[HN Gopher] OODA Loop
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OODA Loop
Author : yehudabrick
Score : 106 points
Date : 2023-02-21 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| KineticLensman wrote:
| The idea of getting inside an enemy's decision loop means that
| you are iterating OODA faster than they are.
|
| OODA is sometimes paraphrased by cynics as 'Observe, Overreact,
| Deny, Apologise'.
| samatman wrote:
| Or by barbarians as "Observe, Orie--" "TIMING!"
| hosh wrote:
| Iterating OODA faster is not the same as getting inside the
| adversary's OODA loop. That's a common misconception. It's more
| that, you are able to drive the adversary's OODA loop so that
| they start doing things in a way you control. Sometimes that
| means iterating faster, but if you are not controlling the
| adversary's OODA loop, you are more likely to be "observe,
| overreact, deny, apologise", just doing it faster. That's
| something you should be doing to the adversary, rather than
| something you yourself should be doing.
|
| For example, a friend told me this story. He doesn't know OODA
| as a formalism, but he knows human nature and practices martial
| art. He was at a party and some dude hits on his girlfriend and
| then challenges him to a first person shooter game. He told me,
| he doesn't have great reflexes, but he knew how people behave
| and act, and so he was able to dictate the entire engagement.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Colonel John Boyd - briefings and personal papers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34153730 - Dec 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _John Boyd_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33766979 -
| Nov 2022 (1 comment)
|
| _Boyd 's Management Model_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28660415 - Sept 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _Boyd 's Law of Iteration (2007)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28218194 - Aug 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate
| Decisions_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26465766 -
| March 2021 (93 comments)
|
| _The OODA Loop and the Half-Beat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601681 - March 2020 (31
| comments)
|
| _Ask HN: How do you apply Boyd 's OODA Loop in your life?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16447690 - Feb 2018 (10
| comments)
|
| _How winners win: John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious
| organizations_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16179009 -
| Jan 2018 (1 comment)
|
| _"Patterns of Conflict" - a techno-industrial "Art of War"
| (1976) [pdf]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063017 -
| Feb 2015 (4 comments)
|
| _John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669129 - Nov 2013 (29
| comments)
| _glass wrote:
| This reminds of the concept of D.I.E. that we use in the social
| sciences, describe, interpret, and evaluate. It is important to
| separate the stages clearly, because if you interpret while
| describing, this taints your observations. Evaluate can be seen
| as a precursor to action, because it is from the implications
| where science then moves forward.
| hosh wrote:
| OODA is a lot more than that. Since it is something developed
| for adversarial interactions, you're also talking about
| disrupting or overwhelming the adversary's OODA. Or another way
| is feeding the OODA bad intel (tainting their observations),
| and then stepping up the tempo so that they are making worse
| decisions faster. Another is taking advantage of the
| adversary's "frame" (the orientation) and using that to drive
| the adversary into diverging from reality. (Sun Tzu talks about
| direct and indirect actions for that).
|
| There's also a version of OODA where things become intuitive
| and there are shortcuts within OODA as well.
| _glass wrote:
| Oh wow, cool. Thanks for the explanation. This is very
| stimulating as a concept, I will dig deeper then. Actually,
| this can be quite productive as a research strategy.
| philip1209 wrote:
| I have fond memories of my Krav Maga instructor casually saying
| "reset their OODA loop" in place of "punch them in the face"
| during lessons.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Casually a trained badass (or a sufficiently unhinged person)
| will ignore that punch and proceed to destroy you. So unless
| you're a super trained boxer and can knock out everyone in one,
| it's a waste of time.
|
| You lost the element of surprise and tempo. If you want to do
| some damage, do it, not rely on the opponent obliging or
| complying.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Certainly it's better to punch them than not punch them. Many
| many times overwhelming violence is sufficient to win a
| fight. Trained people might not be as phased, true.
| varjag wrote:
| _Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth_ -
| Mike Tyson
| lolbert3 wrote:
| [dead]
| abhiyerra wrote:
| I found Science, Strategy, and War a great deep dive of the OODA
| Loop.
