense is the timescale in which you have agency. When something acts faster than you can make sense of it, it gets into your OODA loop. It unravels your ability to orient to what’s happening to you.

This insight goes way beyond player-vs-player conflict. Anything can get into your OODA loop. The environment can get into your OODA loop.

Remember the period immediately after 2016, The Great Weirding? That sense of dislocation was reality getting into the OODA loop of our institutions. All of us depend on institutions as part of our sense-making system, and so, to varying degrees, we all became disoriented

The tempo of our environment has accelerated. We’ve hit an information scaling threshold, and the internet has gotten into everyone’s OODA loop.

The cost of forking realities has dropped below the Coasean floor, and there’s little incentive to merge realities.

The most effective coordination mechanisms left seem to be memes and conspiracy theories.

Philosopher Paul Tillich posits that when social sensemaking fails to keep up with reality, we experience it as a kind of mass neurosis. Everybody has a crisis of meaning at the same time. Life stops making sense.

It's the law of requisite variety, which says that if you want to make sense of a complex world, you've got to have an internal system that is equally complex.
(Karl Weick, 1996, Complicate Yourself)

Tools for thought are tools for orientation

There is too much complexity out there for one brain to handle. It’s time to build a second brain. Tools for thought give us the requisite variety for agency in complex environments.

Better yet, we can share our second brains, combine insights, expand our ability to orient together. (Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts)