Archive for August 2009
Assumptions: War
- War is a strategy intended to make the enemy conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge about your true desires.
- The giant caveat to the preceding definition is that war is also an enemy strategy intended to make you conform to the enemy’s desires when doing so is contrary to what you’d do if you possessed both the power to resist and sufficient knowledge about your enemy’s true desires.
- The nature of a war is determined by the nature of the desires pursued in a war, not by the nature of the power used in a war.
- The power used in war is quite vivid. It can easily overshadow the sometimes nebulous desires sought in war. Yet the more spectacular species of power used in war are not always present in war. In contrast, desire is always present.
- The essence of war is hostile intentions. Your intentions are hostile if you want to make others conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge of your true desires. War is any action taken on the basis of such hostile intentions.
- The stage of war is set by hostile intentions but then the appropriate forms of power must be found to fulfill those intentions in order for hostile intention to become hostile realization. Hostile intentions come first. Hostile power follows.
- While hostile intentions can shift the nature of available power from forms of power that are less appropriate for pursuing a set of intentions to forms that are more appropriate, often the quality and quantity of desire must be adapted to the quality and quantity of the power available to pursue them.
- Since war is a strategy, its nature is highly dependent on the politics that employs it. The nature of politics, more specifically the nature of the internal division of power and the internal struggle for power, determines the nature of war.
- However, in turn, the nature of war will shape the nature of the politics that employs it.
- Politics is always an appallingly messy process and the guidelines it lays down for war are equal parts wishful thinking, cynical rhetoric, and timid hedging. This makes the process of strategic reconciliation problematic and directly affects the nature of war.
- As a strategy, war is an instrument of politics and the main preoccupation of politics is power. Therefore, the main preoccupation of war is power.
- As a political tool, war is a strategy intended to create a division of power in our favor that others would resist if they had the power to do so and possessed sufficient knowledge of our true desires.
- War impacts culture by changing the division of power, which in turn changes the priority of cultural desires. The scale of a war’s impact on culture is directly proportional to the scope of the desires sought by the combatants and the power they have at their disposal to pursue them. A war with limited ambitions would create very few cultural ripples while a war with grander ambitions could permanently shift or even stop a culture’s forward march.
- Culture, through the medium of politics, regulates war, a political instrument. It acts as a ratchet to increase or decrease the scope and intensity of the desires it seeks and the scope and intensity of the power used to pursue them, which in turn dictates the scope and intensity of any war pursued in the name of culture and the politics it produces.
- Since culture is the art of the unspoken assumption, much of war’s aim and execution is guided by unspoken and largely unconscious assumptions and default choices.
- Changed politics will result in changed culture.
- War, as both an expression and instrument of culture, will continue to disproportionately influence culture in ways that escape conscious observation.
- War is the ultimate human intergroup tournament. While all wars are intergroup tournaments, not all intergroup tournaments are wars. Only some intergroup tournaments meet the definition of war.
- A key action to take, while engaged in the intergroup tournament, is to target the other four mechanisms of adaption with influence and violence.
- Diversity generators are critical for creating the designed, engineered, or random adaptations that, when added together, allow you to adapt to the rigors of the intergroup tournament.
- However, too much diversity will cause you to fissure and split. There will be disorientation and indecision which will lead to inaction which will lead to maladaption.
- Speeding up the generation of diversity may rip you apart and send the various fragments on their way.
- The critical regulators of diversity are conformity enforcers. Conformity enforcers control how much diversity is tolerated within a community.
- Producing either stifling conformity or anarchic disarray is the aim of targeting a community’s conformity enforcement. If conformity enforces squeeze too tight, rigidity may set in and your adaptation will become sluggish and behind the curve. Taking the opposite approach, letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend to such an extent that incoherence is produced, than adaption will become disjointed and ill aimed.
- One of the most powerful targets to hit is inner-judges. Inner-judges have the power to rally a community to new heights of effort. If inner-judges think that things aren’t going so well, they can flick off the internal light switch and collapse the entire war effort from the inside. Enlisting them on your side, whether they’re conscious of having volunteered or not, is a key part of a combined strategy of victory. Inner-judges are a potential fifth column if turned in a negative direction. Thinning their ranks with violence is also an option.
