Did I say "OODA-loopy" and "New York Times" in the same post?

Sometimes the New York Times is the gift that keeps on giving. Let's take David Brooks column from yesterday. (Please!) Brooks' The Behavioral Revolution opens thusly:

Roughly speaking, there are four steps to every decision. First, you perceive a situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you calculate which course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.

Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that step three is the most important. Economic models and entire social science disciplines are premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest.

Although I freely admit that I am only marginally familiar with Boyd's OODA loop concepts, this article seems to be heavily sympatico with Boyd's work. However, if I rightly recollect, Boyd placed the emphasis on the second stage, not the third, and explicitly noted that our orientation is heavily influenced by our own biases, predispositions and experiences. This contradicts the assumption that people "are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest." It all comes down to the question of whether our orientation is rational or not.

Brooks spends the rest of the column attempting to shift the presence of bias over to his "first O", that of perception. Although he might never have been exposed to Boyd's work, he trudges the path Boyd blazed, with a little "right wing deviationism" thrown in for fun.

If you start thinking about our faulty perceptions, the first thing you realize is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always good guardians of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances when government could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see “Nudge” by Thaler and Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that government officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality than private business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited, and, being deeply politicized, they’re even more likely to filter inconvenient facts.

This meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It’s a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.

Who'd a thunk?