OODA Loops

(so far this thing is still in a draft state. mostly organizing my notes from this thread on ooda loops but stuck figuring out how to present it.) 

What is an OODA Loop? (explained with games)

OODA stands for; Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

There can be several ooda loops and they can be nested and linked.

The game you're playing is a big ooda loop. Your team and the opposing team are each running a sub-loop, and your role in your team is a smaller sub-loop. Your teammates and opponents are also running their own loops.

A basic understanding of ooda loops allows you to disrupt your opponents ooda loops through bluffs, playing with tempo, etc. If your ooda loops are faster, then you can counter your opponents attempts at disrupting your own loops. If your team is tight (good communication—i.e. fast and relevant—and has a solid game plan) then you can outdo the opposing team.

A more masterful understanding of ooda loops will allow you to fix bugs in your own ooda loops.

A meta-understanding will allow you to understand frames and frame control, and help you choose better games.

(the map is not the territory and my understanding of this model is quite fuzzy. all the stages are connected, and so are the levels. and personally i have a lot weighing on the orientation step)

Observe (and how orient feeds into it)

What you see and remember is what you care about. our mind subconsciously filters and organizes all the information that we see; highlighting what we find important and ignoring/suppressing the rest.

• If I show you a bunch of rocks you will barely be able to differentiate them unless you were a geologist. 
• If you show advanced chess players a board then they will group the pieces together in a certain way, they can memorize chess positions much better than the average player only if its from a real/possible game, if its a fake game then their memory drops
  • i don't remember exactly where i got this from, but i think it was either from moonwalking with einstien (book on memory competitions) or Peak (book on peak performance from the founder of the science of expertise). google returns discussions on chess and i won't waste time on citation rabbit holes
• What you remember from an experience is what you consider meaningful and important, everything else you will ignore and forget

Now there are a few ways that observation can get disrupted. Maybe your opponent is bluffing, maybe you're acting on outdated info, or maybe you are drunk, or too emotional to look at things clearly, or you're focused on the wrong things. (todo: add more examples here)

Religions and ideologies often have a double bind trap. If you question or doubt it, then that is something that an evil person would do, and so you avoid questioning it. e.g. this religion is real and your doubts are an act from the devil, or you are a traitor to the revolution.

Observe both where you are, and where you want to go.

there's a feeling when I am cleaning where my motivation is very simple I simply: 

• perceive the scene 
• envision how I'd like it to be
• do whatever I feel like to close that gap 

there's no to-do list, there's just a world and my desires

@Malcolm_Ocean (unironically believe is worth reflecting on this)

Failure mode: You don't need more data, you need to orient to it. searching for more and more data will make your loop slower and slower, causing you to act on outdated 

Do you have full freedom in observation?

When we're in school, our observation is limited to whatever your teacher says on the sole basis that the teacher said it or it's in a book. Your observation is limited to whatever authority tells you. You can argue that the internet has opened up and leveled the playing field, and this is true to some degree, however in spite of the internet many people still prefer "official" sources.

Ask yourself:

• am i free to observe things directly myself?
  • not filtered secondhand through someone else, who may have missed something unintentionally, or worse is intentionally selling you a narrative
• am i free to listen to everyone?
  • you may decide to ignore certain groups of people for whatever reason, but is it your conscious decision, or is someone telling you they are bad/untrustworthy?
• am i free to consider all possible scenarios, good and bad?
  • this one is usually more of a psychological barrier.
  • sometimes people don't allow themselves consider good scenarios they only focus on what could go wrong. ask yourself, what if something good happens? what about surprisingly good, beyond your expectations? what is the best possible thing that could happen
  • sometimes the opposite is true. people dread and fear considering the bad scenarios. but you need to consider it so you can have a plan of how to deal with it

When listening to a secondhand source (i.e. not directly witnessing things yourself) then you should apply some critical thinking to it. Why are they telling me this? Why are they telling me this now of all times? What if they're wrong? (see the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia

