″...any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch...Put another way, we can expect unexplained and disturbing ambiguities, uncertainties, anomalies, or apparent inconsistencies to emerge more and more often. Furthermore, unless some kind of relief is available, we can expect confusion to increase until disorder approaches chaos— death.
Fortunately, there is a way out.”
~ John Boyd, Destruction and Creation
The key word here is “inward-oriented;” that is, based on internal logic, instead of on new evidence. When previous theories are destroyed by the mismatch with reality, the facts that supported the previous theory are either revealed as untrue, or merged into a newer and more correct theory, that incorporates new evidence and different links between the facts to come to a different, and presumably superior, conclusion.
On second though, that was a bad section to quote, although Boyd never really gave any better ones in his essay. I tried to note the way out without throwing on too much of Boyd’s pointless terminology in the last sentence (“Fortunately, there is away out.”) I clearly failed; my bad.