Alexander Constantine - 6
We accept that imperfection and entropy are system features, not bugs.
Entropy is a reason why change is constant. If everything seeks to degrade, decay and return to chaos then a counterbalancing force is required to maintain the status quo. If the manner in which chaos could manifest or things could decay is not constant i.e. if there are shifting and potentially new ways things can go bad, get worse, screw up or degrade then that counterbalance must be an adaptive force. The counterbalance must be able to change just so things can stay the same.
Evolution is change. The idea that the world is in some form of homeostasis because its organic activity is in balance isn't true. Take mankind and its short time on stage out of the picture for a moment. Everything in the history of the world has been in constant flux. If there was a natural balance there wouldn't be tectonic plate movement, weather, climate (all of which are both the result of and themselves forces of change and imbalance) and there wouldn't be evolutionary pressure. Put mankind back in and what do you get? Increasing numbers of change agents who have an inbuilt capability to bring about chaos, destruction and degradation as well as many forms and degrees of order.
To expect things to stay the same is to deny both entropy and nature. The question becomes how you counterbalance entropy. Are you expending your energy on keeping just enough order to keep entropy at bay or are you trying to get ahead of the curve by initiating change on your terms? Do you want just enough order or do you go beyond?
Order, chaos and power are interrelated. Self-discipline is the fundamental basis for sustained, externalised power. Without power over oneself, one cannot expect to acquire, grow and retain power over others, especially once competition for that power emerges.
At large scale, war embodies the application of mainly destructive power, through order, to induce chaos in one’s opponent in any form. Complex manoeuvre warfare requires high order and coordination across many disciplined groups of units to inflict damage while also retaining the initiative and effectively forcing the enemy into a predominantly reactive state. This is the use of order to induce chaos. War unleashes entropy at high speed across the battlefield. The winner is the one who can maintain a sufficient degree of order to stave off critical entropy while ensuring that the enemy cannot. One way of expressing this concept is the “OODA Loop”.
The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is a decision-making model developed by United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents.
As can be seen from the diagram, the OODA loop includes continuous collection of feedback and observations. This enables late commitment, which is an important element of agility. This is in contrast to e.g. the PDCA cycle which requires early commitment (the first steps are Plan and Do).
The OODA loop has become an important concept in litigation, business, law enforcement, management education, military strategy and cyber security and cyberwarfare. According to Boyd, decision-making occurs in an iterative cycle of "observe, orient, decide, act". An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly and/or more effectively than an opponent, can thereby get inside the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage.
Some scholars are critical of the concept. Aviation historian Michael Hankins, for example, writes that "the OODA loop is vague enough that its defenders and attackers can each see what they want to see in it. For some, the OODA concept’s flexibility is its strength, but for others it becomes so generalized as to lose its usefulness." He concludes that "The OODA loop is merely one way among a myriad of ways of describing intuitive processes of learning and decision making that most people experience daily. It is not incorrect, but neither is it unique or especially profound."
Another paradigm is the “PDCA Cycle”.
PDCA or plan–do–check–act (sometimes called plan–do–check–adjust) is an iterative design and management method used in business for the control and continual improvement of processes and products. It is also known as the Shewhart cycle, or the control circle/cycle. Another version of this PDCA cycle is OPDCA. The added "O" stands for observation or as some versions say: "Observe the current condition." This emphasis on observation and current condition has currency with the literature on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. The PDCA cycle, with Ishikawa's changes, can be traced back to S. Mizuno of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1959.
The PDCA cycle is also known as PDSA cycle (where S stands for study). It was an early means of representing the task areas of traditional quality management. The cycle is sometimes referred to as the Shewhart / Deming cycle since it originated with physicist Walter Shewhart at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1920s. W. Edwards Deming modified the Shewhart cycle in the 1940s and subsequently applied it to management practices in Japan in the 1950s.