Orient

Personally i find this the most important piece of the puzzle, and by far the one i've had the most trouble with. a lot of my ideas are centered on this step. and i'm willing to bet that this is the step most people have the most trouble with. it is a very fuzzy and all encompassing idea to my dismay 😬

In terms of a game, your orientation encompasses:

• your role in the game
• what you think your opponent is doing (e.g. are they attacking or just bluffing)
• your overall experiences with the game

in terms of life your orientation encompasses:

• what games you're playing and your roles in them
  • each game is its own ooda loop, and they can interact and conflict with each other
• your entire life experiences and circumstances
• your worldview
• your intentions
• your understanding of other people's intentions

Being unable to make a decision is often a problem in orientation, not a problem with decision making. If you know what game your playing, what your role is, can observe rapidly freely and accurately,  and know what your priorities are, then decisions are much easier if not automatic.

If you can freely observe the world (ideally directly for yourself, not filtered secondhand through any intermediary) then more observation/data will not help you. Instead, being able to orient to those observations is whats needed—through changing plans, changing views, etc. information that you do not act on is wasted.

Oftentimes, there are emotional blocks to re-orienting. You might not want to admit you were wrong, maybe you have invested a lot and now have sunk cost fallacy, maybe the change you need will be hard in some way. but you need to reorient. You likely already know what you need to do but you refuse to accept it. Asking for advice only confirms what you know.

Where possible, exclusively follow what you think and believe is right. If you follow someone else then you'll resent them if the plans fail, and feel powerless if the plan goes right, having to rely on them and not sharpening yourself. If you exclusively follow yourself, then being wrong is a chance to learn, and being right brings you even more pride and joy.

(side note: i believe the best way to learn is through limit testing; a concept i picked up from grinding games. most people play too passively, instead being more aggressive shows you where you can push harder and where your limits are. once you find your limits you can figure out a way to overcome them. the education system does not do this and this is a failure on their part, over-achieving students are under-stimulated, and under-achieving students are stressed out. worse still they stigmatize failure by limiting the times and number of tests and make you "stay behind" a year, an entire fucking year.)

bold claims (maybe original?)

• nihilism is an inability to orient in life
  • nothing is meanigful = help i can't orient. i've suffered so much pain my ooda loop is broken
• meditation, prayer, focusing (gendlin) aka felt-sense resonance, etc. are all forms of orientating
• comedy is reorientation. the setup leads you to orientation1, and the punchline switches you to orientation2
• emotions and felt-senses are orientations, and emotional updates (usually crying or laughing) / finding resonance are forms of reorientation

Decisions

Well, i actually think that this one is pretty much automatic if you can observe and orient quickly and well.

The most important thing about decisions is being able to take them quickly:

People sometimes ask me the hardest decision I've made as a manager. My hot take is that actually ~no particular call is too hard. What's hard (in a fast growing org) is what I think of as the "decision firehose"—life comes at you too fast to even make all the easy calls well.

thread by Ben Kuhn.  Worth a read

Not being able to decide is sometimes a problem in orientation. You don't know your priorities. Orient first and deciding will fix itself (I suggest Gendlin's focusing if you're struggling with orientation and decision making)

Bedouin's ass

There's a parable of a bedouin's donkey; there is a donkey in the desert that is starving and thirsty. it finds itself exactly in the middle between a pile of food to its left, and water to its right. it stands in the middle unable to decide whether it should go quench its thirst first, or eat to regain strength. unable to make a decision the donkey stays in the middle until it dies.

Don't be an ass. Any decision is better than no decision.

Decide by coin toss

If you can't decide, i personally use a coin toss to pick things. once you toss it you find yourself hoping for a certain side to pop up. go with that choice. if not go with whatever comes up.

