I liked this post, though as a former MMA instructor, I think it’s worth raising a potential risk of gray spaces: many traditional martial arts seem to be very isolated and sometimes stagnant, and I think part of this is that their rituals eat them alive. You might have to train for three years to spar with a black belt, and then it’s within a very specific set of rules. That means that even serious fighters arent allowed to come in and kick people around (it’s too much work for them to get to that point) and bad ideas / techniques can become entrenched.
I completely agree that stagnation can happen, but I think there are multiple cases:
Stagnation happens and people become less effective at fighting, which was what they were there to do
Stagnation happens and people become less effective at fighting, but they actually weren’t there to fight, they were there for some combination of discipline and exercise and community and camaraderie, and even though they themselves might think that it was “about” fighting, it wasn’t, and they’re actually doing quite well on the axes they genuinely care about
In my mind, this is more of a communication issue and a self-knowledge issue than an “actual” problem? In that both types of academies seem valid to me, and it’s just kind of a shame that the latter kind hasn’t found a way to be honest yet (and this creates a lemons problem for people seeking the first kind).
Late edit: boy howdy do the vote ratios between these two comments (and the lack of subsequent acknowledgement or discussion) affirm rather than contradict my sense of LessWrong not being a great place for co-thinking. (This isn’t Cole’s fault.)
In my mind, this is more of a communication issue and a self-knowledge issue than an “actual” problem?
Seems like it depends on what you want. When I see discussions of community here on LessWrong (and especially comparisons to dojos) I imagine the implicit claim is “and this is how we build a rationality community, which is able to get its members to accomplish their goals”. In this circumstance, you may say “well many LessWrongians actually mostly just want community for community’s sake, so they lie in the second case”.
However for those of us who do actually want a rationalist community (that is, the former case), this indeed does seem like a problem. If you offer the trade “you can add more grayspaces meaning you will build a stronger community, but get worse at accomplishing your explicit goals”, this does not seem so nice, even if there are some who would eat that trade up.
Edit: I do also think its worthwhile thinking about how this grayspaces concept could be modified to mitigate the fault Cole sees. Even in the typical case, usually people in a dojo are there for some mix of the two reasons.
When I see discussions of community here on LessWrong (and especially comparisons to dojos) I imagine the implicit claim is “and this is how we build a rationality community, which is able to get its members to accomplish their goals”. In this circumstance, you may say “well many LessWrongians actually mostly just want community for community’s sake, so they lie in the second case”.
Yeah, my biggest issue with LessWrong (and the broader rationality community generally) is that there seems to me to be much more of a focus on growth and inclusion and togetherness (at the expense of quality) than, like, Actual Standards (that would require telling some people that they’re not pulling their weight and can’t be in the garden anymore).
^ That’s an exaggeration; one person can think the boundary ought to be at level X of effort/intensity/prowess/commitment/whatever, and another person can think it ought to be at 1.5X, and it’s not immediately obvious which of these people is correct. But I at least have found that engaging with nominal “rationalists” tends to drag me down rather than helping me accelerate up/forward.
In that case I think this should have been your response to Cole.
I’d be curious to hear what particular ways you think the rationalist community is prioritizing “growth and inclusion and togetherness (at the expense of quality)”, in part because I wonder whether you aren’t just looking at the parts of the rationality community which are already actually grayspaces. Eg public meetups, or LessWrong itself. And perhaps what you may actually want is more black-belt spaces around here.
Eg if your problem is with the userbase of LessWrong in particular, I think its hard to make a public forum have the level of isolation you’d need to make the user-base black-belt quality. Especially if you don’t have any objective (or trusted subjective) measures of what “black-belt quality” means. Therefore LessWrong can only ever be a grayspace.
I don’t think this argument is exactly true – we review and reject like 30 people a day from LW and accept 1-3, and most of the time we aren’t that optimistic about the 1-3, and it’s not that crazy that we switch to the world where we’re just actually pretty selective.
(I think you are nonetheless pointing at an important thing where, when you factor in a variety of goals / resources available, it probably makes more sense to think of LessWrong as a grayspace. Although I think Duncan also thinks, if it were trying on purpose to be a grayspace, there would be more active effort guiding people towards some particular way of thinking/conversing)
Also, Duncan’s written a fair amount about this both in blogposts and comment-back-and-forths and I’m feeling a bit of sadness of “this convo feels like by default it’s going to rehash the Duncan LW Concerns 101 conversation” instead of saying something new.
Seems false for LessWrong 1.0, I’ve read much of the comments on the old Eliezer posts, and they are far far worse than the present forum. I have less to say on early LessWrong 2.0.
