John David Pressman says that the orienting is the tricky and valuable and underdocumented part of OODA. It occurs to me that I can hardly name any times anyone I know “oriented”. When did you orient and what happened?
[Question] When did you orient?
Kyle Scott roughly said that when you know where to look and what to ignore you are oriented. Imagine a general freaking out at all the explosions vs one who knows how severe the explosions are expected to be and the threshold for changing course.
I’m confused at the question. One orients all the time, after observe and before decide. OODA is a loop that gets run over and over, at fractally different levels of scale (what career to pursue, what job to take, what task to perform next,
I most recently oriented after reading this question, to try to understand the context and what was causing my confusion. Then I decided to make a comment, and acted upon that decision. I’ll repeat the loop for other posts, and for replies to this comment.
Does a dog orient? An ant? I thought one of the fighter pilot things was to not allow your enemy the time to orient
I think dogs orient. Orienting is something like “deciding on a new strategic frame”. There are larger and smaller strategic shifts, and orienting is sort of fractal.
Example:
A dog is playing with a ball (action). It spends a while making little microdecisions within the “play with ball” game. (Chase the ball this way, chase the ball that way). Within the play-the-ball-game is one small OODA loop (observe where the ball headed, and what the owner-who-threw-the-ball is doing. Orient to the fact that you need to change direction if you want to catch the ball. Decide to head in the new direction. Head in the new direction. Catch the ball)
Then the dog notices that it’s hungry (observation). It orients to the hunger. Either it’s not that hungry, and it’s going to continue playing with the ball, or it’s hungry enough that now “get food” is it’s new primary goal, and it begins making choices focused on resolving that., rather than ball-playing. (Running back to the front door, scratching it, looking at the owner hoping the owner comes and let’s the dog inside. If that works, go to the kitchen and scratch at it’s food bowl, etc. If it doesn’t work, maybe run back up to the owner and get its attention. If there is no owner)
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Example 2:
The dog is fighting with another dog. It’s making a serious of decisions and actions about fighting the dog. This can include little micro-orientings, like, “the Other Dog is coming up on my left, hmm, maybe instead of biting it right now I want to run away briefly to get a better position.”
But then a major observation + orienting happens when two new dogs join the fight. Previously the fight seemed winnable, now it seems like the new goal is run away or do some kind of submission ritual.
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In both cases there are micro and macro OODA loop. For the micro OODA loop (i.e. decisions within the “fight with individual dog” situation, or “play with ball” situation), the orienting step is very short.
When John Boyd says “get inside your enemy’s OODA loop to prevent them orienting”, I think he means something metaphorically closer to, when the two new dogs join the fight, keep throwing new observations at the dog that doesn’t give it time to realize “wait, there are two new dogs, I need to stop trying to locally gain a minor tactical advantage and instead just run away” (because every time it starts to think about that, a new thing interrupts it)
I do indeed think orienting is an underappreciated skill (I have a blogpost in the works someday about orienting being a key skill for the 21st century because stuff is gonna just Keep On Happening faster than we are used to responding to)
Some specific times I oriented:
Covid
Notably, I think oriented once at the beginning of covid, and then failed to orient a couple more times when it was appropriate, i.e. 3 months into covid and again a year later. But I think I learned lessons from that which were applicable to...
During the Ukraine/Russia nuke scare
Lightcone did some nuclear prep stuff, and, notably as a “lesson learned from covid”, also thought more about how much would be “too much” and what timeboxing to set on the endeavor
When FTX was becoming a prominent funder
Me individually and Lightcone as a whole thought about how much money to pay people and how to change our spending habits
Lightcone team considered moving to the Bahamas. We chose not to, which we’re pretty glad about because…
Again, when FTX collapsed
“Man what life lessons is EA as a whole supposed to learn from this?”
When the world started responding to ChatGPT
Since ChatGPT, AI things have been moving quite quickly and I’ve been doing an orient step every couple weeks (in response to things like the TIME piece, various Open Letters, White House actions, etc)
This has all mostly come in the form of considering new plans (i.e. changing my “deciding” step but not my “action” step, so far)
I think actually the observation step is also underappreciated. I think a common first-level mistake is “forgetting to orient”, and a separate common mistake is that observation is actually separate from orienting and people tend to blur the two together.
Those kind of sound like decisions. Is the difference that you paused a little longer and sort of organized your thoughts beyond what was immediately necessary? Or how would you describe the key differentiating thing here?
In each case, I was sitting around doing some unrelated thing, and then noticed “hey, an observation (covid, ukraine, ftx), seems maybe decision relevant. Let’s think about it and see if changes the space of decisions I might want to make”
In of these cases, if I hadn’t oriented, I would have been doing stuff completely unrelated to covid/ukraine/ai-regulation” (which in my case usually looked like “building LW features and/or Lightcone offices, and having some nice hobbies).
The thing that’s maybe a bit more confusing is the ChatGPT/Open-Letters thing, where I had been working on AI risk mitigation, but I’d been focused on one particular strategic frame (i.e. building infrastructure for AI researchers), because I’d previously judged “help the world-at-large orient to x-risk” wasn’t very tractable. But I’d cached the strategic-thought of “it’s too intractable to help the world orient to AI risk” and not re-examined it, and it took me ~a month or two after chatGPT came out to realize that it was changing that landscape and that I should open up a whole set of possible decisions I’d previously pruned off.