I like the idea, but looking at your examples I'm skeptical that it actually works out that way much in practice. Let's look at your examples, in order.
Hearing pitch isn't scaffolding you remove once you learn to sing, which is why skilled vocalists still have ear pieces so that they can hear themselves when they perform. I'm sure they could still sing better than you even with earplugs in, but not to their potential -- and their performance would likely degrade with time if you cut that feedback loop.
"Rolling" is absolutely a big part of fighting. It's not a huge part of striking, but it's a huge part the grappling aspect of fighting which doesn't go away, and the rolling only becomes more prevalent at the higher levels of grappling. Heck, Jiu Jitsu is one of the main components of modern MMA, and their term for sparring is literally "rolling".
If getting into a fencing jacket isn't a scaffolding skill, then I don't see how getting into donning helmets and gloves can be -- for the exact same reasons. Same with training wheels, which you typically have your parents do for you.
Training wheels have an additional problem in that they actually rob you of the feedback you need in order to learn to ride a bike, making it harder. You could argue that catching yourself with your feet on a balance bike becomes the scaffolding skill, and this is indeed not an integral part of high performance bike riding... but every time you dismount a bike you use this skill. And it's never a limiting skill in the first place.
Skimming through the rest of your examples, it looks like my objections break down into 3 categories.
If we get rid of the second criterion, then there are a lot of things that would fit the requirements. That also seems fair, since there are a lot of times you can't reasonably hire an assistant to get you into your jacket, or to make good pitches for your games. But then again, those would be better described as "supporting skills", because fencers don't stop putting on their fencing jackets once they learn to fence.
I'm struggling to come up with an example of a skill you could really remove to no significant detriment once you get good at the thing. Skilled rock climbers by and large would be pretty pissed if you took their ropes, for example. You might be fine forgetting how to navigate Duolingo's interface once you're fluent, but that skill seems hardly necessary or limiting in the first place.
It just seems too often that the skills that enable a thing either continue to enable the thing or else enable other things. For example, even if rolling was no longer helpful in fighting it's also a skill I've applied to bike riding, for when I've gone over the handlebars -- long after I'd learned to ride a bike.
I'm very, very confident it doesn't work via moving goalposts.
I think we may be talking past each other a bit here.
I think we're in agreement that it works through force vector diagrams, not through magic that defies the physics of force vector diagrams. Similarly, I think we're in agreement that we get to force vector diagrams by patterns of muscular activation and limb positioning. It's not that the visualization is a required component for doing or explaining, it's that it allows you to do something that you don't know how to explain (or do?) otherwise.
My skepticism about The Unbendable Arm is like my skepticism about The Unbendable Tibia. I don't doubt that there are very good structural reasons the arm/tibia doesn't bend, but I am skeptical of the implicit idea that in order to do it you need to learn how to visualize from an Aikido practitioner. Not "Will it work even when an MMA guy tries to bend you arm/tibia?", but "Is the MMA guy actually getting his arm/tibia bent in fights in ways that they wouldn't if he mixed in some Aikido?".
If an Aikido practitioner tries to do the demo on me, there's a few ways it can go.
One is for him to fail to bend my arm, and notice right away "Ah! You already know The Unbendable Arm!". Points for honesty there, but not for teaching me anything.
A second is for him to implicitly or explicitly tell me to do things that make my arm bendable, and then show me that my arm is stronger when I don't do them. Points for honesty if he admits "Yeah, all I'm showing is that you're stronger if you don't literally help me bend your arm", but again, no points for teaching anything useful if you have to tell or imply that I should do things wrong in order to demonstrate your technique.
The third is that he gives clear objective rules, I do a bad job on positioning/activation on my own accord, and then he shows me how to not do that. This is the only case where The Unbendable Arm is worth anything, and it's not because the technique itself is so great but because I was so dumb to start with.
You can say that you're pointing at something that is physically real in the same that my "Unbendable Tibia" technique (of having an intact tibia) is physically real, and I don't doubt that. But the relevance is up to the demonstration subject being dumb enough to need it. So when you say "it doesn't work via moving goalposts" I kinda feel like "Yeah... but it might not seem so relevant once the goal posts are specified properly. And that's an empirical question about the failures that people walk into rather than a statement about the things you can test on your own with weights and a table".
