Talk:John Boyd (military strategist)

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Contents 1 NPOV 2 Confused Theories 3 Incest ? 4 wars

[edit] NPOV

The article reads too much like an advertisement for Boyd, accepting his claims uncritically. For instance, that stuff about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem has very little to do with what the theorem actually states. It is rather doubtful that Boyd understood any of it. Leibniz 11:31, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually it has a lot to do with what the theorem states. The essence of the theorem is that a static logical system cannot fully capture all truth. If Boyd didn't understand it then I would have to say Chaitin didn't either http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/sciamer3.html because both of them concluded the same thing that a static logical system would not work according to Godel's theorem and would require the addition of new axioms in the light of new information.

• No. A "static logical system", as you put it, is a set of axioms in some formal language, e.g. the Peano axioms, stuff like that. That has nothing to do with what some Colonel knows or does not know about what the enemy is up to. Chaitin's pop-logic salesmanship is lamentable if it promotes such confusions. Leibniz 13:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Confused Theories

The article similarly confuses Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with chaos theory. Uncertainty in the common venacular says that observation affects the outcome, which as far as I can tell has nothing to do with Boyd. Chaos says that small pertubations in a complex system can cause large changes in outcome, especially if the system involves feedback loops. Air combat is certainly a feedback loop between the combatants, and so at least Chaos Theory may be relevant to this topic.

I don't know enough Boyd history to know whether Boyd was confused about Heisenberg and Chaos, or if it is just the writers of this article who are confused. In either case it should be fixed, either by deleting the Heisenberg reference entirely, or by explaining some confusion in Boyd's writings about Heisenberg. Crispincowan 21:19, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I've removed the confusion of chaos with Heisenberg and entropy. Chaos theory became widely known much more recently than the other stuff, so it looks like anachronistic additions to Boyd's pop science. Leibniz 22:38, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Incest ?

A paragraph of the Incest article leads the reader to this John Boyd Article.

Sometimes the word "incestuous" is also used metaphorically to describe other inappropriately close relationships, for example between an authority figure and a subordinate, or between people in the same profession or creative field. The term "incest group" is also common in high school, and denotes a group of friends that only date others within their group. Institutions such as churches, colleges, and sometimes whole nations can be described as incestuous when inappropriately close relationships, corrupt conflicts of interest and secret collusions occur inside the institution and especially within the institution's top echelons such as in cases John Boyd exposed in the Pentagon.

Please verify. 69.196.4.153 15:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] wars

My recollection from reading a biography on Boyd was that he served in Vietnam, but not as a pilot like he was in the Korean War. In fact he intentionally got himself sent to Vietnam and ran a small base if not mistaken, just so he could be recognized for that service.