That would be awesome, for sure! But I’d also prefer not to see this get frozen in planning just because there’s a theoretical possibility of making it better. I’d still consider SIAI-biased advice to be vastly better than no advice at all.
Mercurial
Karma: 530
All right, so it seems like we mostly agree now—cool !
Yep!
Rationality training: helping minds change since 2002. :-D
Ok, I get it now, but I would still argue that we should assume we’re awake, until we have some evidence to the contrary; thus, the “hard problem of dreaming” is a non-issue.
You’re coming at it from a philosophical angle, I think. I’m coming at it from a purely pragmatic one. Let’s say you’re dreaming right now. If you start with the assumption that you’re awake and then look for evidence to the contrary, typically the dream will accomodate your assumption and let you conclude you’re really awake. Even if your empirical tests conclusively show that you’re dreaming, dreams have a way of screwing with your reasoning process so that early assumptions don’t update on evidence.
For instance, a typical dream test is jumping up in the air and trying to stay there a bit longer than physics would allow. The goal, usually, is flight. I commonly find that if I jump into the air and then hang there for just a little itty bitty bit longer than physics would allow, I think something like, “Oh, that was barely longer than possible. So I must not be quite dreaming.” That makes absolutely no sense at all, but it’s worth bearing in mind that you typically don’t have your whole mind available to you when you’re trying to become lucid. (You might once you are lucid, but that’s not terribly useful, is it?)
In this case, you have to be really, insanely careful not to jump to the conclusion that you’re awake. If you think you’re awake, you have to pause and ask yourself, “Well, is there any way I could be mistaken?” Otherwise your stupid dreaming self will just go along with the plot and ignore the floating pink elephants passing through your living room walls. This means that when you’re working on lucid dreaming, it usually pays to recognize that you could be dreaming and can never actually prove conclusively that you’re awake.
But I agree with you in all cases where lucid dreaming isn’t of interest. :-)
I’d call the reality-joint-cleaving line the one between adrenaline-trigger training and adrenaline control training.
That is an excellent point. My father and I still sometimes get into debates that pivot on this. He says that in a real fight your fight-or-flight system will kick in, so you might as well train tense and stupid since that’s what you’ll be when you need the skills. But I’ve found that it’s possible to make the sphere of things that don’t trigger the fight-or-flight system large enough to encompass most altercations I encounter; it’s definitely the harder path, but it seems to have benefits outside of fighting skill as well.
A less discrete way to look at it adapts the No Free Lunch theorem...
Possibly! I think that in the end, what I most care about in my art is that I can defend myself and my family from the kinds of assaults that are most likely. I’m not likely to enter any MMA competitions anytime soon, so I’m pretty okay with the possibility that my survival skills can’t compete with MMA-trained fighters in a formal ring.
Luke, I don’t feel I know you well enough to help you with your quest to locate any lingering wrongness in you. From what I’ve seen of your writing and what I’ve heard from people who have met you, you’re doing a really amazing job of walking the rationalist talk. The fact that you even ask the community here this question is quite a testament to your taking this stuff seriously and actually using it. I think I should be asking you this question!
But your asking this makes me think of something. If you, or Eliezer, or someone else of that calibre of rational competence pointed out to me an area where I need to say “Oops” (or otherwise direct rational attention), I’d like to think that I’d take that seriously. I suspect I’d take it even more seriously if there were some avenue for me to ask such people for that help the way you’ve asked the whole Less Wrong community here.
So I wonder: Might it be a good move to set up something like that? We might not yet have a good metric in place for what constitutes someone’s degree of rationality, but I’d imagine if two or three black-belt Bayesians all agree that someone is wrong about something, that should still count for something and is probably a reasonable direction to consider in the absence of a more objective metric. So if there were something set up where people could actively ask for that feedback from known people of skilled rationality (or people designated by those with known impressive levels of rationality), I wonder if that would be useful. What do you think? Or would that just be redundant with respect to the Rationality Dojos you mentioned are coming?
