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The best study I know of that addresses rationality in pro sports is Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. It tells the story of how Billy Beane followed the approaches recommended by people who studied the voluminous statistics on Baseball and pointed to non-standard evaluations of what talents and strategies made a difference in getting to the post-season. It's relevant for two reasons.

1) It talks about the psychology of players and coaches who found reasons to stick with the tried-and-true, even when non-standard approaches had some evidence in their favor.

2) it talks about the process of re-analyzing the statistics to figure out what aspects of the game matter. Part of this is deciding what the goal is, and part is figuring out what helps you reach the goal. In the case of baseball, Beane agreed with the those who argued that getting to the post-season cost-effectively was the goal. That means figuring out how to win more games over a season, which is more straightforward than figuring out how to win individual games. Cost-effectiveness translates to recruiting players whose value is higher than what other teams are willing to pay. Many unconventional styles of play turned out to be valuable, which led to a team that looked bizarre by accepted standards, but who won consistently but unspectacularly.

edited to use proper LW linking

See comment in full context

Epistemic Viciousness

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

Mar 13, 2009

Previously in series: A Sense That More Is Possible

Someone deserves a large hattip for this, but I'm having trouble remembering who; my records don't seem to show any email or OB comment which told me of this 12-page essay, "Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts" by Gillian Russell. Maybe Anna Salamon?

      We all lined up in our ties and sensible shoes (this was England) and copied him—left, right, left, right—and afterwards he told us that if we practised in the air with sufficient devotion for three years, then we would be able to use our punches to kill a bull with one blow.
      I worshipped Mr Howard (though I would sooner have died than told him that) and so, as a skinny, eleven-year-old girl, I came to believe that if I practised, I would be able to kill a bull with one blow by the time I was fourteen.
      This essay is about epistemic viciousness in the martial arts, and this story illustrates just that. Though the word ‘viciousness’ normally suggests deliberate cruelty and violence, I will be using it here with the more old-fashioned meaning, possessing of vices.

It all generalizes amazingly. To summarize some of the key observations for how epistemic viciousness arises:

The art, the dojo, and the sensei are seen as sacred. "Having red toe-nails in the dojo is like going to church in a mini-skirt and halter-top... The students of other martial arts are talked about like they are practicing the wrong religion."
If your teacher takes you aside and teaches you a special move and you practice it for 20 years, you have a large emotional investment in it, and you'll want to discard any incoming evidence against the move.
Incoming students don't have much choice: a martial art can't be learned from a book, so they have to trust the teacher.
Deference to famous historical masters. "Runners think that the contemporary staff of Runner's World know more about running than than all the ancient Greeks put together. And it's not just running, or other physical activities, where history is kept in its place; the same is true in any well-developed area of study. It is not considered disrespectful for a physicist to say that Isaac Newton's theories are false..." (Sound familiar?)
"We martial artists struggle with a kind of poverty—data-poverty—which makes our beliefs hard to test... Unless you're unfortunate enough to be fighting a hand-to-hand war you cannot check to see how much force and exactly which angle a neck-break requires..."
"If you can't test the effectiveness of a technique, then it is hard to test methods for improving the technique. Should you practice your nukite in the air, or will that just encourage you to overextend? ... Our inability to test our fighting methods restricts our ability to test our training methods."
"But the real problem isn’t just that we live in data poverty—I think that’s true for some perfectly respectable disciplines, including theoretical physics—the problem is that we live in poverty but continue to act as though we live in luxury, as though we can safely afford to believe whatever we’re told..." (+10!)

One thing that I remembered being in this essay, but, on a second reading, wasn't actually there, was the degeneration of martial arts after the decline of real fights—by which I mean, fights where people were really trying to hurt each other and someone occasionally got killed.

In those days, you had some idea of who the real masters were, and which school could defeat others.

And then things got all civilized. And so things went downhill to the point that we have videos on Youtube of supposed Nth-dan black belts being pounded into the ground by someone with real fighting experience.

I had one case of this bookmarked somewhere (but now I can't find the bookmark) that was really sad; it was a master of a school who was convinced he could use ki techniques. His students would actually fall over when he used ki attacks, a strange and remarkable and frightening case of self-hypnosis or something... and the master goes up against a skeptic and of course gets pounded completely into the floor. Feel free to comment this link if you know where it is.

