Epistemic Viciousness

Eliezer Yudkowsky

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:

The art, the dojo, and the sensei are seen as sacred. "Having red toe-nails in the dojo is like going to church in a mini-skirt and halter-top... The students of other martial arts are talked about like they are practicing the wrong religion."
If your teacher takes you aside and teaches you a special move and you practice it for 20 years, you have a large emotional investment in it, and you'll want to discard any incoming evidence against the move.
Incoming students don't have much choice: a martial art can't be learned from a book, so they have to trust the teacher.
Deference to famous historical masters. "Runners think that the contemporary staff of Runner's World know more about running than than all the ancient Greeks put together. And it's not just running, or other physical activities, where history is kept in its place; the same is true in any well-developed area of study. It is not considered disrespectful for a physicist to say that Isaac Newton's theories are false..." (Sound familiar?)
"We martial artists struggle with a kind of poverty—data-poverty—which makes our beliefs hard to test... Unless you're unfortunate enough to be fighting a hand-to-hand war you cannot check to see how much force and exactly which angle a neck-break requires..."
"If you can't test the effectiveness of a technique, then it is hard to test methods for improving the technique. Should you practice your nukite in the air, or will that just encourage you to overextend? ... Our inability to test our fighting methods restricts our ability to test our training methods."
"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 problem is that we live in poverty but continue to act as though we live in luxury, as though we can safely afford to believe whatever we’re told..." (+10!)

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?

      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:

The art, the dojo, and the sensei are seen as sacred. "Having red toe-nails in the dojo is like going to church in a mini-skirt and halter-top... The students of other martial arts are talked about like they are practicing the wrong religion."
If your teacher takes you aside and teaches you a special move and you practice it for 20 years, you have a large emotional investment in it, and you'll want to discard any incoming evidence against the move.
Incoming students don't have much choice: a martial art can't be learned from a book, so they have to trust the teacher.
Deference to famous historical masters. "Runners think that the contemporary staff of Runner's World know more about running than than all the ancient Greeks put together. And it's not just running, or other physical activities, where history is kept in its place; the same is true in any well-developed area of study. It is not considered disrespectful for a physicist to say that Isaac Newton's theories are false..." (Sound familiar?)
"We martial artists struggle with a kind of poverty—data-poverty—which makes our beliefs hard to test... Unless you're unfortunate enough to be fighting a hand-to-hand war you cannot check to see how much force and exactly which angle a neck-break requires..."
"If you can't test the effectiveness of a technique, then it is hard to test methods for improving the technique. Should you practice your nukite in the air, or will that just encourage you to overextend? ... Our inability to test our fighting methods restricts our ability to test our training methods."
"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 problem is that we live in poverty but continue to act as though we live in luxury, as though we can safely afford to believe whatever we’re told..." (+10!)

In those days, you had some idea of who the real masters were, and which school could defeat others.

I find my approach to martial arts somewhat different to my philosophy of life.

I'm under the impression that by "martial arts" here you're referring to self-defense. If so, I find exactly the same thing about myself. I'd run from a knife, too! ...Unless someone else I really cared about was with me.

But I still think there's a serious danger in teaching students a martial art - which explicitly looks and feels very much like training our bodies in how to deal with attacks - without taking care to make sure that said art is actually effective. Even if these students should run away, they might actually come to believe that they don't have to. Hopefully a normal untrained person with some wits would know to run away from a person with a knife and would yell "Run!" to his or her comrades. On the other hand, someone with 5+ years of Aikido training might think - much like I do - that it's actually a better bet for the safety of their loved ones to stand their ground. After all, that's what the training is for, right? But if the training is utter junk, you'll just end up a bloody mess. And your family still gets attacked.

Also, you don't always have the option of running away. Sometimes you have to fight, like when someone invades your home and you need to protect your family. And in such cases, bad martial arts can actually be worse than raw untrained instincts - especially if those martial arts teach calmness, so the person doesn't even have the full benefit of a maximal adrenaline rush due to the delusion of competence.

If we wanted to train in Aikido as a form of yoga, then I'd say "effectiveness" shouldn't be at all measured in terms of self-defense. But that isn't how we train: we pretend someone is attacking us, and we pretend to defend in order to gain practice defending against that kind of attack. Similarly, most newcomers don't join Aikido thinking that this is just another form of zen but more dynamic; they join because it sounds like an interesting martial art. The questions I most commonly hear after a training aren't things like "How do I apply these principles to an argument with my spouse?" (although I do hear that one sometimes). The most common questions are things like "What if he comes at you with a roundhouse kick?" or "What do you do if you're grabbed from behind while someone punches at your face?" I think it's a very safe bet to say that these people believe they're learning how to defend themselves against real attackers. Even if we try to tell them verbally otherwise, their bodies are still incorporating habits that will eventually start becoming their automatic reactions given enough training.

So I totally agree, running sounds like the best option for dealing with a knife attack. But if that turns out not to be the best option for one of my students in some situation, I'd like to make sure that he or she has some effective skills to lean upon so as to have a real leg up on an assailant. If I pretended to provide something effective and it ended up hurting my student or one of his or her loved ones as a result, I would feel horrible about that - and I think justifiably so!

But I still think there's a serious danger in teaching students a martial art - which explicitly looks and feels very much like training our bodies in how to deal with attacks - without taking care to make sure that said art is actually effective.

I agree. My comment was specific to the difference between martial strategy and life strategy.

The questions I most commonly hear after a training aren't things like "How do I apply these principles to an argument with my spouse?" (although I do hear that one sometimes).

If I found I needed to be a... (read more)

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