Being able to dance doesn’t force you to dance when at parties where there music playing. I would also rather spent 30 minutes dancing at high energy than going jogging for 30 minutes.
At the LW community camp in Berlin a bunch of people went to play ultimate frisbee instead of having conversations. I don’t think those did that primarily because they have awesome ultimate frisbee skills that force them to play it. My best explanation would be that they thought the did enough serious talking for the day and wanting to switch modes.
Using this framework has enabled me to discern strengths and weaknesses that I had previously not considered, and in some cases those strengths and weaknesses have proven decisive to my planning.
Could you give example where it helped you make decisions against learning a skill?
Both the dancing and the acquiring computer skills example don’t seem to me to be very convincing. Computer skill are useful enough that the slight issue of friends asking you to fix their computer shouldn’t convince anyone to avoid building computer skills.
Could you give example where it helped you make decisions against learning a skill?
For a while I was interested in learning martial arts for self-defense. Then I realized that a version of me that had advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to fight people, while a version of me that did not have advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to avoid conflict.
Given that fighting someone—even with advanced/superior skill—is likely much more dangerous than avoiding conflict, and that there is a risk of injury in martial arts training, I concluded that self-defense martial arts are largely an antiskill and instead pursued martial arts that are useless for self-defense but much more fun.
Then I realized that a version of me that had advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to fight people, while a version of me that did not have advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to avoid conflict.
It is worth pointing out that most martial arts, at least in the older traditions, put quite a bit of stress on the skill of fight avoidance. I have no clue how true that is of American martial arts training.
It also may be genuinely easier to avoid fights if you are not afraid of them. A story along those lines.
Eh, I have a black belt and I don’t think it’s increased my likelihood of getting into fights at all.
Now bodybuilding, on the other hand, is definitely causing an issue via increased testosterone.
I still don’t get into fights, though. One useful thing to remember, if one is the sort of person who reads lesswrong, is interested in either of these activities, but doesn’t want to get into fights is the fact (I can’t remember where I read, this but our purposes, it’s instrumentally useful to believe even if false) that the average IQ of individuals ending up in the emergency room because of fight-related injuries is 87 -- not because dumb people are more likely to lose fights, but because smart people are more likely to avoid them. If you think of yourself as “not the kind of person who gets into fights,” (because they are mostly idiots) you’re less likely to get into fights.
Then I realized that a version of me that had advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to fight people, while a version of me that did not have advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to avoid conflict.
Why? Especially:
Given that fighting someone—even with advanced/superior skill—is likely much more dangerous than avoiding conflict
There’s more than one affordance. For example, the one of being able to go out without having to think all the time about safe routes and sticking to brightly lit public spaces.
Would you avoid making yourself better at thinking because you might start winning arguments by bamboozling your opponent?
Not learning combat skills as a commitment to avoid conflict is a nice mirror image of Schelling’s Xenophon example, where cutting off your ability to retreat is a way to commit yourself to winning a fight.
I don’t think that learning a martial arts increase the chance that you will fight. People usually fight because they are afraid and their fight-or-flight response triggers. Being confident in critical situations because you know how to fight, reduces the chances of actually fighting.
I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. If you’re already in a self-defense situation, martial arts training probably makes fighting more attractive, and therefore more likely relative to flight (if possible) or freezing up (if not). The confidence you’re talking about does make fighting less likely in general, but it does that by reducing the chance that you’ll get into a threatening situation in the first place: unless you’re going around looking for fights, that implies someone else threatening you, and most of the people that’re interested in doing such a thing are going to be looking for soft targets.
Also, in such a situation, most of the sources I’ve read say that you’re more likely to avoid death or serious injury if you do fight back.
On the other hand, you do run a nontrivial risk of injury in training; martial artists are more likely to be injured on the mat than on the street. Most of that comes from being a high-impact athletic activity rather than from the self-defense motive, though, so choosing a non-defensive martial art probably won’t help you much. (Anecdote time: I’ve been hurt more doing fencing, which is defensively useless, than doing jujitsu, which isn’t.)
I don’t understand the point of fencing. From the videos I watched it is a very ungrounded activity with the contests hoping around instead of being a position that trains the kind of body language that you want to have in your normal life. It seems doesn’t look like fluid movement. It looks more like it’s about the guy with the fasted reaction time winning.
