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To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not.

St. John of the Cross, I, 13, #10
The Ascent of Mt. Carmel

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LtCol Dave “Sugar” Lyle recently wrote a great rebuttal piece in the Armed Forces Journal addressing the Oct AFJ article “Goodbye, OODA Loop” which Lyle says, “…should have set off alarm bells across the U.S. defense community.”

As has already been commented on by several in the Boyd community, the oversimplified OODA diagram and corresponding straw-man argument presented in the Benson and Rotkoff article takes an elegant and fairly sophisticated framework and cuts it down to the equivalent of a kindergarten finger painting, turning OODA into a linear decision-making checklist of which Boyd himself would have likely lit on fire with his cheap cigar.

Adam Elkus points out in his own rebuttal piece,

The OODA is neither linear nor prescriptive. One doesn’t, as the article implies, sit down and think “What does my OODA say about ordering lunch today?” It’s simply a model of decisionmaking that more or less occurs automatically. As the “full OODA” shows, it’s significantly more complex than simply a tactical model built on speed

It’s often our initial tendency when dealing with things or ideas that are complex to quickly simplify them to something more manageable or familiar. In certain cases this makes sense as it allows us to filter through a infinite variety of options without getting bogged down in irrelevant details. The full OODA Loop however, it is itself a simplification of a lifetime of Boyd’s work, so by creating an OODA lite one is actually simplifying a simplification…to the point of irrelevance.

Lyle puts it much more eloquently,

Studies by cognitive neuroscientists have demonstrated that as a basic human trait, we are stressed more by uncertainty than unpleasant certainties. But in our efforts to achieve parsimony and the false cognitive ease often associated with it, we sometimes cut out too much detail and end up building expensive empires on theoretical foundations of sand.

Boyd’s work is no different than that of many great theorists of the past in that it requires a good deal of mental wrestling and time to understand. It is not intended to provide straight-forward answers as much as it is better questions.

Here are a few other sections from Lyle’s piece I found of great value,

Ironically, the popularity of Boyd’s ideas has created the largest cognitive trap in which much of the defense community still finds itself. As people absorbed the wisdom of the OODA Loop, they absorbed the simple version as a decision loop, but not the deeper insights of the adaptation engine that Boyd actually offered. While emphasis on the decision-loop aspects of OODA is absolutely appropriate in tactical situations, large parts of the defense community became obsessed with the idea that paralysis — collapsing the adversary’s OODA Loop while maintaining your own at a faster pace — was the ultimate goal of warfare. Network-centric warfare advocates promised that we could achieve “decision dominance” and gain victory through the right combinations of kinetic and nonkinetic effects if we only had the right interconnected systems to remove the fog of war. Under Transformation, we designed light, agile forces designed to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to respond to our higher operations tempo and assumed that this would collapse our enemies’ wills to resist us.

But this approach, just like the simple OODA Loop that it invokes, fails to consider the longer and more important adaptation loops that describe the long-term interactions needed for lasting conflict termination. We focused on short, fast races, forgetting that the race never really ends. The ability to cause paralysis through combat is vitally important to our national security, but paralysis is irrelevant or even counterproductive if it is not serving as a temporary stepping stone on the way to creating lasting, nonviolent, long-term patterns of complementary adaptation between two societies. In the strategic sense, victory does not come from paralysis — it comes from its opposite.

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We’ll never be able to accurately predict the future in a complex world, and we’ll never be able to completely control what happens in it, but with a better understanding of the universal process of adaptation, we can organize what we already know from various disciplines of study, and find new ways to leverage the entire process of adaptation — in the physical, cognitive and moral domains — with comprehensive approaches that go far beyond paralysis. The “better peace” we’re looking for on the other side of war comes when societal patterns of adaptation favor nonviolent methods of competition and cooperation over violent ones. If we don’t understand what drives and sustains mutually beneficial adaptation, how can we ever hope to create the conditions for it using military force?

We don’t need to get rid of the OODA Loop; we need to rediscover it. The universal description of adaptation in OODA can serve as the foundation for a unifying theoretical framework of a more interconnected grand strategy. If Boyd were here today, he would probably tell us to get moving on something better than what he left us.

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seriously, this is amazing not just for the skiing, but for the creativity that went into making it:

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It’s December, that time of year when we can finally drink one of life’s greatest culinary pleasures without getting any too many looks of judgement…eggnog.  My friend Aaron Stern calls Mountain Dew the “nectar of heaven,” but he is mistaken, it’s eggnog….and it’s not even close.

So, a few remarks before enriching your lives with this recipe.

First, it makes A LOT of eggnog so I recommend going to your local brewery/pub/hipster bar and picking up a couple growlers to store it in.  Also makes it convenient when toting to holiday parties or giving to friends.