Apparently the authors of freakanomics did one such experiment at scale (asking strangers online to make life decisions based on a coin toss) and from what i recall the results were positive. The fact that you're asking a question (e.g. whether or not to break up or quit your job) reveals information about the situation (you're thinking about it because the relationship or job is not that good, and if it were good you wouldn't be thinking about it)

Act

(i actually did not realize i forgot to write this section lmao, but i don't have much to say here really)

if you've decided on something go do it.

if you repeatedly fail at it, then you will get frustrated and depressed. Ted K. has a detailed description on what happens to animals in zoos from not being able to do the power process (unrelated to the ooda loop, but it rhymes) and how that applies to modern humans

the whitepill here is that this step is feeds back into the start of the loop. so its not the end of the world if you fail, you will grow from it

Conversations are mutual OODA loops

Conversations are a mutual ooda loop.

People don't say things at random, there is a reason that they're saying it. Maybe its a direct observation that they're commenting on, or maybe they're carrying a feeling that they want to express. —its actually quite fun to scroll social media and ask why did they choose to say that? what is the feeling/orientation (e.g. i'm horny) that drove them?

A common failure mode in conversation is to talk to the speech act and not the underlying feeling/orientation. No amount of data will convince someone that the feelings and experiences driving their worldview is wrong.

Another failure mode is to have mismatched orientations. e.g. a parent wants safety/security/stability for their child, whereas the child wants fun and glory. this leads to arguments of "you don't understand me!" or "you don't care about me!" They're oriented to very different things. The only thing in common is the tongue, not the underlying orientation/worldview.

Mismatched orientations can be intentional and malicious as we'll discuss in frame control and creepiness.

If you want to be a really good conversation partner then get in your partners ooda loop. Talk to the "i'm horny", not the speech act. Listen to all of their body language and intentions. Why did they choose to say that? What world view are they in? Talk to the "I'm horny" nudge them by asking questions and give them space to reoirent do not force an immediate response.

(didn't notice that i wrote talk to the "i'm horny" twice, but it is in fact that important so i'm keeping it)

(this also applies to debates, but they're more hostile and probably harder to do because people have their egos on the line. you can make people change their minds by disrupting their ooda loops)

the goal of a conversation (and most activity) is mutual enjoyment

Flirting and Creepiness

Flirting is also a mutual ooda loop. This is why it's super contextual and there's no script that will work. You need to ooda.

You observe your flirting partner's body language and speech, look for signs of attraction or discomfort, see if they're orienting to you as a friendly interaction or a romantic one, decide whether to escalate your flirting or back off, and based on that you take an action.

Keeping plausible deniability and escalating your flirting is good for both parties as it prevents disrupting the bigger ooda loops/games that you're interacting in. (e.g. you're classmates/coworkers/firends/etc./whatever.) If you're seeing a positive reaction or ambiguity you can escalate to something slightly more explicit, if there's a negative reaction you can apologize and back off no problem.

on creepiness

As for creeps, well they are manipulative and attempt to disrupt your orientation. its identical to a hostile act of frame control. White Knights, Pick Me's and simps all try to do/present good things while manipulating you into sex. they try to hijack your orientation into thinking they're a good person, and then try to (emotionally) blackmail you into reciprocating by getting angry or withdrawing whatever shit they're giving.

The difference between ambiguous flirting and creepiness is the ability to back off and not be a dick about being rejected.

As for guys afraid of being creeps. Well, its partly because they lack the skill to ooda loop conversationally. They don't know when they should back off and are terrified of being a creep or being accused of something*. One time, i was flirting with a girl and she wasn't responding to it, so I asked her if she was uncomfortable with it and she said that she had a bf, ok cool I apologized and was more friendly instead of flirty. A few months later she messages me again and thanks me for asking and backing off because her friends have problems with creeps pressuring them too much.

*(yes there are cases of false accusations. but they are incredibly rare, and if you have some basic social skills you should be able to spot this from a mile away. not to be a dick, but crazy people usually tell you they're crazy—believe them the first time. and its relatively easy to differentiate between visionary or at least harmless crazy and suicidal will also ruin your life because they have nothing to lose kind of crazy.)