I'm not saying this from a perspective of "Woo has no value, you're crazy woo guy, only things that I personally understand are real". I'm saying this from a perspective of "The implicit beliefs about what we're allowed to do shape everything".
I could tell you about when I performed The Unbendable Wrist in jiu jitsu, for example. I was able to let my friend set up her best submission, and through the power of The Unbendable Wrist I didn't have to tap to her wristlock. In contrast, a similarly big and strong guy was forced to tap before she could even get her second hand on to assist in the pull. She was annoyed with him for pretending she was able to submit him instead of actually resisting, and he sincerely reassured her that he really was resisting and really wasn't strong enough to stop it. So she taught him the power of my Unbendable Wrist and he was able to resist as well as I did after that. Can you guess what it took?
It didn't take visualizations of firehoses, or any technical tips. All it took was "Jimmy was able to resist when I had both arms pulling, so unless he's a lot stronger than you, then no, you absolutely can resist". The problem was that he was unknowingly bound by a belief that resistance was futile, didn't really give it his all as a result, and failed to notice the reason for his failure.
So is "The Unbendable Wrist" real? Or is it just that the illusion of The Bendable Wrist just more compelling and common than one might expect? I find the latter way of thinking much more useful.
Sadly I can't draw a force diagram because I honestly don't know how it works.
[...] within some sensible limits I'm very happy to demo this technique in person.
I assume you're still up in the bay area? I'm not likely to be up there anytime soon, but if you're ever back down in socal and want to play with this stuff let me know. It sounds fun.
I bet we'd come out of it with a force vector diagram and a good way to clearly demonstrate what's going on.
I obviously wouldn't try anything that wouldn't fly at a jiu jitsu gym between friends, but anything on top of that I might make you say explicitly :p
But if you're concerned about any hidden rules here, feel free to ask me about them
So in jiu jitsu a large part of what we do is try to bend arms and not have our arms bent -- the other way. You mentioned that getting your upper arm pinned defeats the effect, and unsurprisingly this is known as one of the requirements for doing an armbar against anyone who isn't completely clueless. In general, if you don't control the joints on either side of the one you're trying to attack, the person can just move their body to relieve bending pressure.
In these "Unbendable Arm" demonstrations it gets a bit weird because their shoulder is free and the only way to control it is to put them on the ground. "This is supposed to stay standing" seems to be implied, and in any normal demonstration context I'd feel uncomfortable pulling some Aikido sensei off his feet. I'd expect that to get a response like "Dude, chill, this isn't wrestling. Just try to bend my arm" -- while missing the point that "try to bend the arm, without applying enough pressure to force him to bend the arm if he wants to stay standing" isn't is kinda like saying "Try to bend my tibia -- but don't break it you brute!". I'd expect that most people can sense this implicit rule and that the effective methods would violate it, without being aware that they're holding themselves back.
So who is responsible for keeping the defender on his feet, assuming he's supposed to stay standing? If he falls over with a straight arm, how is that judged?
Similarly, what are the rules on footwork? I think one of the key points is "You don't have to treat it as an isolated joint, so you can work to lift your elbow up as well as working to push your wrist down" (which contributes to the similarity with "reaching", btw), but if you're allowed to step in closer as well then you can get better leverage so there might be even more going on.
I'm guessing that either (a) you're not much stronger than your wife or (b) she didn't click into the thing the visualization is meant to help people click into.
Oh, no. I'm so much stronger than my wife that there's no way she's keeping her arm straight if I'm serious about bending her arm. The test was 1) is she tensing her bicep when I don't subtly suggest she should and 2) is she able to put up more resistance when visualizing instead.
Seriously, the thing I mean when I point at this technique isn't a vague "energy" trick that fails upon encountering an MMA fighter or whatever. And it definitely doesn't rely on subtly deceiving people into tensing the wrong muscles. Unbendable arm is immensely demonstrable
Do you have a preferred video demonstration? Or can you draw the force vector diagrams? I don't doubt that you're observing something real here, but from looking through YouTube I'm not seeing what you're describing.