- OODA loops, if they repeatedly produce losing adaptions, may have a inner-judge that starts to disrupt it internally, meaning that if it is under attack, it ends up fighting a two front war, one against the outer intergroup tournament and one internally against an inner-judge. The inner-judge, because it’s deeply embedded in the cycle, may be tougher to defeat.
- Since politics is the struggle for power, whether through the “other means” of war or not, resource shifters are a critical target. Some winning adaptions can be made to appear more winning so that they attract more power than they actually deserve. The distribution of power by resource shifters can be disrupted by slicing through supply lines and diverting power.
- War itself acts as a resource shifter, stealing from the loser to give to the victorious. The goal is to shift more power to yourself than is shifted away from yourself.
- War operates along a spectrum of power that falls between an absolute concentration of power at one extreme and an absolute absence of power at the other extreme.
- What separates one end of the spectrum from the other is energy and visibility.
- Energy is how much power it takes to make the enemy conform to our political desires while visibility is how easy it is for the enemy to gather knowledge we don’t want them to have.
- There’s a trade off between visibility and energy. The more energy that’s concentrated into a form of strategic power, the more visible it is. The smaller the amount of energy that’s concentrated into a form of strategic power, the less visible a form of strategic power is.
- War is a mixture of two forms of strategic power: violence and influence. In the middle between violence and influence is coercion, the strategic power we use to hurt the enemy until they stop resisting our desires. It’s an even mix of violence and influence, a recipe for moderate palates.
- Influence has low visibility and low energy while violence has high visibility and high energy.
- Influence takes many forms: diplomacy, propaganda, subversion, commerce, agitation, intelligence, education. However, the most elemental form of influence in war is deception, the strategic form of power used to distort enemy perceptions in ways that help us satisfy our desires.
- More depends on how you mix influence and violence due to the wild unpredictability of war.
- It may be that violence will eventually be resorted to when a community has the power to wage it. It often seems cheaper than compromise and easier than influence.
- The two are not mutually exclusive.The process of analysis and deduction open gaps of vulnerability where one group can penetrate another’s dissection of the world and disrupt or even dictate the trailing process of synthesis and induction. Violence can open the holes that influence needs to reach the inner mechanisms of enemies. Influence can make the breaking, killing, and maiming of violence easier.
- Strategic asymmetry in war results from one side orienting, aggregating, and compressing more successfully than the other side. War is a clash between compression algorithms.
- A point along the spectrum of power where you have blocked the enemy from finding a strategic advantage is a selected degree of control along that wavelength of the spectrum of power.
- War is not an attack on a lifeless mass. War is an attack on a living enemy and the one thing you quickly learn about the enemy is that he reacts.
- The nature of the power used in war (the power of violence) can release raw passions of hatred and enmity in both violator and violated. These strong feelings can distort the original cultural priorities and political goals that the strategy of war was supposed to achieve. Throw in chance and probability and you’ve created a volatile mix. Throughout history, many have poorly judged the impact of hostility and change in the strategy of war, especially when choosing when to use it and when not to use it.
Assumptions: Tactics
- Tactics is the fifth and final software control loop on the adaptive stack.
- Like culture, politics, strategy, and operational art, tactics is an OODA loop.
- Tactics is the direct interaction of power and desire with the outside world.
- If tactical interaction leads to the successful pursuit of desire, than tactical adaption is successful. If tactical interaction fails, than tactical adaption is unsuccessful.
- There is nothing between tactics and the outside world. Once tactical action is taken, the outside world pushes right back. This leaves little time or space for deliberation.
- Tactics is the instrument by which operational art successfully arranges desire and power in time and space. If tactical interactions end successfully, operational art can make a successful arrangement. Such arrangements often require that opposition be cleared out of a certain space at a certain time.
- Tactical success and failure flow up the stack, making the chances for operational, strategic, political, and cultural success or failure either much greater or much reduced.
- Tactics needs the Automatic System more than the Reflective System because it has a greater demand for quick reaction.
- Since tactics is easier to reduce to routine and habit than politics, strategy, and operations, military thinkers such as Clausewitz considered tactics more of a science than an art. Principles can be derived from tactical examples that have some hope of application beyond a passing set of circumstances.
- A specific tactical implementation rapidly becomes obsolescent but the principles remain, when interpreted with caution, fairly consistent over time.
- Most obsessions about ongoing adaption are obsessions about tactics. Tactics are easy to see and easy to describe. Most daily interactions are tactical. Obsession with tactics leads to a shallow, short-term fixation on the easily visible and short term rather than the obscure and long-term of other control loops.
