I used to live by this philosophy when this article came out. But now I think it's a fairly imperfect model of the world that can lead you astray easily.
The problem with it is that it's very easy to interpret that y-axis, "something good", as static. It's pretty hard to make sense of the model at all if you don't interpret as static, because your slope will bend all over the place, out of the plane, into multiple dimensions, etc. But once you've set your goal point, your "something good" axis, the natural temptation is to optimize your slope until you're steadily progressing against it. And that's dangerous, because you might forget that the "something good" axis was arbitrary to begin with.
Instead, I've become much more of a fan of John Boyd's "OODA loop" [1] model. Here, you're continually reacting to your environment, which is also continually changing around you. And the person or organization that can react faster usually has an advantage, because they can set the terms of the engagement. We can call that adaptation "learning", but the key point is that it's learning an environment that is dynamic, not static. Sometimes the environment will change in a way that invalidates all of your accumulated learning, and that's okay (and you don't really get a choice about it anyway).
This also drives home the point that choosing the environment you're adapting against is a pretty critical skill, and often dominates how well you adapt to it (i.e. your learning rate). I've seen some relatively mediocre people become billionaires because they picked the right industry and the right opportunity within it to join. Similarly, there are people who are brilliant problem solvers but end up in jail because the environment they are in rewards problem-solving that will get you sent there (think Omar from The Wire, or SBF from FTX).
OODA looks interesting, thank you for link. I personally follow a similar model, which I am sure someone would have articulated better than I do already. Anticipate - Perceive - Act - Understand. The first two are in relation to your presence in an environment. The latter two are about your ability to be an agent in this environment. Your understanding of the world informs the things you prepare yourself to observe (e.g. the direction of your eyes when you drive, very similar to the orient in OODA I think). You perceive within the bounds of your anticipation and act according to the perception as it relates to observation (I.e. not thinking too much about it). The thinking is in the understand part where you structure the relationship of the prior and your actions and secondary post action observations. Not all the loops are completely linear, e.g. you may open a loop with an action and then close it years later in a wiser setting or when the feedback comes.
I like your model, but I love that you put Anticipate at the front. It's a loop so doesn't really matter, but I'm entertained by the idea of "Step 1: Take a wild ass guess at what's about to happen"
The y-axis isn’t forever. Once you plateau, it’s time to change the definition. Then a new S-curve can begin.
Over time you observe periods of quantifiable growth interspersed with discrete jumps.
That said, I believe the core of y-intercept advice hides two key wisdoms: a) don’t be discouraged when you’re new, and b) don’t rest on your laurels when you’re experienced
And perhaps c) if someone is both way better than you and improving faster, you’ll never catch up. This is why I never pursued competitive boxing, for example. Don’t have the talent.
> But once you've set your goal point, your "something good" axis, the natural temptation is to optimize your slope until you're steadily progressing against it. And that's dangerous, because you might forget that the "something good" axis was arbitrary to begin with.
If you're optimizing your slope, that at least implies your slope is something you can optimize. How do you optimize your y-axis?
That's the point - you don't. Once you're faced with something that you can't optimize because there's not even a clear definition of what "good" is, a lot of those rational tools of hill-climbing, success, continuous improvement, etc. fall out the window.
And that's why it's a fun and rewarding rabbit hole to go down. Because when you're faced with an arbitrary, intractable problem, that's when you need to start developing the fuzzy, emotional side of yourself. That's when you need to start making hard choices about what you want your life to look like and what you're going to care about, and you're finally faced with a situation where there's no right answer, and you only have your feelings to go by.
Then you can return to the hill-climbing and optimization as a tool to achieve those arbitrarily-chosen goals, but now you look at them only as tools.
What if, rather than maximizing the slope, you maximize your authority over the slope. That seems closer to the original point of the article too.
The general idea is that being a quick learner is universally valuable because it means you can reach a steep slope over many different dimensions. Hence allowing you to react much better.
