This is very true, but I think it misses a key point in what makes katas useful for actually learning a martial art in the first place. As noted in Matt Goldenberg’s answer, partner work is much more important for actually learning to use a martial art. Just practicing a kata by rote may look pretty, but it won’t tell you anything about how to use it. My own best teachers would teach moves and combinations and katas by rote at first, then very quickly move on to exercises that require creative application. Things like:
Mushin practice—get attacked and respond quickly, and make it work
Randori practice—get attacked repeatedly by multiple opponents, and make it work
Sparring and grappling practice
All of these can be modified with constraints to make them easier or harder. Easier might be “Every attack against you will be this kind of punch.” Harder can be something like “Choose one part of one kata. Come up with a way to use it effectively against whatever your opponent decides to throw at you.” Or “Figure out X different ways to use that same sequence of moves, with only minor variations, in different situations, then execute it and see how well it works.” Hopefully you’ve been practicing smart all along, and visualizing opponents while practicing your katas in the air, and developing your understanding of the moves and body mechanics so your interpretations make sense!
To bring this back to the original question: what are we thinking of as the fundamental “moves” we’re stringing together to make a “kata”? And is a rationality “kata” practice a one-person or two-person activity? Maybe a rationality kata is made up of moves like “1) Figure out what question/problem you’re trying to solve. 2) Spend five minutes thinking about what you know that may be at all relevant. 3) Make a list of unknowns that would be useful to know, and estimate how hard it would be to get the answers. 4) Make a list of strategies and techniques you might try to find a solution, and estimate their odds of success and time required. 5) Rank the results of #4 however you like, and work your way down the list until the problem is solved. 6) Go back to #2 and repeat until you have a good enough solution.” Or they can be more specific—katas for calibration, katas for probability estimation, and so on. “Practicing” katas, then, would be a matter of repeating the words of the steps, to commit them to the mental equivalent of muscle memory. This will be partly crystallizing useful concepts into short handles that leap to mind when needed, a kind of mental Miyagi-ing.
Also, in martial arts, katas can be practiced many different ways. For my own black belt test, some of the kata portion included things like “Precisely execute every kata you know, in order, in less than X minutes total,” and “choose one kata you know, and execute is as slowly as possible, minimum Y minutes, while maintaining precision and focus on every part of every movement,” and “perform this kata correctly, but make it fit completely in a box no more than Z feet across.” I think I’ve also been asked to do the mirror image of a kata a few times, though not as part of a rank test. Similarly, analyzing and verbalizing why a kata is a certain way, and what it’s trying to explore and teach, can be helpful for guiding further practice.
Then, more applied practice might look more like randori, where you get random problems thrown at you repeatedly and you have to use a specific kata to solve them. Or like mushin, where you have to practice quickly figuring out which kata to use for a problem that gets thrown at you, and then make that one work.
And yes, I realize I’ve just accidentally come very close to describing some of Jeffreysai’s methods, which is obviously not a coincidence, I’m sure.
A kata contains a bunch of individual moves that are usually done in the same order every time and practiced together.
The idea is by practicing them that way the individual moves will go into muscle memory and executed in a fast way.
Predicting a metaculus question would be a general task that can be accomplished in a lot of different ways.
This is very true, but I think it misses a key point in what makes katas useful for actually learning a martial art in the first place. As noted in Matt Goldenberg’s answer, partner work is much more important for actually learning to use a martial art. Just practicing a kata by rote may look pretty, but it won’t tell you anything about how to use it. My own best teachers would teach moves and combinations and katas by rote at first, then very quickly move on to exercises that require creative application. Things like:
Mushin practice—get attacked and respond quickly, and make it work
Randori practice—get attacked repeatedly by multiple opponents, and make it work
Sparring and grappling practice
All of these can be modified with constraints to make them easier or harder. Easier might be “Every attack against you will be this kind of punch.” Harder can be something like “Choose one part of one kata. Come up with a way to use it effectively against whatever your opponent decides to throw at you.” Or “Figure out X different ways to use that same sequence of moves, with only minor variations, in different situations, then execute it and see how well it works.” Hopefully you’ve been practicing smart all along, and visualizing opponents while practicing your katas in the air, and developing your understanding of the moves and body mechanics so your interpretations make sense!
To bring this back to the original question: what are we thinking of as the fundamental “moves” we’re stringing together to make a “kata”? And is a rationality “kata” practice a one-person or two-person activity? Maybe a rationality kata is made up of moves like “1) Figure out what question/problem you’re trying to solve. 2) Spend five minutes thinking about what you know that may be at all relevant. 3) Make a list of unknowns that would be useful to know, and estimate how hard it would be to get the answers. 4) Make a list of strategies and techniques you might try to find a solution, and estimate their odds of success and time required. 5) Rank the results of #4 however you like, and work your way down the list until the problem is solved. 6) Go back to #2 and repeat until you have a good enough solution.” Or they can be more specific—katas for calibration, katas for probability estimation, and so on. “Practicing” katas, then, would be a matter of repeating the words of the steps, to commit them to the mental equivalent of muscle memory. This will be partly crystallizing useful concepts into short handles that leap to mind when needed, a kind of mental Miyagi-ing.
Also, in martial arts, katas can be practiced many different ways. For my own black belt test, some of the kata portion included things like “Precisely execute every kata you know, in order, in less than X minutes total,” and “choose one kata you know, and execute is as slowly as possible, minimum Y minutes, while maintaining precision and focus on every part of every movement,” and “perform this kata correctly, but make it fit completely in a box no more than Z feet across.” I think I’ve also been asked to do the mirror image of a kata a few times, though not as part of a rank test. Similarly, analyzing and verbalizing why a kata is a certain way, and what it’s trying to explore and teach, can be helpful for guiding further practice.
Then, more applied practice might look more like randori, where you get random problems thrown at you repeatedly and you have to use a specific kata to solve them. Or like mushin, where you have to practice quickly figuring out which kata to use for a problem that gets thrown at you, and then make that one work.
And yes, I realize I’ve just accidentally come very close to describing some of Jeffreysai’s methods, which is obviously not a coincidence, I’m sure.