Assumptions: Operational Art
- The operational control loop is the fourth highest level software layer on the adaptive stack.
- Like culture, politics, and strategy, operational art is an OODA loop.
- Operational art arranges the prioritized desires of culture and the divisions of power made by politics, joined in a reconciliation mediated by strategy, in time and space.
- If this arrangement successfully pursues desires, operational adaption is successful. If not, operational adaption is unsuccessful.
- Operational art is the instrument of strategy, the means by which strategic reconciliation is made. Operational art moves desire and power into the arrangement that strategy determines will make a reconciliation between the two effective in realizing desire.
- Operational art experiences more friction and willful opposition from opposition than strategy, politics, or culture. It is far closer to the edge of survival and further from the luxury of abstraction than higher control loops on the stack. The more abstract notions of culture, politics, and strategy meet the real world with its real pressures. Abstractions begin to break down and the uncompressed mess of the outside world starts to leak in.
- Operational adaption is faster than cultural, political, or strategic adaption because feedback from the outside world comes faster.
- Operational art uses tactics to effect the best arrangement in time and space. It maneuvers desire and power to the point of contact with the outside world. Then tactics engages and interacts with the outside world.
- Operational methods can be visualized as lying along an operational spectrum, categorized by the concentration of power they involve. Methods that use a low concentration of power are found towards the left end of the spectrum, culminating in passive observation of the opponent. Methods that use higher concentrations of power are found to the right, culminating in the total annihilation of opposition.
- The operational spectrum can be seen as a controller knob. You start with white lies. After the white lies you turn the dial to to systematic fraud: propaganda, subversion, media. Further on, you reach posturing. Turning further, you reach threats and intimidation. Turn further and you reach hurt, actions which cause pain and coerce but do not necessarily destroy. Turn a bit further and you reach destruction of property, then the destruction of individuals, finally culminating at the end of the dial with annihilation of populations and the outside world, the expression of absolute violence.
Assumptions: Strategy
- Strategy is the third highest software control loop on the adaptive stack.
- Like culture and politics, strategy is an OODA loop.
- Strategy is the reconciliation of the quantity and quality of cultural desire with the quality and quantity of the power available to achieve that cultural desire.
- Strategy plays the role of mediator. From one side, you have cultural desires loosely coupled to political power coming down. From the other side, pressure from the outside world are boiling up from control loops that are close to or in direct contact with the outside world.
- Sometimes strategy appears cohesive. Sometimes it appears to be disjointed. Most of the time, however, even if it has several flows, it all flows in one general direction.
- The balance between power and desire is constantly shifting and strategy must constantly adjust the quality and quantity of one to match the quality and quantity of the other.
- The reconciliation of power with desire will never be exact and many times will be fatally contradictory.
- Defining the quality and quantity of power and desire is difficult. Quality is always a fuzzy concept. The only test of quality is the trial of usage. Quantity is more exact but also prone to nebulousness.
- The effectiveness of a new reconciliation of power, desire, and outside pressures is measured in the favorable divisions of power it produces and the higher priority desires it satisfies.
- Strategy is a “a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse” but politics is not “a tyrant”, able to dictate to strategy absolutely. Though strategy falls under the sway of politics, its twists and turns as it seeks reconciliation can generate effects that shape politics.
- Strategy is the instrument that a political participant uses to attract power towards their chosen cultural desires and deflect power from competing cultural desires.
- While politics is the instrument of culture, strategy is the instrument of politics: its nature is a direct reflection of the politics that employs it.
- The outside world is felt more strongly by strategy than by culture and politics.
- Strategy seeks a balance between violence, the absolute concentration of power, and influence, the fleeting mist of dispersed power.
- Influence is a strategy intended to apply control through physically intangible power.
- Violence is a strategy intended to impose control through physically tangible power
- The mixture of these two strategies can be found in specific strategies along the strategic spectrum:
- Peace is widely dispersed power, all influence and no violence in its pure form.
- Economics is largely influence with a touch more violence.
- Government is equal parts violence and influence.
- Central planning is mostly violence with a touch of influence
- War is violence with very little influence in its purest form.
- Economics is a type of politics, a division of power. The type of economy used to accomplish a division of power is a strategy. Free market economies or command economies are strategies used by politics to divide power between desires.
