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army1987 comments on The Zeroth Skillset - Less Wrong
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I don't mean to be rude but as an FYI:
Lowers my confidence of the post. Almost everyone I know has a story about how they almost died except for a moment of abnormal cunning or pure luck; yet I know few people who have died for reasons that would have been avoidable had they or someone around them been more observant. This suggests to me (since not everyone can be above-average observant or lucky) that in most of those stories, they didn't have as high of a chance of death as they thought they did. It's certainly possible that it's not the case with you, but I'd prefer to either see the specific stories or maybe just use a less extreme example in the post. Or maybe it's just me and no one else is bothered by it.
There's a problem with that idea.
(I don't know anyone who died because they where hit by a car while crossing a street, but this doesn't mean that looking for cars before crossing a street is pointless.)
This case is different in an important way. Most people will go inside during a thunderstorm and check for cars before crossing a street, so avoiding these risks doesn't require an unusual degree of vigilance. katydee is claiming that unusually good situational awareness is frequently a decisive factor in avoiding death or serious injury. If that's true, then we should expect to hear about people dying due to inadequate situational awareness fairly often because most people don't have above average situational awareness.
However, I think this is possibly explained by the fact that people with good situational awareness are far more likely to place themselves in situations were good situational awareness is required.
I took "good situational awareness" to mean 'a level of SA unusual among readers of this posts', which I guess is a lower standard than 'unusual among the population', e.g. because of this.
Special case of situational awareness: I read a discussion among martial arts students of whether they'd ever found their art useful. About half of them said they'd been avoided getting hurt from falling. (Sorry, no cite, but it was on usenet.)
http://kojutsukan.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/can-martial-arts-falling-techniques.html may be a useful starting point for further research.
Thanks very much.
Note that falling safely when expecting to be thrown is not the same as landing safely when falling unexpectedly. The latter is probably a special skill, not specifically trained for in martial arts. Here is some discussion:
I don't actually think that's thanks to situational awareness but rather from drilling breakfalls a lot.