Truly is it said that "how to not lose" is more broadly applicable information than "how to win". Every single one of these risk factors transfers straight over to any attempt to start a "rationality dojo". I put to you the question: What can be done about it?

Part of the sequence The Craft and the Community

Next post: "Schools Proliferating Without Evidence"

Previous post: "A Sense That More Is Possible"

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

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A lot of dojos preserve to some degree the social standards of Eastern countries where the sensei's sensei came from. And in Eastern countries, it's much less acceptable to try to question your teacher, or change things, or rock the boat, or show any form of weakness. I taught school in Japan for a while, and the first thing I learned was that naively asking "Any questions?" or "Any opinions on this?" or even "Anyone not understand?" was a waste of time.

Western cultures are a lot better at this, but not ideal. There's still pressure not to be the one person who asks all the questions all the time, and there's pressure not to say anything controversial out of the blue because you lose more status if you're wrong than you gain if you're right. I think part of the problem is that there really are dumb or egotistical people who, if given the chance will protest that they know a much better way to do everything and will waste the time of everyone else, and our society's decided to .make a devil's bargain to keep them under control.

The best solution to this is to found a new culture, live isolated from the rest of the world for a century developing different cultural norms, and then start the rationality dojo there. Of possible second-best solutions:

My Favorite Liar. Tell people that you're going to make X deliberately incorrect statements every training session and they've got to catch them.
Clickers. One of my lecturers uses these devices sort of like remote controls. You can input information into them and it gets sent wirelessly and anonymously to the lecturer's laptop. The theory is that if he says "Raise your hand if you don't understand this" or even "...if you disagree with this", no one will, but if he says "Enter whether or not you understand this into your clicker" he may get three or four "don't understand" responses. Anonymous suggestion boxes are a low-tech form of the same principle.
I always found the concept of Crocker's Rules very interesting. I also remember hearing of a community (wish I could remember which) in which it was absolutely forbidden to give negative feedback under certain circumstances, and the odd social dynamics that created. In a dojo-like setting, there might be situations when either of these two rules could be ritually enacted - for example, a special Crocker Hat, such that anyone wearing that hat was known to be under Crocker's Rules, and a special No Negative Feedback Hat (but with a flashier name, like White Crane Hat of Social Invincibility), which someone could wear when questioning the master or something and be absolutely immune to any criticism.

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I also remember hearing of a community (wish I could remember which) in which it was absolutely forbidden to give negative feedback under certain circumstances

I am living (and about to leave) an Asian society very much like this. It yields some very odd results indeed: corruption, consumerism, lemming-like religious behavior, and vast - feudal - social gaps.

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Care to elaborate?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDaCIDvj6I

" Kiai Master vs MMA "

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

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That wasn't it, but it's even scarier than the one I saw, so ++.

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Yes, Sam Harris wrote an article with it in: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-pleasures-of-drowning

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By far my biggest problem with the way you discusses rationality is the way that you draw on the tropes of Eastern martial arts instruction, and it's because of exactly this sort of thing - those tropes are appropriate for one who wants to be considered a guru, which is the opposite of your stated aims. It's something I have to warn people about if I'm recommending something you've written.

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The best study I know of that addresses rationality in pro sports is Moneyball, by Michael Lewis. It tells the story of how Billy Beane followed the approaches recommended by people who studied the voluminous statistics on Baseball and pointed to non-standard evaluations of what talents and strategies made a difference in getting to the post-season. It's relevant for two reasons.

1) It talks about the psychology of players and coaches who found reasons to stick with the tried-and-true, even when non-standard approaches had some evidence in their favor.

2) it talks about the process of re-analyzing the statistics to figure out what aspects of the game matter. Part of this is deciding what the goal is, and part is figuring out what helps you reach the goal. In the case of baseball, Beane agreed with the those who argued that getting to the post-season cost-effectively was the goal. That means figuring out how to win more games over a season, which is more straightforward than figuring out how to win individual games. Cost-effectiveness translates to recruiting players whose value is higher than what other teams are willing to pay. Many unconventional styles of play turned out to be valuable, which led to a team that looked bizarre by accepted standards, but who won consistently but unspectacularly.

edited to use proper LW linking

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Actually, the martial arts world has recently benefited from a big dose of reality in the form of mixed-martial-arts tournaments. Throwing together fighters from different styles demonstrated that some were overwhelmingly superior to others and unleashed a rapid evolution of technique that blended together the clearly superior methods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts#Evolution_of_fighters

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This is sort-of true, but with one really, really big caveat that people seem to forget: any form of fighting that is controlled basically screws large portions of many styles.

