OODA the OODA
Jordan Hall and the mind that wins the liminal war
Thanks to the work done by others before me in the Game~B scene I was able to collect a nearly comprehensive collection of Game~B material. I’m now for the first time using that collection as a “source of study”, in this case to examine what Jordan Hall has to say about the concept of the OODA loop. I believe I was able to find every public mention of the concept.
Why being interested in this concept at all? Ponder this post by Hall on Facebook:
Once you’ve grasped the absolute centrality of OODA, you might find yourself contemplating the next question: is there a way to specify the design for a “maximum OODA” in principle?
It turns out, the answer is yes.
Moreover, it turns out that if you can follow me this far, we are on the same team. Intrinsically. We just need to improve our network architecture and tune our position in the network.
Alright then, let’s dive in. Quotes are roughly ordered chronologically.
Sovereignty
In this video (and as far as I know, nowhere else), Hall explains the link between OODA and sovereignty.
For those of you who are familiar with Boyd’s OODA loop which is four points — Observe, Orient, Decide Act — you can kind of imagine the three that I’m describing as being the blank space in between.
The three things being three components of sovereignty perception, intelligence and agency. Here’s an illustration:
Also neat to finally see that infamous word in context — sensemaking.
Situational Assessment 2017
Here are the OODA mentions in Hall’s viral medium article Situational Assessment 2017: Trump Edition.
[…] the Insurgency’s ability to read-plan-react (their “OODA loop”) is simply of a higher order than the legacy power structures
[…] the decisive decision in this conflict is whether the “new media” remain coupled to the legacy power structures (and their OODA loops) or decouple and enter into a direct conflict for “decentralized supremacy”
[…] the Insurgency has been able to leverage its decisive OODA loop advantages to turn the entire thing around and make “fake news” its own tool. How? By moving rapidly, unconventionally, in a very decentralized fashion and with complete commitment to victory.
In other words, who has the better OODA, wins.
Here Hall explains his situational assessment to Rebel Wisdom.
[...] part of the problem, of course, is that the deep state seems to have been unwisely continuing to believe that its ability to control the mass media is a powerful lever. It’s not recognizing that it’s in fact punching itself in the face by doing that, and it doesn’t realize that it hasn’t got the right OODA loop, the ability to respond quickly to changes in the game, and so it just keeps executing on old strategies. It’s like the the apocryphal Polish cavalry charging the German tanks. Cavalry used to kick ass, we get it, it’s not gonna work in this war, the war has changed.
Situational Assessment 2019
Talking about QAnon:
[…] if you can “zoom out” and perceive this as one node in an arbitrarily large network that is precisely designed to up-regulate even partial sense through iterative and extremely high velocity experimentation, you will see the underlying components of a creative OODA loop architecture that is at least one full order of magnitude more capable than the Blue Church-style architecture.
And here again, Hall explaining his assessment to Rebel Wisdom.
The insurgency, because it’s operating in the context of this decentralized medium — in a very flat graph — has what’s called an OODA loop that’s very rapid […] this is a concept from military theory or strategy: observe,orient, decide, act, and then obvious when you act you do something in in the world and then you observe again to see what happened.
And the proposition is that broadly speaking the more bandwidth your OODA loop has, which is say the more information that say you can push through the OODA loop faster […] the more a strategic and capacity you have. So, more or less, an OODA loop with higher bandwidth will outcompete an OODA loop with a lower bandwidth. And the proposition is that the insurgency is tapped into something a network decentralized collective intelligence that is running a much much faster OODA loop than the deep state.
From an Entrepreneurial Perspective
In this video they go into a lot of detail, I recommend to watch it all.
A couple of highlights:
I think this is a very very deep concept, and, frankly, I think even the practitioners in the military, who tell you that, don’t understand it well enough.
The common knowledge has is that the the fastest OODA loop wins, and this is actually not true. The better understanding is that the the OODA loop of the highest bandwidth wins, meaning that the one that can handle the most through it the fastest will win.
Jack Murphy
This is where it gets deep, and Jordan Hall addresses the aforementioned question of the “maximum OODA”.