Deming found that the focus on Check is more about the implementation of a change, with success or failure. His focus was on predicting the results of an improvement effort, Study of the actual results, and comparing them to possibly revise the theory.
In war, so some theories go, adversaries’ OODA loops clash and the challenge is to preserve one's own OODA loop while interrupting that of one’s adversary. The more one can know (Observe) and the more one can process and integrate that knowledge (Orient), the “better” a decision can be and so the more effective the resultant action shall also be. Attaching feedback channels to each of the OODA stages that increase the rate and volume of knowledge throughput (total knowledge fidelity) should, in theory, increase overall effectiveness (if information and decision paralysis can be avoided). In simple terms, it's possible to overthink things or fail to take enough action. Sometimes it's better to just do something rather than nothing and worry about whether it was the right thing a bit later. Somewhat paradoxically, “doing nothing” is actually “doing something” and so doing nothing must be considered an option with both power and risk.
The OODA loop and the PDCA cycle can both be seen as cycles that initiate and iterate change, as well as seeking to embody and impose order for some purpose. It's quite obvious that either paradigm can apply to the individual alone or any size of group. Whether a person follows either OODA or PDCA and to what extent is difficult to fully infer and often difficult for the individual to consciously express because a lot of behaviour is semi- or sub-conscious (autonomic), irrational, impulsive, and not always fully informed. Why? Because people are in part black boxes containing black boxes. That is to say that how we are “built” and therefore how we “operate” is a long, complex process that is, at best, semi-opaque. The only person who knows about a person's whole life is that one person and even then they may not have a conscious, accurate understanding of themselves. We can, through communication of various sorts, explain ourselves to ourselves and try to explain ourselves to others but this ultimately hinges on our use of language in the broadest sense of the term (which includes the handling of concepts), while relying on the second party's linguistic and conceptual abilities too, as well as their sympathy and empathy. Also, we didn't used to live in ways that actively fed back data to many other people unless they were witnessing our behaviour and communications. We didn't generally run around constantly explaining ourselves to anyone who'd listen.
It should be fairly self-evident that both OODA and PDCA describe and are also applicable to human education and development. What is the process of education if not a form of OODA loop or PDCA cycle through which the teacher puts the student and the student puts themselves?
I've always seen education as an OODA loop (the school, its curriculum) full of OODA loops (the teachers and their methods, and the students and their abilities and learning styles). The science and art of education is to:
first map out an effective envelope of educational outcomes (embodied by the development of tests and curriculum);
build one or several institutional OODA loop(s) off that envelope;
align the teacher’s OODA loop with that envelope and institutional OODA loop (providing teachers with adequate feed forward and feedback tools);
build the student’s OODA loop on top of those two loops in such a way that he can increasingly flexibly and autonomously Observe and Orient himself.
What education should not do is simply make the student a fixed entity or imprint of his curriculum. This is to fail because the student becomes nonadaptive or even maladaptive. This means that the student loses the ability to develop new hypotheses (decisions) and therefore take actions that are outside of his previous, rigid experience. If one is able to independently, accurately, reliably and confidently Observe and Orient, one is able to self-educate.
Education shouldn't necessarily seek to eradicate or homogenize personality, even though personality can shrink or constrict one’s OODA loop. You might, partly because of your overall personality, default to limited, predictable sets of decisions and actions. This isn't necessarily wrong, especially if it’s done knowingly, irrespective of the outcome. Provided that the student is equipped with self awareness, conscious understanding of their personality and how it manifests, and a suite of tools they can choose from to navigate their OODA loop, then they are well equipped for life. If someone understands the impact of their personality on others and uses tools to optimise that for their desired effect under appropriate circumstances, likely they are gaining self awareness, self control and, ultimately, power.
