Showing all posts tagged #clipping:
Posted on June 27th, 2019
Bulging Muscles Won't Win
The Next WarBy David Hackworth
October 4, 2000
In 1631, General Tilly's imperialist Roman Catholic army was whipped by a significantly smaller force under the command of King Gustavus Adolphus.
For more than 200 years, the formations Tilly fielded that day—the Tercios—had dominated the battlefield. But Gustavus had secretly developed a lean, agile army that struck like lightning—employing combined-arms tea...
Posted on June 27th, 2019
The Changing Face of War:
Into the Fourth GenerationWilliam S. Lind, Colonel
Keith Nightengale (USA),
Captain John F. Schmitt (USMC), Colonel Joseph W. Sutton (USA),
and Lieutenant Colonel Gary I. Wilson (USMCR)
Marine Corps
Gazette
October 1989, Pages 22-26The peacetime soldier's principal task is to prepare effectively
for the next war. In order to do so, he must anticipate what the next war will be
like. This is a difficult ...
Posted on June 26th, 2019
Warfighting Brought to You by . . .
By Major Jeffrey L. Cowan, U.S. Air Force
. . . several people, but most notably, an unlikely source. The
groundwork for the way the U.S. Marine Corps does business was laid by none
other than a retired Air Force officer, the irascible
John Boyd.Co-Winner, Marine Corps Essay Contest
http://www.proceedings.org/Proceedings/Articles01/PROcowan11.htm
Republished wi...
Posted on June 26th, 2019
Editor's note: The following paper is an example of what John Boyd called a "snowmobile," a synthesis of ideas from across a variety of domains (interested readers can see see how Boyd
develops the notion of "building snowmobiles" in his briefing,
Strategic Game of ? and ?, available
here on DNI, then
scroll down.)Snowmobiles result from analyses combined with trials at a synthesis. Since it is virtually imp...
Posted on June 26th, 2019
Marine General: Iraq War Pause
'Could Not Have
Come At Worse Time'Inside The Pentagon Elaine M. Grossman
October 2, 2003
[Reprinted by permission of Inside Washington
Publishers. This article may not be reproduced or redistributed, in
part or in whole, without express permission of the publisher. Copyright
2004, Inside Washington Publishers. For more information and
exclusive news, go to:
htt...
Posted on June 26th, 2019
Marine General: Leading
From Iraqi Battlefield, Informed Key Decisions
Elaine M. Grossman,
Inside The Pentagon,
October 16, 2003, Pg. 1
Reprinted by Permission of Inside Washington Publishers: This
article may not be reproduced or redistributed, in part or in whole, without
express permission of the publisher. Copyright 2001, Inside Washington Publishers.At a time of increasing reliance ...
Posted on June 26th, 2019
Interpersonal Communications and Officer Survival: How Understanding The Boyd Cycle and Non-Verbal Communication Can Save a Law Enforcement Officer’s Life!
Fred T. Leland Jr.*
Republished with permission.
IntroductionAccording to FBI statistics, over 50,000 law enforcement officers are assaulted
each year. One out of every three officers assaulted is injured, and
approximately 70 officers make the ultimate sacrifice in the performa...
Posted on June 26th, 2019
Thinking About Deception by Fred Feer
5 August 2004This brief paper discusses the most often asked questions about military
deception. What is it?Why do it?How do you measure its impact,
or, how do you calculate its contribution to winning?Can you rely on it?What is Deception?The answer to the first question is
misleadingly simple. The official definition is:
deception — Those measures designed to mislead the enemy b...
Posted on June 26th, 2019
October 31, 2005
Beyond Patterns of Conflict?
By Chet RichardsAs many readers of this site know, John Boyd was
heavily influenced by the ideas of the Austrian-American mathematician
Kurt Gödel, particularly, the notion of incompleteness. Although
Gödel worked in the rarified realm of foundations of mathematics, the
notion that no even moderately complex mathematical system can be complete
formed a critical elemen...
