Military experience: I was in the infantry for 5 years, and deployed twice. I gained an extremely high appreciation for several important things: the amount of human effort that goes into moving huge amounts of people and stuff from A to B; growth and decay in the coordination and commitment of a team; the mindblowingly-enormous gap between how a strategy looks from on high to how it looks on the ground (which mostly means looking at failure a lot).
Jayne’s macroscopic prediction paper: I am extremely libertine in how I apply these insights, but the relevant intuition here is “remember the phase volume in the future” which winds up being the key for me to think about the long term in a way that can be operationalized. As an aside, this tends to break down into two heuristics—one is to do stuff that generates options sometimes, and the other is to weigh closing options negatively when choosing what to do.
Broad history reading: most germane are those times when some conqueror seized territory, and then had to hustle back two years later when it rebelled. Or those times when one of the conquering armies switched sides or struck out on their own. Or the charge of the light brigade. There are a huge number of high level coordination and alignment failures.
The most similar established line to the way I think about this stuff is Boyd’s OODA loop, which is also my guess for where you trace the source (did I guess right?). I confess I never actually think in terms of OODA loops. Mostly I think lower-level, which is stuff like “be sure you can act fast” and “be sure you can achieve every important type of objective.”
The most similar established line to the way I think about this stuff is Boyd’s OODA loop, which is also my guess for where you trace the source (did I guess right?).
Follow-up question: do you know where your models/intuitions on this came from? If so, where?
(I ask because this answer comes closest so far to what I picture, and I’m curious whether you trace the source to the same place I do.)
Yes. The dominant ones are:
Military experience: I was in the infantry for 5 years, and deployed twice. I gained an extremely high appreciation for several important things: the amount of human effort that goes into moving huge amounts of people and stuff from A to B; growth and decay in the coordination and commitment of a team; the mindblowingly-enormous gap between how a strategy looks from on high to how it looks on the ground (which mostly means looking at failure a lot).
Jayne’s macroscopic prediction paper: I am extremely libertine in how I apply these insights, but the relevant intuition here is “remember the phase volume in the future” which winds up being the key for me to think about the long term in a way that can be operationalized. As an aside, this tends to break down into two heuristics—one is to do stuff that generates options sometimes, and the other is to weigh closing options negatively when choosing what to do.
Broad history reading: most germane are those times when some conqueror seized territory, and then had to hustle back two years later when it rebelled. Or those times when one of the conquering armies switched sides or struck out on their own. Or the charge of the light brigade. There are a huge number of high level coordination and alignment failures.
The most similar established line to the way I think about this stuff is Boyd’s OODA loop, which is also my guess for where you trace the source (did I guess right?). I confess I never actually think in terms of OODA loops. Mostly I think lower-level, which is stuff like “be sure you can act fast” and “be sure you can achieve every important type of objective.”
Yup, exactly.