[Judo] can be used in many situations where you wouldn’t use other martial arts at all.
I’d be really interested in hearing what those circumstances are. I usually make the same claim about Aikido (e.g., you probably don’t want to crush Uncle Mortimer’s trachea just because he happened to grab a knife in his drunken stupor).
How did you come to LessWrong?
Through cryonics, oddly enough. I went to a “Teens & Twenties” cryonics meetup in January 2009 and met Eliezer there. He kept bringing up the rationality stuff and kept trying to encourage everyone to look at Less Wrong. I could well be the only cryonicist from that meetup who looked up Less Wrong afterwards as far as I know.
Do you think that we (the community) are doing enough to bring in new users to LessWrong? If not, what do you think could be done to increase awareness of LessWrong amongst potential rationalists?
I’m a little concerned that the desire to inflate the tribe might not be well-connected to the purpose of Less Wrong. If the goal is to make the whole world more rational, getting everyone to join Less Wrong might not be the best way to do that. If there’s some other goal, I’m not aware of it and can’t comment on whether the community is “doing enough” since I don’t have a metric for what “enough” means.
You know, something clicked last night as I was falling asleep, and I realized why you’re right and where my confusion has been. But thanks for giving me something specific to work from! :-D
I think my argument can be summarized like so:
All data comes through P.
Therefore, all data about P comes through P.
All theories about P must be verified through data about P.
This means P is required to explain P.
Therefore, it doesn’t seem like there can be an explanation about P.
That last step is nuts. Here’s an analogy:
All (visual) data is seen.
Therefore, all (visual) data about how we see is seen.
All theories of vision must be verified through data about vision. (Let’s say we count only visual data. So we can use charts, but not the way an optic nerve feels to the touch.)
This means vision is required to explain vision.
Therefore, it doesn’t seem like there can be an explanation of vision.
The glaring problem is that explaining vision doesn’t render it retroactively useless for data-collection.
Thanks for giving me time to wrestle with this dumbth. Wrongness acknowledged. :-)
I’m not sure how these two sentences are connected. Obviously, a perfect brain scan shouldn’t indicate that you’re mentally rehearsing Mozart when you are not, in fact, mentally rehearsing Mozart. But such a brain scan will work on anyone, not just you, so I’m not sure what you’re driving at.
What I was driving at is that there’s no evidence that it corresponds to mentally rehearsing Mozart for anyone until I look at my own brain scan. All we can correlate the brain scans with is people’s reports of what they were doing. For instance, if my brain scan said I was rehearsing Mozart but I wasn’t, and yet I was inclined to report that I was, that would give me reason for concern.
The confusion here comes down to a point that I still think is true, but only because I think it’s tautological: From my point of view, my point of view is special. But I’m not sure what it would mean for this to be false, so I’m not sure there’s any additional information in this point—aside from maybe an emotional one (e.g., there’s a kind of emotional shift that occurs when I make the empathic shift and realize what something feels like from another person’s perspective rather than just my own).
What I meant was that, since our theory of Q explains everything, we gain nothing (intellectually speaking) by postulating hat P and Q are different. Doing so would be similar to saying, “sure, the theory of gravity fully explains why the Earth doesn’t fall into the Sun, but there must also be invisible gnomes constantly pushing the Earth away to prevent that from happening”. Sure, the gnomes could exist, but there are lots of things that could exist...
Well, I do know that P exists, and I know that from my point of view P is extremely special. That’s not invisible gnomes; it’s just true. But saying “from my point of view P is extremely special” is tautological since P is my perspective. When something is a tautology, there’s nothing to explain. That’s why it’s hard to come up with an explanation for it. :-P
If you agree with the first part, what are your reasons for disagreeing with the second ? To me, this sounds like saying, “sure, we can explain electricity with the same theory we use to explain magnetism, but that doesn’t mean that we can just equate electricity and magnetism”.
I agree with you now.
Maybe we disagree because of this:
Because if you were dreaming, your idea of Occam’s Razor would be contained within the dream.