Posted on June 26th, 2019
Summary: What would a grand strategy for America look like? This critiques our current policies and Barnett’s proposals in terms our limited wisdom and power. It ends with recommendations for design of a modest but functional strategy for America.ContentsIntroductionWhat is grand strategy?Primal StrategiesGrand Strategies are a ChimeraBarnett’s Grand StrategyWhy do Grand Strategies Fail?America’s Need for a Humble Grand StrategyNatur...
Posted on June 24th, 2019
Hey all -
The discussion below was formerly an introduction, but as usual it turned out far too long, so I decided to break it up into two newsletters.+ what I learned or rediscovered recently
* Eastern philosophy (rating: 4)For most of my life, I dismissed Eastern philosophy as too spiritual, too intangible, too impractical. Western philosophy just seems so much more useful. Equipped with the instrument of reason, you can define, a...
Posted on June 24th, 2019
Hey all -
In a commencement speech made to the graduating students of Kenyon College in 2005, David Foster Wallace opened with the following parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning boys, how’s the water?"
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other, and goes: "What th...
Posted on June 24th, 2019
Man is a bubble, and all the world is a storm.
--Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying (1651)My father owned a gorgeous porcelain tiger about half the size of a house cat. He kept it on a shelf in our family den, where for years when I was a kid it roared down at us -- unappeasably furious (or so I always thought) at being trapped up there on its high perch, with no company except some painted beer mugs and a set of purple glass swizzle sticks....
Posted on June 13th, 2019
The stories we hear of the successful often make it seem like they were destined for greatness. They identified their purpose from an early age and forged ahead, cutting down distractions in their path. But if you peel back the facade, few encountered sudden revelations. Purpose is hard won.
Child prodigies like Mozart or Tiger Woods are the exception. Robert Greene, best-selling author, worked dozens of jobs as a construction worke...
Posted on June 9th, 2019
When statistical things go wrong, it’s often because someone unknowingly assumed ergodicity where that wasn’t ok. This can have dramatic effects in everyday language: I will use the example of incarceration rates. I will then present a visual illustration to discuss the role of time scales.
David and Luigi in jailI’ll tell you a secret: when I read a statistical statement I often wonder whether it’s a temporal statement or an ensembl...
Posted on June 9th, 2019
"POP WANTS TO talk to you."
The server is speaking to a man named Jeremy Threat -- and from the tone in his voice, something is clearly amiss. Threat hustles back to the main dining room of Spataro Restaurant & Bar, an Italian restaurant in Sacramento, California, that has been overrun by the San Antonio Spurs. Players, coaches, management, ownership. All are seated along a handful of long, rectangular tables. The room is pin-drop si...
Posted on June 9th, 2019
"To win wars, people come first, ideas second and hardware last."—Colonel John Boyd
As lawmakers and senior United States Air Force (USAF) officials debate A-10 divestment and alternate approaches to close air support (CAS) responsibilities, the divestment of the A-10 community, not the aircraft, poses the largest risk to the future of the mission. In Gen. David Goldfein’s nomination testimony, he rightly stated the A-10 community is...
Posted on June 9th, 2019
18 May 2019
The software within the two doomed 737 Max 8 aircraft physically wrested control away from the pilots and plunged those aircraft into the Earth at speeds approaching Mach 1, killing everyone aboard.As a pilot, and a software engineer, I have dug pretty deeply into this issue. I’ve read many of the reports, and have read or listened to the opinions and commentary offered by others. Nothing I have read or heard contrad...
Posted on March 24th, 2019
This is Tokyo, circa 1832. The print is "Nihonbashi no hakuu" by the Ukiyo-e master Andō Hiroshige. Many years ago, my wife found a copy in a consignment store in Atlanta. I don’t remember what she paid for it, but she assures me that framing it cost many times the purchase price. Since we’ve been here in South Carolina, we’ve had it reframed to show off the stamps and writing around the borders.
Intro to Chapter 6, Surprise and An...
Posted on March 3rd, 2019
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.
Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn tha...
Posted on February 18th, 2019
A philosophy of pleasure could cure our modern ills.
Rome During the Decadence, Thomas Couture, 1847. Epicureanism for a long time had a reputation as a philosophy that encouraged reckless and immoral hedonism. Epicurus was a hedonist, but encouraged the pursuit of a natural state of pleasure that comes when we free ourselves of desire. His philosophy was very popular throughout the Roman Empire. (Image source: Wikipedia)For over a ...
