martial arts are not a very good skill to neutralize the otherwise dangerous behavior of being around poor people.
Or really any dangerous behavior at all.
When it comes to street crime, I believe that nearly everyone would be better served by learning improved posture (so you don’t look like a target), awareness (so that you know what’s going on and people see that you know what’s going on), and if all else fails, foot speed (so you can get out of dangerous areas fast) rather than martial arts.
That said, I practice martial arts. However, if someone comes up to me with a knife and says “give me your wallet,” you can be damn sure I’ll give him my wallet. Whatever money I have with me is a low price to pay to avoid hand-to-hand combat with an armed opponent.
One useful heuristic for finding a good martial arts class might be to look for instructors who realize that martial arts are not practical for self-defense. An actual self-defense class would be interesting to see and would look nothing like a typical martial arts class.
An actual self-defense class would be interesting to see and would look nothing like a typical martial arts class.
Next time you’re in Tampa, drop a line. My instructor (no particular organized school) teaches punching and stuff, but also how to recognize different types of dangerous people and dissuade or circumvent them.
the otherwise dangerous behavior of being around poor people.
Are you trolling, and if not what the hell is wrong with you?
I’m sure there are plenty of subclasses of “poor people” that it’s best to avoid if safety is your priority. It is absolutely not the case that “being around poor people” as such is dangerous. If you are inclined to protest that statistically it’s correct, then I will remark that the same is probably also true of, e.g., “being around really unpopular people” (some really unpopular people are unpopular because of personality disorders that also make them dangerous; being around sufficiently unpopular people may get you lynched along with them) and “being around young men” (young men are disproportionately likely to commit violent crimes, and to be victims of violent crime); would you say the same about those groups? It’s quite likely also true of “being around depressed people” (suicide is slightly contagious) and it would have been true of “being around Jews” in, say, 1930s Germany (anything that makes you look like a friend of a persecuted group puts you in danger of being targeted by their persecutors). The conclusion I draw from examples like these is that saying “being around members of group X” is dangerous, even when true statistically, is liable to be very misleading; still more so, calling not doing so a “skill”, as you do later in the thread.
(Note 1. Some of the people I know are quite rich. Some are quite poor. I feel—correctly, I’m pretty sure—no less safe with the poor ones than with the rich ones. Note 2. I wonder whether “poor” in your comment is in fact a proxy for “black”. Note 3. I think LW could well do without the sort of “look how hard-headed and unafraid of social stigma I am” posturing that I strongly suspect is the underlying cause of this kind of comment.)
I will bite any and all bullets you care to present. It would be nice to live in a world where these things weren’t true. Unfortunately we do not, and I only care about outcomes, not being fair. I would, in fact, avoid associating with jews if I lived in 1930′s Germany and if you wouldn’t I would deem you insane and also avoid you. I do, in fact, avoid depressed, unproductive, and unpopular people and so do you.
Among the outcomes I care about is having other people not get screwed over. Shunning them because other things have gone badly for them contributes to not achieving such outcomes.
Another outcome I care about is associating with people who are interesting, good company, useful to me, etc. Shunning broadly-defined groups that contain many such people, when there are narrower groups whose shunning would be just as effective, contributes to not achieving such outcomes.
A policy of avoiding dangerous-seeming people seems very reasonable, especially if it’s applied flexibly. (One might, e.g., have a close and dearly loved family member who is dangerous, or an important business connection with someone dangerous. Personal safety is good but not the only thing that matters.) I think it’s very likely that “seems dangerous to me”, fuzzy though it is, is a much more accurate heuristic for identifying dangerous people than “is poor”, and that the same is true for most people here.
“A heuristic, not an algorithm”: what difference are you intending to convey? (I wasn’t trying to suggest that you think avoiding poor people gives some kind of guarantee, or anything like that. A heuristic is what I took you to be saying it was. For me, at least, a heuristic is a kind of algorithm.)
“Not … for safety”: do you mean that there are other purposes to it besides safety? OK, fair enough (though your presentation of this “skill” here has been all about safety) but I don’t think it makes a difference to what I’m saying: safety together with the other things you intend this to achieve are still not the only things that matter, and I gravely doubt that the broad-brush policy of avoiding poor people is a great way of achieving those other things (by comparison with less-simplistic heuristics) -- though on that point I’m prepared to be convinced.
A heuristic is a fuzzy set of principles that are correlated with the outcomes you want. An algorithm is a set of directions that give you the outcome you want. When I say “avoiding poor people is a heuristic” I mean that it is the high level abstraction of a bunch of low level behaviors in various situations.
Edit: the boundaries between algorithms and heuristics are complicated. Colloquial usage referring to heuristics as something like “rules of thumb” and algorithms as “a set of directions” is what was intended.
It would be nice to live in a world where these things weren’t true. Unfortunately we do not
I suspect it might depend on where you are.
I’ve never been in a physical fight myself, but the ones I’ve witnessed were usually initiated by someone wearing not-so-cheap clothes and jewellery. (Maybe rich people are more spoiled, i.e. more used to getting their way, and therefore more likely to get resentful when they don’t, or something.) And according to stereotypes at least, people in the Mafia and similar aren’t exactly destitute. OTOH, beggars and the like don’t look like people who might hurt someone.
YMMV if you’re living in a country where a sizeable fraction of the population legally owns and carries firearms.
the ones I’ve witnessed were usually initiated by someone wearing not-so-cheap clothes and jewellery. (Maybe rich people are more spoiled, i.e. more used to getting their way, and therefore more likely to get resentful when they don’t, or something.)
Where I live, in my experience, the most dangerous neighbourhood (for young men) is the one occupied by many middle-class teenagers. The dangerous ones are the ones who have something to prove about how tough they are. They also make a lifestyle out of pretending to live in american ghettos, and simultaneusly pretending to be wealthy. I was friends with these people growing up. They are entertaining and scary.
We don’t have american-style violent ghetto-dwellers here, though.
If that’s true, that’s one more reason not to choose whom to associate with based on how rich they look. Or by “not hanging out with poor people” do you mean you do an income audit on all your acquaintances?
Because they are terrible optimizers they don’t actually succeed. I can spot low-IQ, low-income, unproductive behavior a mile away. It helps to have grown up on welfare I suppose.
Really? Because reading random intellectual-sounding things on the Internet instead of actually getting things done seems like a fairly common failure mode… that, or playing World of Warcraft.
Actually getting things done is an unrealistic standard for the vast majority of humanity. We amuse ourselves while a few people actually push forward.
Stay outta trouble, learn running, figure out various tricks—kick cars so alarms go off, maybe carry mace and some shrieking device, look crazy when threatened, I don’t know, hiss real loud, that’ll freak people out, they don’t know maybe you’re mentally retarded and basically a bigger chimpanzee. They’d never mess with a smaller brained ape your size, an ape half your size can totally mess people up—an ape will bite off fingers, gouge out eyes, rip off ears… without any martial arts. Don’t look like you’re clever enough to figure out that if you fight back you’re more likely to die. Looking clever is stupid anyway.
My parents made a mistake of being in Russian part of Soviet Union when Soviet Union broke down—can’t really blame them for not wanting to be in a hostile-ish-to-russians region near border when a military superpower goes down, though. The crime rate was like you wouldn’t believe.
Most martial arts schools I’ve checked out have monthly tuitions in the $50-150 range; so on the low end, that’s at least $600 tuition. You won’t get much benefit out of just 1 class a week, but 2 classes a week at an hour & half a piece (travel, changing, recovery + 1hr class ) times 3 weeks a month times minimum wage is $72 a month or $864 a year. So paying for and going to the classes is going to cost you >$1500 a year. That could be a large chunk of what it takes to get out of poverty, for example, that alone is a good chunk of many community college tuitions.
Combine that with the low absolute rate of crimes and the unknown effectiveness of standard martial arts for dealing with said crimes...
being poor doesn’t mean you have to spend time around other poor people. It’s certainly more difficult, but it’s worth it. In addition to personal danger, your habits and behaviors tend towards being the average of those you surround yourself with.
Behaviour is not skill, and the issue is not hanging out with specific people, but living in the same area as them and walking the streets while they are as well. Suppose you don’t want to change your behaviour for example by always walking with others, but instead choose to pick up a new skill. Any significantly better options than martial arts come to mind?
As katydee mentions, awareness, and running are going to be much much more likely to help you. Having the mindset that leads one to “martial arts would be useful” are what will get you into trouble.
Running is a good idea, although I’m not sure how much difference practice really makes for someone who already is somewhat athletic. Parkour might be more useful.
Anecdotal evidence, I know, but I was once going home in the evening and passing through a semi-underground metro station, when out of the blue some guy from a clique was grabbing me by the wrist and aggressively blabbering something. I was rather thankful for having done Aikido when I was still in school because it’s a lot easier to run when you’re not being held back.