I know you said you don’t have a strong view on the actual history, but the actual history does seem pretty central to your argument here. You are free to choose some other argument for your conclusion however.
No—I really did just mean it as an example scenario, and you can plug in ‘x forum’ for ‘lw’. It was a mistake to use something in my example so close to the object level thing being discussed, but I think the argument ‘[forums founded by small communities] can benefit from selection effects that make them something other than gray spaces’ goes through.
I’m objecting to the ‘only ever’ in your initial statement as too strong.
Maybe SL4, Extropians, or something else is better here (like my former-favorite internet music space, llllllll.co, where all the senior members have now moved to Discord).
I think if I’d used a different example you’d be (rightly) dinging me for relevance rather than accuracy, but I really did mean to say the maybe-irrelevant thing and then reached too far for an existence proof (or not far enough, depending on how you see it).
For my two cents, I enjoy dinner parties full of rationalists where we talk about fanfiction and D&D and bread recipes. I would also enjoy having a dojo full of rationalists where I trained how to think faster and make fewer obvious mistakes. Trying to do that with roughly the same people seems likely to work just fine. Trying to do that at the same time (that is, train thinking faster while eating dinner and talking about D&D) sounds like it would not work.
My guess is I’m not disagreeing with Duncan or Garrett here.
I don’t know if I’m disagreeing with Cole. I actually have an idiosyncratic beef with MMA specifically around its very specific set of rules (at least in the MMA scenes I’ve run into) which made it worse at teaching me to fight than some other arts, though I do think MMA is probably more useful than a randomly selected more ritualistic martial art.
Probably this can be fixed by evaluations- I do like the idea of tossing a few masters from different arts into a ring and seeing what happens, I just think in practice a lot of reasonable-at-first-blush-sensible rules around how that gets done wound up distorting things.
I’m kind of skeptical of this claim because in my experience MMA schools are literally mixed and will take stuff from many different systems, and do tend to be mostly focused on winning real fights. But I would be interested in hearing where you think this falls short.
Most people who train MMA are not training to become professional fighters, so I don’t think the rules of the sport tend to effect the training system that much.
Where I trained, we did ground fighting, kickboxing style sparring, takedowns, and then eventually combined everything, and including in live sparring. Also a little weapons defense. That’s been my experience at most MMA gyms I visited, with some minor variation. I don’t know how a system can train more realistically and still be safe—like Krav Maga guys talk about going for the eyes and argue MMA isn’t hardcore enough basically, but we actually also trained that kind of thing a bit and the reality is you just can’t actually go for the eyes in a sparring match so you mostly focus on the other stuff.
Your skepticism seems warranted! I can’t tell how the rules of the sport affect the training system, and I haven’t studied MMA in depth so maybe it has more answers to problems which I just didn’t find.
the reality is you just can’t actually go for the eyes in a sparring match so you mostly focus on the other stuff.
Yeah, that’s the kind of reasonable-at-first-blush rules that come to mind. This is a tangent to the grayspaces post and if we get more than another back and forth into this I might just try to write this up as its own post. I don’t think what I’ve said above or what I’m saying in this comment should be convincing. Training to completion against a resisting opponent usually means training with moves that won’t put someone in the hospital. I don’t know that’s the wrong tradeoff, training against a resisting opponent is pretty useful.
The circumstances I needed martial arts for were mostly across a weight difference, with varying number of opponents, in an environment full of hard abrasive surfaces. There was a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class that said it was pulling in some MMA techniques (yeah, I know calling MMA a style is a bit weird, pretty sure it was mostly Muay Thai) I tried to learn from, and it proved a trap. Later on I learned a bit more about MMA and the parts that felt like traps seemed to come from assumptions like the ground being okay to land on.
Circling back to the grayspaces-as-worrying-insulation-from-tests; if I imagine a bunch of skilled scientists and a bunch of skilled debaters talking about who has better discussion norms, I could see the scientists saying “look, we’re not going to spar with you by your rules, and we’re not going to let you come in and spar with us either unless you spend some time understanding what we think sucks about your rules.” Maybe the scientists have allowed themselves to become too insulated from someone asking the right questions or from outside perspectives. That does seem like it can happen! But also the debaters are focused on a different purpose and that could be an actual problem.
Late edit: boy howdy do the vote ratios between these two comments (and the lack of subsequent acknowledgement or discussion) affirm rather than contradict my sense of LessWrong not being a great place for co-thinking. (This isn’t Cole’s fault.)
Did I miss something? Curious what the observation was.
(the current vote totals are like 38⁄28 and 12⁄7 for me, which seem unremarkable).