I think the additional point I'm making is that a 2D-graph necessarily biases your brain into ignoring the environment change, and that makes this a poor model to think about the world. Indeed, the other comment reply posted as of now still references the graph metaphor, but with S-curves instead of straight lines (which isn't really the point I was making - I'm trying to argue that your lines need to be in infinite-dimension space, regardless of their equation). You certainly can have environment change as an additional mental model you draw on when necessary - but if the quality of a model is in its ability to draw useful conclusions about the world from it, then conclusions which need to be corrected by some other model should be viewed with some suspicion.
> I've become much more of a fan of John Boyd's "OODA loop" [1] model.
As a side note, have you ever heard a coherent and/or useful explanation of the "orient" part? It seems like every time I hear about the OODA loop, that's the part that gets yadda-yadda-yadda'd over.
Ender's Game had a fun take on this. Literally naming the different directions was all that he did on first seeing the battlefield, but that is literally orienting yourself.
So, for example, if you can enumerate the possible transitions, do so.
There are two books I have on my reading list which are supposed to address this in one way or another, both by the same author. Violence of Mind and Beyond OODA, by Varg Freeborn (https://vargfreeborn.com/podcasts/). I've started reading Violence of Mind, and it's been enough to motivate some life changes and deep thinking. Have not finished yet though, the author gave an ultimatum of sorts early in the book and I haven't quite come to grips with my answer yet.
Beyond OODA is probably closer to directly answering your question, though Violence of Mind appears to deal with concrete application of "orientation" to self-defense and violent confrontations as a "good guy". I think I recall hearing in a podcast Varg did that he actually talked with one of Boyd's colleagues when putting together Beyond OODA to learn more and make sure the content was spot on, which was a big motivation for my purchase of the book as I find OODA fascinating and the concept has been very influential in my life.
(The OODA concept is more about modelling your opponent in a competitive game so that you can analyse the opportunities for disrupting them. A competitive game like “dogfighting” or “Cold War counter-intelligence” or “the market for office software products”. When you describe it as “repeat ad infinitum” it sounds like a neat piece of life advice for how to approach any problem (again, only competitive games!) but you’re missing almost the entire message and in essence saying something about as useful as “use your brain to solve the problem”. As long as you’re not asleep, it’s impossible not to be following OODA. Literally anything you do will satisfy it. That’s why it’s a good model for an opponent. And it’s also why it’s a great tool for convincing yourself you’re some kind of strategic genius because you can recognise these very normal things happening in your own brain.)
I think it only makes sense in a specific environment/context. And then you can also have a meaningful interpretation of "orient".
It seems many people want to take these sort of decision making frame works to new contexts or generalize them to a point they no longer make sense to market them.
Synthesizing the new information (from observing) with prior information to understand the fuller picture before deciding. If you skip it, then you're, at best, just being reactive and reacting to only the present incomplete information.
My stab is specific to understanding the full picture is how you can move in it. How many movement choices do you have? Can you get back to a position? Does your moving cause others to move? Can you see places that are safe to experiment in?
For prior information, look for familiar analogs. Defensive positions. Offensive outposts. Well troden paths, etc.
What's hand wavy about it? It's just not concrete because the idea itself is abstract, not concrete. To orient, you have to combine information (synthesis) from your observations and your priors (what you previously observed and what you know). You can give concrete examples but then people still have to figure out the abstraction to connect one concrete example to another, and if they spend time thinking about it end up with the simple concept I described.
But that is no different than any other description I've seen. I took the question to be "what does it mean to orient to the observation?"
That is, I suspect the asker wanted specific examples of what that means. I think it is fair to say that people learn in concretes, not in abstractions. Is why so few of us know what a semigroup is, after all.
I'm not talking in abstract algebra level abstraction here, no need to be a twit. Your comments are usually better than this.
But in the spirit of being a twit, your "answers" are hardly coherent, let alone concrete. They're just as hand wavy as the original asker was probably complaining about if they wanted a concrete answer.
> How many movement choices do you have? Can you get back to a position? Does your moving cause others to move? Can you see places that are safe to experiment in?
If you want to give a concrete answer instead of a hand wavy one like yours pick a real game, sport, or combat scenario and apply it. Here's a stab at it that's absolutely useless unless you generalize the concept back to my original answer:
BJJ (which a lot of people tie to OODA):
The observations are what my own body-awareness and my opponent's actions and position relative to me. Up to this point in the match I've gotten them into my guard, they put their weight and body just far enough back that I haven't had much luck getting more control. But I managed to bump them and trip them up, they slipped up, they just planted their left hand by my right shoulder (observation).