|
| https://amzn.to/3IKx77A
| Entwickler wrote:
| LazerPig gives a pretty good (albeit irreverent) take on John
| Boyd... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZDfdCj61dY
| barking_biscuit wrote:
| 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.
| rwc wrote:
| Can you share the YouTube video?
| vault wrote:
| maybe it's this one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdK4y6O-llE
| badrabbit wrote:
| The thing about OODA is, everyone needs to be onboard.
|
| I've had higher upd override my decision and go "nah,we're just
| gonna act, not gonna let you observe or orient" basically as well
| as peers thay go around you and take actions that prevent your
| observe+orient attempts.
|
| It is intuitive to just act.
|
| I work in infosec for context. One of the biggest non-technical
| issues I have is convincing people to ignore their intuition.
| Especially technical people who don't do IR. Like maybe you spent
| 50 years as a ninja coder or netadmin but I am still gonna want
| the threat actor loose until I have some idea of their intent or
| scope of compromise unless I have reason to believe they're
| acting on their objectives.
|
| Actual military brass get this, you need to understand the
| situation before you can react. That's how ambushes happen or you
| get flanked.
| redivysoft wrote:
| "Adapt, react, readapt, act"
| WalterBright wrote:
| Boyd's biography is a great read:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/031...
|
| about a very unconventional man.
| rcarr wrote:
| For me, OODA really clicked when I mapped it to the Weinberg-
| Satir Interaction Model:
|
| Observe -> Intake
|
| Orient -> Meaning
|
| Decide -> Significance
|
| Act -> Response
|
| Highly recommend checking out the work of Gerald Weinberg and
| Virginia Satir. HN people will probably appreciate Weinberg more
| than Satir as Weinberg was a programmer for NASA back in the day
| so his books are aimed at technical types. People from an arts
| background will prefer Satir who was one of the all time great
| counsellors/therapists.
|
| https://stevenmsmith.com/AONW/Satir%20Interaction%20Model.pd...
| dingosity wrote:
| I fear the Wikipedia article offers only the slightest of
| overviews of a surprisingly deep subject. Don't get me wrong,
| it's a great place to start.
|
| But I would suggest also reading the related "Patterns of
| Conflict" Wikipedia page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_Conflict
|
| Which references this 1986 version of the presentation:
| https://www.ausairpower.net/JRB/poc.pdf
|
| I met John Boyd at Eglin when I was a kid, and later in the 80s
| when I was a Marine. Dude was a complete nut. But I mean that as
| a compliment. Preaching a brand of war-fighting at odds with the
| dominant narrative, I would not have been surprised to see Apple
| feature his image in a "think different" commercial.
|
| The Air Force was slow to warm up to Boyd (and the OODA Loop) --
| but the Marines were ready to hear something new. Here's a page
| with some decent info, including a link to a short video where
| John Schmitt, Van Riper and (my old boss) Al Gray discuss the
| "intellectual renaissance" in how they thought about war-
| fighting. If you're not a military history nut, the 5 minute
| video is good to give you an idea for how "novel" ideas permeated
| the US military in the 70s and 80s. You don't _HAVE_ to be an Air
| Force pilot or Marine to make use of the intellectual
| underpinnings of Boyd 's "Patterns of Conflict." But you _MAY_
| miss out on some critical detail if the only thing you read is
| about the more-generic, not-specific-to-the-military OODA loop.
|
| Which is to say... even if you're not inclined to study military
| history or operations, you may get some decent context on the
| formation of the OODA loop by investigating the environment in
| which it arose. "Maneuver Warfare" is much more than the OODA
| loop, but it was definitely influenced by Boyd's E-M Theory,
| Patterns of Conflict and the OODA loop.
|
| Here... the videos on this page total just over 10 minutes. Worth
| a watch. https://grc-
| usmcu.libguides.com/pme/qpme/history-of-mcdp-maneuver-
| warfare/context-background
|
| And... the link to the full video seems to be broken, so here's
| the direct YouTube link if you're hip:
| https://youtu.be/RL4__NVYByw
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Compare also PDCA [1] which is used more by civilians.