"I want you to hold your right arm out straight, really tight"
"I want him to tense up as physically hard as possible" -- and then he has to admonish his volunteer for "losing focus" when his unbendable arm bends
"the only purpose of this is for me to experience relaxation completely on this muscle" -- with emphasis that the arm is gonna bend at least a little bit and maybe more.
This guy is flat out falling over unnecessarily.
This one shows something closer to what you're talking about, but it's pretty clear that he's cheating the starting position by giving himself a more advantageous position the second time and having the other guy start in a less advantageous position. Which I guess kinda raises the question of what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate? Is that "cheating" or is that the entire thing being conveyed?
My wife's first reaction to "don't let me bend your arm" was actually to swat my hand away from her wrist, which playfully points out that we're implicitly holding back in unspecified ways for sake of the demonstration, and if we were actually trying to not let someone bend our arm we would be doing something quite different. So what are the rules, anyway? As long as the rules are kept hidden it's really easy to move the goalposts around without anyone noticing.
No, I read your vignette as describing a process of things snowballing all on their own, rather than by any such skilful response on either side. Hence my sceptical reply to it.
This is a very strange read, for two reasons.
First, "happens on its own" is a bizarre way to frame things that are entirely composed of human behavior. If a ball is placed on an incline, it will roll down hill on its own with no further human input. If a woman smiles at you, nothing happens unless you do something. If you're smiling and talking to a woman, it seems really strange to say "Yeah, but I am not the one doing it. It's happening on its own!". I obviously see the temptation to define away that which you're not aware of as "not really me" so that you can say "I am fully self aware of everything I do" and mumble the "I don't take responsibility for anything my body does on its own" part, but at some point when this linguistic trick is sufficiently exposed, you'd think you'd say "Shit. I guess 'self awareness' isn't that great if we define the term so as to not include awareness of what's driving my actual behavior'". And it seems obvious enough for that, by now? I apologize if I'm misestimating what's obvious.
Second, I would have thought "Forming mutually fulfilling relationships by navigating ambiguous social cues" was just obviously something that took actual social skills. Like, you can't do it if you're raised by wolves -- or otherwise failing to accurately track and appropriately respond to thing after thing after thing in the ways needed to coordinate a relationship with another human. If nothing else, I would have thought "guys who feel frustrated with their perceived inability to read women's cues" would be obviously suffering from a lack of specific social skills relative to the guys who find themselves effortlessly interpreting and eliciting those signals with the cute girl at the checkout counter -- at least, if we're holding constant other factors like good looks. What even is your model here? That human interaction is fake, and really once you account for height/looks/etc the outcome is predetermined regardless of what the people do or say, so long as someone asks the question?
No.
Speaking of awareness, are you aware of how it comes off this way?
No, that strikes me as so far fetched a scenario as to only occur in the fiction of another era.
Then I guess we're on the same page that "I've never been frog boiled like that" isn't a demonstration of high self awareness? I'm not sure what purpose you had in sharing that if not to use it as an example of the rewards from your deliberate work on attention.
I'm having a bit of trouble reading you. I was originally reading you as "Not understanding what I was saying, but interested to learn if it turns out I'm pointing at something real", so I tried to explain more clearly. Your last comment struck me much more of a "I already AM skilled at this, thank you very much" sort of "I don't have anything to learn from you, I'm just trying to point out where you're wrong", so I poked some fun at it. But you seem to be disclaiming that now.
Can you help me understand where you're coming from? Specifically, to what extent are you convinced that you're succeeding in self awareness and don't have anything big to learn here, and to what extent are you trying to grasp what I'm conveying because you can sense that there might be something big hiding beneath your conceptual floorboards? I'm fairly generous with my time if it's the latter, but if it's the former then I'm happy to just agree to disagree.
FWIW though, that "accidentally intentionally attracting women" problem does happen.
But people vary widely in somatic skills and how they interpret verbal instructions;
Yeah, that's why I actually ran the test. It's also why I used my wife as a test subject rather than one of the guys at jiu jitsu for example. My wife is definitely on the "less aware of how to use her body" side, so the fact that she got it right is more meaningful.
I definitely interpreted it as 'tense your arm really hard' and that's probably why the beam / firehose visualization helped.
