zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron – Iraq war, beginning and ending, analytic power of similarity ]

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I’ve thanked Zen for his Iconic Compare and Contrast post already, but I’d like to run with his juxtaposition of images from the end of the Iraq war, and book-end it with an early DoubleQuote of mine from the beginning, thus:

That’s the beginning of the war, as I saw it “binocularly” — and here’s its ending, as Zen captured it:

Different though they are — one verbal, one visual — I think they go well together. I think they belong together.

But that’s essentially an aesthetic intuition.

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And — apart from thanking Zen — that’s the thing I want to talk about.

The two quotes, eighty-six years apart, about an (anglophone) army in Baghdad coming there to liberate, not to conquer, are similar enough that they should give us pause for thought. They challenge us to think long and hard about the similarities between the two situations — and they challenge us to think no less hard and long about their differences.

Likewise, it’s the similarities between the two images Zen chose — of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the US exit from Iraq — that give that juxtaposition its power.  And Zen has chosen very carefully:

Not only are there two lines of vehicles stretching back from the foreground away into the distance in each image, but the angle from which the two columns are seen is about the same — and there are even two “tracks” in each photo reinforcing the vanishing point — two tracks to the right of the vehicles in the Afghan photo, the edge of the road and a what looks like the shadow of an overhead cable in the photo from Iraq.

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But let’s take this a bit further. The following juxtaposition is every bit as much a juxtaposition of the Soviet and American withdrawals as the pair of images Zen picked, but this time we have an aerial view of the US convoy — so the visual “rhyme” between the two images is no longer there — and even though the aerial shot is an intriguing one, what a difference that makes!

There’s nothing in that juxtaposition to make you go, yes!

On the level of what’s being referred to, the troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq,  this pair of images has the same properties as the two images that Zen selected.  But it doesn’t capture our attention in nearly the same way.

And the same would have been true if I’d picked a different sentence from Rumsfeld‘s speech to juxtapose with General Maude‘s “not as conquerors or enemies but as liberators” — such as, “You’ve unleashed events that will unquestionably shape the course of this country, the fate of the people, and very likely affect the future of this entire region.” I’d still be comparing and contrasting two speeches from the beginnings of two occupations of Baghdad.  But there’d be no oomph to the comparison.

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Because — and this is what I am trying to get at, the basic principle of HipBone analysis and what distinguishes it from otherwise similar modes of brainstorming and mind-mapping — the recognition of pattern, of salient sameness, of close parallelism or opposition is the criterion for success or failure in a HipBone-style juxtaposition.

Zen’s graphic example has that closeness — even down to those two parallel tracks beside and to the right of the vehicles.  My two quotes from Maude and Rumsfeld have that.  And it’s that closeness of match that makes a juxtaposition powerful.

Analogy works this way, rhyme works this way, fugue works this way, graphic match (in cinematography) works this way — it’s basic to the arts, basic to rhetoric, and basic to the way our analogically-disposed minds think.

It is not a method for arriving at conclusions, it’s a method for posing questions. And it sits right at the juncture where analysis admits it is not a science but an art.

[ by Charles Cameron — Ashby, the Law of Requisite Variety, Bateson, the arts and sciences ]

Mapping from complexity to complexity. Access to a set of relationships … that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves.  The depth and riches of imagination, of the arts and sciences, of the listening heart / mind, of the world around us, of the models we need to make to navigate that world successfully… of the wisdom our steersmen need, and all too often lack.

Zen‘s post Ruminating on Strategic thinking had me thinking a bit, and I guess I felt some of his bullet points,

• Assessment of the relationships among the variables
• Assessment of the relationship between the variables and their strategic environment
• Assessment of current “trajectory” or trend lines of variables
• Assessment of costs to effect a change in the position or nature of each variable
• Assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the variables as a functioning system

and particularly

• Recognition of systemic “choke points”, “tipping points” and feedback loops.

are separable as components one might learn, but need to fuse into a single intuition if the result is to be fully system-responsive.

And I think the two comments above by Ashby and Bateson are in their own ways both “about” that — about the need for a gestalt understanding rather than a list of separate and disparate parts…

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And of course, those two quotes can also be used to pitch for cybernetics, or for poetry, or both… much to my delight!

[ by Charles Cameron — Jefferson, economics of possession and ideas, Occupy COG, library ]
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photo credit: Monique Zamir for Untapped Cities

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Let’s start with Thomas Jefferson. I don’t know if he was the first to mention this curious distinction on record, but he makes the point nicely:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

John Perry Barlow quotes that gobbit of Jefferson as the epigraph to his essay, The Economy of Ideas.

2.

Here’s Lawrence Lessig, in his essay Against perpetual copyright:

Tangible goods are rivalrous goods

For one person to gain some tangible item, another person must lose it. For one person to gain the ownership of some piece of land, the previous owner must surrender ownership. T his is the ordinary state of physical property, and the laws around physical property are designed around this fact. Property taxes, zoning laws, and similar legal constructs are examples of how the law relates to physical property.