Oh, no no no! I didn’t mean to make a particularly big deal out of the possibility that we’re dreaming. I was trying to point out an analogous situation. There’s no plausible way to gather data in favor of the hypothesis that we’re not dreaming because the epistemology itself is entirely contained within the dream. I figured that might be easier to see than the point I was trying to make, which was the bit of balderdash that there’s no way to gather evidence in favor of P arising from something else because that evidence has to come through P. The arguments are somewhat analogous, only the one for dreaming works and the one for P doesn’t.
I personally don’t see any issues to tackle. Sure, I could be dreaming. I could also be insane, or a simulation, or a brain in a jar, or an infinite number of other things. But why should I care about these possibilities—not just “most of the time”, but at all ?
Two and a half points:
Again, this was meant to be an analogy. I wasn’t trying to argue that we can’t trust our data-collection process because we could be dreaming. I meant to offer a situation about dreaming that seemed analogous to the situation with consciousness. I was hoping to illustrate where the “hard” part of the hard problem of consciousness is by pointing out where the “hard” part in what I suppose we could call the “hard problem of dreaming” is.
This issue actually does become extremely pragmatic as soon as you start trying to practice lucid dreaming. The mind seems to default to assuming that whatever is being experienced is being experienced in a wakeful state, at least for most people. You have to challenge that to get to lucid dreaming. There have been many times where I’ve been totally sure I’m awake after asking myself if I’m dreaming, and have even done dream-tests like trying to read text and trying to fly, only to discover that all my testing and certainty was ultimately irrelevant because once I wake up, I can know with absurdly high probability that I was in fact dreaming.
Closely related to that second point is the fact that you know you dream regularly. In fact, there’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest that pretty much everyone dreams several times every night. Most people aren’t crazy, or discover that they’re brains in a jar, or whatever every day. So if there’s a way that everything you know could be completely wrong, the possibility that you’re dreaming is much, much higher on the list of hypotheses than that, say, you have amnesia and are on the Star Trek holodeck. So picking out dreaming as a particular issue to be concerned about over the other possibilities isn’t really committing the fallacy of privileging the hypothesis. If we’re going to go with “You’re hallucinating everything you know,” the “You’re dreaming” hypothesis is a pretty darn good one to start with!
Again, though, I’m not trying to argue that we could be dreaming and therefore we can’t trust what we know. I was trying to point out an analogy which, upon reflection, doesn’t actually work.
It seems like we need three letters
I guess so!
I also want to emphasize that P is your own personal experience, not any abstract “subject’s”. It’s the one that you can access directly.
Er… By “your”, do you mean to refer to me, personally? I’ll assume that’s what you meant unless you specify otherwise. Henceforth I am the subject! :-D
I would agree with your statement if you removed the word “completely”.
But that’s the crux! I know I’m conscious in a way that is so devastatingly self-evident that “evidence” to the contrary would render itself meaningless. But if some theory for P were developed that demonstrated that Q doesn’t exist, I wouldn’t view that theory as nonsensical. It’d be surprising, but not blatantly self-contradictory like a theory that says P doesn’t exist. I believe in Q for highly fallible reasons, but I believe in P for completely different reasons that don’t seem to be at all fallible to me. I deduce Q but I don’t deduce P.
(Although I wonder if we’re just spinning our wheels in the muck produced from a fuzzy word. If we both agree that P is self-evident while Q is deduced from Pq, perhaps there’s no disagreement...?)
Obviously, you know you are conscious, and you can experience P directly. However, you can also collect the same kind of data on yourself (or have someone, or some thing, do it for you) as you would on other people. For example, you could get your brain scanned, record your own voice and then play it back, install a sensor on your fridge that records your feeding habits, etc.; these are all real pieces of evidence that people are routinely collecting for practical purposes.
