A lot of dojos preserve to some degree the social standards of Eastern countries where the sensei's sensei came from. And in Eastern countries, it's much less acceptable to try to question your teacher, or change things, or rock the boat, or show any form of weakness. I taught school in Japan for a while, and the first thing I learned was that naively asking "Any questions?" or "Any opinions on this?" or even "Anyone not understand?" was a waste of time.
Western cultures are a lot better at this, but not ideal. There's still pressure not to be the one person who asks all the questions all the time, and there's pressure not to say anything controversial out of the blue because you lose more status if you're wrong than you gain if you're right. I think part of the problem is that there really are dumb or egotistical people who, if given the chance will protest that they know a much better way to do everything and will waste the time of everyone else, and our society's decided to .make a devil's bargain to keep them under control.
The best solution to this is to found a new culture, live isolated from the rest of the world for a century developing different...
I also remember hearing of a community (wish I could remember which) in which it was absolutely forbidden to give negative feedback under certain circumstances
I am living (and about to leave) an Asian society very much like this. It yields some very odd results indeed: corruption, consumerism, lemming-like religious behavior, and vast - feudal - social gaps.
By far my biggest problem with the way you discusses rationality is the way that you draw on the tropes of Eastern martial arts instruction, and it's because of exactly this sort of thing - those tropes are appropriate for one who wants to be considered a guru, which is the opposite of your stated aims. It's something I have to warn people about if I'm recommending something you've written.
The best study I know of that addresses rationality in pro sports is Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. It tells the story of how Billy Beane followed the approaches recommended by people who studied the voluminous statistics on Baseball and pointed to non-standard evaluations of what talents and strategies made a difference in getting to the post-season. It's relevant for two reasons.
1) It talks about the psychology of players and coaches who found reasons to stick with the tried-and-true, even when non-standard approaches had some evidence in their favor.
2) it talks about the process of re-analyzing the statistics to figure out what aspects of the game matter. Part of this is deciding what the goal is, and part is figuring out what helps you reach the goal. In the case of baseball, Beane agreed with the those who argued that getting to the post-season cost-effectively was the goal. That means figuring out how to win more games over a season, which is more straightforward than figuring out how to win individual games. Cost-effectiveness translates to recruiting players whose value is higher than what other teams are willing to pay. Many unconventional styles of play turned out to be valuable, which led to a team that looked bizarre by accepted standards, but who won consistently but unspectacularly.
edited to use proper LW linking
Actually, the martial arts world has recently benefited from a big dose of reality in the form of mixed-martial-arts tournaments. Throwing together fighters from different styles demonstrated that some were overwhelmingly superior to others and unleashed a rapid evolution of technique that blended together the clearly superior methods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts#Evolution_of_fighters
This is sort-of true, but with one really, really big caveat that people seem to forget: any form of fighting that is controlled basically screws large portions of many styles.
If you go into an MMA tournament and deliberately break someone's arm, you aren't going to be asked back. Let alone if you break their neck. Furthermore, non-crazy martial artists don't even want to: there's too much respect for that. There are styles that are centered around causing maximum damage as quickly as possible, and they are entirely useless in MMA fights. You're never going to see a hard-style master being competitive in an MMA tournament, because 90% of what they know is irrelevant.
-Robin
rlpowell, you are incorrect. You are spouting an untested theory that is repeated as fact by those with a vested interest in avoiding the harsh light of truth.
In actual fact, there is no problem with breaking someone's arm in an MMA fight (see Mir vs. Sylvia in the UFC, for example). It's also close to impossible to break someone's neck (deliberately), despite what you may see in movies.
The "we're too dangerous to fight" is an easy meme to propagate. But let me just ask you this: let's just say, hypothetically, that your theory ("maximum damage" masters are "useless in MMA fights") was false. How would you ever know? Assuming that someone did not yet have a belief about that proposition, what kind of evidence are you actually aware of, about whether the statement is true or false?
(way after the fact)
You know what? You are absolutely right that I'm spouting an untested theory. I have since stopped.
The problem is that I see no way to test either side; either what I said or the converse, which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.
The only test I can think of is to load up fighters that assert opposite sides of this, and are both highly trained in their respective arts and so on, on lots of PCP, and see who lives.
There are ... some practical and ethical problems there.
