tdaxp

Steven Pinker's article in the New York Times, "The Moral Instinct" is wonderful. Thanks to Gene Expression for linking to it.

Pinker discusses the current state of research on moral reasoning, and I love it. Like me, Pinker's skeptical of the "Kohlberg model," and instead focuses on moral intuition. That is, we both focus on an OODA-loop like model that focuses more on Orientation and less on Decision. (The article is doubly-cool because I will be running a very similar study this semester.)

The Times article presents a number of moral dilemmas. In each of these situations, think what you would do:

Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?

and:

. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge?

and:

A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever?

Ultimately, in the context of the OODA Loop, orientation makes sense for situations that are complex, and decision makes sense for situations that are logical. Because we live in a world that is typically complex and rarely logical, it makes more sense for us to follow orientation and bypass decision... and that goes for morality, too!

Evans, J. St. B. T. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093629.

John Boyd's OODA Loop is a dual processing model of cognition. The very best discussion of dual processing is Jonathan St. B. T. Evans' "Dual processing accounts of reasoning, judgment and social cognition" (55-page pdf, Annual Review's description) to be published in January 2008, in the Annual Review of Psychology.

The article goes over a tremendous amount of literature in excellent style. Evans synthesizes many sources I've mentioned such as Lieberman's "comparison between thinking and riding a bicycle," and recent work noting the very strong correlation between working memory and IQ . But he puts everything in a larger context, showing how field after field is adopting dual processing systems, and thus coming ever closer to Boyd's OODA model.

If you want to know how people think, Evans' article is the place to start.

Chet Richards, founder of DNI and Belisarius, has an excellent post on decision speed cycle (in the context of the OODA loop):

1. The side which can keep its Orientation more closely matched to the unfolding situation will have an advantage. Another way to say this is that the side whose mental model of the universe is better will find opportunities to create and exploit gaps in the other side’s understanding.

2. You need an inventory of potentially effective actions that can flow smoothly from Orientation via the “implicit guidance and control” link. These actions are generally developed and made intuitive through years of hard training and exercises.

Basically, under this concept, when Orientation decides that it’s time to trigger an action, it just does it. Until then, we continue to observe and to tweak our orientations.

My current projects center around translating these concepts for educational psychologists. It's a ton of work getting beyond the catch-22 ("why develop a theory if it's not mentioned in the experimental literature?" "why run an experiment if its not implied by the theoretical literature"), but also a ton of fun.

Reacting privately to my posts on Cognitive Development, Rational Moral Development, and the OODA Loop, an immensely valued critic wrote:

It remains unclear to me why you are skeptical of rational agency despite having no problem with rationality, metacognition, or other related concepts. My sense is that you see intelligence, and thus rationality, as residing mostly in automatic, domain-specific processes, and associate agency with more controlled and general forms of reasoning that you think are more likely to undermine rationality than to enhance it.

Since getting this email last week I've been tossing it around in my head. I think I agree.

People know much more than they can say. Our verbal descriptions most closely match our behavior when we are new at a task, and know it only as a series of steps. With practice we no longer think about those steps -- we automate them -- so that we can perform them mindlessly while thinking about other things

The human ability to think has two main purposes: to allow us to learn new thinks (reorientation) and disrupt the execution of already automated tasks (disorientation). That is, thinking is a tool that should be used when our orientation is insufficient for the actions we have to perform. Normally, we rely on anxiety, or disorientation produced by orientation, to tell us when we need to calculate a new path or go back and reorient ourselves for a later time. Metacognition is similar to anxiety, except that it's controlled by decision instead of orientation.

So why am I skeptical of rational agency, the idea that being human means having well-thought-out reasons for one's actions? Because the tool of thought is just that, a tool. Decision is a tool used by persons in situations where they are unable or undesirious of trusting what they already know -- it is not the essence of personhood.

I'm in the middle of a really fun project. I am writing a paper for a professor on the OODA loop in education. Our goal is to get it published in a top-line theoretical journal that focuses on Educational Psychology. Additionally, I am hoping to turn it into the "Literature Review" section of a disertation proposal and, ultimately, build a dissertation off it.

