One of the things I struggled with while in graduate school was the idea that academic disciplines were mutually exclusively, wholly incompatible frameworks for understanding the world. This concerned me deeply. Some of the world’s greatest discoveries have come about due to people taking things that, at first glance, have nothing in common and smashing them together. For example, chocolate and peanut butter. Or heck, peanut butter and jelly. That’s pure comedy right there, until you taste the result.

In today’s world, things are changing with such rapidity and force that the jobs of today likely won’t exist in ten years. If you limit your study to a single discipline you risk siloing your knowledge and becoming an ossified, outdated unit of human capital. I understand the need for disciplines within academia. It helps define intellectual borders, it keeps everyone on the “same page” so to speak, and gives a sense of orderliness and predictability to academic debate. The problem is, outside the exclusive realm of theory there’s this thing called the real world, and it tends to intervene in a damningly unforgiving way.

I think a better approach is something along the lines of what Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway suggests. There’s an element of the Pareto principle in his philosophy. He advocates the broad acquisition of knowledge across numerous domains that can then be applied to any number of situations. This is similar to what Bruce Lee espoused while developing his self-defense system of Jeet Kune Do, the whole “absorb what is useful and discard the rest” approach to education. In Munger’s words:

[T]he first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.

What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.

It’s like the old saying, “To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And of course, that’s the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you’ve got to have multiple models.

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.

I hadn’t been able to articulate specifically why academia bothered me until I came across Munger’s work. It seemed ridiculous to me how disciplines would ignore each other and posit frameworks that tried to answer everything when, in reality, they could only answer some things. Going back to finance and investing, anyone who believes you can predict human behavior with physics-like precision is deluding themselves. Compartmentalization doesn’t work if your system of understanding is being tested outside the realm of theory by the selection tests of the real world. Learning should be an exercise in understanding, not an exercise in hubris or ego.

I just finished reading Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, a biography by Robert Coram. It’s a fantastic book, appealing in depth, in complexity, and in its treatment of Colonel John Boyd, one of the finest unsung heroes of contemporary military science.

In the truest sense of the word, John Boyd was a genius. Taking just a brief tour of his accomplishments, we discover he wrote the manual on air-to-air combat. Before Boyd, dog-fighting was seen as some interpretative art–like ice dancing–and beyond the realm of science.

Boyd served as an instructor at the Air Force’s Fighter Weapons School (the nomenclature and design were later copied by the Navy, hence “Top Gun,” however Boyd’s Air Force institution was the original and the real deal). At age 33, he wrote a booklet on air superiority titled “Aerial  Attack Study.” It was so revolutionary that, since the time of its release, no further advances have been made in aerial combat strategy. Boyd’s booklet was the first and last word on tactical piloting and weapons use.

Boyd later developed the Energy-Maneuverability Theory. The E-M Theory gave fighter pilots for the first time a rubric to determine the energy potential of any given maneuver at any altitude for any aircraft, whether it be their own or their enemies. Before the acceptance of Boyd’s E-M Theory, fighter jets were designed to fly fast in a straight line or fly high. The F-15 was the first to be developed with maneuverability in mind. Boyd played a critical role in its construction and design.

Later Boyd and the “Fighter Mafia,” as they were dubbed, became the most influential ad hoc group the Pentagon had ever known, and in time fathered the F-16 and the F-18. Boyd’s later works like Patterns of Conflict and The Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action Loop helped form the bedrock of the Defense Reform Movement and led to much of the strategy behind the first Gulf War.

We on occasion run into similar quandaries in our daily lives as a fighter pilot does in the sky. At times the stakes can be just as serious. So what of it? How could a fighter pilot trying to jockey a $20 million aircraft apply to such mundane matters as politics?

First, it’s important to recognize that we are all complicit in politics, whether it be the public governance type or just what happens in our family lives. Politics has come to be used as a pejorative and that proves unfortunate. If you head to Definr, my favorite online dictionary,  and search for politics, the first definition you’ll come up against is this:

politics (http://definr.com/politics)

n 1: social relations involving authority or power [syn: {political
relation}]

Read that one carefully. First, “social relations.” By design, humans are social creatures. There are macro-sociological arguments abound that titrate from our inherently social nature our improved chances for survival and hence the broader evolutionary process. The final segment of the definition, which reads “involving authority or power,” is the crux of this deceptively simple definition.

All relations involve authority or power whether we like it our not. Relations with girlfriends, boyfriends or spouses, children, parents, pets (okay, maybe the goldfish gets a pass), trolls on the internet, or the barista at Starbucks (I need my latte now!). Politics is power.

When John Boyd developed the OODA Loop, he found a means to power for the fighter pilot. Later the OODA Loop would find its way into business and government. In aerial combat, a pilot cycles through the steps of Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action ad infinum. He scans the airspace for enemies and, upon recognizing a threat, orients the enemy into the broader context of the air battle. Based on this synthesis, the pilot decides and acts in accordance with the provided information.

The idea  is to see what your enemy sees and get inside his OODA Loop. To be able to feint and counter-attack, to anticipate, this delineates an effective usage of the OODA Loop.

For example, let’s presume Pilot A is tailing Pilot B. Pilot B, in an attempt to lose Pilot A from his six, applies hard rudder, angles to starboard and pulls high Gs in a sharp turn that orients him perpendicular to the earth. Pilot A is in a slower aircraft and won’t be able to keep up. But Pilot A, tactically, is inside Pilot B’s OODA Loop, and through a series of quick observations and decisions, he chooses to pull hard to port to intercept Pilot B’s flight line and go for the kill.

