Did John Boyd Leave Game Theory Out of the OODA Loop

Game theory tries to solve the game. The OODA loop reshapes the conditions under which any game gets played. Brian "Ponch" Rivera and Mark "Moose" McGrath open the archives and ask a sharp question: John Boyd clearly understood game theory, so why is it nearly absent from A Discourse on Winning and Losing?

The answer is Orientation. Game theory assumes a fixed board with stable payoffs. Boyd assumes every representation is incomplete and open to manipulation, and that the act of observing changes the game itself. You cannot optimize a matrix while your opponent is dissolving it. Sparked by Donald D. Hoffman and Andrew Gallimore's new "Traces of Others" paper, this is a fast, host-only reorientation on why the real OODA loop is not a menu of options and never was.

OODA loop, John Boyd, orientation, non-linear OODA, decision making under uncertainty, game theory, destruction and creation, implicit guidance and control, maneuver warfare.

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

X: @NoWayOutcast · @PonchAGLX · @NoWayOutMoose

Substack: The Whirl Of ReOrientation - www.thewhirl.substack.com

Transcript

Why game theory is missing from John Boyd's OODA loop

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:20

Hey, Moose, uh, I want to talk to you about game theory and why it might be absent from uh John Boyd's work. Before I do that, I want to share with you why or what triggered this. And that is I came across Donald Hoffman's work with Andrew Gallimore. You know, Andrew Gallimore does a lot of work on DMT, and we're recording this on a day when um DMT is big in the news. ATAI is being uh bought out by uh I think Lily on big, big news today. So today today's Thursday, July 16th. We'll try to get this published immediately. So traces of other are DMT entities real. So I looked into this and they have a PDA loop, a it's perception, decision, action loop that kind of overlaps with Boyd's work. It's really cool. Mathematics are involved. But the math involved really comes

Traces of Others: Hoffman, Gallimore, and the DMT news

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:05

from game theory. So uh what I did is I went back into you know the archives, I looked around and only found one mention of game theory in John Boyd's notes. I don't have those in front of me. I'm gonna have to find them for this conversation. Maybe we maybe we can add that a little bit later on. But I also went back through uh a discourse on winning and losing. I looked around and I couldn't find much about game theory. So here's how I'm kind of thinking through this. You look through the references, you look at where John Boyd was in the Pentagon, he clearly understood game theory, right? 15 F-16 trade-offs and things like that. These things are happening in the 70s. But why, why did Boyd not include it, in my opinion? I I gotta check in with you. Why is it not in there? So I did some digging around, and yeah, there's connections to uh, you know, some key theorists at the time. I don't have those in front of me. Maybe we could talk more about that. He did write this thing called Science, Engineering, and Technology, a brief on it about cooperation and competition. Again, I found that in the notes uh that we have. And he and he lists a lot of people, a lot of thinkers that are in that space. And that's uh uh Faraday, Maxwell, Marx, Engels, Plank, Einstein, Bohr, Tarski, Church, Turning, Shannon. The con Shannon's been mentioned quite a bit in the last week on on Wall Street, Mandelbrot, and more. So he's already looking at this. But my question to you is why isn't it mentioned in there? And I think I know the answer.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Well, the first thing I'd say, uh I loved how you pointed out Boyd's interdisciplinary approach. And you can't just study one thing. You have to study lots of things from lots of perspectives.

Boyd's interdisciplinary edge: don't mistake the triangle for the pyramid

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Otherwise, you're looking at a triangle and thinking it's a triangle and not realizing that you're about to get slammed with a pyramid and you'll have no idea what to do. I think that Boyd, I think that the deepest difference is that game theory generally assumes that the actual game can be represented where where Boyd assumes that every representation is incomplete, it's temporary, and it's it's vulnerable to manipulation and how we look at it and and how we shape it. And that opposed to a game theorist, which is probably seems to me more static. I have a menu of options, things seem to be fixed, or at least it's training my mind to be fixed. If I'm operating in a game theory medium, right, the medium is the message. I'm looking at everything as if it always has static options and fixed options and that there's only a few ways out. I think that Boyd would tell you that no, you have to look for mismatch. You have to destroy any obsolete concepts, you have to break those apart and you have to synthesize novelty that didn't previously exist. Um, you have to act like uh certainty doesn't exist because game theory with a fixed menu, that that seems to me like the pursuit of certainty, which is the opposite of so much of what Boyd is uh was Boyd is is telling us. And psychological collapse, right? Isn't this our very psychology, our our our emotional