Agreed. Notice, though, that the only way I’m able to correlate this Q-like data with P is because I can see the results of, say, the brain scan and recognize that it pairs with a particular part of P. For instance, I can tell that a certain brain scan corresponds with when I’m mentally rehearsing a Mozart piece because I experienced the rehearsal when the brain scanning occurred. So P is still implicit in the data-collection and -interpretation process.
If you think that the above paragraph is true, then it would follow that you (probably) can collect some data on your own Q, as it would be experienced by someone else who is conscious (assuming, again, that you are not the only conscious being in the Universe, and that your own consciousness is not privileged in any cosmic way).
Mostly agreed. If others experience, then others experience. :-)
The main point at which I disagree is that P is privileged. There’s no such thing as a P-less perspective. But if we’re granting that others are actually conscious (i.e., that Q exists) and that we can switch subjects with a sort of P-transformation (i.e., we can grant that you have P and that within your P my consciousness is part of Q), then I think that might not be terribly important to your point. We can mimic strong objectivity by looking at those truths that remain invariant under such transformations.
If you agree with that as well, then, assuming that we ever develop a good enough model of Q which would allow you to predict any person’s behavior with some useful degree of certainty, such a model would then be able to predict your own behavior with some useful degree of certainty.
Hmm… “behavior” is being used in two different ways here. When we use our “theory of Q” to make predictions, what we’re doing is assuming that Q exists and is indicated by Pq, and then we make predictions about what happens to Pq under certain circumstances. On the other hand, when we look at my “behavior”, what we’re considering is my P in a wider scope going beyond just Pq. For instance, others claim that they see blue when we shine light of a wavelength of 450 nm into their functional eyes. When we shine such light into my eyes, I see blue. Those are two very different kinds of “behavior” from my perspective!
But presumably under the P-transformation mentioned earlier, other subjects actually do experience blue, too. So we’ll just go with this. :-)
If you agree that the above is possible, then we can go one step further. A good model of Q would not only predict what a person would do, but also what he would think...
I agree with what you elaborate upon after this. Since the “behavior” here is a kind of experience, I would include the experience of thinking in that. So yes, already granted.
At this point, we have a model that can explain both your thoughts and your actions, and it does so solely based on external evidence. It seems like there’s nothing left for P to explain, since Q explains everything.
I wonder if you arranged your sentence a little bit backwards...? I think you meant to say, “It seems like there’s nothing left of P to explain, since our theory of Q explains everything.” Is that what you meant?
If so, then sure. There’s a detail here I’m uneasy about, but I think it’s minor enough to ignore (rather than write three more paragraphs on!).
Thus, P is a null concept; this is the “objective truth that this “bias” is causing you to mentally deviate from”, which you asked about in your comment. That is, the “objective truth” is that P can be fully explained solely in terms of Q, even though it doesn’t feel like it could be.
Hmm. You seem to be saying two different things here as though they’re the same thing. One I strongly disagree with, and the other I half-agree with.
The one I half-agree with is that based on the trajectory you describe, it seems we can describe P with the same brush we use to explain Q. The half I hesitate about is this claim that we can just equate P and Q. That’s the part that is to be explained! But perhaps something would arise in the process of elaborating on a theory of Q.
The part I totally disagree with is the claim that “P is a null concept”. Any theory that disregards P as a hallucination, or irrelevant, or a bias of any sort, is incoherent. I’ll grant that the impression that P is special could turn out to be a bias, but not P itself. And we can’t disregard the relevance of P. How would we ever gain evidence that P can be disregarded? Doesn’t that evidence have to come through P?
But I do agree:
We should be able to predict Pq with evidence that remains fixed under a P-transformation.
It seems easier and more consistent to assume that Pq points to an extant Q.
If Q exists, then under a P-transformation my experience (previously P) is part of Q.
Therefore, a full model of Pq should offer a kind of explanation of P.
But I still don’t see how this model actually connects P and Q. It just assumes that Q exists and that it’s a kind of P (i.e., that P-transformations make sense and are possible).
Eeergh, that’s a whole other topic for a whole other thread...
Fair enough!
