+1 I would love to see more posts introducing the rationality community to techniques from other domains as I am afraid that we are reinventing the wheel in too many cases.
In terms of a framework for making decisions, the orient step seems to be the only step different from how people normally make decisions as everyone will automatically observe, decide and act. In contrast, it is very easy to skip the orientation step without noticing and therefore uncritically adopt a default orientation*.
So I actually see this more as a framework for analysing how you are making decisions. Many people who want to make better decisions will end up focusing exclusively on the decide step, but if you use this framework you are more likely to end up analysing all aspects of the decision making process.
I also think it would be very interesting to apply the orient step to conversations that are heading towards an argument. So possible orientations could be:
Persuade the other person
Persuade the audience
Understand the other person’s view
Present your viewpoint so that other’s understand it
I think an important point that I’ve seen raised a bunch with at least pairwise attempts to help people is that often the attempts to help are geared toward decide/act when what the other party really needs is help orienting properly.
I’d claim that “skipping the orient step” is actually the source of a lot of people’s persistent problems. Using the wrong heuristic, rounding off the interaction to a nearby stereotype, trying what’s worked in other domains inappropriately, springing into action when maybe you can just solve the problem with stoicism, etc.
I like your list of orientation possibilities re: conversation; I think explicitly practicing the “are there other orientations I could have?” move is going to produce pretty solid results for most people.
“I’d claim that “skipping the orient step” is actually the source of a lot of people’s persistent problems”—in total agreement. I edited the sentence to say, it is very easy to skip the orientation step “without noticing” because what I wrote before was ambiguous.
Couple of additional things I think that are worth mentioning.
First, OODA is to me an ugly acronym. I know it’s what Boyd used, but some subsequent use has switched to NODA for Notice, Orient, Decide, Act so that each stage has its own unique starting letter. Unfortunately NODA doesn’t show up much in search results, but it is in use within business consulting and other fields as an alternative to OODA.
Second, you might be interested in my recent writing on the personal growth cycle, mainly the last section because I view personal growth, NODA, and other things as ones of many special cases of a more generic anti-entropic feedback mechanism we see pop up everywhere. I’m not sure how much I might write about that idea, but if you ever wondered why some people get so excited about Bayes around here it’s because it too is an instance of the same pattern, though one that is much more precise.
Excellent post! I’ve noticed in my own life that I lot of the progress I make (in rationality or otherwise) comes when I get in the habit of asking better questions when something goes wrong. Your debugging chart offers a great diving board to do just that. I like the flexibility it offers as well. It would be easy enough to start with a blank OODA chart, and add one’s own tools as they learn them, since the placement on the chart is more a pragmatic memory tagging aid, rather than a deep epistemic claim.
+1 I would love to see more posts introducing the rationality community to techniques from other domains as I am afraid that we are reinventing the wheel in too many cases.
In terms of a framework for making decisions, the orient step seems to be the only step different from how people normally make decisions as everyone will automatically observe, decide and act. In contrast, it is very easy to skip the orientation step without noticing and therefore uncritically adopt a default orientation*.
So I actually see this more as a framework for analysing how you are making decisions. Many people who want to make better decisions will end up focusing exclusively on the decide step, but if you use this framework you are more likely to end up analysing all aspects of the decision making process.
I also think it would be very interesting to apply the orient step to conversations that are heading towards an argument. So possible orientations could be:
Persuade the other person
Persuade the audience
Understand the other person’s view
Present your viewpoint so that other’s understand it
Leave people asking questions
Politely avoid the conversation
Shame the other person for wrong-think/ignorance
Be socially agreeable
* Edited
I think an important point that I’ve seen raised a bunch with at least pairwise attempts to help people is that often the attempts to help are geared toward decide/act when what the other party really needs is help orienting properly.
I’d claim that “skipping the orient step” is actually the source of a lot of people’s persistent problems. Using the wrong heuristic, rounding off the interaction to a nearby stereotype, trying what’s worked in other domains inappropriately, springing into action when maybe you can just solve the problem with stoicism, etc.
I like your list of orientation possibilities re: conversation; I think explicitly practicing the “are there other orientations I could have?” move is going to produce pretty solid results for most people.
“I’d claim that “skipping the orient step” is actually the source of a lot of people’s persistent problems”—in total agreement. I edited the sentence to say, it is very easy to skip the orientation step “without noticing” because what I wrote before was ambiguous.
Couple of additional things I think that are worth mentioning.
First, OODA is to me an ugly acronym. I know it’s what Boyd used, but some subsequent use has switched to NODA for Notice, Orient, Decide, Act so that each stage has its own unique starting letter. Unfortunately NODA doesn’t show up much in search results, but it is in use within business consulting and other fields as an alternative to OODA.
Second, you might be interested in my recent writing on the personal growth cycle, mainly the last section because I view personal growth, NODA, and other things as ones of many special cases of a more generic anti-entropic feedback mechanism we see pop up everywhere. I’m not sure how much I might write about that idea, but if you ever wondered why some people get so excited about Bayes around here it’s because it too is an instance of the same pattern, though one that is much more precise.
Excellent post! I’ve noticed in my own life that I lot of the progress I make (in rationality or otherwise) comes when I get in the habit of asking better questions when something goes wrong. Your debugging chart offers a great diving board to do just that. I like the flexibility it offers as well. It would be easy enough to start with a blank OODA chart, and add one’s own tools as they learn them, since the placement on the chart is more a pragmatic memory tagging aid, rather than a deep epistemic claim.