Where game theory goes static and orientation goes non-linear

SPEAKER_01 3:50

state, our psychology. Where does that factor in game theory? So I don't I don't think that game theory really allows for the reorientation that Boyd says that you need to uh that you need to do. That's that's kind of like my my big big picture take on it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 4:03

So when so you you have a background in economics and and I did too. Yours is deeper than mine. But if I remember correctly, and then we might bring an image up of game theory, it's it's a two by two matrix, right? So it you just said it's fixed, known strategy, uh, maybe stable payoffs, pretty standard things, right? And you also said this, and we kind of recap it, and that is uh the model changes. It's it's it's very there's variation in the model as

The two-by-two matrix vs. the OODA loop that perturbs the game

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 4:26

we take an action into it, as as our orientation, as our oodaloops go and perturb the environment, that changes the name of the game. Even just observing the game changes the game. Um I think that I think Boyd would agree with that. Um we go through a cycle of destruction creation when we're doing that, right? We we change this the set of the game. Uh and again, I think the bottom line here is game theory is kind of fixed. So as I'm thinking through Donald Hoffman's use of, and I'm not saying he's right or wrong, I'm just saying they use the math of game theory to come up with the uh traces of others, which which is really interesting. It says that we don't actually, you and I are not engaging with each other, we're engaging with the traces of each other, which I think aligns well with what John Boyd is. John Boyd is very clear in saying that I'm your environment, or excuse me, you're my environment, I'm your environment, which is aligned to like constraints like approach and and warfare and competition. McLuhan. And even game theory, but can you go a little bit deeper as to what you know what what the mismatches and all this?

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Like I think like game theory, what it gets right is that it recognizes that actors are they're anticipating each other, right? They're anticipating what what the other's gonna do. Incentives matter. Like you you do something thinking that you're gonna profit or or or be better off. Signaling matters, you know. We want to see what what I can extract from a like from a signal standpoint, cooperation,

What game theory gets right, and where it becomes pure vulnerability

SPEAKER_01 5:46

things like prisoner's dilemma or whatever, right? I mean, that that could be fragile based off of the things that it's not factoring in, like my orientation and my my uh emotional state or my psychology or my previous experience. I think it also gets right that, you know, threats can be threats can be credible, could be a credible threat, and that every move that that's that's made and observed, that'll change the other side's calculation. Like I think it gets all that right. I think that the the mistake is where people treat that as a complete theory of strategy. And what what Boyd would start asking is like, well, what is the other side, what does each side believe is actually going on? You know, what what are they how do they form that belief? Where did that belief even come from? What's their orientation like that even came up with that belief? What are they missing? Because we know from destruction and creation with Girdle that uh all information is incomplete. So I I can never have total information, I can never have uh perfect information. What assumptions are being made to try to hold it all, hold the picture, uh hold the picture together? And then how are those uh you know, Boyd says you gotta challenge all assumptions, otherwise, what becomes doctrine today is dogma forever after. How can those assumptions be attacked? Where will they be attacked from? Why would they be attacked? What do we do if they are attacked? And then how quickly can you detect mistakes that are made and then and then reorient? That's that's orientation warfare. That that's where game theory could be a component, but if it's my only component for strategy, that's pure vulnerability.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 7:15

So there's no doubt that uh Boyd had access to the theorists of the time. Uh we do have his background in economics and of course uh trade-offs in the F-16 and in the aircraft design. So that's not in dispute. Um, and this would be something we may want to check in with Chuck and Chet on is what's their take on this? Because uh again, this is just something that emerged in the last week when I was looking at the traces of others uh theory, if you want to call it that, basically saying that uh these DMT entities that are out there or maybe out there, that we're not truly um that they're in the space that we're in, that our senses that we have been designed in such a way not to have direct access with them all the time. But when that implicit guidance control, that perception gets uh suppressed, that ego gets suppressed, we gain more access to more information that's around us. So again, that's what drove

The most dangerous model: smart, credentialed, and wrong

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 8:01

a lot of this uh this thinking this week. And that's why I asked you, man, what are your thoughts on this?

