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Sewing-Machine comments on [SEQ RERUN] The Martial Art of Rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (45)
Too general, and maybe false. Many people, rational and not, are interested in and successful at achieving their goals well. And: less wrong is sometimes a seminar on how to achieve your goals, but it is not always and only that (I hope!).
They are rational to the extent they are interested and successful at achieving their goals.
Imagine two people, Alice and Bob, share the goal of deadlifting X lbs. Alice and Bob are equally "interested and successful at achieving" all their other goals besides deadlifting X lbs. Bob is stronger than Alice. Therefore, he is more likely to be able to deadlift X lbs. Can we thereby conclude that Bob is more rational than Alice?
You say "all else equal" here. But all else clearly isn't equal - they have different genders.
All else being equal, yes I'd expect deadlift weight to be somewhat correlated with rationality.
You assumed that Alice was a girl (normally a good guess), but I never mentioned his gender in my thought-experiment. Then again, they have different names, etc...But this misses the point of my "all else equal" clause, which refers to their interestedness and succesfulness (besides their (probable) success at deadlifting), not a myriad of accidental features.
No. It is incredibly weak evidence that Bob is more rational than Alice.
Many people, martial artists and not, are interested in defending themselves and others from physical threat. That doesn't mean that Wikipedia's definition of martial arts is too general or false.
(Although, actually, it's too specific, in this case, since a lot of martial artists are not interested in the defense aspects, but more in physical fitness or enlightenment or whatever).
By "many people" I might have meant "every creature that can be said to have goals at all."
I could quibble with "successful at", but I think the analogy still holds in any case. Virtually everyone is interested in defending themselves, at least, from physical threat.
Martial arts are one approach to being more effective at defense, and rationality is a similar approach to being more effective at reaching goals in general.
We should absolutely be quibbling about "successful." Someone comes to me with advice for achieving my goals: "I know just the ticket, all you have to do is swallow this giant pack of lies." Well, couldn't they be right?
I think it's a rare individual who would actually be in less physical danger if they were better at martial arts. The scope of rationality is similarly limited -- it's not useful for every one, or for every goal.
Do you think that because you believe most people don't experience physical danger? Or because you think that martial arts is ineffective in dealing with the most common types of danger? Or some other reason?
I think martial arts are unnecessary for dealing with the most common types of danger.
The most valuable lesson I ever learned from martial arts was how to fall down without hurting myself, and I'd say this is a skill that would help most people significantly reduce the number and severity of physical injuries they experience over their lifetime.
Tangential point: breakfall is the exact wrong thing to do if you've lost your balance while jumping on a trampoline -- found that one out the hard way. But really this comment should be filed under Cached Thoughts.
That's interesting. Is that a consequence of your holistic knowledge of martial arts or a single technique that could be taught on its own? Can the technique be taught e.g. to elderly people who are not in good shape?
It's actually a corpus of techniques that can be taught separately from the rest of the martial arts syllabus. Collectively they are called "breakfall".
ETA:
There are very gentle intro exercises which involve starting from a seated position; however, it's conceivable that a sufficiently frail person might not be able to manage even those.
Intro judo classes emphasize safe falling quite a bit. I have no idea if anyone teaches judo to elderly people, though.
The knowledge is basically muscle memory: we didn't spend a lot of time learning the formal breakfall techniques, so much as every class involved falling or being knocked over from a variety of awkward positions, on the order of 100 times per class. So although it might be possible to teach the elderly the techniques (Cyan sounds like ey knows more about this than I do), the way I learned them probably wouldn't be a good way to do it.
I have found the experience transferrable, though, to situations like skiing, slipping on icy ground, crashing my bike, etc.