Assumptions: Politics
- Politics is the second highest control loop in software on the adaptive stack.
- Like culture, politics is an OODA loop.
- Politics is the process of dividing power between cultural desires. It’s a struggle first for survival and second for preeminence.
Division of Power
- The nature of politics is heavily shaped by the nature of the culture that employs it: the strengths and flaws of culture become the strengths and flaws of politics. Politics is the continuation of culture with the addition of power as a cultural instrument.
- Politics does not always follow culture’s lead; mismatches inevitably arise between what culture seeks and where power is allocated. Politics can turn the tables and shape culture but the effort is power intensive. Since it’s uphill battle, culture usually has the upper hand.
- The quality and quantity of political power will allow pursuit of some cultural desires and discourage others. That will shape both cultural priorities and how political power is allocated.
- Politics can’t avoid eventually adapting to the outside world.
- Politics leans towards rationality. Indeed, politics’s irrational side can largely be seen as an overflow from culture. Politics focuses on the tangible. It must be practical. Culture focuses on the intangible. It has the luxury of impracticality if it so chooses.
- To achieve priority over other desires, a desire must acquire power. Power is the only currency that can buy priority. Only power bestows the freedom to pursue and even realize desires.
Rise and Fall
- By a cruel arithmetic, desires that make better politics win higher priority while desires that make bad politics “win” lower priority.
- The division of power is never final and the outside world always get a vote.
- The process of dividing power is both an internal and an external process. Externally, power is divided between your desires and those of others. Internally, power is divided between competing cultural desires within you.
- Your internal division of power heavily shapes the division of power between you and others. In turn, the division of power between you and others heavily influences your internal division of power.
- The crucial factor that determines the balance between cultural diversity and cultural conformity is power.
- With greater diversity comes a wider range of competitors and a wider distribution of power.
- With greater conformity there are fewer competitors and fewer divisions of power.
- The most diverse shade of politics is anarchy where power is dispersed widely between competitors and diversity is at its peak.
- The shade of politics with the most conformity is autocracy where power is concentrated in a few competitors and conformity pushes to the limits of maximum compression.
- No one will every have enough power to satisfy all their desires. This means that the process of dividing power between desires usually degenerates into a struggle for power between desires.
- Economics is a type of politics.
Assumptions: Culture
- Culture is the highest software control loop on the adaption stack.
- Culture is an OODA loop.
- Culture’s job is, first, to prioritize desires and, second, to make that prioritization unconscious.
- Most of this process is completely unconscious: culture is the art of the unspoken assumption.
- Culture establishes the unconscious defaults that lead us to make one choice over another. Prioritization of desire establishes the default choices that guide us and determines how strong those defaults will become.
- Cultural automation can contribute to success if its unconscious guidance brings success.
- Unconsciousness is a feature, not a bug. Once desire is entrenched in unconsciousness, it’s difficult to dislodge. The height of cultural achievement is embedding a desire so deeply in your mind that you are completely unaware of either its presence or its potency.
- Culture is habit, the enduring pattern of human behavior. It doesn’t linger in consciousness but soaks in deeper to shape consciousness beyond awareness.
- Desires that attain maximum priority will achieve maximum unconsciousness.
- Each desire is a meme, a cultural unit that seeks priority for itself at the expense of other memes.
- Cultural repulsion is diversity and cultural attraction is conformity. All cultural compression is stored in a state that lies somewhere between these two poles.
- Culture is a tug of war between diversity generators and conformity enforcers.
- Diversity generators seek to maximize the number of desires that are prioritized in order to cover more contingencies. Conformity enforcers seek to limit the number of desires that are prioritized in order to achieve efficient compression. One seeks to maximize the range of future choices. One seeks to restrict them.
- Diversity is ultimately offensive and conformity is ultimately defensive.
- Diversity generators produce new potential priorities for desires.
- Conformity enforcers mitigate diversity in the interests of internal cohesion and external effectiveness.
- Conformity enforcement usually gets the lion’s share of power. Power spent on cultural conformity enforcement is power spent on the known. Rather than expending power on new and untested desires, it is easier to devote power to further optimizing the existing cultural understanding.
- The inertia of internal cultural consensus is the norm rather than the exception.