I wasn't there so I can't say, but it's worth noting that the cues on how to interpret things can be subtle, and the fact that they're being led in a certain way can really easily slide under people's radar even while they simultaneously notice the cues and respond to them.
For example, if I wanted to tell my wife to tense her arm without telling her to tense her arm, I could have said "You're going to hold your arm out like this and not let me bend it" -- showing her a tense arm. Or I could have been more subtle and just kept a sub-noteworthy amount of tension throughout my body, and when I went to grab her wrist, grabbed it in a rigid fashion. This all suggests "this is how we resist things" without ever having to say it.
I'm not saying that Akido practitioners are deliberately misleading, just that people tend to nonverbally communicate in ways that convey their perspective, whatever that perspective may be. This tends to happen whether they realize it or not, and indeed whether they want it or not. For example, when my daughter was.. I think three, she watched a show explicitly intended to help kids not be afraid to get their shots. The thing is, she was already not afraid to get her shots and had actually thrown a tantrum because she could only get one flu shot the previous year. But as a result of watching that show, she picked up the creators' actual beliefs of "Shots are scary, but they shouldn't be so we're supposed to insist they're fine" -- and the show had the exact opposite effect from intended. It turns out, insisting "You shouldn't be afraid" isn't very compelling when you simultaneously demonstrate that you're coming from a place of fear -- even if you never admit to the latter out loud.
The way I held myself when telling my wife to not let me bend her arm was relaxed, only contracting the muscles that had a specific purpose. I don't recall if I demonstrated with my own arm, but if I did it was loose. When I held her wrist, I'm sure it was loose, etc. I don't mean to suggest that people don't unintentionally get confused into ineffective responses -- that definitely happens a lot. I just mean that IME a lot of the time all it takes is not buying into it oneself, and that the confusions persist in large part because they're actively upheld by the people giving instructions.
"Frog boiling" is standing in for "responding skillfully to women expressing subtle interest, and managing to turn it into clear cut interest so that asking her out is no longer a leap of faith"... right?
Am I reading this correctly that you're patting yourself on the back for successfully avoiding this experience? Is accidentally intentionally getting women too obviously interested in them the problem that you think most men have in dating?
Don't get me wrong, I know that's a real problem that can be had. It just seems like a weird flex, since most men would be more interested in knowing how to cultivate those experiences intentionally than how to avoid them. The latter is fairly self evident.
It turns out that for most people, the default intention of “holding your arm straight” by tensing your muscles and resisting your partner is not very effective.
Notice the presupposition that "tensing your muscles" is the default way most that most people hold their arm straight? Notice how in the video you linked he explicitly specified "really tight" and didn't just say "don't let me bend your arm", letting people do what actually comes by default? They seem to always specify to make the arm tense, which is unsurprising because if you're not told to resist wrong, you might not resist wrong and then their trick won't work.
I tried it with my wife, only instead of saying "Hold your arm really tight" I just said "Don't let me bend your arm". As a result, she didn't foolishly contract her bicep to help me, and was able to resist just as well as when I told her to visualize stuff. It's not that visualizing firehoses is unusually effective, it's that you're getting bamboozled into doing it unusually ineffectively to start with.
That all sounds right to me.
Yes, if you're considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues, you've likely noticed that you're considering asking for a phone number based on what seem like unreliable clues. That's something where you're quite likely to be wrong in a way that stings, so you're likely to notice what you're doing and rethink things.
When the cashier smiles at you 1% more than usual, you probably don't stop and wonder whether it's a sign or not. You won't think anything of it because it's well within the noise -- but you might smile 1% more in return without noticing that you do. She might smile an additional 1% the next time, and you might respond in kind. Before you know it people might be saying "Get a room, you two!".
Even if she then asks you out -- or you ask her out -- it was the subtle iterated things that built the mutual attraction and recognition of attraction that enabled the question to be asked and received well. In that same situation, if you would have responded to that first 1% extra smile with "WILL YOU DATE ME", she probably would have said no because she probably didn't actually like you yet.
If you do ask her out, and she says "Yes", do you credit the fact that you explicitly asked, or the fact that she smiled that little bit more? Or the fact that you smiled back that little bit more and played into the game?
