Humans are biased to overrate bad human behavior as a cause for mistakes.
If a crocodile bites off your hand, it’s generally your fault. If the hurricane hits your house and kills you, it’s your fault for not evacuating fast enough. In general, most causes are attributed to humans, because that allows actually considering alternatives. If you just attributed everything to, say, God, then it doesn’t give any ideas. I take this a step further: everything is my fault. So if I hear about someone else doing something stupid, I try to figure out how I could have stopped them from doing it. My time and ability are limited in scope, so I usually conclude they were too far away to help (space-like separation), but this has given useful results on a few occasions (mostly when something I’m involved in goes wrong).
The decent thing is to orient yourself on whether similar studies replicate.
Not really, since the replication is more likely to fail than the original study (due to inexperience), and is subject to less peer-review scrutiny (because it’s a replication). See http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm. The correct thing to consider is followup work of any kind; for example, if a researcher has a long line of publications all saying the same thing in different experiments, or if it’s widely cited as a building block of someone’s theory, or if there’s a book on it.
Regardless every publish-or-perish paper has an inherent bias to find spectacular results.
Right, people only publish their successes. There are so many failures that it’s not worth mentioning or considering them. But they don’t need to be “spectacular”, just successful. Perhaps you are confusing publishing at all, even in e.g. a blog post, with publishing in “prestigious” journals, which indeed only publish “spectacular” results; looking at only those would give you a biased view, certainly, but as soon as you expand your field of view to “all information everywhere” then that bias (mostly) goes away, and the real problem is finding anything at all.
Let’s say wearing red every day.
So the study there links red to aggression; I don’t want to be aggressive all the time, so why should I wear red all the time? For example, I don’t want a red car because I don’t want to get pulled over by the cops all the time. Similarly for most results; they’re very limited in scope, of the form “if X then Y” or even “X associate with Y”. Many times, Y is irrelevant, so I don’t need to even consider X.
Thinking that those Israeli judges don’t give people parole because they don’t have enough sugar in their blood right before mealtime. Going and giving every judge a candy before hearing every case to make it fair isn’t warranted.
Sure, but if I’m involved with a case then I’ll be sure to try to get it heard after lunchtime, and offer the judge some candy if I can get away with it.
That’s fixable by training Fermi estimates.
You can memorize populations or memorize the Fermi factors and how to combine them, but the point stands regardless; you still have to remember something.
It’s a reference to the controversy about whether washing your hands primes you to be more moral. It’s a experimental social science result that failed to replicate.
Ah, social science. I need to take more courses in statistics before I can comment… so far I have been sticking to the biology/chemistry/physics side of things (where statistics are rare and the effects are obvious from inspection).
For example, I don’t want a red car because I don’t want to get pulled over by the cops all the time.
The car story appears to be a myth nowadays, but that could just be due to the increased use of radar guns and better police training. Radar guns were introduced around the 1950′s so all of their policemen quotes are too recent to tell.
So if I hear about someone else doing something stupid, I try to figure out how I could have stopped them from doing it.
Conflating whether or not you could do something to stop them with finding truth makes it harder to have an accurate view of whether or not the result is true.
Accepting reality for what it is helps to have an accurate perception of reality. Only once you understand the territory should you go out and try to change things. If you do the second step before the first you mess up your epistemology. You fall for a bunch of human biases evolved for finding out whether the neighboring tribe might attack your tribe that aren’t useful for clear understanding of todays complex world.
There are so many failures that it’s not worth mentioning or considering them. But they don’t need to be “spectacular”, just successful. Perhaps you are confusing publishing at all, even in e.g. a blog post, with publishing in “prestigious” journals, which indeed only publish “spectacular” results
I spoke about incentives. Researchers have an incentive to publish in prestigious journals and optimize their research practices for doing so. The case with blogs isn’t much different. Successful bloggers write polarizing posts that get people talking and engage with the story even there would be a way to be more accurate and less polarizing. The incentives go towards “spectual”.
Scott H Young whom I respect and who’s a nice fellow wrote his post against spaced repetition and still know recommends now in a later post the usage of Anki for learning vocabulary.
You can memorize populations or memorize the Fermi factors and how to combine them, but the point stands regardless; you still have to remember something.
It’s not about remembering it’s about being able to make estimates even when you aren’t sure. And you can calibrate your error intervals.
So the study there links red to aggression; I don’t want to be aggressive all the time, so why should I wear red all the time?
Aggression is not the central word. Status and dominance also appear. People do a bunch of things to appear higher status.