Should education, therefore, always seek to produce maximally powerful, self-contained individuals who are flexible, adaptable and adept at mixing with and influencing others? That depends entirely upon one's view of society and one’s general perspective on life. There's no right answer because context is everything and some things are unimaginable. What if, over the course of several generations, the world's basic education standards were brought up to the equivalent of, say, the 5th highest system in the world, combined with flexibility of thought and self determination? Likely the act of governance would become much more difficult, hence why education is generally commoditized and kept artificially substandard. The plebians must remain underdeveloped in order to serve the masters at acceptably low management overheads, even if the masters aren't actually any smarter than the plebs. Education is also mental, cultural and social indoctrination, which is why class, networks and nepotism that stems from one’s education are key facets of individual and collective power.
How one optimises education is an open question. It's also impossible to control all the variables. Education isn't a process that happens in just the vacuum of school, it's a whole-of-life thing. We are the sum total of our experiences and our processing of them, which are unique to each of us. In some ways we are all black boxes made of other boxes, some black, some grey, some white, some translucent, some opaque.
Until recently, the degree to which any of us could know any other was limited to our conventional faculties and communication networks and therefore we can never truly know one another in totality and nor can we deeply know many people. To know someone is to be able to accurately predict their behaviour.
When one takes a more clinical, dispassionate and distant view of people, we get to where we are today: in a race to use any and all forms of data to build gigantic OODA loops that deliver the ability to predict collective and individual behaviour. Thereby, these OODA loops enable their masters to literally act on society further and faster than society can act on itself, thus providing the masters with dominant, multifaceted, leading and lagging control, which is exactly what a sophisticated OODA loop provides.
It's possible to insert probes into a rat's brain and read off with sufficient fidelity enough distinct brain activity that one can then build a digital simulation of the rat. That digital simulation or avatar can accurately predict the real rat's actions. This uses direct data in the model but one can also use indirect data for the same purpose. The more indirect data one has, the more accurate the avatar becomes and the more predictive power one acquires.
Every organisation builds “customer profiles” out of data with varying degrees of sophistication. Every form of informed power seeks to increase its power by:
aggregating such data into maximally sophisticated data avatars;
using the avatars to predict the behaviour of whatever the avatars represent e.g. real people;
maximising its predictive power and thus its control via some form of OODA loop.
This is exactly what the concept of Digital Identity is at its heart. It is not about identification, per sé. It is about individual and collective control through comprehensive, inescapable aggregation of indirect data to enable the development of accurate individual and collective avatars that provide incredibly precise predictive power to the masters of the system. Loss of anonymity is just one concern along the way. The end goal seems still to be undetected or misunderstood by the majority.
As Covid developed, suspicion and knowledge of the totalitarian control agenda started to circulate through a growing minority but that knowledge was imperfect, corrupted by chaos agents and idiots, and obfuscated in various ways. People tended to think that the control would come from the integration of Central Bank Digital Currencies with a system of Social Credit Score, of which widespread biometrics and Digital ID were key parts. This was right insofar that this paradigm was a feasible means to implement control. But it was a grossly inadequate view that simply ignored many, many other control paradigms that were already in place by the 2020s and/or were different paradigms that didn't need CBDCs, SCS, and massive biometric systems.
As we watched the internet develop, we at Manningham Academy came to refer to social media platforms as Sentition Engines but we quickly broadened our view of what constituted or contributed to such things. Our term, Sentition, was a conflation of sentiment and emotion, although the term meant and encapsulated more than just these two elements. What social media platforms did was capture and increasingly parse and process what people were willing to express publicly while observing a set of rules (or lack thereof) that differed to those observed in real life. This meant that the masters of the Sentition Engines could use them to first gauge then later directly affect sentiment and emotions in any level or aspect of the user base.
Over time and with increasing degrees of sophistication, the Sentition Engine masters were able to increasingly affect the sentition of people in real life, offline. They gained disproportionate influence over their user base's knowledge, sentiments and emotions, and ultimately their very personalities. But this was far from the whole story. The larger a platform’s database was the more detailed the digital avatars built from all the data became. When one then used those avatars to simulate the users, the predictive accuracy of user behaviour across many, many aspects of their individual and collective lives was remarkable. This power was superficially marketed as a means to optimise advertising, which was proof that the masters always had a bidirectional power: they could know what a user liked and sold that knowledge to advertisers; they could tell the user, with increasing power and frequency, what to like within a given category and then in other categories.