It’s much like how you can never know for sure that you’re not dreaming: any test you can perform is a test you can dream. There’s no way out even in principle.
Why not just use Occam’s Razor ?
Because if you were dreaming, your idea of Occam’s Razor would be contained within the dream.
I’m reminded of some brilliant times I’ve tried to become lucid in my dreams. I look at an elephant standing in my living room and think, “Why is there an elephant in my living room? That’s awfully odd. Could I be dreaming? Well, if I were, this would be really strange without much of an explanation. But the elephant is here because I went to China and drank tea with a spoon. That makes sense, so clearly I’m not dreaming.”
So when you go through an analysis of whether the assumption that you’re awake yields shorter code in its description than the assumption that you’re dreaming does, how sure can you really be that you have any evidence at all that you’re not dreaming? Sure, you can resort to Bayesian analysis—but how do you know you didn’t just concoct that in your dream tonight and that it’s actually gibberish?
I think in the end it’s just not very pragmatically useful to suppose I’m dreaming, so I don’t worry too much about this most of the time (which might be part of why I’m not lucid in more of my dreams!). But if you really want to tackle the issue, you’re going to run into some pretty basic epistemic obstacles. How do you come to any conclusions at all when anything you think you know could have been completely fabricated in the last three seconds?
Drat. Well, do keep me posted, and I’ll keep an eye out for similar info.
This is utter gold. Thank you for posting this!
Not understanding people’s behavior is your confusion, not theirs
I agree soooooooo much on this point.
I teach math courses for college students who want to become elementary teachers. The course I’m currently teaching is arithmetic—not that they can’t do arithmetic, but there are a lot of things that often confuse kids that teachers just don’t understand are confusing unless they’ve been told about them. For instance, there’s a difference between partitive division (“Johnny has 10 apples and wants to give them to each of his 5 friends; how can he do so most fairly?”) and quotitive division (“Johnny has 10 apples and wants to make bags of 5 apples; how many such bags can he make?”). When division is explained as “equal sharing” and then the teacher teaches the quotitive long-division algorithm, it confuses kids. But most teachers seem to default to the theory that if they explain something they think they understand and their kids don’t get it, then that’s a display of the kids’ stupidity.
The mantra I have to tell, pretty much every single day in these classes, is that everything anyone does is sensible to them at the time they’re doing it. What practically defines empathy, in my mind, is the ability to perceive that sensibility and make sense of the person’s behavior in light of that.
And yes, I completely agree, it’s a skill that can be practiced and learned. A thousand times, yes!
Instead, build accurate models of people and figure out whether your model would’ve predicted such behavior. If not, gather reliable evidence proving what the person actually felt and tweak your model accordingly.
[...]
Start developing models of individuals and groups, which predict their behaviors under certain circumstances. Like a scientist, when the model proves to have low predictive value, tweak them until they do.
This.
Caveat: If you’re very different from most people, then understanding yourself better won’t be as helpful. In this case, I’d suggest finding someone more typical to be your proxy. Get to know them well enough to the point where your proxy model can explain/predict behaviors in other typical people.
This is one of the very few places where I’m not sure we agree. I agree, someone who is really different from others will have a harder time getting the empathy ball rolling. But I still think self-understanding is utterly critical. It’s the only way you can control for projection.
For instance, when I was a kid my father tended to be very judgmental. He would point out what was wrong with the way others were doing something and get physically tense about the issue, sometimes even marching up and fixing it himself. For years I assumed this was because he couldn’t stand the stupidity he saw in others. But as I came to understand myself better, I realized that that’s why I would do something like that. My father knows that IQ 100 is actually pretty dumb, but it’s actually the imperfection that bothers him, not the lack of intelligence. I had to realize that I was projecting my own motives onto him in order to stop doing so long enough to get where he was coming from.
There’s also the fact that some people identify with being unusual or different, but such people usually exaggerate their differences more than is justified. However, that isn’t something that introspection can detect. So I would still say that self-understanding is really critical for empathy, if for no other reason than to understand to what degree projection is reliable or unreliable for a person who self-labels as “different.”