Funniest part is that getting out of wrist holds is one of the basics of Aikido for which there’s a wide variety of techniques, but I’d never have expected anyone to actually try wrist-grabbing. I had never encountered wrist-grabbing in the few fights I had in school and I used to assume that if someone wanted to beat you up, they’d just try to beat you up.
Perhaps the whole situation could have been avoided by more caution or alertness, it’s difficult to say. The whole thing was a unique experience for me; it was still rather early and while the sun had set (winter) there were lots of bright lights and some normal people around, so although I saw the clique and the guy, I didn’t expect him to actually try anything. And of course nothing like that ever happened again.
Still not sure what to make of the whole incident in regards to useful skills. I did move away eventually, though.
I have reason to believe that the chances that trying to run would increase my risk of harm are above average. In all likelyhood, if I were in a place where there was a significant risk of being attacked or otherwise threatened by another creature, I’d probably be carrying a big stick. If I were still put in a fight-or-flight situation in spite of this, I’m not entirely confident that my extremely limited aikido/judo/Tai Chi training would be sufficient. (Semester courses in college with the latter two, sporadic classes with the former that are no longer an option for logistical reasons).
This past December, I got a wallet filled with fake money, for the specific purpose of using as a decoy in the unlikely event of a robbery, since I have only about $1000 that I could conceivably use for… anything. (This was a simplification of my original idea, which was to fill a fake wallet with flashpaper and matches...). Of course, if such an idea caught on, it’d rapidly lose value, since criminals would adapt, but for now it seems sufficiently paranoid to have a decent chance of success.
Of course, if anyone reading this tries to rob me, I’m screwed, having just divulged my entire arsenal (assuming I’m not lying/won’t add something). But what’s the probability of that?
I have practiced parkour as well and consider it similarly less than optimally useful. Aside from a few basic vaults, most moves are not practical unless you anticipate a foot chase through dense terrain with a determined pursuer, in which case altering other aspects of your behavior may prove more useful.
In terms of actually getting out of dangerous situations fast, practicing moving through crowds quickly is almost certainly more useful than parkour.
That said, parkour is really fun and a good workout to boot.
martial arts are not a very good skill to neutralize the otherwise dangerous behavior of being around poor people.
Or really any dangerous behavior at all.
When it comes to street crime, I believe that nearly everyone would be better served by learning improved posture (so you don’t look like a target), awareness (so that you know what’s going on and people see that you know what’s going on), and if all else fails, foot speed (so you can get out of dangerous areas fast) rather than martial arts.
That said, I practice martial arts. However, if someone comes up to me with a knife and says “give me your wallet,” you can be damn sure I’ll give him my wallet. Whatever money I have with me is a low price to pay to avoid hand-to-hand combat with an armed opponent.
One useful heuristic for finding a good martial arts class might be to look for instructors who realize that martial arts are not practical for self-defense. An actual self-defense class would be interesting to see and would look nothing like a typical martial arts class.
Next time you’re in Tampa, drop a line. My instructor (no particular organized school) teaches punching and stuff, but also how to recognize different types of dangerous people and dissuade or circumvent them.
Will do (entirely serious here).
Are you trolling, and if not what the hell is wrong with you?
I’m sure there are plenty of subclasses of “poor people” that it’s best to avoid if safety is your priority. It is absolutely not the case that “being around poor people” as such is dangerous. If you are inclined to protest that statistically it’s correct, then I will remark that the same is probably also true of, e.g., “being around really unpopular people” (some really unpopular people are unpopular because of personality disorders that also make them dangerous; being around sufficiently unpopular people may get you lynched along with them) and “being around young men” (young men are disproportionately likely to commit violent crimes, and to be victims of violent crime); would you say the same about those groups? It’s quite likely also true of “being around depressed people” (suicide is slightly contagious) and it would have been true of “being around Jews” in, say, 1930s Germany (anything that makes you look like a friend of a persecuted group puts you in danger of being targeted by their persecutors). The conclusion I draw from examples like these is that saying “being around members of group X” is dangerous, even when true statistically, is liable to be very misleading; still more so, calling not doing so a “skill”, as you do later in the thread.
(Note 1. Some of the people I know are quite rich. Some are quite poor. I feel—correctly, I’m pretty sure—no less safe with the poor ones than with the rich ones. Note 2. I wonder whether “poor” in your comment is in fact a proxy for “black”. Note 3. I think LW could well do without the sort of “look how hard-headed and unafraid of social stigma I am” posturing that I strongly suspect is the underlying cause of this kind of comment.)