|
| Every time people rediscover rapid iteration in tight feedback
| loops, and every time so far it's gotten watered down to nothing
| again by people who get the rituals, but don't quite grok the
| underlying concept. [2]
|
| On the other hand, you could do practically any sort of ritual or
| even just laze around in bed: if you understand the underlying
| concept, you'll still get decent results. [3]
|
| see also: [4] for a short bit on OODA when actually flying an
| aircraft.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
|
| [3] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html See eg. Tom Knight
| and the Lisp Machine ;-)
|
| [4] https://youtu.be/OCFMX5z-ed4?t=940 (starting 15:40) Art of
| the kill, Pete "Boomer" Bonanni
| Terretta wrote:
| PDCA is entirely unrelated to OODA. There are a bunch of
| graphics that confuse people into thinking they're related, by
| showing O-O-D-A-> in a circle. That's dead wrong.
|
| OODA is all about feedback mechanisms:
|
| https://co2partners.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/ooda.png
|
| So any correspondence is a misunderstanding:
|
| https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f16206_0206cf0c618a47b1ab...
|
| You will _not_ achieve the same results with an iteration.
|
| You will only achieve similar results with "double loop"
| learning and informed intuition driven actions that skip the
| "decide" step.
| cjmb wrote:
| I highly recommend reading Boyd's transcript of a talk he gave in
| 1989 instead of the wiki on this stuff:
| https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5497331ae4b0148a6141b...
|
| It will resonate with any builders in the HN audience and give a
| ton of context behind the thinking here.
|
| > You know, some people like to be regarded as being an analyst.
| They think that's a term of endearment. I treat it as a personal
| insult if somebody calls me an analyst. A personal insult. If
| you've read the last paragraph, I've showed there are two things
| you have to be able to do: analyze and synthesize. Analysis and
| synthesis. And if you can do that in many different areas,
| tactics, strategies, goals, unifying theme, you can run
| businesses, you can do any goddamn thing you want.
|
| I find his discussion of Clausewitz's "friction" and the idea of
| speed as always being relative to one's adversary incredibly
| useful, even for my day to day work in Tech.
| taeric wrote:
| Would be amazing if that talk is available as a recording
| somewhere. I was several pages in before I looked at how big
| the transrcipt is. Will have to come back to it. Huge thanks
| for posting it!
| hencq wrote:
| Some Googling led me to this: https://geekboss.com/blog/boyd-
| patterns-of-conflict It does have 4 youtube videos that seem
| to be of a presentation he gave, though I don't think it's
| the same one as the transcript (apologies, I haven't watched
| them yet, only briefly skipped through them). They are a bit
| potato quality, but might still be of use.
| taeric wrote:
| My apologies on having you do the googling for me! Huge
| thanks!
| notShabu wrote:
| FYI vgr of Ribbonfarm has a significant body of work expanding on
| the OODA loop, including a book "Tempo".
|
| https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-use-and-misuse-of-the-oo...
|
| If I were to summarize it to a 5 year old I'd use the analogy of
| rhythm games like taiko drum master. Once you make a mistake your
| timing is thrown completely off and everything going forward is
| wrong unless you can get your timing back. OODA is way of
| thinking about things to help you "get into the rhythm" of a
| situation faster than an opponent.
| NoraCodes wrote:
| I always find formalized metacognitive tools like this very
| interesting. Having ingrained "memory items" that can be called
| on as if they were instinctual requires a huge training
| investment, and for highly dangerous situations the tradeoff of
| time spent to value is much clearer than for, say, software
| engineers. That said, having the _right_ metacognitive tools
| deeply embedded in one 's thought pattern might still be very
| valuable for those of us that fly desks rather than jets!
| meltyness wrote:
| This is not untrue, but a more applicable interpretation of
| this conceptual framework might go as follows:
|
| In an AAR[0] operators explain risks, causes, and limitations
| of the system. This provides a formal structured language for
| describing how, precisely, supporting systems can be improved
| and how they impact all specific aspects of operator
| interaction.
