John_Maxwell_IV comments on POSITION: Design and Write Rationality Curriculum - Less Wrong

54 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 January 2012 06:50AM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 22 January 2012 05:12:27AM *  0 points [-]

The author of the original epistemic viciousness essay seems to think that culture (in other words, "being smart and not letting it happen", or not) is actually pretty important:

Just last week I was on the way home from a judo class with a friend— a senior judoka and university student—who insisted that although there was nothing wrong with lifting weights, strength was unimportant in judo, and it wouldn’t help one to become a better judo player. To this the appropriate reply is of course, unprintable.

...

Judo is an art in which there is relatively little room for pretence; in randori, either you manage to throw your opponent, or you don’t. In newaza, either you escape from your opponent’s hold or you don’t.

...

Why are there so many fantasists in the martial arts, as compared to other activities? And there are; you won’t find many sprinters or removal-men who would tell you that strength doesn’t matter to their chosen tasks, nor will you find power-lifters who think they can move the bar without touching it or engineers who specialise in ki-distribution.

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~grussell/epistemicviciousness.pdf

Comment author: Prismattic 22 January 2012 05:40:18AM 0 points [-]

I believe the judoka being quoted may have misheard, misremembered, or is misapplying a different point that is sometimes taught and that is not insane. I have elsewhere heard the advice that bulking up too early in one's judo studies is counterproductive, because you have more margin for error in techniques if you can make up for doing them not-quite-correctly by being very strong, so really buff people may fail to notice and correct flaws in their form. Then they get whupped by people who actually mastered the techiques.

Of course, once you've reached yudansha, and already have a good grasp of form, then you're supposed to bulk up to be able to beat other yudansha.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 22 January 2012 05:59:32AM *  1 point [-]

Could be true.

It's not that important to what I was saying, though: the essay is mostly about how martial artists in particular have terrible epistemic hygiene. The idea of lack of measurement is only mentioned in passing, along with the remark that theoretical physics manages to be respectable despite it and that the real problem is not that martial arts lacks measurement, but that martial artists are much more sure of themselves than their paucity of data justifies.

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