The other issue guys afraid of being creeps have is an unclear orientation with their hornieness/sexuality. Not as in a am i gay or straight kinda thing, but rather on some level they believe that sex or their horniness is bad in some way. Maybe they believe its a sin or maybe they have such low self esteem that they think they're repulsive and assume that flirting inflicts psychic damage on their partners, or maybe they're conflicted between a madonna/whore dichotomy or some shit.

In this case they need either to find a healthy outlet for their hornieness (e.g. marriage for those who think its a sin) or some therapy. bruh horniness is natural and good

Frames and Frame Control

A Frame is a game that you're playing.

e.g. is this a business interaction? where you focus on making money and maintaining formality and obligations. or is this a playful improv scene about a business meeting where you focus on playing and acting out a scene. or is this a flirty interaction (discussed above). 

What norms and assumptions are there? What are we focusing on? What is our goal?

Frame Control is when you get the victim playing one game, while the attacker plays another game manipulating his victim.

Creepiness is one (somewhat poor) example of frame control. the more subtle ones will drive you insane after prolonged exposure

(I'm mostly going to be quoting Aella here because her post on frame control is just *chefs kiss*)

When I mention my dad’s abuse, I usually mention salient things – physical pain, insults, and controlling behavior. These are “clearly bad” – if I tell that he you often told me I was lazy and would fail horribly at life once I left home, you know it’s bad, because it’s concrete, easy to imagine and obviously unkind. But this wasn’t the worst of the abuse; the most terrible parts were extraordinarily hard to understand or describe.

In his world, I felt insane – I couldn’t tell what was real, who was at fault, or why my heart hurt so much. My sense of clarity around my own intentions crumbled; everything I thought or did might have seemed good on the surface, but that goodness became just a disguise for my true, darker intentions – all helpfully revealed to me by my dad. And none of it was salient or concrete or easily understandable; I remember my mom once telling me, “I can’t describe what this is like to other people. The individual things seem so silly, I can’t put the important thing into words.” 

...

• Debate: Trying to demonstrate, through reason and facts, how their box is better (“No, sex isn’t about power, it’s about sex, here’s a study!”)
• Recommendation: Showing that the box they’re in has been really good for them (“Viewing my body tension as actually about childhood trauma really cleared things up”)
• Pressure: Holding social alliance with them as conditional on them joining you in your box (“I only really respect people who believe all lives matter”)
• Rescue: Offering up their box as the solution for an issue you have (“Want to escape your suffering? Become aware of no-self”)
• Aggression: Trying to push you into their box (“You’re a piece of shit for denying climate change, you’re the reason we’re all going to die”)

These are all attempts to control your frame, but none of these is what I mean by frame control. These techniques can be manipulative or abusive, but they’re also broadcast clearly; in a similar way to how a man catcalling on a busy street alerts both the target and everyone else to their presence. It’s annoying, but clearly legible. It’s easy for you and everyone around you to say to each other, “Ah, that person wants something from you” and move on with your day.

No; frame control is the “man doesn’t announce his presence, he just stalks you silently” of the communication world. It’s when you end up in the other person’s box without knowing that it happened. It’s not violence you can feel, or coaxing you can reason with; it’s a slow build of their frame around you until you don’t remember what your box ever looked like. Frame control is a quiet subversion of your agency; instead of offering up their frame for you to consider, they pull you in without consent, into a world you probably would never have endorsed from the outside.

Frame control often results in doubt, denial, or suppression of your own feelings, as the frame controller has you in their frame and exerts a huge amount of energy to keep you there. Your own experience is warped to align with that of the frame controller, even (especially?) when this comes at cost to you.