|
| Since the operator is viewed simply as a networked control-
| system in this case, the cognitive path from structure,
| supporting physical system, and then physical quantities
| needing improvement is unmistakably clear, as is required in
| successful planning, acquisitions, operations, and
| maintenance.[1]
|
| Essentially it makes subjective experience concrete, and is
| prophylactic against bikeshedding/blame-gaming.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-action_review
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/ir0FAa8P2MU?t=1340
| getpost wrote:
| Tangentially, Taleb tweeted a nice quote yesterday, "You don't do
| well by trying to be right; it is impossible for humans. You do
| well by figuring out when you're wrong faster than others do."
|
| https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1627765781168619520
| john-tells-all wrote:
| Strongly agree. We need to put out a constant stream of low-
| quality products, and iterate quickly to achieve our goals.
|
| I used to do the opposite: write high-quality well-tested code,
| but very often the results weren't useful to the business by
| the time I was done. It would have been much better to produce
| a couple "sketches" of the feature first, then the business
| could kill or refine it as they want. Everyone wins!
|
| (disclaimer: writing a book, featuring feedback loops)
| wruza wrote:
| Isn't most of our business code just glue, forms and api? I
| appreciate the quick way, but also believe that our tools at
| hand have a plenty of room to improve. Sometimes I drop a
| project because it induces "ah, here we go again" mood. Quick
| mudballs that could be bricks that could be panels, but
| there's nowhere to order them. The worst part is when the
| idea actually works so that mudball becomes your home.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| That is quite nuanced. It is good to be clear when you are
| building a POC or a production ready feature. Often the POC
| becomes the POS. But https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.p
| hp/2730:_Code_Lifesp...
| JohnBooty wrote:
| This is wack advice.
|
| There's value in shipping an MVP (or multiple MVPs) fast, sure.
| Cull the failures and iterate the successes. Better than trying
| to achieve perfection with a forever-delayed product that never
| ships.
|
| But even the sloppiest, most minimal MVP has to get _something_
| extremely right. You need to solve some problem for the user in
| ways that others haven 't.
|
| If you don't get things right enough, you've just trashed your
| entire brand. Game over.
|
| And sometimes, getting things "right" is literally your entire
| unique selling point. Look at Apple nailing the iPod's features
| in ways that its predecessors didn't. Look at Tesla nailing
| their vehicles' features in ways that its predecessors didn't.
| Etc.
| ouid wrote:
| It is not impossible for humans to be right. This is an idiotic
| position.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Taleb loves an idiotic aphorism.
| getpost wrote:
| I have no idea what Taleb actually means, but to the extent
| it isn't dramatic rhetoric, I imagine his claim is based on
| the idea that humans can never be completely right, due to
| the limits of our perception and memory. The best we can hope
| for is to be right enough to survive until the next iteration
| of our learning process.
| zoenolan wrote:
| Some previous discussions
|
| The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate
| Decisions (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26465766
|
| The OODA Loop and the Half-Beat (2020)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601681
|
| Ask HN: How do you apply Boyd's OODA Loop in your life? (2018)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16447690
| grrdotcloud wrote:
| I teach the OODA loop in Martial Arts. Watching the pattern
| develop in my child was fascinating.
|
| First object permanence, then two and three and eventually four
| dimensional tracking. Throwing is easy. Catching tool effort and
| developing these skills. I recall him reaching blindly at objects
| as he could recall their position in space, orient his body, and
| grab them without looking.
|
| Having him catch Frisbees and racquetballs at 2 years gave me
| insight into what skill and observational development was
| required. At some point he was able to transition between
| projecting the path of a rolling object vs a thrown object.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I built a startup around 2005 based on a variation of OODA that I
| independently devised before I learned of it. Unfortunately the
| critical hardware features I needed weren't caught up yet and it
| didn't work out, but the competitors to this day still don't have
| feature parity. Thinking in the framework of feedback loops is
| super powerful.
| jph wrote:
| I teach OODA loop ideas to software teams, and have open source
| notes here: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ooda-loop
| lolbert3 wrote:
| [dead]
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