Orientation: Combining the observation and my training in BJJ, I know that this situation ripe for an arm bar or a triangle.
Decision: I will grab their arm and adjust my guard to pull off the next move, an arm bar.
Action: I grab their arm, but this isn't a turn based game and they move too.
Observation: Gripping my sleeve or collar or shifting their weight, they make an arm bar too hard.
Orientation: I'm still in a good position for a triangle.
Decision: I'll attempt the triangle, but maintaining proper control I can still shift back to the arm bar if they open themselves up to it again.
Action: Move my legs and their body to achieve the triangle.
---------
But while concrete, the only utility here is to point out its generality. Either the person gets it and understands the concept beyond BJJ (and this specific scenario) and maybe other combat sports or they don't. This was a longwinded way to get back to the core concept: Take the observations and combine them to feed into the decision process.
And if you really think that last sentence has anything to do with semigroup-level abstraction, I can't help you.
Ha! Fair on my answers not being too concrete or coherent, either. Was why that was my "stab." I don't have a firm grasp on the idea, myself. My examples were trying to build on my other post bringing in Ender's Game as a neat take. (No, I didn't link those correctly.)
I also should have pushed back to your terms. I think it is surprisingly useful to constantly ask what that sentence would mean in different situations. Such that I plan on doing just that for the next few days. Specifically, what did you mean to synthesize new ideas?
Would love to have success getting my kids to try this. I love your narrative there, as it shows how rapid the progression can go. At least, that is my current read.
What I wrote was "Synthesizing the new information (from observing) with prior information", not new ideas. Synthesize means "combine into a coherent whole" (among other things, but this is the definition I intended; it's the one programmers ought to become familiar with since we "synthesize" solutions to problems by combining existing and new programs and possible physical components into a whole, our field is fundamentally synthetic). Here it's the act of combining information into a more coherent and accurate model: Present observations, past observations (part of your prior knowledge), and previous training and whatever else (the rest of your prior knowledge).
All of that gives you your present orientation, your position, in either a literal or figurative sense.
And then there's your "opponent" (if there's not one, OODA may not be the right mental model to use). In your observations of your opponent and repeated orientation you are building up a model of them, synthesis again. You start with any prior knowledge (have you encountered this opponent before?) or an assumption (maybe a worst case, or estimate based on sizing them up). Then you engage, and in the engagement you observe and determine their real capabilities, which feeds into orientation for rendering a more accurate model of the opponent.
Orientation is taking the existing knowledge, adding new knowledge or information, rendering a better model (hopefully). Then you decide based on that model, act on that decision, and observe.
Of course it's not actually linear, all of this is happening at the same time, or can be. You don't stop observing while you orient, decide, or act. And you don't stop acting while you observe, orient, or decide.
The problem with it is that it's very easy to interpret that y-axis, "something good", as static. It's pretty hard to make sense of the model at all if you don't interpret as static, because your slope will bend all over the place, out of the plane, into multiple dimensions, etc. But once you've set your goal point, your "something good" axis, the natural temptation is to optimize your slope until you're steadily progressing against it. And that's dangerous, because you might forget that the "something good" axis was arbitrary to begin with.
Instead, I've become much more of a fan of John Boyd's "OODA loop" [1] model. Here, you're continually reacting to your environment, which is also continually changing around you. And the person or organization that can react faster usually has an advantage, because they can set the terms of the engagement. We can call that adaptation "learning", but the key point is that it's learning an environment that is dynamic, not static. Sometimes the environment will change in a way that invalidates all of your accumulated learning, and that's okay (and you don't really get a choice about it anyway).
This also drives home the point that choosing the environment you're adapting against is a pretty critical skill, and often dominates how well you adapt to it (i.e. your learning rate). I've seen some relatively mediocre people become billionaires because they picked the right industry and the right opportunity within it to join. Similarly, there are people who are brilliant problem solvers but end up in jail because the environment they are in rewards problem-solving that will get you sent there (think Omar from The Wire, or SBF from FTX).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop