A Fight is a Faster Tax on Bullshit
The Nameless Virtue
In The Twelve Virtues of Rationality, Eliezer Yudkowsky points at a nameless virtue. He pulls this quote from Miyamoto Musashi:
The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.
He adds:
Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.
By this, Yudkowsky gestures to the distance between trying to act versus acting. As Yoda says, “there is no try”. Trying is a form of performative signaling. Signaling is extremely useful and necessary, but the most effective long-term signals are honest signals. The best honest signal is to simply do, to embody the virtue you claim instead of performing the virtue you seek. You’ve heard of Guess, Ask, and Tell culture. Many rationalists found Guess culture encouraged miscommunication when they used it. When a group has enough trust, Guess culture horseshoes into viability again. It becomes viable because people feel safe to act, and their movements are aligned with their intention. Since movement is aligned with intention, you may communicate more easily through movement- through action. This, we might call a culture of Action. A culture that makes coordinated action easy. Ergocracy, not democracy.
If we’re going to coordinate humanity in the face of existential risk, we must first coordinate ourselves.
How a Bet is a Tax on Bullshit
To cut from the heart of our beliefs, we bet. This creates a feedback loop between our stated beliefs and our action- in this case, since almost everyone wants money, giving ourselves a chance to lose money is a thread that aligns our beliefs with an action. The more we connect our belief to action, the more quickly we are forced to update as things change. Without the pain of the threat of losing money (and through losing money, losing status- which hurts more than losing money since it is a representation of how much we belong to our groups), the surprise from a belief that is not aligned with our expectations can be more easily ignored.
Fighting Tests Alignment
It is no accident that this started with a quote by a duelist. Fighting forces you to place your whole body at risk to test your alignment. Cognition is embodied. If you are misaligned in a fight and you are up against an opponent who is more aligned than you, you will lose (provided that strength, size, and skill advantage is not dramatically in your favor- incidentally this is how smaller agents take on larger agents and win). If you’re reading this, you obsess about alignment on a grand strategic scale. Alignment is also a deciding factor at individual, tactical, and strategic scales . This is repeatedly mentioned through terms like ‘asabiyyah’, ‘unity’, or ‘maintenance of the aim’. As such, you may use your body as an intuition pump for alignment- it’s a laboratory you have access to in every single moment. To better inform your model of alignment, it will pay to learn to fight. No other activity provides feedback as quickly and clearly as fighting. In essence, a fight is a faster tax on bullshit than betting- this is alluded to in the comments of the EconLib post by Bryan Caplan, where user rhhardin mentions that betting was used in place of altercation. Now it’s not just the pain of losing money- it’s the pain of getting punched repeatedly, having a limb broken, or being choked out. It’s the pain of putting maximum skin in the game. With this, you will not forget your surprises as easily. And noticing your surprise, you will adjust.
Where to start?
The following activities are both commonly accessible and provide sufficient ground to test your alignment: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, HEMA, Judo, MMA, Muay Thai, wrestling (freestyle, catch, or Greco-Roman), and boxing. I’ve listed these in order of cultural fit for rationalists. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu even has a rationalist contingent, best represented by BJJ Mental Models. MMA offers the most complete environment (and so is more resistant to bullshit than all the other modes listed here). In Muay Thai, a rationalist-friendly perspective is Sylvie Von Douglas-Ittu. If you want to see what a rational fighter looks like, look at Ryan Hall- whose actions answer ‘yes’ to the question: “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you winning?”
To catch a glimpse into other scales, I recommend US Marine doctrine on Tactics. Of existing military organizations today, their theoretical approach is most aligned with rationalist virtues. This is best exemplified in their doctrine on learning.
I neither up- nor downvoted this—I found it interesting, but not very enlightening or actionable. Mostly, I think physical fighting is a very limited domain of bullshit to test, and while some lessons translate into other domains, that requires a lot of introspection and care that could (for many) be learned without the actual fighting.
I do support the recommendation that most people spend some energy on becoming good at at something competitive, but many things can provide the same benefits, including sports and performance arts. The feedback loops from competition and adversarial planning are important, the specific element of combat less so.
How may they be learned without the actual fighting? What’s the relative speed of the loops and clarity in sports and performance arts? For example, how is a musical performance judged? Is it more or less clear than a fight?
Competition is an important and hard-to-obfuscate part of the feedback—musical performances are judged by what position in the orchestra or what level of venue you’re drawing. But also, like fights, there’s a lot of real feedback in the self-, peer-, and coach-evaluations of practices and exercises.
Fights provide more salient feedback (in the form of the threat of bodily pain and injury) than artistic or sports performance.
Your ability to win a fight is distinct from whether what you are saying is bullshit. Being able to defend your argument by being phsyically stronger then the other party doesn’t make you truth aligned.
You’re saying that your ability to win a fight is based on physical strength?
I’m saying that it’s not based on the quality of most of your empirical beliefs. If I’m telling my friend that I strongly believe that politican X will do Y if elected, my ability to fight has nothing to do with taxing me if that belief is bullshit.
Fighting is fundamentally a faster version of existing interactions. At slower speed you might say it’s not violent, and call it ‘politics’. As such, the most consistent fighters win by noticing and making use of the preferred patterns in their opponents. We might call these patterns ‘bias’. In other words, fighting is won by prediction and surprise. As all cognition uses analogy, to understand coordination at a grand strategic level (like you would want in a question like this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/47pqaDPCmzQBTFija/great-power-conflict), it is useful to understand individual coordination. As such, combat sports and street fights provide a relatively accessible training ground for models of human behavior- a value, after all, is what someone wants, and if not all of you wants to hit the other person, you will not hit the other person.