# John Boyd | General Intellect Unit

This contains my collected notes on the three part series by [[General Intellect Unit]] on [[John Boyd]].


## Notes


### Part 2

-   Pre-modern warfare is basically an aristocrats game. If you involve the peasants too much the food supply for your country would fall apart!
-   the [[American revolution]] had to deal with this class question: they had to figure out how to handle an all volunteer army, unlike the armies of Europe which did not have to
-   [[Japan]] banned the use of firearms during the period of isolation in order to prevent the deligitmization of the aristocracy
-   Boyd’s criticism of [[Clauswitz]] was that he was too focused on the rigid aristocratic Napoleon instead of the dynamic one
-   the [[VSM]] is a model of physiology and not anatomy: it’s about connections and not what the system is made up of
-   [[Boyd]] believes it’s better to be a nervous system disorder than a cancer on your enemy
-   Clauswitz assumed the stakes for each side was the same, but the logic of [[insurgent warfare]] is that this assumption is not true. With insurgent warfare, you just have to make the occupation too expensive
-   the key to [[revolutionary defeatism]], a concept unique to [[Leninism]], puts the ruling class on crisis immediately
-   revolutionary defeatism, in WW1, meant that it was preferable for Russia to lose the war because losing meant they could focus on the class conflict
-   the means by which the Bolsheviks seized power also determined how they ruled: by being authoritarian and rigid they came to rule in such a way as well. Lenin didn’t think he could have built a democracy
-   [[Boltzmann brain]]: quantum fluctuations could spontaneously cause a mind to appear but it would think a single thought and immediately decay because it’s a brain in space
-   you have to consider building a viable alternative, not just defeating the enemy


## Refs

-   http://generalintellectunit.net/e/082-john-boyd-part-1-destruction-and-creation/
-   http://generalintellectunit.net/e/084-john-boyd-part-3-winning-and-losing/
-   http://generalintellectunit.net/e/083-john-boyd-part-2-patterns-of-conflict/