Posted on January 15th, 2019
I
have found an interesting discussion on the Cook by Chuang Tzu on Wikipedia http://www.philosophy.hku.hk/ch/zhuang.htm
It
does begin to get at what mastery begins.
Cook Ting was slicing up an oxen for Lord Wenhui. At
every push of his hand, every angle of his shoulder, every step with his feet,
every bend of his kneezip! zoop! he slithered the knife along with a zing, and
all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were dancing to Mulb...
Posted on December 21st, 2018
I tend to think of "agility" as adaptability with a time dimension, that is, the ability to adapt more rapidly to new situations than can competitors or opponents. That may not, however, be the only or even a very good way to think about these concepts. Here’s an alternative view:AQ is hot right now – but is it the Adaptability Quotient or the Agility Quotient?Kristopher Floyd
Founder and CEO, TeamMate AINovember 13, 2018
Originally...
Posted on July 17th, 2018
By Hiroshi "Mickey" Mikitani
May 18, 2018CEO and Chairman, Rakuten, Inc.Are you thinking about doing something innovative?
If so, stop that. Stop thinking, and act.
It is tempting to greet an idea with a call to "think things through"—to research, consider, and consult. And of course, some thinking at the start is important. But in order to take your thinking to the next level—to really understand what needs to happen to make your id...
Posted on June 4th, 2018
Notes: Trust your right-brained pattern-spotting. Be a skeptical, data-driven empiricist. Add a moral compass. Tie it all together with storytelling. Be aware of, and exploit, the flawed doctrines of others. Do not be concerned about the morality of this: doctrinal flaws provide the moral justification for their own exploitation
August 31, 2009 By Venkatesh Rao
Last fall, I spent a long weekend in the Outer Banks region, a few hour...
Posted on May 22nd, 2018
A Short Tutorial on the Moral Essence
of Grand Strategy
September 11, 2003
Comment: #491
Discussion Threads - Comment #s: 490
and referenced comments.
Attached References:
[Ref.1] Richard Bernstein,
"Foreign Views Of U.S. Darken Since Sept. 11," New York Times, September
11, 2003, Pg. 1
On the second anniversary of 9/11, the world-wide outpouring
sympathy a...
Posted on May 21st, 2018
What was Boyd thinking and when did he think it?In his own words:For the interested, a careful examination will reveal that the increasingly abstract discussion surfaces a process of reaching across many perspectives; pulling each and every one apart (analysis), all the while intuitively looking for those parts of the disassembled perspectives which naturally interconnect with one another to form a higher-order, more general elaborat...
Posted on May 15th, 2018
This piece was originally published in 1999, and is based on a 1996 camping trip. My thoughts have been drifting back to this experience lately, so I thought I’d share it. It’s a little overwrought, but it is significant for me personally because my writing voice first started emerging with this piece. Besides a few copy-editing and internationalization touches, I haven’t changed anything.
– One –
Namdapha, in an obscure corner of th...
Posted on May 10th, 2018
It’s a common nightmare for programmers to come in late to a project or organization and then have to make sense of a complex "spaghetti mess" of code created over the previous 10 years — a technical debt that takes huge resources in time and money to clean up. Ten years of technical debt is an all-too common headache: Decades of debt were at the root of the Y2K COBOL nightmare. MySpace struggled famously for years with a crippling t...
Posted on May 1st, 2018
For months now, I’ve been thinking about a whole mess of related ideas with the aid of a Penrose triangle visualization of three key, interconnected loci that frame a sort of canvas on which life scripts (whether canned or improvised) play out. The three vertices are home, public and frontier. This is the simplest version of the visualization:Between home and public you find subcultures of being and identity, defined by the question,...
Posted on May 1st, 2018
Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy in practice seems to be a cruel and even silly joke. I learned that the hard way when I went to college long before I ever studied strategy formally. My own "strategy" about how to get through college collapsed virtually the moment I set foot on campus. I was living on my own for the first time and had never been outside of California’s perennial summer weather environment before. I...