If you go into an MMA tournament and deliberately break someone's arm, you aren't going to be asked back. Let alone if you break their neck. Furthermore, non-crazy martial artists don't even want to: there's too much respect for that. There are styles that are centered around causing maximum damage as quickly as possible, and they are entirely useless in MMA fights. You're never going to see a hard-style master being competitive in an MMA tournament, because 90% of what they know is irrelevant.

-Robin

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rlpowell, you are incorrect. You are spouting an untested theory that is repeated as fact by those with a vested interest in avoiding the harsh light of truth.

In actual fact, there is no problem with breaking someone's arm in an MMA fight (see Mir vs. Sylvia in the UFC, for example). It's also close to impossible to break someone's neck (deliberately), despite what you may see in movies.

The "we're too dangerous to fight" is an easy meme to propagate. But let me just ask you this: let's just say, hypothetically, that your theory ("maximum damage" masters are "useless in MMA fights") was false. How would you ever know? Assuming that someone did not yet have a belief about that proposition, what kind of evidence are you actually aware of, about whether the statement is true or false?

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(way after the fact)

You know what? You are absolutely right that I'm spouting an untested theory. I have since stopped.

The problem is that I see no way to test either side; either what I said or the converse, which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.

The only test I can think of is to load up fighters that assert opposite sides of this, and are both highly trained in their respective arts and so on, on lots of PCP, and see who lives.

There are ... some practical and ethical problems there.

I do think, however, that neither of us get to spout either side of this issue and claim that we have a well-tested theory on our side. Having said that, I would say your side has more evidence at this time.

-Robin

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which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.

If that is the claim you are rejecting then I must agree. I have no reason to expect optimal fighting technique to come out of MMA, indeed, it would indicate a failure of optimisation in MMA competitors. As you go on to indicate you are measuring fighting technique as it serves to facilitate survival in one on one fights to the death. The social and physical payoffs in MMA training, competition and sparring are different. Optimising for one instead of the other has the problems of a lost purpose.

Of course "optimal fighting technique" suffers from some rather significant No Free Lunch issues. Optimal for what? How many opponents are attacking you? Do you wish to use your arts to intimidate as well as protect? Are there consequences to killing the opponent instead of incapacitating? How tall are you?

The only test I can think of is to load up fighters that assert opposite sides of this, and are both highly trained in their respective arts and so on, on lots of PCP, and see who lives.

I can't suggest a better test than this but there is another problem here related to the above NFL considerations. There will be a correlation between the effectiveness of a fighting technique and success in battles but it is not a simple one. You will end up identifying the technique that is optimal for the most physically capable combatants, not the optimal fighting technique in general.

A technique that is highly specialized to steroid pumping genetic freaks but barely usable by the majority of fit and healthy people will get the kills.

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There will be a correlation between the effectiveness of a fighting technique and success in battles but it is not a simple one. You will end up identifying the technique that is optimal for the most physically capable combatants, not the optimal fighting technique in general.

I wonder if there's something like this at work in programming?

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This is also quite a while after the fact, but I will note that we do have access to some relevant information on this issue, coming in large part from military martial arts research. Active militaries have significant exposure to data on what sort of techniques are useful in self defense, and they use this as their metric for success. How closely does MMA resemble military based martial arts? I think the quote from one of the instructors in the Krav Maga episode of Human Weapon, to the host Jason Chambers, pretty much sums it up.

You're a good pro fighter, but you don't know shit about self defense.

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PhilosophyTutor

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How many unarmed combats do you think modern militaries actually get into, and how much of their training time do you think is spent on preparing for this eventuality?

My understanding is that the answers are "almost none" and "very little". Hence I place very little weight on the fact that military organisations have at one time or another used one martial art or another.

The fact that a Krav Maga salesperson claims that their product is better than MMA for self-defence is not evidence that should shift a Bayesian's prior probability estimate more than infinitesimally, because they'd say that whether or not they had proper evidence it was true.