- However, periodically, the steady optimization of existing cultural consensus is punctuated by outbursts of diversity. These outbursts eventually build to such a crescendo that they overwhelm the conformity enforcers of the old consensus and ring in a new consensus with a new set of conformity enforcers and a new equilibrium to optimize.
- Cultural conformity enforcement is the heart of cultural defense.
- Cultural defense is stronger than cultural offense. It has a negative object: all it has to do is deny cultural offense of its positive purpose.
- Since a cultural offensive must be launched based on the unknown, untested, and unproven, the cultural defensive has the advantage that comes from possessing the known, the time-tested, and the proven.
- While the cultural offensive must have initiative and momentum, forces that easily dissipate, the cultural defensive has inertia and the privilege of waiting on a prepared battlefield on its side.
- The inherent strength of cultural defense is one reason why cultures persist over time and why culture change is rarely an objective in war unless the disparity in power and desire disproportionately favors one side over another.
- Each priority is an adaption, proposed by culture and disposed by the changing environment.
- Observation receives feedback from the outside world.
- Orientation determines whether the priority should be called to action or be subjected to decision.
- Decision proposes the priority and makes a prediction about its success.
- Action tests the prediction by submitting it to external testing.
- If a priority is a successful adaption, it gains priority. If it is found wanting, it loses priority.
- Ultimately, culture is shaped by the outside world. Culture must ultimately adapt itself to the outside world.
- If the outside world is kind and forgiving, culture may persist for generations with little visible change.
- If the outside world is harsh and unforgiving, cultural change must come fast and furious or a culture will suffer.
- In the short term, culture is a voting machine. Desires accumulate that can be, by equal measures, rational and irrational. Some desires start out rational but endure well past their expiration date. Some desires are just plain loony from the start. This is why, over the long term, culture is a weighing machine. In the end, it rewards success and punishes failure.
- The coin in which gains or losses in cultural priority are measured is power.
- The instrument that culture uses to divide priority between desires is politics, the division of power between desires. Power makes a desire achievable. Desire is a wish acted upon and power is prerequisite for action. Without power, desire loses priority. It becomes nothing more than a wish, fragile and transient.
- While culture decisively shapes politics, its influence is not inescapable. For politics, culture is like a gravity well: escape is possible with enough velocity. Imbalances that emerge between how priority is divided and how power is divided can be exploited by politics to shape culture.
- Culture is not instantly subject to conscious design. It’s plastic, able to bend but only with effort. This plasticity is a result of culture being tightly intertwined with instinct, the inherited mental hardware of man.
- Culture can change but the process is long, arduous, and only happens over extended periods of time.
- Culture is a complex assembly with many tiny moving parts whose fragile interactions are hard to chart and even harder to predict. It’s quirky, resisting rational and predictable outcomes. Strange, unseen inputs flow in and strange, unseen outputs flow out. Culture is ultimately an rational adaption but its intermediate stages of development take on curious and tortured forms.
- Culture can lead to ruin if your unspoken assumptions silently pull you down to defeat. This makes shaping a culture in ways that enhance success an enticing goal for politics. It also makes influencing culture in ways that may produce defeat an enticing goal for external actors.
- The problem both internal and external manipulators face in shaping culture is that political efforts to shape culture produce unpredictable outcomes.
- Internal attempts at cultural optimization are distorted by the optimizers being trapped inside the default assumptions of their culture. External attempts to manipulate other cultures founder when the external manipulator’s own culture distorts their perception of the cultures they are attempting to manipulate. Both forms of manipulation become a lot of groping the cultural elephant in the dark.
- The hardware hardware layer that culture sits on evolves over eons. Culture evolves over centuries, providing instant adaption on the scale of geological time.
- Acquired and even designed attributes can be passed on to future generations through cultural evolution (as opposed to biological evolution which passes on random accumulations of mutations to future generations).
- Cultural narratives are hard to reach. The outside world may rage all it wants and never touch the long unfolding of a deep cultural narrative.
- Once cultural priorities are set, dominant desires frame all other desires.
- This framing is largely internal but, as a meme, it seeks to subvert and replace external cultural frameworks through asserting control. This makes battles between cultures battles between frameworks as one culture attempts to impose its framing on the others.
- Cultural confrontations are the most difficult and power intensive of all conflicts, requiring one culture to push completely through another culture’s tactical, operational, strategic, and political loops to its tasty cultural filling.