One of the studies in question suggested that it makes woman more attracted to you measured by the physical distance in conversation. Another one suggest that attraction based on photo ratings.
I actually did the comparison on hotOrNot. I tested a blue shirt against a red shirt. Photoshopped so nothing besides the color with different. For my photo blue scored more attractive than red despite the studies saying that red is the color that raises attractiveness.
I have been sticking to the biology/chemistry/physics side of things (where statistics are rare and the effects are obvious from inspection).
The replication rates for cancer biology seem to be even worse than for psychology if you trust the Amgen researchers who could only replicate 6 of 55 landmark studies that they tried to replicate.
Probably a minor point, but were both the red and blue shirts photoshopped? If one of them was an actual photo, it might have looked more natural (color reflected on to your face) than the other.
In this case no, the blue was the original you are right that this might have screwed with the results. HotOrNot internal algorithms were also a bit opaque.
But to be fair the setup of the original study wasn’t natural either. The color in those studies has the color of the border of the photo.
If I wanted to repeat the experiment I would like to it on Amazon Mechanical turk. At the moment I don’t really have the spare money for projects like that but maybe someone else on LW cares enough to dress in an attractive way and wants to optimize and has the money.
The whole thing might also work good for a blogger willing to a bit of cash to write an interesting post.
Especially for online dating like Tinder, photo optimisation through empiric measurement of photos can increase success rates a bit.
Conflating whether or not you could do something to stop them with finding truth makes it harder to have an accurate view of whether or not the result is true. Accepting reality for what it is helps to have an accurate perception of reality.
I’m not certain where you see conflation. I have separate storage areas for things to think about, evidence, actions, and risk/reward evaluations. They interact as described here. Things I hear about go into the “things to think about” list.
Only once you understand the territory should you go out and try to change things.
The world is changing so I must too. If the apocalypse is tomorrow, I’m ready. I don’t need to “understand” the apocalypse or its cause to start preparing for it. IF I learn something later that says I did the wrong thing, so be it. I prefer spending most of my time trying to change things than sitting in a room all day trying to understand. Indeed, some understanding can only be gained through direct experience. So I disagree with you here.
If you do the second step before the first you mess up your epistemology. You fall for a bunch of human biases evolved for finding out whether the neighboring tribe might attack your tribe that aren’t useful for clear understanding of todays complex world.
The decision procedure I outlined above accounts for most biases; you’re welcome to suggest revisions or stuff I should read.
I spoke about incentives. [...] The incentives go towards “spectual”.
You didn’t, AFAICT; you spoke about “inherent biases”. I think my point still stands though; averaging over “all information everywhere” counteracts most perverse incentives, since perversion is rare, and the few incentives left are incentives that are shared among humans such as survival, reproduction, etc. In general humans are good at that sort of averaging, although of course there are timing and priming effects. Researchers/bloggers are incentivized to produce good results because good results are the most useful and interesting. Good results lead to good products or services (after a 30 year lag). The products/services lead to improved life (at least for some). Improved life leads to more free time and better research methods. And the cycle goes on, the end result AFAICT is a big database of mostly-correct information.
Scott H Young whom I respect and who’s a nice fellow wrote his post against spaced repetition and still know recommends now in a later post the usage of Anki for learning vocabulary.
His post is entitled “Why Forgetting Can Be Good” and his mention of Anki is limited to “I’m skeptical of the value of an SRS for most domains of knowledge.” If he then recommends Anki for learning vocabulary, this changes relatively little; he’s simply found a knowledge domain where he found SRS useful. Different studies, different conclusions, different contributions to different decisions.
It’s not about remembering it’s about being able to make estimates even when you aren’t sure.
You’re never sure, so why mention “even when you aren’t sure”, since it’s implied? Striking that out…
It’s not about remembering it’s about being able to make estimates.
Estimation comes after the evidence-gathering phase. If you have no evidence you can make no estimates. Fermi estimation is just another estimation method, so it doesn’t change this. If you have no memory, then you have no evidence. So it is about remembering. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
And you can calibrate your error intervals.
If you have no estimates you can’t have error intervals either. Indeed, you can’t do calibration until you have a distribution of estimates.
Aggression is not the central word. Status and dominance also appear. People do a bunch of things to appear higher status.