Use the fact that most people project to your advantage. If someone’s trying to empathize with you, they’ll most likely project i.e. put themselves in your shoes.
This is clever. I often forget to do this. Thanks!
The simplest explanation is usually correct
I think I understand what you’re getting at here, and I generally agree. I just want to emphasize that simplicity is relative. To me, the simplest explanation for why Lady Gaga so highly values “fighting for who you are” is that she’s an Enneagram type Four. But describing what that means and why that constitutes an explanation actually requires a fair amount of time and verbiage. It’s simple to me only because I’m familiar with what it means for someone to be a Four.
experiencing more means being a better empathizer.
Absolutely.
Thank you for posting this!
Two questions: does my concept of “metaphor blindness” seem reasonable?
Possibly. But since we’re on the topic of empathy, I’d like to emphasize that definitely among the most treasured practices I’ve found is finding a way to understand why what the other person is doing is sensible to them. Even if I can’t see the reason, it’s there. So, it’s really critical to remove every hint of a judgmental tone even from one’s own mind when trying to understand another person. (You can turn it back on later, but while in the process of empathizing it seems to be critical not to evaluate.)
Assuming you’re accurate and this person really can’t “see” metaphors, I think the next question to ask is, “What is it like to experience the world with this metaphor blindness?” Or more generally, “Why does this person’s actions make sense?”
In this respect I take a page from Buddhism. I find that my ability to empathize with others is tremendously greater if I can (a) understand in what sense their negative behavior arises from some kind of suffering and (b) cultivate a wish that they weren’t suffering (which is what many Buddhists mean by “compassion”). I simply don’t do this to “end the karmic cycle of death and rebirth”; instead, I do it because I’ve found that it enriches my life and helps me understand others tremendously better.
For what it’s worth!
And...how can I be more empathetic in this case?
Again, in your position, I would ask myself “In what sense does this person’s behavior make sense?” As I wrestle with this question, I know I’ve hit on a viable hypothesis when everything suddenly becomes clear and I no longer feel any sense of judgment or frustration with the person.
In this case, I wonder if you might be conflating two different issues. Empathy is a matter of understanding another person’s experience from their point of view, but it sounds to me like your concern is with the fact that this person doesn’t seem to abide by basic laws of reason. In particular, you say:
In abstract terms, my toolkit for achieving consensus or exploring issues rationally has been rendered useless.
It might be that exploring issues rationally isn’t a driving desire for this person like it is for you. If it is—that is, if this person identifies with being reasonable and objective despite not being so from your perspective—then this person’s behavior is a loud signal of their suffering. For instance, the harsh sense of rejection of others as stupid, incompetent, useless, etc. really strikes me as a distancing behavior. The fact that they reject arguments against their arguments as “irrelevant” also seems like a way of choosing to cling to the value of their arguments, as though their sense of self-worth is somehow tied up in their ability to believe those arguments—which, again, seems to suggest a fear of letting others get too close. So the question I would gravitate toward is, “Why does this person need emotional distance from others?”
(Based on way too little information, by the way, I have to wonder if the person you’re describing is an Enneagram type Five at Health Level 6. If so, they’ll also tend to have a nihilistic attitude toward the world, as though nothing really matters. Not depression per se, but a sense of pointlessness to life and a kind of irritation that others are so stupid as to be blind to said pointlessness. They’ll also be driven to impress upon others how intelligent and unusual they are, and will often gleefully share uncomfortable truths that disturb others’ sense of the world being okay. If that doesn’t describe the person to a ‘T’, though, then disregard this suggestion!)
You might find that you have to distinguish between having rational conversations with this person on the one hand and coming to a rational consensus on the other. Someone who uses the cloak of logic to hide from others isn’t likely to be open to logic as a way of opening up to others, so you’re fighting the emotional brain on that one. But if you can “get” why they feel like their distancing behavior makes sense, you might be able to use your understanding to help them relax a little bit and choose courses of action for whatever you’re talking about that make sense. They might need to justify it in weird ways you disagree with, but I think the actions people take are generally more important than the reasons they tell themselves for why those actions make sense.
