Mysticism in John Boyd's OODA Loop →
“Despite appearances, OODA is more Sun Tzu than feedback control block diagram. More Musashi than computer science flowchart. In fact, interpreted through those narrowly technical lenses, it can appear to be a clunky and impoverished model of human decision-making.
To get to the essence of OODA you have to take the apparently mystical element seriously.
You have to try to make sense of the cryptic utterances in OODA culture, such as “you must get inside the tempo of your adversary” or “fight the enemy, not the terrain.” There are layers of meaning to peel back there. As my martial artist friend Ho-Sheng Hsiao would say, the OODA loop is more a kata than a recipe.
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Most recently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover, during a conversation with a chemist friend of mine at UCLA, that he’d been sort of rediscovering certain ideas I’d classify as “Boydian” through his study of how certain virus RNA molecules fold onto themselves. That conversation helped me connect some crucial dots that I’ll talk about another day. Hint about the connection: the word unfolding occurs a few times in the OODA diagram; there is a certain sense in which OODA “unfolding” is related to protein folding.
With that cryptic teaser, I’ll leave you to go ponder the OODA Mandala on your own.”
- Venkatesh Rao