I do think, however, that neither of us get to spout either side of this issue and claim that we have a well-tested theory on our side. Having said that, I would say your side has more evidence at this time.
-Robin
which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.
If that is the claim you are rejecting then I must agree. I have no reason to expect optimal fighting technique to come out of MMA, indeed, it would indicate a failure of optimisation in MMA competitors. As you go on to indicate you are measuring fighting technique as it serves to facilitate survival in one on one fights to the death. The social and physical payoffs in MMA training, competition and sparring are different. Optimising for one instead of the other has the problems of a lost purpose.
Of course "optimal fighting technique" suffers from some rather significant No Free Lunch issues. Optimal for what? How many opponents are attacking you? Do you wish to use your arts to intimidate as well as protect? Are there consequences to killing the opponent instead of incapacitating? How tall are you?
The only test I can think of is to load up fighters that assert opposite sides of this, and are both highly trained in their respective arts and so on, on lots of PCP, and see who lives.
I can't suggest a better test than this but there is another problem here re...
There will be a correlation between the effectiveness of a fighting technique and success in battles but it is not a simple one. You will end up identifying the technique that is optimal for the most physically capable combatants, not the optimal fighting technique in general.
I wonder if there's something like this at work in programming?
Israeli forces use Krav Maga for peacekeeping ("peacekeeping," anyway,) not just armed military engagements.
MMA has a lot fewer rules than, say, kickboxing, but practically every illegal technique is useful in some way (otherwise there would be no need to have a rule against it,) the matches are fought in rounds, always against a single opponent, with a referee who restarts the action if the combatants reach a stalemate on the ground, in a ring with plenty of space to maneuver, no obstacles or potential improvised weapons, and fighters have months in advance to research each other's fighting styles and plan countermeasures. It's not as if MMA constitutes a particularly rigorous investigation into the optimal fighting style for personal self defense.
MMA has a lot fewer rules than, say, kickboxing, but practically every illegal technique is useful in some way (otherwise there would be no need to have a rule against it,)
My own view is that Krav Maga, Wing Chun and similar belief systems use an inverted form of Sagan's Dragon reasoning. Whatever you cannot test is whatever they claim would allow them to win, hence they always have an unfalsifiable hypothesis that their style would win in MMA.
There were almost no rules in UFC1 yet groin attacks and whatnot that have been hypothesised to be dominant strategies in no-rules engagements failed to perform as advertised and bread and butter techniques like punches, kicks and rear naked chokes were what won. So we have a very limited data set, but based on that set we should place a low probability on the hypothesis that these are dominant strategies.
I wouldn't put Krav Maga into the same category as Wing Chun; it's essentially Jeet Kune Do under another brand name (or Jeet Kune Do is Krav Maga under another brand name, since neither particularly owes its existence to the other.) To the best of their abilities, Krav Maga instructors test the performance of their skills under as close an approximation of the circumstances they expect that their soldiers will need to apply them as they can contrive.
I only took a few classes in Krav Maga, but I spent a longer time training in Wun Hop Kuen Do, a branch of Kajukenbo with similar training outlook. Kajukenbo was a mixed martial art before the rise of sport MMA, and developed a formidable reputation in Hawaii at a time when violent street engagements were common. My own instructor's teacher (Grandmaster Al Dacascos, father of the martial arts movie actor Mark Dacascos,) reminisced about how back when his old school had a white pants and white shirt dress requirement, students from his school would actually go and beat up sailors and steal their pants to wear in class. This is not a style that developed in isolation from regular exposure to evidence of what works on the street. As a si...
Yes, Sam Harris wrote an article with it in: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-pleasures-of-drowning
This is an aside, but related: there is an awesome website dedicated to investigating and uncovering fraud and vice within the Martial Arts world: Bullshido. Participants post about questionable doings (such as masters who claim to teach or use ki) and visit those schools to report on the fraud. It also has areas for regular Martial Arts chat, but this sub-forum is the one that primarily focuses on investigations.
This, then, is an incomplete outline to an answer to your question: due diligence and active pursuit of those who fraudulently represent "arts of rationality." If there were a series of Dojos of the Bayesian Sect, those dojos would be responsible for exposing the Thousand Schools of False Ways. It would ever be an ongoing battle. Just as the members of Bullshido are constantly encountering and exposing "McDojos" that claim to teach practical self-defense techniques that would, in reality, probably just get you killed or kids' grappling schools taught by instructors with sex assault convictions.