It looks like the central word is definitely dominance. Stringing the top words into a sentence I get “Sports teams wear red to show dominance and it has an effect on referees’ performance”. I guess I was going off of the Mandrill story where signs of dominance are correlated with willingness to be aggressive. This study says dominance and threat are emphasized by wearing red, where “threat” is measured by “How threatening (intimidating, aggressive) did you feel?”. Some other papers also relate dominance to aggressiveness. So I feel comfortable confusing the two, since they seem to be strongly correlated and relatively flexible in terms of definition.
The comments do focus on status, so I guess you have a point. But I generally skip over the comments when an article is linked to. And the status discussion was in the comments of Overcoming Bias post, so by no means central.
One of the studies in question suggested that it makes woman more attracted to you measured by the physical distance in conversation. Another one suggest that attraction based on photo ratings. I actually did the comparison on hotOrNot. I tested a blue shirt against a red shirt. Photoshopped so nothing besides the color with different. For my photo blue scored more attractive than red despite the studies saying that red is the color that raises attractiveness.
Would you be referring to, among others, this study? Unfortunately… it still looks like experimental psychology, so again I have to plead lack of statistics.
The replication rates for cancer biology seem to be even worse than for psychology if you trust the Amgen researchers who could only replicate 6 of 55 landmark studies that they tried to replicate.
I’ve mostly been reading Army / DoD studies, which have a different funding model. But I guess cancer will become relevant eventually (preferably later rather than sooner).
Side note: does LW have a “collapse threads more than N levels deep” feature like reddit? It probably should have triggered a few replies ago, so I didn’t post on the wrong child...
The decision procedure I outlined above accounts for most biases; you’re welcome to suggest revisions or stuff I should read.
The problem is that you assume that know the relevant biases. There are often cases where you don’t know why someone screws up. There are domains where it’s easier to get knowledge about how much people screw up than understanding the reasons behind screwups.
Some other papers also relate dominance to aggressiveness. So I feel comfortable confusing the two, since they seem to be strongly correlated and relatively flexible in terms of definition.
Fear produces fight or flight responses. People often fight out of fear. Aggressiveness often comes out of weakness. A karate black belt is dominant but usually not aggressive. Taller people get payed more money because being tall is a signal for social dominance.
Would you be referring to, among others, this study?
The problem is that you assume that you know the relevant biases.
Wikipedia has a list; I’ve checked a few of them, and the rest are on my TODO list. I have that page watched so if there’s a new bias I’ll know.
There are often cases where you don’t know why someone screws up. There are domains where it’s easier to get knowledge about how much people screw up than understanding the reasons behind screwups.
Information is produced regardless, and often recorded (see e.g. Gwern’s Mistakes page). So long as I myself don’t screw up, which, assuming that I always follow my decision procedure and my decision procedure is correct, I won’t, then it doesn’t matter.
Fear produces fight or flight responses. People often fight out of fear. Aggression often comes out of weakness.
OK, but I was talking about “perceived willingness to be aggressive” (signal), not aggression (action).
A karate black belt is dominant but usually not aggressive. Taller people get payed more money because being tall is a signal for social dominance.
Someone wearing a black belt is probably going to be perceived as more aggressive, the same way someone idly cleaning their fingernails with a sharp knife might be. Similarly if a person adopts something recognized as a fighting stance. Not certain about tall people, that’s probably something else besides perceived aggressiveness, e.g. “My parents were rich and could feed me a lot”.
This has gone on long enough that it might be worth summarizing into a post… do you want to write it or should I?
Wikipedia has a list; I’ve checked a few of them, and the rest are on my TODO list. I have that page watched so if there’s a new bias I’ll know.
There not good evidence for the claim that reading a list of a bunch of biases improves your decision making ability. See Eliezers discussion on the hindsight bias: http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/
Someone wearing a black belt is probably going to be perceived as more aggressive, the same way someone idly cleaning their fingernails with a sharp knife might be.
I’m not so much talking about actually wearing the black belt but the psychological changes that the kind of training that makes people a black belt creates. Changes in confidence and body language.
This has gone on long enough that it might be worth summarizing into a post… do you want to write it or should I?
We went through many separate points and at the moment I don’t know how to pull them in a good way together into one post. If you see a decent way feel free.
There not good evidence for the claim that reading a list of a bunch of biases improves your decision making ability. See Eliezers discussion on the hindsight bias: http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/
I checked that the procedure accounts for the biases. Hindsight bias is avoided by computing uncertainty using a regression analysis. Availability bias is avoided by using a large database with random sampling. Etc. I haven’t gone through all of them, but so far the biases I’ve looked at can’t affect the decision outcome because the human isn’t directly involved in those stages of computation.