Does that help?
I just noticed this:
Like the last survey, if you take it and post that you took it here, I will upvote you, and I hope other people will upvote you too.
I suppose that means you’d like to know that I took it about two weeks ago. Sorry for not mentioning that earlier!
If the model SIAI uses is that they’re the “hombu dojo” and each regular meetup group is a local dojo, then I think this would probably be downright necessary.
I think so… I went to one of the meetups at an IHOP. The weekly LA meetups are about a two-hour drive from me, though. (I’m in San Diego.)
Ah! Thank you. So the short version is:
IF is a riskier method of doing CR
You still have to have the net effect of CR
My personal experience with IF suggests that there are pretty major benefits from doing it regularly. I lost 30 pounds (and I had no idea I needed to lose them—but I definitely look and feel much better!), my general levels of inflammation dropped, my energy stabilized, and my various biomarkers went from good to excellent. And I’m no longer trapped by a regular need for food; if it takes an extra three hours or so to get to a meal, it doesn’t really affect me.
But I’ve seen this warning about sudden adult-onset CR shortening lifespan, and I see in this article you link to that it’s apparently an issue with IF too. That concerns me. I switched to IF over the course of about a week. Does anyone know what the mechanism for shortening lifespan with too quick an adaptation to CR is? If there’s some way of checking for that kind of damage or ongoing effect in myself, I’d like to do so.
And is it a matter of “once done, you’ve done the damage and it’s too late,” or is it more that ongoing CR that started too suddenly keeps affecting the organism in negative ways, kind of like getting continually exposed to cold air actually inhibits circulation rather than strengthening it if the initial burst of cold was too strong? That difference would matter a lot to me because if IF isn’t really having any negative longevity effects, I’d still want to keep doing it because the other benefits I’m getting from it are so pragmatically awesome. But if I’m continually cutting months off my life, I’ll stop right away!
Could you clarify this just a bit? I practice IF for health reasons, so I’m quite interested in learning if it’s bunk. I was under the impression that the whole point was that in induces essentially the same effects as CR but without needing to worry about calorie-counting, etc. It’s just automatic. Is that what you meant to say? Or are you pointing toward evidence against IF such that people like me who are interested in longevity should consider stopping?
I find my approach to martial arts somewhat different to my philosophy of life.
I’m under the impression that by “martial arts” here you’re referring to self-defense. If so, I find exactly the same thing about myself. I’d run from a knife, too! …Unless someone else I really cared about was with me.
But I still think there’s a serious danger in teaching students a martial art—which explicitly looks and feels very much like training our bodies in how to deal with attacks—without taking care to make sure that said art is actually effective. Even if these students should run away, they might actually come to believe that they don’t have to. Hopefully a normal untrained person with some wits would know to run away from a person with a knife and would yell “Run!” to his or her comrades. On the other hand, someone with 5+ years of Aikido training might think—much like I do—that it’s actually a better bet for the safety of their loved ones to stand their ground. After all, that’s what the training is for, right? But if the training is utter junk, you’ll just end up a bloody mess. And your family still gets attacked.
Also, you don’t always have the option of running away. Sometimes you have to fight, like when someone invades your home and you need to protect your family. And in such cases, bad martial arts can actually be worse than raw untrained instincts—especially if those martial arts teach calmness, so the person doesn’t even have the full benefit of a maximal adrenaline rush due to the delusion of competence.
If we wanted to train in Aikido as a form of yoga, then I’d say “effectiveness” shouldn’t be at all measured in terms of self-defense. But that isn’t how we train: we pretend someone is attacking us, and we pretend to defend in order to gain practice defending against that kind of attack. Similarly, most newcomers don’t join Aikido thinking that this is just another form of zen but more dynamic; they join because it sounds like an interesting martial art. The questions I most commonly hear after a training aren’t things like “How do I apply these principles to an argument with my spouse?” (although I do hear that one sometimes). The most common questions are things like “What if he comes at you with a roundhouse kick?” or “What do you do if you’re grabbed from behind while someone punches at your face?” I think it’s a very safe bet to say that these people believe they’re learning how to defend themselves against real attackers. Even if we try to tell them verbally otherwise, their bodies are still incorporating habits that will eventually start becoming their automatic reactions given enough training.