Olympic fencing’s pretty hyperspecialized. Especially foil and saber. It’s what you get when you take training for dueling weapons (mainly smallswords and Hungarian dueling sabers) and pile on a couple hundred years of refinements that make scoring or other aspects of sport practice easier or safer, or were originally intended as teaching tools (i.e. the right-of-way rules), but also take it further away from its roots: by now this includes everything from the shape of the piste to the scoring rules to the details of the uniforms. A lot of martial arts go this way eventually: kendo post-WWII is probably the closest parallel, but you can also see it happening with judo and Tae Kwon Do.
Some aspects and schools of thought are more baroque than others, of course. I’m an epeeist, and my main teacher was into the classical side of the sport, so my approach to it was a little more martial-artsy than average. And even at its most elegantly refined it’ll still teach you a lot about timing and distance.
(Reaction time isn’t as important as you’d think, incidentally; being able to read other people’s body language will get you farther. There was a seventy-year-old man in my old club who was by far the best fencer there.)
If I’m following your meaning, then that’s just hard in general. It’s easy to tell when someone’s throwing a punch as it happens, of course, but by that time it’s far too late to block or avoid; to get to it in time, you need to be able to see it in body alignment before it happens. And that’s not something we tend to get a lot of practice with in everyday life.
Whether reading body language is something that you practice in everyday life depends how your everyday life looks like.
Not bumping into other pairs while dancing Salsa on a crowded dancefloor needs the ability to read the body language to know where they will be. When it comes to experienced dancers who move fluently that works quite well. When you on the other hand dance next to a beginner who’s not dancing fluently you don’t know where they are going to be as easily and thing get much harder. Then it takes conscious effort to think about them.
Body language also matters for hugging other people. At least if you don’t have stickers. If I go for a hug, does the other person body language prepares for a hug or do the tense up? If they tense up, I stop the hug before it really happens and therefore I don’t invade the other person.
I agree that self-defense martial arts is a better example of an anti-skill. And that aestetic martial arts (e.g. stange combat) have most advantages (e.g. health and signalling-wise) but few of the disadvantages. I did choose foil fencing for this reason—after getting the idea from Heinleins books (who was a fencer http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/annapolis.html ).
If you are genuinely interested in self defense, get a weapon that is legal in your jurisdiction. Even pepper spray will probably serve you better than martial arts. If you want to learn martial arts for fitness AND self-defense, a weapon will complement the second purpose.
Being able to dance doesn’t force you to dance when at parties where there music playing. I would also rather spent 30 minutes dancing at high energy than going jogging for 30 minutes.
At the LW community camp in Berlin a bunch of people went to play ultimate frisbee instead of having conversations. I don’t think those did that primarily because they have awesome ultimate frisbee skills that force them to play it. My best explanation would be that they thought the did enough serious talking for the day and wanting to switch modes.
Could you give example where it helped you make decisions against learning a skill?
Both the dancing and the acquiring computer skills example don’t seem to me to be very convincing. Computer skill are useful enough that the slight issue of friends asking you to fix their computer shouldn’t convince anyone to avoid building computer skills.
For a while I was interested in learning martial arts for self-defense. Then I realized that a version of me that had advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to fight people, while a version of me that did not have advanced martial arts knowledge would be more inclined to avoid conflict.
Given that fighting someone—even with advanced/superior skill—is likely much more dangerous than avoiding conflict, and that there is a risk of injury in martial arts training, I concluded that self-defense martial arts are largely an antiskill and instead pursued martial arts that are useless for self-defense but much more fun.
It is worth pointing out that most martial arts, at least in the older traditions, put quite a bit of stress on the skill of fight avoidance. I have no clue how true that is of American martial arts training.
It also may be genuinely easier to avoid fights if you are not afraid of them. A story along those lines.
Eh, I have a black belt and I don’t think it’s increased my likelihood of getting into fights at all.
Now bodybuilding, on the other hand, is definitely causing an issue via increased testosterone.
I still don’t get into fights, though. One useful thing to remember, if one is the sort of person who reads lesswrong, is interested in either of these activities, but doesn’t want to get into fights is the fact (I can’t remember where I read, this but our purposes, it’s instrumentally useful to believe even if false) that the average IQ of individuals ending up in the emergency room because of fight-related injuries is 87 -- not because dumb people are more likely to lose fights, but because smart people are more likely to avoid them. If you think of yourself as “not the kind of person who gets into fights,” (because they are mostly idiots) you’re less likely to get into fights.
Why? Especially:
Affordances; men with hammers and all that.