I don't know much about American professional sports--even less about pro sports in other countries--for that matter, I don't know much about martial arts. But as far as I do know, pro sports have none of these problems. Athletes do all sorts of outrageous things; coaches, athletes, and strategies are chosen on merit; absurdly detailed statistics are collected. Baseball players admire Babe Ruth but they don't idolize him. The analogy between pro sports and martial arts isn't perfect, but neither is the analogy between martial arts and rationality.
So, what do pro sports have to "keep them honest", that martial arts don't?
Teams of athletes compete in tournaments that directly demonstrate their skills at their sport. In theory, the sport of martial artists is hand-to-hand combat, but martial arts tournaments never allow eye-gouging, biting, and so on. The further the distance between the tournament rules and reality, the less useful the tournament will be. Fortunately, I don't think there's a rationalist equivalent of eye-gouging, so setting up tournament rules should be relatively easy.
An athlete or coach who gives up a pet technique for one that works better will
In defense of martial arts I want to note that in their case the mentioned key observations for epistemic viciousness are not independend and partially unavoidable. Especially the "deference to famous historical masters" point is no more than a logical conclusion of the "we live data poverty" point: Until less than a hundred years ago people would risk their health (even life) in fights to establish the superiority of the brand of martial artists they espoused. Not to mention life circumstances in general, which more often than not included more or less regular violent conflicts, which usually meat hand-to-hand combat (as opposed to guns). These people did certainly not live in data poverty regarding the efficacy of their techiques, hence it is fair to assume they were (at least on average) better fighters than today's martial artists.
I believe the video you were looking for is here:
[censored the link on account of comment below]
http://www. yachigusaryu. com/blog/2007/02/no-touch-knockout-fraud-exposed.html
What successful(as winning in the UFC) martial arts have in common: realistic sparring. BJJ(Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu), Boxing and Muay-Thai all have this(of course with certain restrictions) and they have shown to be effective.
Edit: translating to the rationality dojo, we need some method of empirically testing the techniques. One way would be to do some exercises after the theory was learned like asking some question or doing some test and then seeing who gets the answer right. Another would be to ask for real-life experiences like: what irrational believe or habit did you manage to get rid of in the last month/week? Where did you improve something?
What can be done about it? We can fight.
The Master can argue for Creationism, and try to defeat the pupil's refutation of it. We can argue for or against One-boxing on Newcomb's problem. Or pretend to be the AI arguing that the Gatekeeper should free it. The Master is only Master for as long as s/he is undefeated.
This equates rationality with victory in argument on an arbitrary side of an issue regardless of the truth; which is not at all the skill we want to inculcate.
Maybe instead of a fight, form it as a riddle:
The master gives an argument for creationism. The "homework" is for the student to understand why this argument is invalid.
Every now and then, just to mix things up, the master would give an argument for a statement which actually turns out to be true, to make sure that the student is actually searching for truth, and not just arbitrary counter-arguments to whatever it is the master said.
This is the skill of Debating, which is highly respected and taught the world over. Because it wins at politics (convinces the other chimps) even if it loses at matching the territory. It's damned useful, but it's a bit Dark Arts prone. (That's not a reason to avoid it, but one to take care.)
I was disappointed in my dojos because I went there to learn self defense and psychological survival but only learned about punches and kicks and heard promises of eventually knowing enough to "win" in a fight.
One of the ways they measure how much "better" you are is by having you punch or kick easily breakable wooden boards. Three or more is impressive but broken boards neither prepares you for "winning" a fight or knowing the self-defense techniques involved in preventing or de-escalating a potential fight. Yet, it feels pr...
One of my probability books was about the usage of the term probability - what it meant. (Ian Hacking?) Once upon a time, probable meant being attested to by some authority. That was the measure of truth - what Authority had to say.
"The Truth" is judged differently by different people. For some, The Truth is what an Authority says, where Authority is identified by signaling. In the absence of data, how else are you to judge truth claims? So competing Authorities compete through signaling louder, more congruently, more forcefully, which often amp...
