MrHen comments on Mandatory Secret Identities - Less Wrong
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Comments (177)
I do not think this analogy fits. Martial arts is a self-contained bubble. What else is there to do but teach? To use a variation on the analogy, if someone being trained in the United States Marine Corps were given the question of what a truly dedicated student of the USMC were to become, they would probably answer along the lines of someone who kills things and doesn't die while doing it.
(Minor point) Martial arts do have tournaments and the like, so I suppose that is an alternate path. There is an inherent time-limit on those activities because of the human aging process, however, and after you retire from fighting, what else is there to do but teach what you learned?
This second analogy is in a world where there is something more to do than teach. Choosing not-writing over writing is a failure mode in literary arts but not for literary criticism. Literary criticism is too specific. If you study literary criticism it naturally follows that you will become a literary critic. (Minor point) I could be completely misunderstanding what you meant but "writing anything".
Also, in a sense you digress from the pattern in the first analogy. Being a student of martial arts is to teaching martial arts as being a student literary criticism is to teach literary criticism.
In my opinion, the lesson to be learned here is to study something that can be applied to the real world in a form other than simply teaching other people what you learned. (Someone else mentioned something similar to this in the comments, but I cannot find it again via skimming.)
All that being said, this statement does loosely follow:
But I imagine that a lot of people who desire to eventually teach will do so after a full life of other activities. I also imagine this is a decent way to keep generational bias out of a system of education, since the next generation of students will likely spawn new variations and having those variations inserted back into the system by a "newer" instructor can encourage growth. Having the same ol' instructors around limits that somewhat.
The computer science analogy of this would be classes taught by old fogies who still think of programming as playing with decks of punch cards. Even if they move beyond that in their knowledge, their mind is potentially tainted by what-once-was.