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 related to the above NFL considerations. 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.
A technique that is highly specialized to steroid pumping genetic freaks but barely usable by the majority of fit and healthy people will get the kills.
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?
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?
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?