Act according to actual circumstances
It is easy to give in to established patterns of thought. While it is often wasteful1, an accurate assessment to spot deviations in the current environment is often needed to adapt. Because Reality has a suprising amount of detail.
Observations trump hypotheses. One black swan invalidates the claim of only white swans. I am unable to locate the quote, but Confucius said something that amounts to not wishing for the world to be different but to act knowing how it is.
John Boyd stressed the importance of orienting in the OODA Loops, which of course depends on observing. In Creation and Destruction, he brings together Gödel, Heisenberg, and thermodynamics to make the claim that we must be constantly destroying mental models to create new ones.
One thing that stands in the way of letting the observations make their way to the brain is identity. Keep your identity small
Having said that, the Whitehead quote1 can be seen as pushing the idea of implicit guidance in the OODA loops. The more that can be done without explicit thought the more tempo we can gather.
References:
- “Act according to the actual circumstances. Avoid responses which are based on imagination, memory of the past, or habits acquired in other circumstances.” â Three Strategies of Huang Shigong - Wikipedia
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âIt is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. ==Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.== Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle â they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.â â Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911 ↩ ↩2
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