Society took a very long time to understand that search engines were Sentition Engines of a different and perhaps more powerful kind. What people are privately thinking, wondering, feeling and curious about goes into search engines. This data is fundamentally different to what's on social media, where people are consciously making public statements and so, to some extent, self modulate or moderate. Integrate the “private” search engine data with the social media data and you have much more of the inner and outer fabric of a person than was ever previously available. Now add any and every other database you can get your hands on and you get more and more detailed avatars of individuals, groups, organisations and societies.
Digital Identity was the latter stages of integrating all data sources using government access, legislative and enforcement power in order to build the Ultimate Sentition Engine that bound governments, corporations and other private power entities into a collusive, fascist web that served only itself. Mutuality and collusion were the two key ways to keep control over all the corporate and private power entities in the system. People didn't understand it because they were deliberately misled by the superficial claim that it was for convenient ID services, or by the false notion that it was just one element in a system that included CBDCs, SCS and biometrics. Those systems weren't necessary to achieve what Sentition Engines alone could achieve, never mind what the Ultimate Sentition Engine could do. The plebs were kept from understanding the massive power of Sentition Engines and the perverse, corrupt, inverted data and convenience model that powered them. There was barely any effort from users to take ownership, control and income from their data. They gave it away for free without question until they believed they were trapped inside an immutable and essential convenience panopticon, which they had to serve in order to live normal lives. Thus, normality itself had been manipulated by the Sentition Engines, such was their power.
User perception had been so warped by the Sentition Engines that users didn't know what the reality of their data paradigm actually was any more. They didn't want to know what reality was because reality was being made into and sold as something less and less pleasant. If they were told simple, basic truths about Sentition Engines they paid no attention even when they objected to the conceptual overreach of power. They even attacked or killed the messenger, especially if that messenger was intelligent, well informed and demonstrably correct. The truth was that they were all voluntarily in a digital panopticon whose doors were open. Most of the stuff they did in there was of little to no value to their lives, it being vapid, low quality, nonsensical and so on. Instead they believed fake stories about how the Sentition Engines were the last vestige of freedom of expression and authentic communication when both claims were provably false.
Those who understood what had happened to the human race and wanted to halt it, reverse it or change it at scale had literally no hope of succeeding. Humanity was essentially too feckless, selfish and ignorant to listen to the warnings let alone compete with the power of the Sentition Engines that kept consolidating their power and reach. It was as though people wanted to be turned into zombies who believed newly fabricated myths that abrogated responsibility to mythological characters.
Covid was the final test of this desire for enslavement that green-lighted the whole vision of neo totalitarian control.
There are two sayings whose sentiments, when combined, serve to illustrate some of Mannigham Academy's ambitions.
Money talks, wealth whispers.
Walk softly and carry a big stick.
We combined these sentiments to arrive at this notion: undetected power wielded subtly is a power of its own kind.
We at Mannigham never wasted our time or effort on trying to stop what was happening; we never had the power and scale to achieve such a thing and never would. But we had generational ambition to wield asymmetric power over all of these systems without anyone in any of the systems ever realising.
We sought to combat entropy, pursue forms of order, embrace evolution at any scale, and manifest direct and indirect power that wasn't easily detected. We defined and implemented change on our own terms. The way we did that was to blend the old and the new in pursuit of something that we might consider the best for our ends.
We accept that change is constant, and imperfection and entropy are system features not bugs. By engineering adaptability into the substrate we seek to build systems that are resilient and undetectable.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
–Frederick Douglass
the insipid world/life of duality... yin /yang / yung... the more it changes the more it stays the same , the pendulum is swinging... etc .... good God help us enlighten our darkness