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Israeli forces use Krav Maga for peacekeeping ("peacekeeping," anyway,) not just armed military engagements.

MMA has a lot fewer rules than, say, kickboxing, but practically every illegal technique is useful in some way (otherwise there would be no need to have a rule against it,) the matches are fought in rounds, always against a single opponent, with a referee who restarts the action if the combatants reach a stalemate on the ground, in a ring with plenty of space to maneuver, no obstacles or potential improvised weapons, and fighters have months in advance to research each other's fighting styles and plan countermeasures. It's not as if MMA constitutes a particularly rigorous investigation into the optimal fighting style for personal self defense.

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PhilosophyTutor

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MMA has a lot fewer rules than, say, kickboxing, but practically every illegal technique is useful in some way (otherwise there would be no need to have a rule against it,)

My own view is that Krav Maga, Wing Chun and similar belief systems use an inverted form of Sagan's Dragon reasoning. Whatever you cannot test is whatever they claim would allow them to win, hence they always have an unfalsifiable hypothesis that their style would win in MMA.

There were almost no rules in UFC1 yet groin attacks and whatnot that have been hypothesised to be dominant strategies in no-rules engagements failed to perform as advertised and bread and butter techniques like punches, kicks and rear naked chokes were what won. So we have a very limited data set, but based on that set we should place a low probability on the hypothesis that these are dominant strategies.

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I wouldn't put Krav Maga into the same category as Wing Chun; it's essentially Jeet Kune Do under another brand name (or Jeet Kune Do is Krav Maga under another brand name, since neither particularly owes its existence to the other.) To the best of their abilities, Krav Maga instructors test the performance of their skills under as close an approximation of the circumstances they expect that their soldiers will need to apply them as they can contrive.

I only took a few classes in Krav Maga, but I spent a longer time training in Wun Hop Kuen Do, a branch of Kajukenbo with similar training outlook. Kajukenbo was a mixed martial art before the rise of sport MMA, and developed a formidable reputation in Hawaii at a time when violent street engagements were common. My own instructor's teacher (Grandmaster Al Dacascos, father of the martial arts movie actor Mark Dacascos,) reminisced about how back when his old school had a white pants and white shirt dress requirement, students from his school would actually go and beat up sailors and steal their pants to wear in class. This is not a style that developed in isolation from regular exposure to evidence of what works on the street. As a side note, some Kajukenbo schools train professional MMA competitors (such as the one where Chuck Liddell trained.)

When I did full contact sparring with my instructor, he would indeed usually finish matches by submission. Having trained for a while in BJJ as well, while I was never able to submit my instructors using legal techniques, I often found myself in positions where I could grab their testicles, gouge their eyes, manipulate the pressure points under their ears, shove a thumb into the base of their windpipe, etc., and they would tell me that while those techniques were effective in a real fight, I wouldn't be allowed to use them in competition. Trying those against Sifu Jason, my Wun Hop Kuen Do instructor, he'd simply shut me down because he was used to dealing with all of them. He trained and used his techniques in MMA rules fights (Krav Maga practitioners often spar this way as well,) but he would also do heavy contact multi-man sparring drills, weapon vs. weapon sparring, weapon vs. unarmed sparring, and other drills to condition students for potential self defense situations. Being an instructor level pracitioner in Wun Hop Kuen Do is essentially a research position; he would train against guys who would attack him in earnest with a real knife (having worked his way up after years of training with a rubber knife with a chalked edge) to make sure that his techniques actually worked as advertized. Is it reckless? Of course, but when the product you're selling is defense in potentially life-and-death situations, and your techniques aren't effective, you're putting all your students at risk.

Sifu Jason is also one of the more active participants on Bullshido, and many of their style vs. style matches are hosted at his school. When it comes to demonstrating real life effectiveness in martial arts, I think he's pretty effectively shouldered the burden of evidence. And because lives depend on it, and they're passionate about what they do, that's how seriously serious military instructors take their styles too.

Present day MMA is probably not far off from the optimal on-on-one fighting style without street clothes in a ring with no rules. But if MMA fighters optimize for personal combat of that type, and display the same sort of uncomprehending helplessness that many of the strikers did back in the earliest days of the UFC upon being brought to the ground for the first time as soon as they run into a fight with multiple opponents or a knife, then the training is not well optimized for self defense.