Someone wearing a black belt is probably going to be perceived as more aggressive
And there’s even a study on black uniforms that shows they increase perceived aggression.
Changes in confidence and body language.
This page says martial arts training increases dominance, as you say. On the other hand, that study also says that martial arts training decreases (observed) aggression. This study says perceived aggressiveness is highly correlated with proportion of mixed-martial-arts fights won, which I interpret as also meaning that martial arts training increases perceived aggression before a fight (since martial training ought to result in winning more martial arts fights). So it looks like martial arts training encourages controlling the aggressiveness signal, suppressing it in some non-fighting cases and enhancing it in competition. Or else the actual aggression levels decreased because the willingness to fight was communicated more clearly and thus people chose to fight less because their estimates of the costs rose.
We went through many separate points and at the moment I don’t know how to pull them in a good way together into one post. If you see a decent way feel free.
My general writing strategy is as follows: I go through source material, write down all the quotes/facts that seem useful into a bullet list, then sort alphabetically, then reorder and group the bullets, then rewrite the sub-bullets into paragraphs, then reorder the paragraphs, then remove the list formatting and add paragraph formatting, then add a title and introduction. (The conclusion is just more facts/quotes). I’ve practiced this on a couple of my required-because-core essays and they’ve gotten reasonable marks (B+ / A- level depending on how nice the teacher is).
In most social situations aggressiveness is bad. A woman doesn’t want an aggressive boyfriend. But she usually want that her boyfriend isn’t low status without any amount of dominance.
If you sit in school it’s good if your teacher is dominant but aggression is not a sign of a good teacher.
Or else the actual aggression levels decreased because the willingness to fight was communicated more clearly and thus people chose to fight less because their estimates of the costs rose.
People don’t make clear estimates of costs when in high pressure situations. Instead fight/flight/freeze reactions trigger. Martial arts training removes that trigger and instead allows it’s participants to make more conscious decisions about whether to fight. Being able to make conscious decisions often leads to less fights.
I’ve practiced this on a couple of my required-because-core essays and they’ve gotten reasonable marks (B+ / A- level depending on how nice the teacher is).
If a crocodile bites off your hand, it’s generally your fault. If the hurricane hits your house and kills you, it’s your fault for not evacuating fast enough. In general, most causes are attributed to humans, because that allows actually considering alternatives. If you just attributed everything to, say, God, then it doesn’t give any ideas. I take this a step further: everything is my fault. So if I hear about someone else doing something stupid, I try to figure out how I could have stopped them from doing it. My time and ability are limited in scope, so I usually conclude they were too far away to help (space-like separation), but this has given useful results on a few occasions (mostly when something I’m involved in goes wrong).
Not really, since the replication is more likely to fail than the original study (due to inexperience), and is subject to less peer-review scrutiny (because it’s a replication). See http://wjh.harvard.edu/~jmitchel/writing/failed_science.htm. The correct thing to consider is followup work of any kind; for example, if a researcher has a long line of publications all saying the same thing in different experiments, or if it’s widely cited as a building block of someone’s theory, or if there’s a book on it.
Right, people only publish their successes. There are so many failures that it’s not worth mentioning or considering them. But they don’t need to be “spectacular”, just successful. Perhaps you are confusing publishing at all, even in e.g. a blog post, with publishing in “prestigious” journals, which indeed only publish “spectacular” results; looking at only those would give you a biased view, certainly, but as soon as you expand your field of view to “all information everywhere” then that bias (mostly) goes away, and the real problem is finding anything at all.
So the study there links red to aggression; I don’t want to be aggressive all the time, so why should I wear red all the time? For example, I don’t want a red car because I don’t want to get pulled over by the cops all the time. Similarly for most results; they’re very limited in scope, of the form “if X then Y” or even “X associate with Y”. Many times, Y is irrelevant, so I don’t need to even consider X.
Sure, but if I’m involved with a case then I’ll be sure to try to get it heard after lunchtime, and offer the judge some candy if I can get away with it.
You can memorize populations or memorize the Fermi factors and how to combine them, but the point stands regardless; you still have to remember something.
Ah, social science. I need to take more courses in statistics before I can comment… so far I have been sticking to the biology/chemistry/physics side of things (where statistics are rare and the effects are obvious from inspection).
The car story appears to be a myth nowadays, but that could just be due to the increased use of radar guns and better police training. Radar guns were introduced around the 1950′s so all of their policemen quotes are too recent to tell.