SPEAKER_01 8:05

I Do you ever think like the the most dangerous person is not always the one who's ignorant, right? It's uh it's often the really smart person whose model has stopped matching reality, even if it came from Princeton, even if it came from Nobel laureates, right? They've got the data, they've got the confidence, they've got the logic, they've got the uh you know the perceived pedigree, they've got the polished explanations why I why everything should work the way that they they want it. But then all of a sudden, like the mismatch is that the environment, the reality, refuses to cooperate. So the model saying, yes, but the the reality is saying, hell no.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 8:42

This is great, man. I like this this format where we just kind of throw something out there. It uh again, I want to recap something else. So the game theory optimizes play within a fixed game, right? So so we you know, we laugh at folks that use effects-based operations, starting with the future, declared destination of future, working backwards. Like, that's not how the world generally works. There are contexts where that works, but uh Boyd would say you're attacking the game itself when we perturb the environment, when we take action. And I think that's what uh Hoffman and Gallimore would agree on, but I don't think that's what they're truly after in the in the um traces of others. And you can't optimize a matrix uh in a in a context where your opponent is dissolving the matrix as you're as they're doing the game too. So fascinating conversation. Again, I think we need to check in with Chad.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

You want to like, you know, your opponent's not just making moves, he should be trying to help you misread the board. So like I don't know I don't even I don't even know what game I'm playing,

Attacking the game itself: you can't optimize a dissolving matrix

SPEAKER_01 9:35

you know. Yeah. We think we think of like high tempo, we talk about like basketball a lot. We think, you know, where you where you've seen a lopsided mismatch game where somebody looks in a total state of flow, the other team doesn't even look like they're playing basketball. That's because that's because what's being done to them that's empowering them in turn to do all the work for their opponent, they're completely misreading. They don't they don't even know where they are. The the the other side has become uh like what Boyd would say, like an enigma, like a cryptogram, like you know, like something that can't be cracked and encoded, and they just they just fall apart.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 10:08

No, I agree. So I'm gonna share with our our listeners again, and we'll we'll wrap it up here in a second, and that is from the newly emerged Trace Institute. Hopefully that's shown on the screen. I'll enlarge a little bit better. Uh you go to traceinstitute.org, take a look at their paper, Traces of Others. This is from Donald D. Hoffman out at

Making your opponent misread the board

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 10:25

Irving, California, and then uh Andrew Gallimore. Andrew Gallimore has uh written several books or three books that I paid attention to and used in the conversation at Hedgeye, where we looked at attractors, fractals, and uh how not DMT works, but how Ibogaine works. And of course, a lot of this is driven by us looking outside our comfort zones, looking at DMT, looking at Ibogaine, looking at ayahuasca, and seeing what the research says there. And I think that has been a instrumental in helping me understand John Boyd's real work because uh the science overlaps. And uh I think uh, you know, if you're listening out there poo-pooing the idea that uh we're getting ideas from psychedelic assisted therapy research, um the whole point of the Oodaloop is to look outside your domain, right? Challenge your own assumptions.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

All right. Yeah. Okay, I I'll close

Traces of Others and looking outside your domain

SPEAKER_01 11:13

with this. So yeah, if our clients, our prospects, people that we speak, our listeners on the show, our readers on the substack, game theory is trying to solve the game. Boyd is trying to understand, disrupt, and shape the conditions under which any game can be played. And that's what we help people understand. And when you know that difference and you not only know it, but you understand it, then you can apply it, and then you your results go up while your opponents implode.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 11:41

Let's leave it at that, man. We'll close it out right there. Thanks, Boos. Yep, see you, Poncho.