For a very simple, obvious example (not all of them are so obvious!), my dad would sometimes command obedience in things that were very painful to obey (e.g., permanently ending all contact with my best friend). This made me angry, but his frame treated my anger as a sign that I was sinful and corrupt, and I thus experienced my anger as a failure on my part. I would get angry, and then feel guilty for being angry, and spend a huge amount of effort suppressing the anger and trying to convince myself I felt grateful for how much effort my dad was putting into his parenting. 

last two paragraphs sound a lot like a hostile disruption of an ooda loop

Frame controllers, typically after they get a good foothold, also can determine the standard by which you measure what is good. Instead of just replicating good behavior, they also tell you what good behavior is, e.g. “correcting your sins is good” or “not giving what you want is good for you.”

targeting and disrupting your orientation

Second point is a doozy, and it’s that you can’t look at intent when diagnosing frame control. As in, “what do they mean to do” should be held separate from “what are the effects of what they’re doing” – which I know is counter to almost every good lesson about engaging with people charitably. 

Frame control is an effect; very often, people who frame control will not be aware that this is what they’re doing, and have extensive reasoning to rationalize their behavior that they themselves believe. If you are close to a frame controller and squinting at them to figure out “are they hiding intent to control me,” you often will find the answer is “no.” 

not sure how to interpret these two paragraphs but they are right and important (then again, not everythig needs to fit in a framework no need to trap ourselves in our own loops :p)

I literally want to put 99% of the post here and add annotations but i will refrain from doing that. Hopefully, if my writing is worth its salt you should be able to see how frame control and ooda loops overlap, if not DM me on twitter or mastodon and i will continue annotating it.

Aella's post on frame control, one of the best and most important pieces of writing you will read. she has more examples of frame control and how to handle it. seriously, go read this post

 (links are the same post, but different comment sections)

• lesswrong
• substack
• knowingless

Groups, narratives, and roles

(needs to be fleshed out a bit still a stub. also might be better with different examples)

Groups have two central parts.

1. a common orientation. i.e. shared goals and beliefs
2. an interface. i.e. they interact with each other

as members of a group we see x, we collectively decide its good/bad, we orient based on our roles 

e.g. stereotypical men should defend women -> if there's a threat the men go fight it and the women run/hide

Once you identify the roles people are playing and how they interlock with each other and the incentives keeping them there, you can disrupt the group. You can redefine the roles that people have. if youre this type of person / part of this group then you should do x. this is usually stated more positively: 

• this type of person does x
• group members do x 

I think you can also reverse this to get more cohesive groups. Focus on aligning people with a common goal and shared beliefs (honesty is the best policy here, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be—and it will be destroyed by the truth sooner or later), focus on giving people clear but adaptive roles and make sure that these roles do not get hijacked either intentionally by malicious actors, or unintentionally by people trying to do too much or policing each other. the roles and maybe the entire group will need to be redefined as things change sooner or later.
 

History of the ooda loop (for nerds mainly)

The OODA Loop is an abstract framework, but it originated from the very practical example of fighter pilot combat. As a Colonel in the US Air Force, Boyd sought to understand why his F-86 fighter pilots had fared so well against MiG fighters in the Korean War. Through his observations, Boyd determined that 1) F-86 planes gave pilots a wider field of vision than MiG planes, and 2) the F-86 plane’s hydraulic controls allowed for quicker maneuvering than the MiG plane.1 From these two technical observations, Boyd articulated a general framework explaining how pilots could gain a competitive advantage over their adversaries in the context of ‘fast-moving conflict.’⁷ This initial analysis laid the groundwork for the OODA Loop as it is known today.

quote from the decision lab and their citation in case you want to fact-check:

Vagle, J.L. (2016). Tightening the OODA Loop: Police Militarization, Race, and Algorithmic Surveillance, 22 MICH. J. RACE & L. 101. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol22/iss1/4?utm_source=repository.law.umich.edu%2Fmjrl%2Fvol22%2Fiss1%2F4&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages
 

inspiration

Honestly, I did not understand nor care about ooda loops until i watched this video analyzing a 2 minute play in League of Legends over the span of 30 minutes (yes the play is that complicated). I used to think that ooda loops were useless pedantry until I watched this video and ooda loops clicked for me (leaving it as an exercise to the reader hehe) 

and the more i thought about ooda loops the more other things made sense.