Yes, there are obviously many instances where men feel like their only chance is a leap of faith, and men tend to notice when they're contemplating it. In absence of opportunity to iterate, they might even be right.
At the same time, much of the work -- especially when done well -- is in responding to things too subtle to be overthinking like that, and iterating until the leap takes much less faith. I'm not taking any hard stance of when you should take a leap of faith or not, but I am pointing out that with enough iteration, the gap can be closed to the point where no one ever has to ask anyone anything.
I should clarify what would actually surprise me.
Most people at a jiu jitsu gym don't really get jiu jitsu, and struggle in ways that they don't have to if they were to just learn jiu jitsu. This is unavoidable, as learning to jiu jitsu takes time, but it also means that even if BJJ has an equivalent concept of this Unbending Arm thing you should expect these results. I don't doubt that there's something there.
What I'm skeptical of is the idea that it's a blind spot in jiu jitsu, to the point where cross training in Aikido for concepts like this has demonstrable merit. I'm skeptical that the field of jiu jitsu lacks an equivalent concept and therefore systematically misleads its practitioners in a way that is relevant to BJJ/MMA/street altercations/etc.
These blind spots do exist, but they're impressive and cognitive dissonance inducing when demonstrated. My favorite example is Derrick Lewis "just standing up". The announcers recognize that Derrick Lewis isn't demonstrating skill at "jiu jitsu", and don't recognize the unforced errors that his opponents are making which allow him to just stand up, so they're shocked. "This isn't supposed to work, and it is!".
If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they haven't practiced it, then that's kinda unavoidable. It takes practice.
If someone tries to stand on one foot with their eyes closed and falls over due to the fact that they tried to stand on one foot with their eyes closed... instead of just opening their eyes and putting their foot down when there's no reason to not open their eyes and put their foot down... then that's entirely avoidable. All you have to do is think through what you're actually trying to achieve.
By using the word "dumb" I'm saying that if it turns out I'm missing something here it's not because I haven't spent ten years practicing Aikido visualizations in the mountains of Japan. It's because I was doing something drastically wrong that can apparently be fixed in a 30 second demonstration, which I've had ample time to notice, and have apparently been blind to for whatever reason.
The distinction is important because if it happens, it calls for some more self reflection on how I ended up not knowing how to use my arms despite using them for decades. In the same way that if you think you're about to submit someone and they "just stand up", its in your best interest to humble yourself a bit and go back to the drawing board.
I trust your honesty about where the goal posts are, but I still have to locate them in order to know what you're saying, exactly. I'm trying to find out where you're drawing the line between "the thing" and "not the thing" so that I can understand what you're saying and make sense of why the Aikido demonstrations look so much like they're trying to hide what's actually going on.
I tried it this morning at the jiu jitsu gym, with a fairly skilled training partner that likes to play with challenges like this. Specifically, what I did is say "I want to play an Aikido game with you. See if you can bend my arm", and then placed the back of my wrist on his shoulder, and let him do as much as I thought I could without letting my arm bend.
He started off gently pushing and pulling to feel me out, and I had to move my feet to stay standing because it doesn't take much if you're in a regular upright stance. Eventually he pulled pretty hard and I had to half collapse in order to keep my arm straight. A bit after that I had to collapse fully, and he spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how to pin my arm in a way that allows him good biomechanics for bending my arm. The game ended when I had to tap to an arm bar... which I guess is fair since I didn't specify that he had to bend it forward and he certainly would have been able to bend it backwards from there.
When we switched roles, I immediately did the thing that he eventually did to bring me down, and bent his arm. I reminded him that he was not obligated to stay standing, and that the lose condition is just the arm being bent. The next time I couldn't bend his arm with him standing, but I could force him off his feet so long as I took a step back and used good biomechanics to pull his elbow down and into me.
The thing is, none of this looks anything like an Aikido demonstration. It looks like a grappling match.
Why don't Aikido demonstrations look like grappling matches, if not for implicit rules about what you're not supposed to do? Why does the guy demonstrating the technique never get to the point of having to say "Okay, but no pinning my upper arm"? Why is he never forced to collapse to the ground in order to keep his arm straight? Why doesn't the offensive player ever take a step back and pull them down in the way that generates significant bending moment -- the way my training partner did to me?