OODA

Full Title or Meme

"Observe Orient Decide Act" is the model for

Context

The philosophies of COL John R. Boyd never cease to amaze me.

In his paper, "Destruction and Creation," to describe a fixed mental model or concept, he combines Gödel's incompleteness theorem, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and entropy or the 2nd law of thermodynamics to state, "According to Gödel we cannot—in general—determine the consistency, hence the character or nature, of an abstract system within itself. According to Heisenberg and the Second Law of Thermodynamics any attempt to do so in the real world will expose uncertainty and generate disorder. Taken together, these three notions support the idea that any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch."

In other words, I'm insane to try the same mental model/concept over and over again expecting different results. If I want to increase my capacity for independent action, I need a new model, I need to destroy the failed concept and create a new concept, over and over again, to fight entropy and to remove or overcome obstacles to my independent action.

Boyd concludes by stating, "Taken together, the entropy notion associated with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the basic goal of individuals and societies seem to work in dialectic harmony driving and regulating the destructive/creative, or deductive/inductive, action—that we have described herein as a dialectic engine. The result is a changing and expanding universe of mental concepts matched to a changing and expanding universe of observed reality. As indicated earlier, these mental concepts are employed as decision models by individuals and societies for determining and monitoring actions needed to cope with their environment—or to improve their capacity for independent action."

... in briefings Boyd would talk about constantly observing from every possible facet (as countermeasures to numerous kinds of biases) ... also references to observation, orientation, decisions, and actions are constantly occurring asynchronous operations (not strictly serialized operations).

... when I was first introduced to Boyd, I felt a natural affinity from the way I programmed computers. There is anecdote from after the turn of century about (Microsoft) Gates complaining to Intel about transition to multi-core chips (from increasingly faster single core) because it was too hard to write programs where multiple things went on independently in asynchronously operating cores