Assumptions: Adaption Stack
Adaptive Stack
- Aggregate adaption originates from the interaction of six internal control loops (two loops in hardware for performance, one loop in firmware for stability and plasticity, and three loops in software for maximum flexibility) with the outside world (“the play of chance and probability”):
- Hardware (“primordial hatred, enmity, and violence”):
- Reptilian loop: instinct
- Mammalian loop: emotion
- Firmware (Hominid loop)
- Cultural loop: divides priority between desires.
- Software (Hominid loop-”reason”)
- Political loop: divides power between desires.
- Strategic loop: reconciles power and desire.
- Operational loop: arranges power and desire in time and space.
- Tactical loop: controls the interaction of power and desire with the outside world.
- Hardware (“primordial hatred, enmity, and violence”):
- Each of these is a OODA loop (or, more likely, the aggregation of many OODA loops) running independently and in parallel with the others.
- Each control loop may produce different adaptations from other levels.
- Each of these control loops performs a dedicated control task.
- Each control loop is the instrument of the next highest control loop and the master of the next lowest control loop.
- Lower level control loops, however, can influence higher level control loops on the stack. Adaptations in lower level control loops can add up and cascade up the stack until they change all higher level loops completely.
- Each control loop forms a complex adaptive system. Added together, the full adaption stack is a larger complex adaptive system.
- Each control loop is subject to a varying range of immediate control. Some are immediately responsive. Others are not.
- All control loops must ultimately adapt to the outside world but they also have the opportunity to push back at the outside world through attempts at control.
- Most adaption takes the form of optimization within a control loop. However, input from other control loops have the potential to shift the adaption a control loop produces completely (in effect, a paradigm shift).
- Each control loop differs in the length of time of its cycle. Higher level loops tend to take longer than lower level loops.
- On the firmware layer, adaption is somewhat slower and more plastic.
- On the hardware loop, adaption can take centuries to eons to change.
- This is not to say rapid adaption can’t happen at higher level loops, only that, in the long run, adaption will be slower in higher level loops than in lower level loops.
- While adaptions produced by one control loop may be successful, adaptions produced by other control loops may lag in overall adaptability or even fail.
- A tactical loop directly interacts with the outside world while hardware and firmware loops are well insulated from the outside world.
- As you move up the stack, adaptions tend to unfold over longer and longer periods of time as they grow more and more insulated from tactical buffeting. It becomes progressively more difficult to penetrate and impose control over each successively higher control loop because more and more power must be expended to change it.
- Most of the adaptative mismatches that occur between you and the outside world can be traced to adaptive lag. A control loop is optimized for a specific adaptation and acquires optimizations particular to that adaption. However, desires or the outside world change and the control loop, especially if it’s a higher level control loop, may only change their adaption at a glacial pace.
- Higher level loops on the stack provide more staying power for adaption.
- The tactical loop is more Automatic than Reflective. Yet the reptilian loop, the mammalian loop and the cultural loop are also more Automatic. If the Automatic System is the X axis and the Reflective System is on the Y axis, the Automaticness and Reflectiveness of the various control loops falls on a bell curve. The reptilian, mammalian, and cultural loops are Automatic on the upward slope; the political, strategic, and operational loops are more Reflective in the middle bulge; and the tactical loop becomes more Automatic on the downward slope.
Assumptions: Decision
Decision
- Decision takes an orientation and subjects it to a more deliberate, structured, iterative, and reflective process by formalizing it as a hypothesis.
- Decision is the center of the Reflective System.
- Each hypothesis is a prediction about the outside world.
- Your internal reality is fairly predictable. It’s the rudeness of outside interruptions that keeps introducing unpredictability. Since a hypothesis is a prediction, control, when acting on a hypothesis, above all seeks to make the outside world predictable.
- Decision may choose to test a hypothesis in the outside world through action or it may discard the orientation internally through inner judgment.
- If a hypothesis and the action it produces are proved by the outside world, success will be observed as a OODA loop repeats. The experiment has been successful for now.
- If the hypothesis and the action it produces are not proved by the outside world, assuming the failure to verify doesn’t kill you, the unsuccessful outcome will still be observed. The experiment has failed for now.
- If a hypothesis is correct and the results are stored for future recollection, adaption has been achieved.
- If a hypothesis is incorrect or the results of previous experience are discarded, adaption has failed.
- Attempts to control the outside world are projected through action.