Over the next two weeks, I am serializing the current version of the article into a tdaxp series. Consider this an "alpha" release. What follows is a foreshadowing of what to come, though much improved from my earlier "Variations of the OODA Loop. With two exceptions (a true "Introduction" and an overview of other Information Processing models) all the major sections that will appear are there. But the writing style is still closer to my note-taking style that it is to what is common in journals, and many of the references will fall away as later iterations focus more space on fewer sources.

I have two main motives for posting this. One, of course, is hoping for positive comments re-inforcing where I've gone right. But even more valuable are comments on where I have gone wrong. Your help is infinitely valuable, and as easy as commenting on anything that caches your interest.

Thank you for reading.

OODA Alpha, a tdaxp series
1. Abstract
2. Dual Processing Systems
3. The OODA Loop
4. Decision
5. Orientation
6. A Theory of Mind
7. Reorientation
8. Disorientation
9. Education
10. Instruction
11. Student Interaction
12. Creativity
13. Conclusion
14. Bibliography

Chet Richards isn't just a retired colonel in the Air Force Reserve, a doctor of mathematics, and the organizer of the yearly Boyd Seminars. He's also an incredibly nice guy who responds to email far faster than I do, and gave incredible corrections and suggestions for my upcoming paper on the OODA loop in education.

Thanks, Chet!

Read a great review by Bill Lind of a great book by Frans Osinga.

For the OODA article I am writing, Osinga's book is the most cited source. It's invaluable in understanding Boydian psychology. Get it. Read it. Learn it.

gnxp links to The Economist and Science, which both tell the story of how chimpanzees play the ultimatum game more rationally than humans. (The ultimatum game featured prominently in my last two experiments on the wary guerrilla and the wary student).

One explanation is that part of humanity's success is an innate ability to be irrational, to focus on cooperative-competition rather than one-against-all-ism. Another, not contradictory, theory would be that chimpanzees are easily disoriented (in the Boydian sense) and unable to keep ideas such as justice or fairness in mind.

Proposed Title: Implicit Guidance and Control
Proposed Subtitle: Applying the Strategy of John Boyd to Educational Psychology

Proposed Abstract:

The article presents an overview of the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) model of cognition. The OODA model's history, use in military strategy, and utility in educational contexts is discussed. Next, special attention is paid to how the OODA model integrates into Boydian cognition, cognitive science, and educational psychology, focusing especially on (a) orientation, or implicit guidance and control over action, (b) decision, or hypothesis generation, and (c) disorientation, or the process of interfering with the former and encouraging the latter. Following this, an interpretuation of the sociocultural contexs that make OODA model analysis especially productive is given. Specifically, the OODA model is applied to the realms of (a) education, or improving performance in discrete tasks, (b) academics, or proper behavior among peers, and (c) creativity, or life-long success. Finally, the role of the OODA model in developing rationality, which is a vital goal across educational, is briefly considered.

Thoughts?

This is my first reaction paper for Cognitive development: Fourth edition by Flavell, Miller, & Miller (2002). In their first chapter, “Introduction,” they discuss the theories of Jean Piaget and the major research programs which owe a lot to him: the neo-piagetian, information processing, biological perspectives, theory theory, dynamic systems, and sociocultural approaches. Rather than summarizing the material in the chapter, which would be about as interesting as the preceding two sentences, I will confess my bias and outline my perspective, tying these as needed to the book's contents.

I do not believe that people have good reasons for their actions. I do not believe that people are rational agents, that they create and test scientific theories, or that their self-conceptions matter most of the time. I think this is all for the best, as the limited cognitive resources of homo sapiens make them terrible decision makers. Humans make their best actions when they do not have to labor over decision making and instead trust their orientation state – their gut. Verbal discourse exists primarily to get people to do things against their own interests. It is a relic of the group-selection events that formed our species. Intuition, by contrast, is how we and every animal actually live.