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by barking_biscuit
1215 days ago
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Every discussion I see of the OODA loop is almost always ridiculously oversimplified to the point of being useless or just plain wrong. I watched a ~2 hour interview on YouTube with a guy who worked alongside Boyd when he was developing the idea, and the way he explained it just clicked and was one of the most beautiful ideas I've seen to date. You mostly see it depicted as a circle, well forget that as it's completely meaningless in that formulation. Search up the original diagram of it and you see that it's actually a set of loops through which there are some different pathways. It starts with an observation that comes from the outside world, and proceeds to the orientation phase which is about how you interpret the situation, and from the orientation phase it can go one of three ways. In one path you aren't sure what action you need to take so you form a hypothesis upon which you act, which generates a change in the external world which then becomes a new observation and the cycle starts again. Another path is that of a reflexive or instinctual reaction in which you have no need to form a hypothesis but rather you have a heuristic upon which you act, and so you are able to act quicker, and again your action generates a change in the external world which becomes a new observation and the cycle starts again. The third and most important pathway, and they key idea/realisation, is that new observations can be generated directly from the orientation phase and this can be exploited! Why? It's a positive feedback loop that is devoid of any information from the external world, so the more iterations it goes through before finally breaking out and going through one of the paths that do interact with the external world it will be more and more detached from reality and hence the action will be less effective at moving you towards your goals. I recall the guy saying that Boyd's key insight was the exploitability of that positive feedback loop that was detached from physical reality and if one can purposely trigger it in their adversary they can make their adversary behave in a way that takes them away from their goals. To me that's such a neat observation. |
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