Intellectual works are non-rivalrous

Intellectual works are ordinarily non-rivalrous. It is possible for someone to teach a work of the mind to another without unlearning it himself. For example, one, or two, or a hundred people can memorize the same poem at the same time. Here the term “work of the mind” refers not to physical items such books or compact discs or DVD’s, but rather to the intangible content those physical objects contain.

3.

As someone whose work falls almost entirely in the “non-rivalrous” category, I am naturally very interested by this distinction, both for my own sake, and because (if the coming economy is an “information” or “imagination” economy) it may be the hinge on which the future of that economy turns…

4.

Which brings me to the Occupy movement, and to this curious fact which I found in an article I didn’t otherwise read. It’s from David Graeber, On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet :

It’s no coincidence that the epicenter of the Wall Street Occupation, and so many others, is an impromptu library: a library being not only a model of an alternative economy, where lending is from a communal pool, at 0% interest, and the currency being lent is knowledge, and the means to understanding.

In quoting this, I mean neither to endorse nor to condemn the movement, but simply to note that its center of gravity as described here (although technically, books are rivalrous goods) falls clearly within the non-rivalrous category: it is a market-place of ideas.

5.

As a one-time tank-thinker, I was trained to spot early indicators.

I don’t know what this one means, but I suspect it’s an indicator.  Give me another to pair it with, and I may be able to foresee a trend.

What do you see?

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I spotted a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov‘s  The Master and Margarita in one of the photos.

photo credit: Blaine O’Neill under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license

and DH Lawrence, Sons and Lovers and Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories; Strindberg, The Plays and Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape; Dr Who, yeah and Star Wars too; William Gibson‘s Neuromancer and his Mona Lisa Overdrive; Max Marwick‘s Witchcraft and Sorcery; Orson Scott Card‘s Ender’s Game and Lewis Carroll‘s Alice in Wonderland — and for the politics of it all, Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict… which I’ve linked for your convenience.

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For what it’s worth…

Nathan Schneider‘s article, What ‘diversity of tactics’ really means for Occupy Wall Street, cites blog-friend David Ronfeldt‘s study (with John Arqilla) Swarming & the Future of Conflict — along with (among others) Gene Sharp, whose work I discussed here a few months back.

[ by Charles Cameron — mapping, silos, Y2K, 9/11, rumors, wars, Boeing 747s, Diebold voting machines, vulnerabilities, dependencies ]

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The “bug” of Y2K never quite measured up to the 1919 influenza bug in terms of devastating effect — but as TPM Barnett wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map:

Whether Y2K turned out to be nothing or a complete disaster was less important, research-wise, than the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age.

1.

My own personal preoccupations during the run-up to Y2K had to do with cults, militias and terrorists — any one of which might have tried for a spectacle.

As it turned out, though, Al Qaida’s plan to set off a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve, 1999 was foiled when Albert Ressam was arrested attempting to enter the US from Canada — so that aspect of what might have happened during the roll-over was essentially postponed until September 11, 2001. And the leaders of the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, acting on visionary instructions (allegedly) from the Virgin Mary, announced that the end of the world had been postponed from Dec 31 / Jan 1 till March 17 — at which point they burned 500 of their members to death in their locked church. So that apocalyptic possibility, too, was temporarily averted.

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Don Beck of the National Values Center / The Spiral Dynamics Group, commented to me at one point in the run-up:

Y2K is like a lightening bolt: when it strikes and lights up the sky, we will see the contours of our social systems.

— and that quote from Beck, along with Barnett’s observation, pointed strongly to the fact that we don’t have anything remotely resembling a decent global map of interdependencies and vulnerabilities.

What we have instead is a PERT chart for this or that, Markov diagrams, social network maps, railroad maps and timetables… oodles and oodles of smaller pieces of the puzzle of past, present and future… each with its own symbol system and limited scope. Our mapping, in other words, is territorialized, siloed, and disconnected, while the world system which is integral to our being and survival is connected, indeed, seamlessly interwoven.

I’ve suggested before now that our mapping needs to pass across the Cartesian divide from the objective to the subjective, from materiel to morale, from the quantitative to the qualitative, and from rumors to wars. It also needs a uniform language or translation service, so that Jay Forrester system dynamic models can “talk” with PERT and Markov and the rest, Bucky Fuller‘s World Game included.

I suppose some of all this is ongoing, somewhere behind impenetrable curtains, but I wonder how much.

3.

In the meantime, and working from open source materials, the only kind to which I have access – here are two data points we might have noted a litle earlier, if we had decent interdependency and vulnerability mapping:

Fear-mongering — or significant alerts?  I’m not tech savvy enough to know.

4.

Tom Barnett’s point about “the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age” still stands.

Y2K was what first alerted me to the significance of SCADAs.