Assumptions: Orientation
- Orientation is the most important stage in the OODA loop.
- Orientation is where most internal diversity generation, inner judging, resource shifting, and conformity enforcement occur through the interaction of software (analysis/synthesis, new information from observation, previous experience), firmware (cultural tradition), and hardware (genetic heritage).
Orientation
- Orientation is primarily a process of compression. The outside world is too vast to fit in one tiny skull. After it’s observed, it must be reduced to a form that will fit inside the human brain. Some observations will be kept. Some observations will be lost. Some observations will be enhanced. Some observations will be distorted.
- If the process of orientation compresses the outside world with great fidelity, capturing all the important bits of reality, and leads to successful action, the result is usually healthy adaption.
- If its compression of the outside world is faulty, leaving out essential details, and leads to failing action, the result is usually unhealthy adaption.
- Compression is a sequence of synthesis-induction and analysis-deduction.
- First an observation is analyzed by breaking it into smaller, more easily processed chunks through a process of deduction which starts from the observation’s surface and works inwards.
- Then the observation is synthesized by reassembling it into a new, compressed, and possibly more relevant pattern through a process of induction which starts from inside the analyzed observation and works outwards.
- Analysis-deduction plays the role of repulsion while synthesis-induction plays the role of attraction.
Attraction and Repulsion
- Attraction seeks to compact the outside world into the smallest possible space. This sometimes results in seemingly useless but important bits of the outside world being tossed out in order to make it fit.
- Repulsion seeks to include as many important bits of the outside world as possible, meaning that sometimes useless bits are included in the grand sweep.
- This leaves varying levels of compression between the two poles of attraction and repulsion, some hyper compact and some barely compressed at all.
- The compression algorithm used by the brain is narrative.
- The brain uses fundamental symbols to represent common patterns within a compressed Universe. These function as a kind of gooey shorthand for the fundamental patterns of the outside world.
- These symbols are strongly tied to the fundamental human needs of food, water, social positioning, and reproduction. The base algorithms anchored to these fundamentals are then extended by the human mind into new dimensions that are the continuation of human desires with often strange new twists.
- The deeper in the mind you go, the more observed information is thrown away in analysis, the tighter the compression produced by synthesis becomes, and the more reliance is placed on compression shortcuts like heuristics and archetypes. For example, hardware compression is tighter than software or firmware compression.
World's Tightest Fit
- Control seeks to apply the synthesized compression created by orientation to you and the outside world.
- In order to test how well its compressed form represents the outside world, an orientation is either acted upon directly or forwarded to decision for further deliberation.
- The primary goal of any adaption is to lodge itself in orientation. This is the Automatic System where adaptation to the real world happens without thought. It wants to orient action without passing through decision. If an adaptation is true to the outside world, lodging in orientation can improve your overall adaptiveness. Adaptation can be faster, more automatic.
Week Links in the Chain: How Many Nuclear Licks Does It Take to Get to the Center of the Earth
- Isegoria links to this post on how many nuclear bombs it would take to destroy the world. An illustration:
How many nukes does it take to destroy the world?
- Classic crank Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes to Tory leader David Cameron on how to make a black swan safe world. You can hear Taleb gesticulating wildly as he writes:
The solution is obvious: build an economy that increases the role of well-tested traditions. Ban financial derivatives that require advanced mathematics rather than trial and error. Look at mother nature. There is a complex system built around sound principles that has insured both evolution and survival. It does not let anything get too big to fail. It breaks things early. I don’t understand why people who stand against tampering with nature accept tampering with the economy that would have organically grown too. Work on building a “robust” society, capable of withstanding errors, in which the role of finance (hence debt) would be minimal. We want a society in which people can make mistakes without risk of total collapse. Silicon Valley offers a good example, where people have the chance to fail fast (and repeatedly).
The best blueprint is the very opposite of the Obama administration’s economic policies (its foreign policy is commendable). It has been administering pain-killers without addressing the cause of disease. Obama is strengthening those who do the wrong thing. Take the “cash for clunkers” programme. It is a handout to those who bought the wrong – uneconomic – car. He is penalising people who did not make a mistake. The same applies to other “rescues”. By raising taxes after the crisis, the administration is hampering evolution. Those who do well in difficult times end up paying more tax and those who lost money in the crisis pay less. The rich who got us here are being rescued by regular Joes and being subsidised by the tax system.