This isn’t a war anymore about bringing force to bear. This is a war about bringing speed to bear. To be able to actually move faster. It’s called a concept in military theory called the OODA loop.
This is a war where strategy has become meta strategy, where you have to actually abstract your strategic agency into an increasingly sophisticated capacity to do strategy. Not to have a good strategy, but to actually have the meta strategy of always having a better strategy.
If you take John Boyd, and you kind of plug John Boyd into John Boyd, and then you just keep doing that […] a recursive loop on it, you get to an end point, and if you can perceive what I just said and hold it you’re now actually holding on to the thing. […] that’s no joke […] that is not a trivial thing. The notion of what happens when you try to run a recursive process of OODA loop on OODA loop is the mind — all right so I have to now step back. Here’s a problem we run into, and we’re actually at the end. Like, this is the end of the story as far as we can go.
I find that last bit remarkable. He stops in his tracks.
If you try to figure out how to build a new mind, you quickly discover that […] you can’t build the new mind with the old mind. […] That’s kind of the centerpiece of the whole thing. […] This is where, by the way, I am […] the awareness of this problem and then the endeavor to try to find a way to, let’s call it build — you might have to call it discover — a new mind that is intrinsically the kind of mind that is all these various things we talked about […].
Murphy: you don’t think that the human mind is adaptive enough to sort of overcome that problem on its own?
Hall: I do, but the the late 20th century Western civilization blue church mind is not […].
Murphy: but can we discard it and find a new one?
Hall: Yep.
This interview is from February 2019. As you can see Jack Murphy is still impressed by the proposition in March 2020.
Here’s another quote from the 2019 situational assessment:
Evolution did this by moving almost all of our adaptive specialization from the biological (hardware) layer into the cultural (software layer). And it coded (at a very deep level) a capacity to shift from “culture mode,” where we are limited to using the tools in our given cultural toolkit, into a creative “liminal mode,” where we can form collective intelligence to navigate complex reality directly and with remarkable fluidity.
My sense is that meanwhile the question of the reinventio of the liminal mind has found more intelligibility, since Jordan Hall’s collaboration with John Vervaeke, and that’s thanks to Vervaeke’s insight that sometimes you can talk about the process even though you can’t talk about the product. Namely, we need a scientifically informed ecology of psychological practices, coordinated through Dialogos.
Situational Assessment 2020
And this video is where “the thing” finds its synthesis in the collective intelligence.
Here Hall talks about 4 different categories people and organizations might find themselves in during the Covid crisis. Category 1: people being in an unstable situation. Category 2: people asking how to best be of service.
Category 3:
If you have that kind of capacity — forming collective intelligences that have an OODA loop that can operate strategically and that can perceive, sensemake and then choicemake and actuate in the pace and complexity of the environment that we are operating in, and have the best interest the whole in mind — do that.
Category 4:
The ability to have the conversation we’re having right now, to actually perceive the meta landscape that includes all the previous categories, and to be able to contemplate what might it look like, in principle, to have an OODA loop, to have sovereignty, to have a perception, sensemaking , choicemaking and actuation capacity in that context: how might we go about constructing a collective intelligence with enough strength, with a binding capacity, with an ability to move things through it, fast enough and rich enough to perceive everything that’s happening, and to make effective choices in that context, and then to percolate those effective choices down into the actuation dynamics of the real world, so as to maximally nudge the total system dynamics in an upgrading for the whole.
If you understood […] what I said right there, welcome to category four. It’s not a common place to be, but it can become very common if people are listening in the right way. […] The only language we have to describe it is something that transcends into a spiritual dimension: maximally using your cognitive and embodied capacities to communicate and perceive — it’s the rule Omega point.
It strikes me that there can only be one collective intelligence that satisfies this metadesign. If there were two, they would become allies and try to merge, or they would succumb to the one. To quote Hall’s Facebook post again:
it turns out that if you can follow me this far, we are on the same team. Intrinsically. We just need to improve our network architecture and tune our position in the network.
#oodatheooda