The OODA Loop has since been expanded beyond what Boyd originally intended, and has made headway into business and manufacturing circles, amongst other trades. In power conflict, the mind is critical. More specifically, the ability the mind has to adapt and maneuver in congruency with whatever structure, ambiguity, or chaos may surround it. Boyd refers to maneuvers that disorient an opponent–those acts that innervate an opponent’s OODA Loop–as fast transients. The quicker a pilot can cycle through these loops in combat, or the faster a business can recognize and act to solve problems, the more successful each will prove to be.

In life we are forever confronted with challenges, with conflict, with social relations that demand we act. The game grows more difficult as the number of variables increase. By observing and orienting ourselves to the actions of others, we can come to a better understanding of the realities that surround us, and loose ourselves from the placid and comfortable narratives that conceal truth.

And here, it’s important to note that it is action that is what matters. Not words, but actions and the results of those actions. It’s important to make this distinction and not lull oneself into complacency through a susceptibility to outward poses. When confronted with conflict, learn to take action, and decisive action at that. As Boyd said, don’t worry about your own flanks. Instead, make your opponents worry about theirs.

A Chinese man looks at a note and flowers left as support outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP

In response to increasingly strict demands over censorship, mounting government intervention, and a disastrous cyber-attack in December, Google has decided to pull its search engine functionality out of China. As of March 22nd, 2010, users in China proper are being rerouted away from the Google.cn website to offshore servers based in Hong Kong.

The mainstream media has, thus far, failed to pick up the implications of the decision to route mainland users to Hong Kong. This proves a metaphorical smack in the face to Chinese leadership as animosity between the former British colony and the Communist party runs deep. Hong Kong has long asserted a nominal independence from China since its reintegration in 1997.

Officially a special administrative region, Hong Kong continues to exist as a unique, semi-sovereign global actor. Its political, economic, and judicial systems oppose the “socialist” system of mainland China. When the constitution of Hong Kong came into effect in 1997, Chapter 1, Article 5 of this document titled “Hong Kong Basic Law” was written to state the following:

The socialist system and policies shall not be practiced in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years.

Whether Google was aware of the latent animosity between Hong Kong, whose population consists of 95% ethnic Chinese, and the Communist party remains unclear. Hong Kong features a regulatory economic system similar to the system employed in the U.S., functions in accordance with English common law, and looks to be on the precipice of universal suffrage, which should come into effect in the next decade or so.

All of this underscores the fact that Google has become a de facto player in global politics, whether it likes it or not. To the rest of the globe, Google reflects the position of the U.S. at large. The idea that a company can act in true independence from its host nation is still a foreign one to most states in the international system. The U.S. remains the outlier in global politics when looking at state-market relations, choosing to take a positivist, laisezze-faire approach to government regulation.

Calls from China demanding that the U.S. government seek action against Google were met with resistance from the White House. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton stated last week that Google’s actions were the exclusive concernof the Google and the Chinese state.

That hasn’t kept the Chinese from stirring the firmament of already strained U.S.-China relations. “The search engine leader’s exit from the Chinese mainland is a deliberate plot,” Ding Yifan, a researcher at the Development Research Center under China’s State Council, wrote in the China Daily. “Google’s case is in essence part of the U.S. Internet intrusive strategy worldwide under the excuse that it advocates a free Internet.”

So where does this leave Google in Asia? The company’s exit from China portends good things for Japan and Korea where Google has hereto struggled to acquire market share from domestic competitors. China’s Asian neighbors are more amendable to the presence of multinational behemoths akin to Google, and will likely welcome the foreign investment with open arms.

So often in life we have this tendency to make appeals to a person’s character or personality when explaining some deviant or undesirable behavior. Bad service at a restaurant? The waiter is lazy. Cut off while driving home from work? The driver is an asshole.

We so rarely take a step back from such situations to consider the broader environment or social context of these occurrences. We feed our psyches a false sense of security so as to make the world more palatable to our tastes. The world isn’t simple, and rarely are people decidedly evil or self-serving.

The theory of the fundamental attribution error, the conceptual bedrock of modern social psychology, argues that people over-estimate the importance of dispositional or personality-based explanations when explaining the behavior of others. We tend to under-value the importance of social or environmental context, the situational or institutional constraints that shape and mold another’s behavior.

Perhaps our waiter was still recovering from a late-night bender, working off a wicked hangover when he attended to our table. Maybe the driver that cut us off, a diabetic, was racing home to get in his next insulin dosing.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the recently released book What the Dog Saw, offers a softer definition of the above. His version of the fundamental attribution error incorporates any situation where one extrapolates the importance of a measured characteristic to a generalized view of a person, attributing measured habituations to unmeasured or unrelated characteristics.

For example, just because a student is punctual and well-mannered gives no indication to his behavior at home. Again, it’s often our environment that shapes how we act. The fundamental attribution error is entirely other-focused, and so we never make these attributions of ourselves. In explaining our own behavior we will cite situational or environmental factors – we had a long day at work, we were hungry, an eyelash was caught beneath our contact lens – to explain errant behavior.

It’s the rare person who can, with objectivity, place his behavior beneath a psychological microscope and analyze his deeper character. This mindfulness pays dividends in our quality of life.

In a recent online debate I happen to participate in, these very same sorts of attributions were thrown around with abandon. This is often the case during heated argumentation when rational appeals take a backseat to emotional responses.

Next time, consider the institutional constraints of an individual before blanketing them with dispositional pejoratives. The subsequent lessons learned can lead us all closer to the truth.