Second, if you intend on making this recipe sans alcohol I leave you with the words of the great Deangelo Vickers, “Ever play Russian Roulette? Time to spin the chamber Boris.” The alcohol is what kills potentially harmful bacteria like salmonella that are enter the realm of possibility when the first ingredient in your nog recipe is 12 eggs. Don’t believe me…science proves it.

Homemade Egg Nog from GQ Magazine that Author Can No Longer Find (Serves 8-10)

Ingredients:

• 12 Eggs (pasteurized if possible, but not necessary…see above)
• 1 Cup + 3 Tablespoons Sugar
• 3 Pints Whole Milk
• 3 Cups Heavy Cream
• 6 oz. Hennessy vs Cognac
• 6 oz. Maker’s Mark
• 5 Teaspoons Freshly Grated Nutmeg

Directions:

• Separate the eggs.
• Beat yolks w/ electric mixer for a minute or so until they lighten up in color, then
• Gradually add 1 cup sugar and beat until completely disolved
• Add milk, cream, cognac, bourbon, and nutmeg – stir to combine
• Beat egg whites in separate bowl until soft peaks form with the mixer running, then
• Gradually add 3 tsp of sugar and beat until peaks stiffen.
• Whisk beaten egg whites into mixture, garnish w/ nutmeg.

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Posted this on a Facebook thread last week and wanted to add it here to solicit feedback:

Here’s what I think we should do to the AF rank structure:
1) Merge 2nd and 1st Lieutenant into Lieutenant
2) Merge LtCol and Colonel into Colonel with squadron command positions going to senior Majors
3) only 2 types of General instead of 4

Each level of hierarchy removed helps for more accurate information as it travels to decision makers…less opportunities for rank-intimidation/posturing to obscure the message

Chuck Spinney added the following which also would be a huge step forward in the right direction:

“…also make it illegal to go thru revolving door after retirement, especially for ranks Col and above under your new scheme”

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When we look realistically at the world in which we are living today and become aware of what the actual problems of learning are, our conception of education changes radically. Although the educational system remains basically unchanged, we are no longer dealing primarily with the vertical transmission of the tried and true by the old, mature, and experienced teacher to the young, immature, inexperienced pupil. This was the system of education developed in a stable, slowly changing culture. In a world of rapid change, vertical transmission of knowledge alone no longer serves the purposes of education.

Margaret Mead
(1958)

Related posts:

1. Deresiewicz on The Crisis in Higher Education

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As talk of big defense cuts continues to make the rounds, one term is being latched onto with gusto by both military and civilian leadership – “hollow force.” Warnings are coming from every direction that large defense cuts could result in this terrifying phenomena. Thankfully, Ink Spots brings a bit of clear thinking to what has been a conversation dominated up to this point by paranoia and alarmism. While he doesn’t come out and say it, he is alluding to a necessary part of strategy – choosing what NOT to do, i.e. global power projection is no longer an attainable goal, we must instead focus on a few key areas and allow that we will lose significant amounts of leverage and control over others.

Hollowing isn’t just about spending less money, but about allocating money improperly. If Congress cut the defense budget by half tomorrow and said to DoD “make it work,” there are two basic ways the Pentagon could execute that tasking: 1) by slashing force structure, aircraft, vehicles, and personnel numbers and then training and maintaining that smaller force to accomplish a smaller range of mission; or 2) by keeping all those airplanes, never taking them out of the hangers, and saving money on jet fuel; keeping all those brigade combat teams, never turning a wrench on Strykers or Humvees, and spreading your non-broken down vehicles thinner across the formations; keeping all those personnel but cutting down on their expensive professional military education and realistic live-fire training. (Incidentally, the defense industry doesn’t much care whether the force is hollow or not — they’ll happily sell you vehicles and planes for your last dollar, whether or not you’ve got the cash left over to put gas in them and take them out of the garage.)

A smaller military that does less accordingly is not a “hollow force,” even if it’s a less capable one. A large, apparently “world-class” military that fights poorly because of insufficient training, low morale, broken vehicles, and a lack of amunition — that’s a hollow force. So if we know now that a hollow force is a specific type of bad military, one that’s bad for a specific reason, can we all agree to stop using the term as a general synonym for “bad military”?

For more reading on the necessity to choose, read Dan Trombly’s, “Castex and the illusion of mastering the commons.”

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It may seem odd for a 27-yr old to be spending much time thinking about retirement, but over the past couple years it’s something that keeps popping into my mind at the most random times.  Part of it, of course, is due to the large shift taking place in the economy and all that it entails.  Generations of workers have watched in horror as their retirement dreams of shuffleboard in Boca Raton have gone up in smoke…a smoke the smells suspiciously like that of Gordon Gecko’s stogie.