I will bite any and all bullets you care to present. It would be nice to live in a world where these things weren’t true. Unfortunately we do not, and I only care about outcomes, not being fair. I would, in fact, avoid associating with jews if I lived in 1930′s Germany and if you wouldn’t I would deem you insane and also avoid you. I do, in fact, avoid depressed, unproductive, and unpopular people and so do you.
Among the outcomes I care about is having other people not get screwed over. Shunning them because other things have gone badly for them contributes to not achieving such outcomes.
Another outcome I care about is associating with people who are interesting, good company, useful to me, etc. Shunning broadly-defined groups that contain many such people, when there are narrower groups whose shunning would be just as effective, contributes to not achieving such outcomes.
A policy of avoiding dangerous-seeming people seems very reasonable, especially if it’s applied flexibly. (One might, e.g., have a close and dearly loved family member who is dangerous, or an important business connection with someone dangerous. Personal safety is good but not the only thing that matters.) I think it’s very likely that “seems dangerous to me”, fuzzy though it is, is a much more accurate heuristic for identifying dangerous people than “is poor”, and that the same is true for most people here.
It’s a heuristic, not an algorithm for safety.
“A heuristic, not an algorithm”: what difference are you intending to convey? (I wasn’t trying to suggest that you think avoiding poor people gives some kind of guarantee, or anything like that. A heuristic is what I took you to be saying it was. For me, at least, a heuristic is a kind of algorithm.)
“Not … for safety”: do you mean that there are other purposes to it besides safety? OK, fair enough (though your presentation of this “skill” here has been all about safety) but I don’t think it makes a difference to what I’m saying: safety together with the other things you intend this to achieve are still not the only things that matter, and I gravely doubt that the broad-brush policy of avoiding poor people is a great way of achieving those other things (by comparison with less-simplistic heuristics) -- though on that point I’m prepared to be convinced.
A heuristic is a fuzzy set of principles that are correlated with the outcomes you want. An algorithm is a set of directions that give you the outcome you want. When I say “avoiding poor people is a heuristic” I mean that it is the high level abstraction of a bunch of low level behaviors in various situations.
Something can be an algorithm despite not necessarily giving you exactly the outcome you want. Hence approximation algorithms and probabilistic algorithms.
Edit: the boundaries between algorithms and heuristics are complicated. Colloquial usage referring to heuristics as something like “rules of thumb” and algorithms as “a set of directions” is what was intended.
I suspect it might depend on where you are.
I’ve never been in a physical fight myself, but the ones I’ve witnessed were usually initiated by someone wearing not-so-cheap clothes and jewellery. (Maybe rich people are more spoiled, i.e. more used to getting their way, and therefore more likely to get resentful when they don’t, or something.) And according to stereotypes at least, people in the Mafia and similar aren’t exactly destitute. OTOH, beggars and the like don’t look like people who might hurt someone.
YMMV if you’re living in a country where a sizeable fraction of the population legally owns and carries firearms.
Where I live, in my experience, the most dangerous neighbourhood (for young men) is the one occupied by many middle-class teenagers. The dangerous ones are the ones who have something to prove about how tough they are. They also make a lifestyle out of pretending to live in american ghettos, and simultaneusly pretending to be wealthy. I was friends with these people growing up. They are entertaining and scary.
We don’t have american-style violent ghetto-dwellers here, though.
Poor people in the first world are often poor partially because they optimize for not looking poor.
If that’s true, that’s one more reason not to choose whom to associate with based on how rich they look. Or by “not hanging out with poor people” do you mean you do an income audit on all your acquaintances?
Because they are terrible optimizers they don’t actually succeed. I can spot low-IQ, low-income, unproductive behavior a mile away. It helps to have grown up on welfare I suppose.
Are you equally good at spotting high-IQ, low-income, unproductive behavior?
Pretty good, but they’re uncommon so I have limited data to calibrate on.
Really? Because reading random intellectual-sounding things on the Internet instead of actually getting things done seems like a fairly common failure mode… that, or playing World of Warcraft.
Actually getting things done is an unrealistic standard for the vast majority of humanity. We amuse ourselves while a few people actually push forward.
Some people get less done than others. I, for one, am job-free. ;)
It can take years to work one’s way out of poverty. What do you suggest doing in the meanwhile?
Stay outta trouble, learn running, figure out various tricks—kick cars so alarms go off, maybe carry mace and some shrieking device, look crazy when threatened, I don’t know, hiss real loud, that’ll freak people out, they don’t know maybe you’re mentally retarded and basically a bigger chimpanzee. They’d never mess with a smaller brained ape your size, an ape half your size can totally mess people up—an ape will bite off fingers, gouge out eyes, rip off ears… without any martial arts. Don’t look like you’re clever enough to figure out that if you fight back you’re more likely to die. Looking clever is stupid anyway.
