Five Factors & Seven Comparisons
Updated 2026-09-11
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
The Five Factors and Seven Comparisons comes from the opening chapter of Sun Tzu's Art of War and lays out five constants, namely the Way, heaven, earth, command, and law, plus seven comparisons of relative strength between the two sides. Its core proposition is that victory can be estimated in advance by systematically comparing conditions rather than by intuition at the moment of contact. The key qualifier is honest measurement, since a checklist filled from assumption merely formalizes existing bias.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Item comparison: compare both sides item by item before you commit any resources. - Moral weighting: weight the moral factor rather than raw resources or simple headcount alone. - Checklist conversion: convert vague intuition into a checkable pre-commitment comparison list of seven factors.
Anchor fast decisions
Converting a felt sense of advantage into explicit named factors forces each assumption to be examined and compared against the opponent's actual position. Because the comparison is made before contact, it separates the estimate of outcome from the pressure of the moment, and repeated use builds a record of which factors actually predicted results.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- zh.wikisource.orghttps://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%AD%AB%E5%AD%90%E9%9B%86%E8%A8%BBverified
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