Conflating whether or not you could do something to stop them with finding truth makes it harder to have an accurate view of whether or not the result is true.
Accepting reality for what it is helps to have an accurate perception of reality. Only once you understand the territory should you go out and try to change things. If you do the second step before the first you mess up your epistemology. You fall for a bunch of human biases evolved for finding out whether the neighboring tribe might attack your tribe that aren’t useful for clear understanding of todays complex world.
I spoke about incentives. Researchers have an incentive to publish in prestigious journals and optimize their research practices for doing so. The case with blogs isn’t much different. Successful bloggers write polarizing posts that get people talking and engage with the story even there would be a way to be more accurate and less polarizing. The incentives go towards “spectual”.
Scott H Young whom I respect and who’s a nice fellow wrote his post against spaced repetition and still know recommends now in a later post the usage of Anki for learning vocabulary.
It’s not about remembering it’s about being able to make estimates even when you aren’t sure. And you can calibrate your error intervals.
Aggression is not the central word. Status and dominance also appear. People do a bunch of things to appear higher status.
One of the studies in question suggested that it makes woman more attracted to you measured by the physical distance in conversation. Another one suggest that attraction based on photo ratings.
I actually did the comparison on hotOrNot. I tested a blue shirt against a red shirt. Photoshopped so nothing besides the color with different. For my photo blue scored more attractive than red despite the studies saying that red is the color that raises attractiveness.
The replication rates for cancer biology seem to be even worse than for psychology if you trust the Amgen researchers who could only replicate 6 of 55 landmark studies that they tried to replicate.
Probably a minor point, but were both the red and blue shirts photoshopped? If one of them was an actual photo, it might have looked more natural (color reflected on to your face) than the other.
In this case no, the blue was the original you are right that this might have screwed with the results. HotOrNot internal algorithms were also a bit opaque.
But to be fair the setup of the original study wasn’t natural either. The color in those studies has the color of the border of the photo.
If I wanted to repeat the experiment I would like to it on Amazon Mechanical turk. At the moment I don’t really have the spare money for projects like that but maybe someone else on LW cares enough to dress in an attractive way and wants to optimize and has the money.
The whole thing might also work good for a blogger willing to a bit of cash to write an interesting post.
Especially for online dating like Tinder, photo optimisation through empiric measurement of photos can increase success rates a bit.
I’m not certain where you see conflation. I have separate storage areas for things to think about, evidence, actions, and risk/reward evaluations. They interact as described here. Things I hear about go into the “things to think about” list.
The world is changing so I must too. If the apocalypse is tomorrow, I’m ready. I don’t need to “understand” the apocalypse or its cause to start preparing for it. IF I learn something later that says I did the wrong thing, so be it. I prefer spending most of my time trying to change things than sitting in a room all day trying to understand. Indeed, some understanding can only be gained through direct experience. So I disagree with you here.
The decision procedure I outlined above accounts for most biases; you’re welcome to suggest revisions or stuff I should read.
You didn’t, AFAICT; you spoke about “inherent biases”. I think my point still stands though; averaging over “all information everywhere” counteracts most perverse incentives, since perversion is rare, and the few incentives left are incentives that are shared among humans such as survival, reproduction, etc. In general humans are good at that sort of averaging, although of course there are timing and priming effects. Researchers/bloggers are incentivized to produce good results because good results are the most useful and interesting. Good results lead to good products or services (after a 30 year lag). The products/services lead to improved life (at least for some). Improved life leads to more free time and better research methods. And the cycle goes on, the end result AFAICT is a big database of mostly-correct information.
His post is entitled “Why Forgetting Can Be Good” and his mention of Anki is limited to “I’m skeptical of the value of an SRS for most domains of knowledge.” If he then recommends Anki for learning vocabulary, this changes relatively little; he’s simply found a knowledge domain where he found SRS useful. Different studies, different conclusions, different contributions to different decisions.
You’re never sure, so why mention “even when you aren’t sure”, since it’s implied? Striking that out…
Estimation comes after the evidence-gathering phase. If you have no evidence you can make no estimates. Fermi estimation is just another estimation method, so it doesn’t change this. If you have no memory, then you have no evidence. So it is about remembering. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
If you have no estimates you can’t have error intervals either. Indeed, you can’t do calibration until you have a distribution of estimates.