Posted on May 1st, 2018
In November 2008, with the financial crisis in full swing, Queen Elizabeth attended a ceremony at the London School of Economics. Facing an audience of high ranked academics, she posed a simple question: "Why did nobody notice it?"
How could it be that no one among the smartest economists, commentators, and policymakers in all her kingdom – and beyond – had been able to see the formation of a bubble of such dimensions?Illustration of...
Posted on May 1st, 2018
Make Your Own Rules
February 15, 2018 By Venkatesh Rao We seem to be in the middle of a renaissance of rules for life. Not since Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten (1987) and Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits (1989) has there been such a peak of interest in such rules. Then, as now, we were going through a period of deep global changes, and everybody was very anxious because nobody knew what the new rules...
Posted on May 1st, 2018
June 18, 2015 By Venkatesh Rao
If you’re a certain sort of metacognition-obsessed person, at some point in your intellectual wanderings, you will eventually run into a murky and illegible world of ideas and practices swirling around words and phrases like OODA loop, control the tempo, snowmobile, fast transient, maneuver warfare, E-M theory, inside the decision cycle of your adversary, fight the enemy, not the terrain, and be someb...
Posted on July 25th, 2017
Summary: How to deal with risks dominates our headlines, usually driven by single-interest groups that see only their favorite threat. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest work offers a way to identify the most serious threats facing us, and determine how much we should spend to fight each of them. It has received much attention. Is it useful? Part one of two.
A series of papers by Nassim Nicholas Taleb et al made a large co...
Posted on April 22nd, 2017
By William S. Lind
June 11, 2004
In my last column, I referenced "the canon," the seven books which, if read in the correct order, take the reader from the First Generation of modern war through the Second and Third Generations and into the Fourth. A number of people responded with requests for a description both of the canon and of the Four Generations, so here goes.
The First Generation of modern war began with the Peace of Westpha...
Posted on April 22nd, 2017
Why our greatest military theorist only made colonel.
John Boyd during the Korean War Off and on for about 20 years, I had the honor of working with the greatest military theorist America ever produced, Col. John Boyd, USAF. As a junior officer, Boyd developed the energy-management tactics now used by every fighter pilot in the world. Later, he influenced the designs of the F-15 and F-16, savin...
Posted on March 19th, 2017
The World According to Nassim Taleb
Derivatives Strategy: What problems do you have with financial
engineering?
Nassim Taleb: I disagree with such an approach in financial risk
management. Some folks looked
at the literature and saw differential equations and said "Gee it's like engineering".
Engineering relies on models because you can capture the relationships in the physical world very
well. Models in the social sciences se...
Posted on August 10th, 2015
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Greek Orthodox Christian from Lebanon; the Levant. In the course of his book Antifragile, he promotes skepticism, theism, tradition, the writings of the stoics and seeks to restrict the claims of theory and "naĂŻve rationalism."
Elsewhere I have said that often theory seems to make us stupider than we would be without the theory. This is particularly true when theory says something is not possible. A key phr...
Posted on April 19th, 2015
May 2004
(This essay was originally published in Hackers
& Painters.)