There’s more than one affordance. For example, the one of being able to go out without having to think all the time about safe routes and sticking to brightly lit public spaces.
Would you avoid making yourself better at thinking because you might start winning arguments by bamboozling your opponent?
I do avoid making myself better at arguing for this reason. Thinking is another story.
Not learning combat skills as a commitment to avoid conflict is a nice mirror image of Schelling’s Xenophon example, where cutting off your ability to retreat is a way to commit yourself to winning a fight.
I don’t think that learning a martial arts increase the chance that you will fight. People usually fight because they are afraid and their fight-or-flight response triggers. Being confident in critical situations because you know how to fight, reduces the chances of actually fighting.
I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. If you’re already in a self-defense situation, martial arts training probably makes fighting more attractive, and therefore more likely relative to flight (if possible) or freezing up (if not). The confidence you’re talking about does make fighting less likely in general, but it does that by reducing the chance that you’ll get into a threatening situation in the first place: unless you’re going around looking for fights, that implies someone else threatening you, and most of the people that’re interested in doing such a thing are going to be looking for soft targets.
Also, in such a situation, most of the sources I’ve read say that you’re more likely to avoid death or serious injury if you do fight back.
On the other hand, you do run a nontrivial risk of injury in training; martial artists are more likely to be injured on the mat than on the street. Most of that comes from being a high-impact athletic activity rather than from the self-defense motive, though, so choosing a non-defensive martial art probably won’t help you much. (Anecdote time: I’ve been hurt more doing fencing, which is defensively useless, than doing jujitsu, which isn’t.)
I don’t understand the point of fencing. From the videos I watched it is a very ungrounded activity with the contests hoping around instead of being a position that trains the kind of body language that you want to have in your normal life. It seems doesn’t look like fluid movement. It looks more like it’s about the guy with the fasted reaction time winning.
Olympic fencing’s pretty hyperspecialized. Especially foil and saber. It’s what you get when you take training for dueling weapons (mainly smallswords and Hungarian dueling sabers) and pile on a couple hundred years of refinements that make scoring or other aspects of sport practice easier or safer, or were originally intended as teaching tools (i.e. the right-of-way rules), but also take it further away from its roots: by now this includes everything from the shape of the piste to the scoring rules to the details of the uniforms. A lot of martial arts go this way eventually: kendo post-WWII is probably the closest parallel, but you can also see it happening with judo and Tae Kwon Do.
Some aspects and schools of thought are more baroque than others, of course. I’m an epeeist, and my main teacher was into the classical side of the sport, so my approach to it was a little more martial-artsy than average. And even at its most elegantly refined it’ll still teach you a lot about timing and distance.
(Reaction time isn’t as important as you’d think, incidentally; being able to read other people’s body language will get you farther. There was a seventy-year-old man in my old club who was by far the best fencer there.)
Then the nonfluent body language is probably explained by people trying to move in ways that are hard to read.
If I’m following your meaning, then that’s just hard in general. It’s easy to tell when someone’s throwing a punch as it happens, of course, but by that time it’s far too late to block or avoid; to get to it in time, you need to be able to see it in body alignment before it happens. And that’s not something we tend to get a lot of practice with in everyday life.
Whether reading body language is something that you practice in everyday life depends how your everyday life looks like.
Not bumping into other pairs while dancing Salsa on a crowded dancefloor needs the ability to read the body language to know where they will be. When it comes to experienced dancers who move fluently that works quite well. When you on the other hand dance next to a beginner who’s not dancing fluently you don’t know where they are going to be as easily and thing get much harder. Then it takes conscious effort to think about them.
Body language also matters for hugging other people. At least if you don’t have stickers. If I go for a hug, does the other person body language prepares for a hug or do the tense up? If they tense up, I stop the hug before it really happens and therefore I don’t invade the other person.
I agree that self-defense martial arts is a better example of an anti-skill. And that aestetic martial arts (e.g. stange combat) have most advantages (e.g. health and signalling-wise) but few of the disadvantages. I did choose foil fencing for this reason—after getting the idea from Heinleins books (who was a fencer http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/annapolis.html ).
Very funny—my own choice for a fun-but-useless martial art was the épée!
And which was the unfortunately-useful martial art you took before that?
If you are genuinely interested in self defense, get a weapon that is legal in your jurisdiction. Even pepper spray will probably serve you better than martial arts. If you want to learn martial arts for fitness AND self-defense, a weapon will complement the second purpose.