Aliveness in Training

While I don't read scientific literature that much, I do make formal predictions pretty often. Typically any time I notice something I'm interested in that will be easy to check in the future.

Will I get to bed on time today? Will I be early for the meeting tomorrow? Etc.

I second the anecdotal evidence that this is a "live" exercise. Sidenote: it took me way too long to realize I needed to write all my predictions down. I spent a few weeks thinking I was completely excellent at predicting things.

Here's a prior that served me well for reading empirical literature:

1.) There is no effect (the null is true).

2.) If there is an effect but the data is observational, be very careful of any causal claims (they are most likely either due to modeling issues, bias due to confounding they missed, or getting the causal analysis wrong, or [a thousand more things]).

3.) If there is an effect and it is causal, I probably already heard about it, and there are lots of papers establishing it. Give the publication rate, and my reading rate, the chances of me stumbling on a genuinely new empirical result being reported for the first time is quite low.

4.) Conditional on me reading a paper, it's either related to what I do, or the authors are "good at the media," or (very rarely) it's actually a breakthrough!

5.) Most papers are crap, most wrong findings are not retracted (incentives).

I can identify three fairly significant issues at fault here, all stemming from the fact that the original senseis actually fought and most of their successors don't:

• Many martial arts-- despite originally being optimized for keeping you alive in combat-- have since been optimized for being accessible and easy to learn, in some cases for preteens. Accessibility and effectiveness are in many cases at cross purposes.

• Many martial arts, without actual combat to point to as a metric of success or failure, have instituted systems of "point sparring" and so on in order to run tournaments. Thanks to Goodhart's Law, many of these martial arts have then become diluted by techniques and training optimized for scoring points in tournaments rather than defending yourself.

• Many techniques that were once very practical are no longer so, and out of respect for tradition or simple lack of constant reevaluation are still being taught.

  For instance, many traditional martial arts focus a lot on defending yourself against wrist grabs. I am told that this is because hundreds of years ago in Japan, wrist grabs were actually a common means of attack and important to know how to protect yourself against-- if someone walked up to you and grabbed your wrist, you couldn't draw your sword, which often meant you were about to die.

  Nowadays, of course, people don't often initiate attacks by walking up and grabbing your wrist, so there is much less utility in such movements, but the curriculum of many traditional martial arts has not been updated to compensate.

When I was practicing a (relatively new - think 1970s) form of karate, I discovered that there was a near-religious fervor surrounding the art. While I did see a lot of competent martial artists at the higher levels, they continuously insisted on the infallibility of the kata, slow-speeds sparring, and "situationals" that made up the bulk of their practice. I was repeatedly informed that the art was self-defense oriented, but was rarely subjected to any realistic practice. They claimed that they removed a lot of their sparring early on because it incited competitiveness, and there were strict rules about questioning the senseis. I ended up leaving my local school for a number of reasons, the most relevant being a desire for more realistic instruction in self-defense.

I did see a lot of value in this particular martial art, but none of that was in its ability to foster combat skills. Sure, the members who had been there ten years and gotten their black belts were better fighters than your average guy on the street. But at the lower levels, the value lay more in the discipline and personal development aspects than anything else. I would have stayed longer, probably, if the other practitioners had just admitted that, rather than insisting on complete infallibility in combat. Their cult-like devotion drove me away faster than mere honesty would have.

Why do so many top martial arts, as for example Shotokan Karate, focus so strongly on kata, pre-set sparring exercises, and a little punches-pulled sparring?

The simple answer is that kata develop muscle memory and submerge proper responses below the consciousness level. In a high-level fight you don't have time to think what to do -- you have to react "on instinct" and your instinct comes from (among other things) doing katas. Pre-set sparring does the same -- develops muscle memory and makes proper reactions "instinctive".

And sparring is "punches-pulled" because concussions, internal bleeding, and broken bones are bad for keeping and attracting students :-)

One other thing is that martial arts are quite different. The major relevant distinction here is between external and internal martial arts. Crudely speaking, external arts (e.g. taekwondo) focus on fairly straightforward application of physical force. Internal arts (e.g. tai chi) usually use less obvious and more complicated whole-body techniques but also stress the general energy/health aspect. It is often said that internal-arts masters live longer than external-arts masters.

Oh, and suburban-mall martial arts studios are generally a bad joke.

What criteria are you using her for "top martial arts?"

If we're talking in terms of "widely practiced," there's a strong selection pressure favoring schools which don't impose activities on their students which are highly painful, frightening, or conducive to injury. In the absence of strong feedback mechanisms where if the training doesn't work, the students find out and leave, the most popular martial arts will be ones which don't demand much of their students.

That's not to say that forms only persist because they allow students to believe they're practicing martial arts without engaging in more demanding activities; even arts with strong feedback mechanisms generally include some non-alive exercises, such as bagwork or shadowboxing, or the striking practice used in kendo.

It would not necessarily be correct to assume that the manner in which traditional martial arts are practiced today strongly reflects the training methods used by the traditional masters; the forms might be the same, but the emphasis on different types of training has shifted.

Non-alive training methods may be preferable when the techniques can't be practiced in alive training without an unacceptably high rate of injury, or when one is practicing basic movements at high levels of repetition to ingrain them into muscle memory, and involving a partner to use as a target would, even if it helped refine the movements, impose a great deal of boredom on the partner.

I agree with this but wouldn't necessarily recommend it as a go-to training method. See also Bet Your Friends to Be More Right.

How is aliveness different from "make beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience"?

Aliveness is making beliefs pay rent in actual experience.

A belief in the invisible garage dragon pays no rent: You don't anticipate anything. A belief that you can disarm someone holding a gun on you pays rent: You anticipate that if someone aims a gun at you, you'll be fine. A belief paying rent is not in principle relevant to whether or not it's true, though it does open it up to falsification.

Aliveness is a training paradigm designed to help create useful skills and ensure your beliefs about what those skills can do are accurate; making beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience is a technique for ensuring that your beliefs are meaningful.