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PhilosophyTutor

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I wouldn't put Krav Maga into the same category as Wing Chun; it's essentially Jeet Kune Do under another brand name (or Jeet Kune Do is Krav Maga under another brand name, since neither particularly owes its existence to the other.) To the best of their abilities, Krav Maga instructors test the performance of their skills under as close an approximation of the circumstances they expect that their soldiers will need to apply them as they can contrive.

Krav Maga as taught to Israeli soldiers might be some such animal. The scam with the same name where you get an instructor's certificate after a brief workshop which allows you to rip off the gullible is pure bullshido.

Present day MMA is probably not far off from the optimal on-on-one fighting style without street clothes in a ring with no rules. But if MMA fighters optimize for personal combat of that type, and display the same sort of uncomprehending helplessness that many of the strikers did back in the earliest days of the UFC upon being brought to the ground for the first time as soon as they run into a fight with multiple opponents or a knife, then the training is not well optimized for self defense.

I've got no argument with this, although styles that train full-contact for multiple attackers or knives are very few and far between,

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Both MMA and BJJ are seriously flawed if one is potentially facing more than one adversary. Knock down and disengage is strictly superior when you run the risk of getting kicked in the back of the head by adversary n+1 while you are busy putting a submission on or pounding adversary n from close range.

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The "we're too dangerous to fight" is an easy meme to propagate. But let me just ask you this: let's just say, hypothetically, that your theory ("maximum damage" masters are "useless in MMA fights") was false. How would you ever know? Assuming that someone did not yet have a belief about that proposition, what kind of evidence are you actually aware of, about whether the statement is true or false?

Military application of the "maximum damage" martial art, and the restriction of certain training to military personnel, would be solid evidence that it goes beyond what is considered safe in sport.

For instance, I know that certain weapon techniques in Krav Maga are generally taught only to policemen or combat soldiers.

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I don't know much about American professional sports--even less about pro sports in other countries--for that matter, I don't know much about martial arts. But as far as I do know, pro sports have none of these problems. Athletes do all sorts of outrageous things; coaches, athletes, and strategies are chosen on merit; absurdly detailed statistics are collected. Baseball players admire Babe Ruth but they don't idolize him. The analogy between pro sports and martial arts isn't perfect, but neither is the analogy between martial arts and rationality.

So, what do pro sports have to "keep them honest", that martial arts don't?

Teams of athletes compete in tournaments that directly demonstrate their skills at their sport. In theory, the sport of martial artists is hand-to-hand combat, but martial arts tournaments never allow eye-gouging, biting, and so on. The further the distance between the tournament rules and reality, the less useful the tournament will be. Fortunately, I don't think there's a rationalist equivalent of eye-gouging, so setting up tournament rules should be relatively easy.
An athlete or coach who gives up a pet technique for one that works better will be rewarded with status and money. The culture of pro sports permits athletes to train in entirely different ways from one season to the next, and coaches to change their playbooks whenever they like. Martial arts schools are stagnant by comparison. The money in pro sports comes from fans (directly through sales or indirectly through advertising) and it would take a lot of effort to raise awareness for rationality. But if rationality masters were really so awesome they'd have no trouble getting the money, right?
Pro sports aren't considered a "way of life" the way martial arts are. Athletes move from one team to another and it's not a big deal, but if Bruce Lee had given up Jeet Kune Do during his life, and taken up Shotokan Karate instead, the martial arts world would still be talking about it. It would be like the Pope converting to Wicca. Readers of OB will probably agree with me that rationality should be a way of life; but I hope they'll also agree that no particular school of rationality should be.

Comment edited for suitable URL tags.

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I don't think there's a rationalist equivalent of eye-gouging, so setting up tournament rules should be relatively easy.

Well, then again, I don't think there's a rationalist equivalent of a tournament just yet, either.

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Well... there is the stock market, but that's generally too much of a challenge; any edge you get disappears very quickly, so the best thing to do is "free ride" off of other people's attempts to value stocks and just buy index funds (or the equivalent).

Other domains in which rationality can be tested are "intellectual sports" such as poker, chess, or Magic: The Gathering... it's hard to test "rationality" in a way that doesn't simply test intelligence or learned skills, though.