Something very like what Y2K might have been seems to be unfolding — but slowly, slowly.

Are we thinking yet?

At Fabius Maximus, Dr. Chet Richards reviews TEMPO by Dr. Venkat Rao, enjoying the book as much as I did, if not more. Chet has some particularly incisive comments, positive and critical, in his review, which I suggest you read in full:

Book Review: Tempo

…Rao draws on Boyd in several places, as well on sources ranging from the topical, such as Gladwell and Taleb, to the foundational (e.g., Camus and Clausewitz), to the downright obscure – know anything about The Archeology of Garbage? Do the words wabi and sabi ring a bell?

The result is a synthesis, what Boyd called a “snowmobile,” that combines concepts from across a variety of disciplines to produce a cornucopia of new ideas, insights and speculations. You may be confused, challenged, outraged, and puzzled (some of the language can be academic), but you’ll rarely be bored because every chapter, often every page, has something you can add to the parts bin for building your own snowmobiles.

Let me highlight just a couple, of special interest to folks familiar with Boyd’s concepts. Near the end of the book, Rao introduces an expanded version of “legibility”:

A piece of physical reality is legible if it is obviously the product of coherent human agency, a deliberate externalization of a mental model. When human and natural sources of order are harder to tease apart, you get greater illegibility (p. 133 – and I warned you about the academic language).

Then a couple of paragraphs later, he claims that:

Used with adversarial intentions, Boyd’s OODA can be understood as a deliberate use of illegibility to cause failure.

At first, this seems silly. Boyd only considers conflict between groups of human beings (Patterns of Conflict, 10), so all uses of his strategic concepts would seem to be prima facia examples of legible phenomena. On the other hand, and this is an example of what makes Rao’s little book so valuable, some commentators, such as Stalk and Hout in 1990’s Competing Against Time, point out that victims of a Boyd-style attack can rarely identify the cause of their problems – often blaming bad luck or incompetent, self-serving and treacherous idiots in their own organizations. Boyd made this clear in his own work, such as in Patterns of Conflict, 132, when he suggested that his victims would exhibit a variety of traumatic symptoms including confusion, disorder, panic, chaos, paralysis and collapse – indicating unrelenting attack by forces outside the scope of their own mental models…

Chet concludes with a suggestion for Venkat (with which I concur):

…As for where to go from here, Rao might write more about tempo. This will seem strange to him, I’m sure, but pages go by with hardly a mention of the concept. This means that we need another book from him. I’d suggest expanding on some of the concepts that he raises but doesn’t find space to develop. Here are three ideas: […]

But you will have to go over to Fabius Maximus to read the rest. Venkat, in turn responded to Chet over at his blog, Ribbonfarm:

Chet Richards’ Review of Tempo on Fabius Maximus

….Overall, Chet comes to the conclusion that Tempo resonates with the Boydian spirit of decision-making. I don’t entirely get out of jail free though:

Perhaps his unfamiliarity with the original briefings, however, led him to  make one characterization that is incorrect, although widely believed:

The central idea in OODA is a generalization of Butterfly-Bee: to simply operate at a higher tempo than your opponent. (118)

Guilty as charged. I didn’t spend enough time exploring how OODA gets beyond merely “faster tempo” to “inside the adversary’s tempo.” That’s something I hope to explore in a more nuanced way in a future edition. Over the last 6-8 months, I think I’ve come to understand the subtleties a lot better, and the challenge is to now spend more time thinking through clear definitions and examples….

I think everyone who has explored the OODA Loop concept, including John Boyd himself, initially gravitated to the aspect of cycling “faster” than one’s oponent because it is a natural assumption that resonates with our own experiences. We have all seen competitions where one player or athlete was “quicker” in reading situations and arriving at the right intuitive decision – usually most of us have been both the faster as well as the slower and more hesitant person. It’s the first scenario that springs to mind and being “faster” gives an obvious comparative advantages. Obvious does not mean “only” though.

What made the “faster” interpretation of OODA Loop really stick in the culture though, IMHO, was this unfortunate but easily understood graphic:

NOT THE REAL OODA LOOP

As a result, we get critical arguments that the OODA Loop is really something germane only to binary situations similar to the high pressure aerial combat that Boyd experienced in the Korean War or as a tactical fighter pilot instructor (or Musashi’s sword fighting) and not something generally useful in military strategy. An odd argument, given that Clausewitz liked to use binary metaphors to describe the nature of war.

The next graphic, which better illustrates the simultanaeity and dynamic nature of the OODA Loop, with other potential avenues of exploitation than just going “faster” (which will swiftly hit diminishing returns in any event) does not lend itself as easily to nearly instant comprehension:

THE ‘OFFICIAL” OODA LOOP:

With these cognitive relationships operating continuously, mostly subconsciously with automaticity and in an iterative fashion, a different set of meanings to the phrase “inside your oponent’s OODA Loop” than just going “faster”, like a formula one race car zooming around a track.