It looks like the central word is definitely dominance. Stringing the top words into a sentence I get “Sports teams wear red to show dominance and it has an effect on referees’ performance”. I guess I was going off of the Mandrill story where signs of dominance are correlated with willingness to be aggressive. This study says dominance and threat are emphasized by wearing red, where “threat” is measured by “How threatening (intimidating, aggressive) did you feel?”. Some other papers also relate dominance to aggressiveness. So I feel comfortable confusing the two, since they seem to be strongly correlated and relatively flexible in terms of definition.
The comments do focus on status, so I guess you have a point. But I generally skip over the comments when an article is linked to. And the status discussion was in the comments of Overcoming Bias post, so by no means central.
Would you be referring to, among others, this study? Unfortunately… it still looks like experimental psychology, so again I have to plead lack of statistics.
I’ve mostly been reading Army / DoD studies, which have a different funding model. But I guess cancer will become relevant eventually (preferably later rather than sooner).
Side note: does LW have a “collapse threads more than N levels deep” feature like reddit? It probably should have triggered a few replies ago, so I didn’t post on the wrong child...
The problem is that you assume that know the relevant biases. There are often cases where you don’t know why someone screws up. There are domains where it’s easier to get knowledge about how much people screw up than understanding the reasons behind screwups.
Fear produces fight or flight responses. People often fight out of fear. Aggressiveness often comes out of weakness. A karate black belt is dominant but usually not aggressive. Taller people get payed more money because being tall is a signal for social dominance.
Yes.
Wikipedia has a list; I’ve checked a few of them, and the rest are on my TODO list. I have that page watched so if there’s a new bias I’ll know.
Information is produced regardless, and often recorded (see e.g. Gwern’s Mistakes page). So long as I myself don’t screw up, which, assuming that I always follow my decision procedure and my decision procedure is correct, I won’t, then it doesn’t matter.
OK, but I was talking about “perceived willingness to be aggressive” (signal), not aggression (action).
Someone wearing a black belt is probably going to be perceived as more aggressive, the same way someone idly cleaning their fingernails with a sharp knife might be. Similarly if a person adopts something recognized as a fighting stance. Not certain about tall people, that’s probably something else besides perceived aggressiveness, e.g. “My parents were rich and could feed me a lot”.
This has gone on long enough that it might be worth summarizing into a post… do you want to write it or should I?
There not good evidence for the claim that reading a list of a bunch of biases improves your decision making ability. See Eliezers discussion on the hindsight bias: http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/
I’m not so much talking about actually wearing the black belt but the psychological changes that the kind of training that makes people a black belt creates. Changes in confidence and body language.
We went through many separate points and at the moment I don’t know how to pull them in a good way together into one post. If you see a decent way feel free.
I checked that the procedure accounts for the biases. Hindsight bias is avoided by computing uncertainty using a regression analysis. Availability bias is avoided by using a large database with random sampling. Etc. I haven’t gone through all of them, but so far the biases I’ve looked at can’t affect the decision outcome because the human isn’t directly involved in those stages of computation.
And there’s even a study on black uniforms that shows they increase perceived aggression.
This page says martial arts training increases dominance, as you say. On the other hand, that study also says that martial arts training decreases (observed) aggression. This study says perceived aggressiveness is highly correlated with proportion of mixed-martial-arts fights won, which I interpret as also meaning that martial arts training increases perceived aggression before a fight (since martial training ought to result in winning more martial arts fights). So it looks like martial arts training encourages controlling the aggressiveness signal, suppressing it in some non-fighting cases and enhancing it in competition. Or else the actual aggression levels decreased because the willingness to fight was communicated more clearly and thus people chose to fight less because their estimates of the costs rose.
My general writing strategy is as follows: I go through source material, write down all the quotes/facts that seem useful into a bullet list, then sort alphabetically, then reorder and group the bullets, then rewrite the sub-bullets into paragraphs, then reorder the paragraphs, then remove the list formatting and add paragraph formatting, then add a title and introduction. (The conclusion is just more facts/quotes). I’ve practiced this on a couple of my required-because-core essays and they’ve gotten reasonable marks (B+ / A- level depending on how nice the teacher is).
In most social situations aggressiveness is bad. A woman doesn’t want an aggressive boyfriend. But she usually want that her boyfriend isn’t low status without any amount of dominance.
If you sit in school it’s good if your teacher is dominant but aggression is not a sign of a good teacher.
People don’t make clear estimates of costs when in high pressure situations. Instead fight/flight/freeze reactions trigger. Martial arts training removes that trigger and instead allows it’s participants to make more conscious decisions about whether to fight. Being able to make conscious decisions often leads to less fights.
Then I’m happy to see the outcome in this case.