So I totally agree, running sounds like the best option for dealing with a knife attack. But if that turns out not to be the best option for one of my students in some situation, I’d like to make sure that he or she has some effective skills to lean upon so as to have a real leg up on an assailant. If I pretended to provide something effective and it ended up hurting my student or one of his or her loved ones as a result, I would feel horrible about that—and I think justifiably so!
I’ve been training in Aikido for about 20 years. I tend to agree with you, John.
On “ki,” I think it’s helpful to think of it as a description of a set of sensations one can learn to be conscious of. I think what’s really going on is that we’re subconsciously picking up on and sending subtle body cues, but that isn’t what it feels like. It actually feels like a kind of flow between the attacker and defender. That flow has certain characteristics, and it’s quite possible to learn to be very sensitive to those characteristics. As I’ve gained skill and awareness, I’ve found that it’s often most helpful to frame that sensation as “the flow of intention” and relate it to the sense of anticipation that is physically felt when you decide to, say, reach for an object to pick it up but haven’t yet physically moved.
I have to admit that the idea of teaching Aikido without any attention to it being effective in an actual fight sounds downright dangerous to me. Whatever we might say about philosophy, when someone trains hard and long enough, their reactions change. I’ve been training in Aikido for around two thirds of my life, so if someone pounces me I’m pretty likely to whip out my training and try to apply it before I even know what I’m doing. And this isn’t just theory: when someone jumps at me and surprises me, I first jump (thanks to the startle reflex) and then while still in the process of jumping reach out in a circular movement to take down whatever startled me. I can usually gain conscious control of my reflexes before I grind my poor unsuspecting friend’s face into the pavement, but the point remains: the reflexes are there. If I were to teach my students Aikido with the idea that it teaches them “principles of life” without attending to effectiveness, then I would feel personally responsible for the result of their attempts to defend themselves in, say, a knife attack.
One of the most beautiful things to me about Aikido is that you can go all-out, full-force, and if it’s done well no one gets hurt. Sure, there might be some pain involved, but no lasting damage virtually ever. You can actually have five or so people all taking real, meaningful swings at an aikidoka, and the occasional blow that lands becomes a lesson that improves his or her skill. Not only does this mean that there’s the potential for empirically testing real refinements in the effectiveness of Aikido techniques, but it also means that you can use the art in its full form in a civilized society. When Uncle Mortimer has a bit too much to drink and starts swinging around a kitchen knife as though conducting the drunken choir, you’d rather not whip out your well-honed striking skills and crush his larynx; instead, you want to disarm him safely without bringing harm to anyone. And if you get mugged but defend yourself by breaking someone’s limbs or killing someone, you then have to answer to a judge; but if you can defuse the attack without hurting anyone, any police involvement will probably just recognize you as a good citizen attacked by thugs.
I’m very, very biased, though. I’ve only ever trained seriously in Aikido, so there’s naturally a desire on my part to justify why it’s the best martial art to choose.
But with all that said, I totally agree with Gillian Russel’s main points. I see most Aikido dojos—in fact, virtually all American dojos I’ve ever encountered—saturated with this kind of “epistemic viciousness.”
Yeah, that’s another dynamic I meant to ask about. I could see SIAI wanting to make sure that the only Rationality Dojos they acknowledge are ones led by those whose rationality skills they’ve agreed are formidable (and, hopefully, who have also developed good teaching skills). But if that’s the case, I’d still want to use the local groups to practice even if SIAI doesn’t want to recognize or support us as “a Rationality Dojo.”
Very Ericsonian. I like it!