Also, it’s much productive to have a higher community standard of niceness-padding, and then take it off when you know the recipient doesn’t want or need it, than to adopt more padding when it seems called for, if the goal is a vibrant and expanding community.
I liken this to a martial arts dojo, where the norm is to not move at full speed or full intent-to-harm, but high level students or masters will deliberately remove safeguards when they know the other person is on their level, more or less. If they went all-out all of the time, they would have no new students. This is not a perfect analogy.
Yep, I agree! But I also want to clarify that, unlike a martial arts dojo, the safeguards aren’t unnecessary when you get good at rationality. They become unnecessary when you trust the person … Which is kind of an orthogonal thing.
Isn’t this how we got Karate America? Making things softer and softer to appeal to more and more people until the martial art is a useless exercise for children?
I think that happened mostly because you need to actually attract customers to stay open and make money, and parents got softer and less inclined to pay money for places where their children get hurt. Especially if the children won’t, with good probability, need to use those skills elsewhere in society.
In the early days of martial arts in America, most schools hardly taught children anyway; it was more or less taken for granted that the training was too harsh for kids. The idea that the martial arts were an appropriate way to teach kids positive values like discipline, restraint, self respect, etc. didn’t have much currency; it was more like boxing, where you might encourage an unruly and violent child to get into it to channel and redirect their energy, but encouraging a normal kid to get into it would be unnecessary and somewhat cruel.
Parents’ values may have changed somewhat, but I’d say the dominant factor is that the original market for martial arts training was fairly niche, and teachers simply expanded into more profitable demographics.
Edit: According to this book which I read recently, children have been pushed into increasingly more intense, competitive, and physically harmful sports activities for decades; while the average child may be fatter and out of shape, child athletes are being pushed more than ever. Parents who’re willing to push their children into activities where they’ll get hurt may not be in decreasing supply at all.
I was mostly speaking from anecdata, but that’s really interesting. Though I can’t say it’s very surprising, because I think this relates to the various sneaky connotations of the word “hurt”. I expect modern parents to be more horrified if a child got punched in the face than if the child passed out from too much training, even if the latter did way more physical damage.
That sounds plausible; it may relate to the same sort of consideration that comes into play in trolleylike dilemmas, “who do I assign responsibility for this?”
If a kid blows out their elbow from being made to pitch too many balls without adequate rest, that feels like something that just happened to them, but if a kid gets their nose bloodied being punched in the face, that’s something someone did to them, which makes it seem worse and more in need of prevention despite being comparatively trivial.
Yep, and right before their elbow blows out, it’s “training” or “work” and not “a fight”. Afterwards it’s an “accident.”
You know, I kinda want to have a more general discussion about when the “responsibility” model falls apart. It seems to be really useful for some situations and then just lead to a guilt-riddled, counter-productive blame game of awfulness. It would be nice to generalize those so we can just run an analysis of the situation and stop talking about responsibility if the analysis says it’s useless.
Also, your earlier point is why I refused to talk about the Olympics with people. I kept insisting that it wasn’t relevant to me personally what the superhuman athletes were doing. Just because they happened to be from my country doesn’t mean we have anything in common and cheering for them doesn’t make me any more gifted at sports or them any more absurdly good at things they’re already absurdly better at than everyone else in the world. I guess I should have been saying “Imagine how awful their life was when they were children?”
Also, it’s much productive to have a higher community standard of niceness-padding, and then take it off when you know the recipient doesn’t want or need it, than to adopt more padding when it seems called for, if the goal is a vibrant and expanding community.
I liken this to a martial arts dojo, where the norm is to not move at full speed or full intent-to-harm, but high level students or masters will deliberately remove safeguards when they know the other person is on their level, more or less. If they went all-out all of the time, they would have no new students. This is not a perfect analogy.
Yep, I agree! But I also want to clarify that, unlike a martial arts dojo, the safeguards aren’t unnecessary when you get good at rationality. They become unnecessary when you trust the person … Which is kind of an orthogonal thing.
Isn’t this how we got Karate America? Making things softer and softer to appeal to more and more people until the martial art is a useless exercise for children?
I think that happened mostly because you need to actually attract customers to stay open and make money, and parents got softer and less inclined to pay money for places where their children get hurt. Especially if the children won’t, with good probability, need to use those skills elsewhere in society.
In the early days of martial arts in America, most schools hardly taught children anyway; it was more or less taken for granted that the training was too harsh for kids. The idea that the martial arts were an appropriate way to teach kids positive values like discipline, restraint, self respect, etc. didn’t have much currency; it was more like boxing, where you might encourage an unruly and violent child to get into it to channel and redirect their energy, but encouraging a normal kid to get into it would be unnecessary and somewhat cruel.
Parents’ values may have changed somewhat, but I’d say the dominant factor is that the original market for martial arts training was fairly niche, and teachers simply expanded into more profitable demographics.
Edit: According to this book which I read recently, children have been pushed into increasingly more intense, competitive, and physically harmful sports activities for decades; while the average child may be fatter and out of shape, child athletes are being pushed more than ever. Parents who’re willing to push their children into activities where they’ll get hurt may not be in decreasing supply at all.
I was mostly speaking from anecdata, but that’s really interesting. Though I can’t say it’s very surprising, because I think this relates to the various sneaky connotations of the word “hurt”. I expect modern parents to be more horrified if a child got punched in the face than if the child passed out from too much training, even if the latter did way more physical damage.
That sounds plausible; it may relate to the same sort of consideration that comes into play in trolleylike dilemmas, “who do I assign responsibility for this?”
If a kid blows out their elbow from being made to pitch too many balls without adequate rest, that feels like something that just happened to them, but if a kid gets their nose bloodied being punched in the face, that’s something someone did to them, which makes it seem worse and more in need of prevention despite being comparatively trivial.
Yep, and right before their elbow blows out, it’s “training” or “work” and not “a fight”. Afterwards it’s an “accident.”
You know, I kinda want to have a more general discussion about when the “responsibility” model falls apart. It seems to be really useful for some situations and then just lead to a guilt-riddled, counter-productive blame game of awfulness. It would be nice to generalize those so we can just run an analysis of the situation and stop talking about responsibility if the analysis says it’s useless.
Also, your earlier point is why I refused to talk about the Olympics with people. I kept insisting that it wasn’t relevant to me personally what the superhuman athletes were doing. Just because they happened to be from my country doesn’t mean we have anything in common and cheering for them doesn’t make me any more gifted at sports or them any more absurdly good at things they’re already absurdly better at than everyone else in the world. I guess I should have been saying “Imagine how awful their life was when they were children?”