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Are you insane? Professional team sports are a bastion of epistemic viciousness. A surprising amount of professional athletes and coaches do not have a coherent grasp of why they are able to do what they do, are awful at evaluating themselves and recognize, yet dismiss, what they should do to get better. Case in point: Shaquille O'Neal, with his free throws and rejuvenation once he encountered the Phoenix medical staff.

Or any number of idiotic football coaches who refuse to implement strategies that Madden video games and real life show as valid, winning strategies. On the other hand, there's Don Nelson - who appears to be playing a demented brand of basketball in a bizarro dimension.

Disclosure: I have done Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for eight months and dabble in mixed martial arts. I have watched more than a few hundred hours of videos of all kinds of martial arts, been active in individual and team sports and did taekwondo a long time ago.

My experiences in BJJ and MMA have shown me a population of people unusually aware of the strengths and limitations of almost every martial art out there. There's a strong institutional emphasis (from the instructor) to do techniques shown in class specifically as shown; however, there's also a strong unofficial emphasis on watching YouTube videos, grappling with other people and coming up with stuff on your own time. Both pathways are tested in grappling. The OODA loop works so much better within the BJJ/MMA groups than it does in people outside.

I have no idea why this is, but I suspect it is primarily because of the UFC and other MMA organizations showing the continual development of individual combat (within rules). The personal fighting has also borne this out, but isn't nearly as capable of influencing other people.

By continual testing against others, the chinks are eventually shown and either patched up or styles reconfigured. A variety of styles and strategies have been shown to work - swarming (old Shogun, old Wanderlei), counterfighting (Evans, Rampage), Muay Thai (Anderson Silva), submissions from the top (Maia), submissions from the bottom (Minotauro), wrestling (St. Pierre) etc. [Note: almost all of the previously mentioned are world-class experts in multiple disciplines]

Bruce Lee sorta gave up Kung Fu. Pro sports are a way of life for many, many millions.

Rationality dojo: isn't this place one?

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I don't think I'm insane. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?

You've misread me to suit your preconceptions. I never said that there was no epistemic viciousness in professional team sports. What I said was that the particular problems that Russell describes aren't problems in pro sports. It's possible to learn from the pro sports model without adopting it in every particular.

Of course not all football coaches rationally choose strategies; not all football coaches are competent, period. But unlike the dojos Russell describes, in pro sports that behavior in is understood as biased and unreasonable, not praised as respect for tradition.

I agree that "pro sports" are a way of life for many people--this was phrased poorly in my original post. I should have said that membership in a team isn't a way of life for professional athletes. Fans generally stick with one team or another, but when you move from Chicago to Los Angeles, it's not a big deal if you stop following the Bulls and start following the Lakers. Anyway, the analogy breaks down here--what would a "rationality fan" who didn't actually practice rationality look like?

You say the breadth of martial arts knowledge of your BJJ/MMA community is "unusual." I assume you meant relative to the rest of the martial arts community rather than the general population, which would be trivially obvious. Either way we agree that "continual testing against others" is the common denominator that keeps a dojo or a professional sports team effective.

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I don't think I'm insane. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?

Repeat after Tarski:

If I am insane,
I desire to believe that I am insane;
If I'm not insane,
I desire to believe that I'm not insane;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

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10 points

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FTFY:

If I am insane, I desire to believe that marble tomato cheese brain.

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BrandonReinhart

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This is an aside, but related: there is an awesome website dedicated to investigating and uncovering fraud and vice within the Martial Arts world: Bullshido. Participants post about questionable doings (such as masters who claim to teach or use ki) and visit those schools to report on the fraud. It also has areas for regular Martial Arts chat, but this sub-forum is the one that primarily focuses on investigations.

This, then, is an incomplete outline to an answer to your question: due diligence and active pursuit of those who fraudulently represent "arts of rationality." If there were a series of Dojos of the Bayesian Sect, those dojos would be responsible for exposing the Thousand Schools of False Ways. It would ever be an ongoing battle. Just as the members of Bullshido are constantly encountering and exposing "McDojos" that claim to teach practical self-defense techniques that would, in reality, probably just get you killed or kids' grappling schools taught by instructors with sex assault convictions.

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

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Doesn't seem like an "aside" to me; investigations that look for that sort of simple fraud was something I hadn't yet thought of.