Venkatesh Rao summed it up nicely a couple weeks ago explaining why the Occupy Wall Street movement was missing the mark,

It does not matter how many people demonstrate and pour out into the streets. This is not a problem that can be solved by industrial-age collective action models because the problem is the end of the industrial age. One side has collected the trophy and left the field, the other side is still on the field, trying to convince itself the game is still going on. The winners, and ahead-of-the-curve losers, are already setting up the playing field for the new game.

He goes on to describe the people “…already setting up the playing field for the new game,”

Instead of protesting Wall Street, this is the sector that’s slowly figuring out how to do without Wall Street. For now, all they’ve done is accept reality: game over. As Bruce Sterling noted, there is a certain fatalism to this group (he called it “Dark Euphoria”) that unites it with the winning team (their variety of Dark Euphoria is what Sterling calls “Gothic High Tech”). The Dark Euphoria types aren’t really trying to avert disaster or change/save the “system.” They are simply preparing for an economic-survivalist lifestyle.

But the Favela Chic group may do more than just survive. Once this group finds its footing, and awareness dawns on the rest of the economy that it really is a case of game over, this is where we can expect a new breed of political and economic leaders to emerge and reboot the economic system.

This fatalism is something I’ve felt quite strongly for a while now when surveying the economic and political landscape of America.  Surprisingly, the result hasn’t been as much depression as it has an incredible sense of freedom, like Rose finally letting go of Jack’s lifeless hand and letting him sink to the abyss along with the Titanic.  Unlike Rose, however, the grieving period has been virtually non-existent.

So now that I’ve managed to work Gordon Gecko and Titanic into the same post let me try to get to the point.

First, the traditional retirement paradigm (work 40+ yrs at a job w/ a pension so you can live a life of leisure during the later years) is based on a false assumption that happiness = not working.  Idle people are rarely happy.  What people really desire isn’t no work, but fulfilling work.  Fulfilling work is something that the industrial age scoffed at as something for the Peace Corps.  ”You want fulfilling work?  Here, take a pay raise and go hiking on the weekends or do yoga or something…”

People crave meaningful work, but are often so starved of it that they end up trying to address symptoms rather than root causes.  If you’re not a fulfilled person now, retirement is not going to change that.

Second, most people look at retirement as a time when they will no longer have to worry about money.  ”Once I’ve saved all this money I won’t have to worry about it anymore!”  In reality the opposite is normally true.  Ever wonder why you see so many old folks at Costco meticulously examining the price/oz. of Metamucil?  Retired people generally worry about money MORE than their working peers.

“But, isn’t the point to save ENOUGH money that you don’t have to worry about it during retirement?”

Of course, but how much is enough?  The nifty retirement calculators present a deceptively simple solution to this question, but the answer is often much more philosophical than it is financial.  Enough depends not on a number, but on the state of the person.  That deserves a post to itself so I’ll continue on…

So, if traditional retirement is based on a false premise and retired people end up worrying more about money than ever before why are so many people still chasing the illusion?  Better yet, what is the alternative.

Here’s my alternative: several mini-retirements/sabbath years spread throughout a lifetime, specifically take one year off every 7 years.

“You arrogant little….wouldn’t we ALL like to do that!”

I’m not trying to sell you on my solution (I know 99% of people won’t do it), but I will say that it is possible.  Only, however, if you give up trying to play the game laid out by generations past (industrial economy) and switch to a new game and field.  A few hints on how this would work:

1) would require either self-employment or a job that would allow for a year off every 7-10 yrs.

2) would require financial discipline/conscious spending plan (h/t Ramit Sethi)/passive income is VERY helpful (rents, dividends, royalties, etc.).  Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek” addresses a lot of this well.

3) the year long mini-retirements would not necessarily consist of not working, but instead working at jobs you’ve always wanted to try or fields you’re interested in.  Lower wages most likely, but a big help in making it financially viable

4) these mini-retirements would be purposeful (i.e. more than just laying on a beach somewhere)

Disclaimer: I haven’t got this all figured out yet so I acknowledge there are large hurdles to cross between conception and reality. Second, this is not an attempt to escape hard work, it’s about structuring your life in such a way that you can do FULFILLING work. Most will agree that people who find fulfilling work actually end up working much harder than those stuck at a meaningless 9-5 job. Additionally, this plan basically takes as a given that I will work my entire life, or as long as I’m physically able. There is no “life of leisure” escape plan built in at the end, just small, consistent breaks every 7 years.

To see (in a much clearer fashion than I just laid out) the benefits of a sabbath year every 7 years see the following:

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