If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best
bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a
reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word "startup"
dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is
very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the
Middle Ages.Startups usually involve technology, so much so that t...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
There is a remarkable psychological theory that explains the paradox of why so often our pleasures turn into problematic addictions and, conversely, why our stressful experiences frequently lead to sustained good feelings and even happiness. This under-appreciated theory was developed in the 1970s by behavioral psychologist Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania. He published his theory and findings in 1980 in the journal ...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
How much weight lifting or other exercise is optimal for fitness? What is the right amount of carbohydrate restriction or fasting for sustained weight loss and health? What level of exposure to allergens will reduce allergies? How many hours of sun tanning is healthy? How frequently should plus lenses be worn to reduce myopia? Do I need to take cold showers every day to get their benefit? How much stress is enough — and how much is...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
When does stress help you and when does it hurt you? There is no doubt that stresses of the wrong sort can lead to anxiety, emotional turmoil — and eventually depression and diseases like atherosclerosis and cancer. Yet a central theme of this blog is that certain stresses are "hormetic": at the right dose and frequency, stress can actually make you stronger and more resilient. The many posts on this blog illustrate how stress can ...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
There are many different reasons that people exercise: weight loss, cardiovascular health, strength improvement, stress reduction, recreation, and more. If you are looking for recreation and stress reduction, mildly aerobic exercise such as walking, jogging or swimming can be beneficial. If you want to lose weight, the evidence is fairly clear that dietary changes have a much more significant impact than most forms of exercise. If y...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
You may have had success losing weight on a low calorie, low carb, low glycemic or low fat diet. While I have found low carb to work best, both from research and personal experience, I think any of these approaches can be effective, and some diets work better than others in individual cases. But in many cases a restrictive diet is not enough and you find yourself regaining the weight. One of the main reasons for this is that you’re ...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
Do adaptations to stress exposure show up as changes in blood chemistry or heart function? The answer appears to be "yes". In his Newsweek article "Lessons in Survival", Ben Sherwood reported on a very interesting study of elite Army Airborne and Special Forces soldiers that probed the differences between those who could and could not endure an extremely stressful 19-day mock-prisoner-of-war camp. The Resistance Training Laborator...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
Hormetism is more than a scientific perspective; it also embodies a practical self-help philosophy for overcoming stress. The central idea of Hormetism is that organisms are inherently plastic and adaptable, and that the controlled application of stress can be used to induce adaptive changes that will increase stress tolerance. This applies not only to the physical organism, but to psychology. Just as we can adapt to better handle p...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
adaptation: a long-term change in the structure or regulation of an organism in response to the stimulus of an external stress, which enables it to better tolerate future occurrences of that stress.
cold water therapy: showering, bathing, or swimming in cold water in order to induce thermogenesis or other stress response.
constraint: an external device or internal discipline used to ensure adherence to proper form in a training exerc...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
Stoicism / Getting Stronger
Stoicism
Hormetism is a practical set of tools that can help you lose weight, get fit, or even improve your eyesight. But thinking of it as just "as set of tools" actually undervalues the benefits of Hormetism, because it leaves out the greatest benefit: a path to freedom from stress and a means of increasing your physical, mental and spiritual strength. Hormetism is at once a broad perspective on li...
Posted on March 17th, 2015
Rehabilitation
Do you wear glasses or contact lenses? (If so, click ). Use a hearing aid? Use a crutch or brace to walk? Based upon recent breakthroughs from the science of neuroplasticity, there may be a way to permanently eliminate the need for these aids — without the use of surgery or other artificial means.
Crutches or Stimulators? Correction by the use of compensatory devices or "crutches" is the usual approach to treating p...
Posted on March 11th, 2015
Hormesis is the ability of organisms to become stronger when exposed to low-dose stress. Is hormesis a basic principle of biology — or is it merely a strange but unimportant quirk of nature that only applies in exceptional circumstances?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb–the options trader turned philosopher–is intrigued by hormesis, and sees it as but one example of a much broader phenomenon: a fundamental principle he calls "antifragility"....
Posted on March 11th, 2015
In April, Brian Eno wrote to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, asking, "how can we even think about designing for a future that we can’t imagine?"
The letter he sent was the inaugural Longplayer Letter, the first in a series of letters published by ArtAngel and Jem Finer’s Longplayer – a project to compose and perform a 1,000 year-long piece of music (running now for 13 years).
The letters are to be written in relay-style: in responding to Eno’...
Posted on March 11th, 2015
Hormesis is a biological phenomenon whereby a beneficial effect (improved health, stress tolerance, growth or longevity) results from exposure to low doses of an agent that is otherwise toxic or lethal when given at higher doses. The philosophy of Hormetism, advocated in this blog, is based upon harnessing this biological phenomenon in a deliberate and systematic way in order to increase strength and resilience.
The plot below illus...
Posted on September 11th, 2014
Stripe, the payments company that makes it simple to accept payments on the web has quietly been amassing one of the strongest engineering teams in Silicon Valley. In this First Round Capital CTO Summit talk, Greg Brockman, founding engineer at Stripe, pries open the black box and shares how Stripe recruits. Below is an interpretation, not a transcript, of Greg’s talk. The credit goes to him for all the good stuff, and you can watch ...