Howdy
I have studied Aikido on and off for 25 years, more seriously the last 10 years. Aikido appealed to me in the beginning because it did not require that I accept any concept on insufficient evidence. In my teaching, I refer to "ki" in non-mystical terms, as "enthusiasm" or "vitality" or "intention." None of these captures the full value of "ki" as an organizing principle, but neither do they require a leap of faith. I leave it to individuals to further define the concept from direct experience.
On the to...
If I found I needed to be applying what I learn in martial arts training to arguments with my spouse I think I'd hire a divorce lawyer.
Perhaps it is just a misunderstanding, and they meant to sign up for a marital arts class. Perhaps one involving an entirely different set of holds, pins, and takedowns.
Most of the points carry over to other domains as well (e.g., music, art, ballet, stage acting, spiritual traditions that have "gurus" or "masters").
For example, there are many (e.g.) piano teachers who can trace their lineage back to Beethoven (and they know it off the top of their heads if you ask them), who are similarly overly deferential to historical masters, who see their knowledge and music in general as sacred knowledge. There is also the same extreme conservatism, and different teaching techniques and performance techniques ca...
I'm mostly speaking from anecdotal experience, but my experience confirms that the effectiveness goes way up if you go back to historical martial arts.
I'm practicing historical fencing, the techniques are from the textbooks that we got from where people were actually killing each other with them, and many seem to have been independently recreated in modern times, such as the techniques for defence against knives (with modifications caused by the different length of the blades).
On a side note not really relevant to the subject, we had some group...
But the real problem isn’t just that we live in data poverty—I think that’s true for some perfectly respectable disciplines, including theoretical physics
The reason for that is similar to these -- if for a theoretical physics question there already was enough data, it would be a settled question and theoretical physicists would be working on something else.
(Note: I disagree with the majority the claims in the linked post.)
The way I test the rationality of the people around me is by lying to them, generally about irrelevant things, and seeing if they can unravel the lies.
In virtually all cases, what happens is that they simply learn not to believe anything I say, at which point I start telling the truth in a way that makes it seem like a lie. People dial their credulity up and down, and eventually just give up.
From the general attitude of the people here, I doubt most of them have gotten beyond the "calibration" mindset either, thinking of rationality like tuning a...
The way I test the rationality of the people around me is by lying to them, generally about irrelevant things, and seeing if they can unravel the lies.
I don't believe you.
And when they call you on your bull, you say "I was only trying to make you think"? I think I met you at a party once.
Someone deserves a large hattip for this, but I'm having trouble remembering who; my records don't seem to show any email or OB comment which told me of this 12-page essay, "Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts" by Gillian Russell. Maybe Anna Salamon?
We all lined up in our ties and sensible shoes (this was England) and copied him—left, right, left, right—and afterwards he told us that if we practised in the air with sufficient devotion for three years, then we would be able to use our punches to kill a bull with one blow.
I worshipped Mr Howard (though I would sooner have died than told him that) and so, as a skinny, eleven-year-old girl, I came to believe that if I practised, I would be able to kill a bull with one blow by the time I was fourteen.
This essay is about epistemic viciousness in the martial arts, and this story illustrates just that. Though the word ‘viciousness’ normally suggests deliberate cruelty and violence, I will be using it here with the more old-fashioned meaning, possessing of vices.
It all generalizes amazingly. To summarize some of the key observations for how epistemic viciousness arises:
One thing that I remembered being in this essay, but, on a second reading, wasn't actually there, was the degeneration of martial arts after the decline of real fights—by which I mean, fights where people were really trying to hurt each other and someone occasionally got killed.
In those days, you had some idea of who the real masters were, and which school could defeat others.
And then things got all civilized. And so things went downhill to the point that we have videos on Youtube of supposed Nth-dan black belts being pounded into the ground by someone with real fighting experience.
I had one case of this bookmarked somewhere (but now I can't find the bookmark) that was really sad; it was a master of a school who was convinced he could use ki techniques. His students would actually fall over when he used ki attacks, a strange and remarkable and frightening case of self-hypnosis or something... and the master goes up against a skeptic and of course gets pounded completely into the floor. Feel free to comment this link if you know where it is.
Truly is it said that "how to not lose" is more broadly applicable information than "how to win". Every single one of these risk factors transfers straight over to any attempt to start a "rationality dojo". I put to you the question: What can be done about it?