My parents made a mistake of being in Russian part of Soviet Union when Soviet Union broke down—can’t really blame them for not wanting to be in a hostile-ish-to-russians region near border when a military superpower goes down, though. The crime rate was like you wouldn’t believe.
Most martial arts schools I’ve checked out have monthly tuitions in the $50-150 range; so on the low end, that’s at least $600 tuition. You won’t get much benefit out of just 1 class a week, but 2 classes a week at an hour & half a piece (travel, changing, recovery + 1hr class ) times 3 weeks a month times minimum wage is $72 a month or $864 a year. So paying for and going to the classes is going to cost you >$1500 a year. That could be a large chunk of what it takes to get out of poverty, for example, that alone is a good chunk of many community college tuitions.
Combine that with the low absolute rate of crimes and the unknown effectiveness of standard martial arts for dealing with said crimes...
being poor doesn’t mean you have to spend time around other poor people. It’s certainly more difficult, but it’s worth it. In addition to personal danger, your habits and behaviors tend towards being the average of those you surround yourself with.
Suppose you haven’t got a gun because you don’t live in America. Know any better skills?
Not hanging out with poor people is a skill. And it’s better than guns.
Behaviour is not skill, and the issue is not hanging out with specific people, but living in the same area as them and walking the streets while they are as well. Suppose you don’t want to change your behaviour for example by always walking with others, but instead choose to pick up a new skill. Any significantly better options than martial arts come to mind?
Or just suppose you’re still in school.
As katydee mentions, awareness, and running are going to be much much more likely to help you. Having the mindset that leads one to “martial arts would be useful” are what will get you into trouble.
Running is a good idea, although I’m not sure how much difference practice really makes for someone who already is somewhat athletic. Parkour might be more useful.
Anecdotal evidence, I know, but I was once going home in the evening and passing through a semi-underground metro station, when out of the blue some guy from a clique was grabbing me by the wrist and aggressively blabbering something. I was rather thankful for having done Aikido when I was still in school because it’s a lot easier to run when you’re not being held back.
Funniest part is that getting out of wrist holds is one of the basics of Aikido for which there’s a wide variety of techniques, but I’d never have expected anyone to actually try wrist-grabbing. I had never encountered wrist-grabbing in the few fights I had in school and I used to assume that if someone wanted to beat you up, they’d just try to beat you up.
Perhaps the whole situation could have been avoided by more caution or alertness, it’s difficult to say. The whole thing was a unique experience for me; it was still rather early and while the sun had set (winter) there were lots of bright lights and some normal people around, so although I saw the clique and the guy, I didn’t expect him to actually try anything. And of course nothing like that ever happened again.
Still not sure what to make of the whole incident in regards to useful skills. I did move away eventually, though.
I have reason to believe that the chances that trying to run would increase my risk of harm are above average. In all likelyhood, if I were in a place where there was a significant risk of being attacked or otherwise threatened by another creature, I’d probably be carrying a big stick. If I were still put in a fight-or-flight situation in spite of this, I’m not entirely confident that my extremely limited aikido/judo/Tai Chi training would be sufficient. (Semester courses in college with the latter two, sporadic classes with the former that are no longer an option for logistical reasons).
This past December, I got a wallet filled with fake money, for the specific purpose of using as a decoy in the unlikely event of a robbery, since I have only about $1000 that I could conceivably use for… anything. (This was a simplification of my original idea, which was to fill a fake wallet with flashpaper and matches...). Of course, if such an idea caught on, it’d rapidly lose value, since criminals would adapt, but for now it seems sufficiently paranoid to have a decent chance of success.
Of course, if anyone reading this tries to rob me, I’m screwed, having just divulged my entire arsenal (assuming I’m not lying/won’t add something). But what’s the probability of that?
I have practiced parkour as well and consider it similarly less than optimally useful. Aside from a few basic vaults, most moves are not practical unless you anticipate a foot chase through dense terrain with a determined pursuer, in which case altering other aspects of your behavior may prove more useful.
In terms of actually getting out of dangerous situations fast, practicing moving through crowds quickly is almost certainly more useful than parkour.
That said, parkour is really fun and a good workout to boot.
I can do that, but I guess the technique I use only works for large people (I’m 1.88 m (6′2″), 93 kg (205 lb)).