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.
Krav Maga as taught to Israeli soldiers might be some such animal. The scam with the same name where you get an instructor's certificate after a brief workshop which allows you to rip off the gullible is pure bullshido.
Present day MMA is probably not far off from the optimal on-on-one fighting style without street clothes in a ring with no rules. But if MMA fighters optimize for personal combat of that type, and display the same sort of uncomprehending helplessness that many of the strikers did back in the earliest days of the UFC upon being brought to the ground for the first time as soon as they run into a fight with multiple opponents or a knife, then the training is not well optimized for self defense.
I've got no argument with this, although styles that train full-contact for multiple attackers or knives are very few and far between,
Krav Maga as taught to Israeli soldiers might be some such animal. The scam with the same name where you get an instructor's certificate after a brief workshop which allows you to rip off the gullible is pure bullshido.
Agreed. Even the place where I trained briefly, which was run by a couple of former Israeli soldiers, was not on the level of instruction of some of the other martial arts dojos in the area. You can make a competent fighter with a few months of hard work, but it takes years to make a serious martial arts expert, so when it comes to military arts I tend to categorize the military instructors quite differently from the instructed.
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?