He’s really interesting in that he worked on a mix of problems and areas with many different levels of complexity and rigor.
Notably, while he’s usually talked about in terms of military strategy, he did some excellent work in physics that’s fundamentally sound and still used in civilian and military aviation today:
He was a skilled fighter pilot, so he was able to both learn theory and convert into tactile performance.
Then, later, he explored challenges in organizational structures, bureaucracy, decision making, corruption, consensus, creativity, inventing, things like that.
There’s a good biography on him called “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War”—and then there’s a variety of briefings, papers, and presentations he made floating around online. I went through a phase of studying them all; there’s some gems there.
Notably, his “OODA” loop is often incorrectly summarized as a linear process but he defined it like this —
I think the most interesting part of it is under-discussed — the “Implicit Guidance and Control” aspect, where people can get into cycles of Observe/Act/Observe/Act rapidly without needing to intentionally orient themselves or formally make a decision.
Since he comes at it from a different mix of backgrounds with a different mix of ability to do formal mathematics or not, he provides a lot of insights. Some of his takeaways seem spot-on, but more interesting are the ways he can prime thinking on topics like these. I think you and he were probably interested in some similar veins of thought, so it might produce useful insights to dive in a bit.
I’ve read some of his stuff on strategy. It seemed like there were a lot of interesting insights in there, but it was all presented in the sort of way that sounds sciency to non-science-people but didn’t really communicate a proper model. If someone knows of or could write a good explanation of the models underlying his ideas, I’d be very interested to read that.
I think you’d probably like the work of John Boyd:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)
He’s really interesting in that he worked on a mix of problems and areas with many different levels of complexity and rigor.
Notably, while he’s usually talked about in terms of military strategy, he did some excellent work in physics that’s fundamentally sound and still used in civilian and military aviation today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy%E2%80%93maneuverability_theory
He was a skilled fighter pilot, so he was able to both learn theory and convert into tactile performance.
Then, later, he explored challenges in organizational structures, bureaucracy, decision making, corruption, consensus, creativity, inventing, things like that.
There’s a good biography on him called “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War”—and then there’s a variety of briefings, papers, and presentations he made floating around online. I went through a phase of studying them all; there’s some gems there.
Notably, his “OODA” loop is often incorrectly summarized as a linear process but he defined it like this —
https://taskandpurpose.com/.image/c_fit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_620/MTcwNjAwNDYzNjEyMTI2ODcx/18989583.jpg
I think the most interesting part of it is under-discussed — the “Implicit Guidance and Control” aspect, where people can get into cycles of Observe/Act/Observe/Act rapidly without needing to intentionally orient themselves or formally make a decision.
Since he comes at it from a different mix of backgrounds with a different mix of ability to do formal mathematics or not, he provides a lot of insights. Some of his takeaways seem spot-on, but more interesting are the ways he can prime thinking on topics like these. I think you and he were probably interested in some similar veins of thought, so it might produce useful insights to dive in a bit.
I’ve read some of his stuff on strategy. It seemed like there were a lot of interesting insights in there, but it was all presented in the sort of way that sounds sciency to non-science-people but didn’t really communicate a proper model. If someone knows of or could write a good explanation of the models underlying his ideas, I’d be very interested to read that.
Most of Boyd’s work was communicated through briefings and presentations, so we don’t have a lot of the underlying models, except second hand.