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I believe the video you were looking for is here:

[censored the link on account of comment below]

http://www. yachigusaryu. com/blog/2007/02/no-touch-knockout-fraud-exposed.html

10 points

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10 points

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In defense of martial arts I want to note that in their case the mentioned key observations for epistemic viciousness are not independend and partially unavoidable. Especially the "deference to famous historical masters" point is no more than a logical conclusion of the "we live data poverty" point: Until less than a hundred years ago people would risk their health (even life) in fights to establish the superiority of the brand of martial artists they espoused. Not to mention life circumstances in general, which more often than not included more or less regular violent conflicts, which usually meat hand-to-hand combat (as opposed to guns). These people did certainly not live in data poverty regarding the efficacy of their techiques, hence it is fair to assume they were (at least on average) better fighters than today's martial artists.

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5 points

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What can be done about it? We can fight.

The Master can argue for Creationism, and try to defeat the pupil's refutation of it. We can argue for or against One-boxing on Newcomb's problem. Or pretend to be the AI arguing that the Gatekeeper should free it. The Master is only Master for as long as s/he is undefeated.

5 points

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Eliezer_Yudkowsky

17 points

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This equates rationality with victory in argument on an arbitrary side of an issue regardless of the truth; which is not at all the skill we want to inculcate.

17 points

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12 points

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Maybe instead of a fight, form it as a riddle:

The master gives an argument for creationism. The "homework" is for the student to understand why this argument is invalid.

Every now and then, just to mix things up, the master would give an argument for a statement which actually turns out to be true, to make sure that the student is actually searching for truth, and not just arbitrary counter-arguments to whatever it is the master said.

12 points

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14 points

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This is the skill of Debating, which is highly respected and taught the world over. Because it wins at politics (convinces the other chimps) even if it loses at matching the territory. It's damned useful, but it's a bit Dark Arts prone. (That's not a reason to avoid it, but one to take care.)

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5 points

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What successful(as winning in the UFC) martial arts have in common: realistic sparring. BJJ(Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu), Boxing and Muay-Thai all have this(of course with certain restrictions) and they have shown to be effective.

Edit: translating to the rationality dojo, we need some method of empirically testing the techniques. One way would be to do some exercises after the theory was learned like asking some question or doing some test and then seeing who gets the answer right. Another would be to ask for real-life experiences like: what irrational believe or habit did you manage to get rid of in the last month/week? Where did you improve something?

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3 points

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What can be done about it?

I'll suggest it first so nobody else has to lose karma over it: don't start a rationality dojo.

Is this what you're looking for?

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2 points

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I was disappointed in my dojos because I went there to learn self defense and psychological survival but only learned about punches and kicks and heard promises of eventually knowing enough to "win" in a fight.

One of the ways they measure how much "better" you are is by having you punch or kick easily breakable wooden boards. Three or more is impressive but broken boards neither prepares you for "winning" a fight or knowing the self-defense techniques involved in preventing or de-escalating a potential fight. Yet, it feels pretty darn good to break those boards.

Martial Arts exists as one extremely unlikely and limited-use scenario of self defense. Against most of your peers, some MA knowledge will help you not get your ass kicked. Against people who employ violence for a living, MA skills are more likely to make you either a corpse or involved in a legal dispute and likely sporting a wonderful case of PTSD (whether you win or lose the fight, you still lose).

Self defense isn't about finding the "best" martial art. If rationality is going to have true value, teaching it isn't mainly going to be for some lower utility such as fighting the theists.

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2 points

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One of my probability books was about the usage of the term probability - what it meant. (Ian Hacking?) Once upon a time, probable meant being attested to by some authority. That was the measure of truth - what Authority had to say.

"The Truth" is judged differently by different people. For some, The Truth is what an Authority says, where Authority is identified by signaling. In the absence of data, how else are you to judge truth claims? So competing Authorities compete through signaling louder, more congruently, more forcefully, which often amplifies the nuttiness, with increasing claims of certainty and disrespect for other theories.

For a lot of problems like this, I take the mind as a bunch of competing pattern matching algorithms, and note that it doesn't appear that your algorithms are weighted the same way mine are. Most people have their Authority algorithms weighted much higher than I do, and much higher than most people here do as well.

2 points

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