LessWrong is still a really rough place for me to try to do anything other than “present complete thoughts that I am thoroughly ready to defend.”
The fact that some other comments trickled in, and that the vote ratios stabilized, was definitely an improvement over the situation in the first 36h, but I think it’s not super cruxy? It was more of a crisp example (at the time) of the larger gestalt that demoralizes me, and it ceasing to be an example doesn’t mean the gestalt went away.
One of the things that hurts me when I try to be on LessWrong is something like ….…
A person will make a comment that has lots of skewed summaries and misinterpretations and just-plain-wrong claims about the claims it says its responding to (but it’s actually strawmanning)
Someone else will make an effortful rebuttal that corrects the misconceptions of the top-level comment and sometimes even answers the steel version of its complaint
The top comment will continue to accrue upvotes at a substantially faster clip than the lower comment, despite being meaningfully wrong, and it won’t ever get edited or fixed and it just keeps anchoring people on wrongthoughts forever
The lower comment gets largely ignored and often people don’t even engage with it at all
...all of which lives in my soul as a sort of despair that might be described as “yeah, so, if you want to give people a platform upon which to strawman you and then gain lots of local status and also infect the broader crowd very efficiently with their uncanny-valley version of your ideas such that it becomes even harder to actually talk about the thing you wanted to talk about … post it on LW!”
A whole other way to gesture at the same problem is something like, out in the real world I often find myself completely alone against the mob, fighting for either [truth] or [goodness] or both. And that’s fine. The real world makes no promises about me-not-finding-myself-alone.
But LessWrong, by its name and mission and sometimes by explicit promise or encouragement, is “supposed” to be the sort of place where I’m not completely alone against the mob. For one thing, the mob is supposed to be good instead of bad, and for another, there are supposed to be other people around who are also fighting the good fight, and not just me all by myself.
(There’s some hyperbole here, but.)
Instead, definitely not all the time but enough times that it matters, and enough times that it’s hurt me over and over again, and enough times that it produces strong hesitation, I’ve found myself completely alone with even high-status LWers (sometimes even senior mods!) just straightforwardly acting as the forces of darkness and madness and enacting mindkilledness and advocating for terrible and anti-epistemic things and it just hurts real bad. The feeling of betrayal and rug-pulled-out is much worse because this was supposed to be a place where people who care about collaborative truth-seeking could reliably find others to collaborate with.
I can find people to think productively with on LessWrong. But I can’t rely on it. More than 20% of the time, it goes badly, and “do an expansive and vulnerable thing in an environment where you will be stabbed for it one time out of five” just … kinda doesn’t work.
I have tried thinking about what’s the best way to avoid the groupthink that exists on most social media forums and also on lesswrong. I’m not yet convinced it can be solved at the level of software, the underlying social graph is fucked up.
There is no agreed upon definition of “good” on lesswrong. Theres people pro and against:
various AI alignment research agendas
various AI governance agendas
human genetic engineering
utilitarianism
longtermism
transhumanism of various types—such as human genetic engg, whole brain emulation, etc
Getting questions like this right or wrong is going to affect everything. Literal billions of people may well end up living or dying based on how these discussions go. (And yes I mean present day people, not hypothetical future people.)
I’m morally against a majority of the ideas proposed on lesswrong so I’m well aware it’s a hostile place for me.
I understand you are not here to discuss longtermism or whatever, but I’m just making you aware that’s what the “mob” also does at this place so ofcourse the same behaviour carries over to your replies.
I don’t really have firsthand knowledge of the academies which are not focused on fighting—I always assumed they wanted to be about fighting, so i found this an interesting point, though I can’t really assess its accuracy. Plenty of the students who ended up in MMA from other traditions did seem to be looking for real fighting skills, but that’s possibly a selection bias.
I liked this post, though as a former MMA instructor, I think it’s worth raising a potential risk of gray spaces: many traditional martial arts seem to be very isolated and sometimes stagnant, and I think part of this is that their rituals eat them alive. You might have to train for three years to spar with a black belt, and then it’s within a very specific set of rules. That means that even serious fighters arent allowed to come in and kick people around (it’s too much work for them to get to that point) and bad ideas / techniques can become entrenched.
I completely agree that stagnation can happen, but I think there are multiple cases:
Stagnation happens and people become less effective at fighting, which was what they were there to do
Stagnation happens and people become less effective at fighting, but they actually weren’t there to fight, they were there for some combination of discipline and exercise and community and camaraderie, and even though they themselves might think that it was “about” fighting, it wasn’t, and they’re actually doing quite well on the axes they genuinely care about
In my mind, this is more of a communication issue and a self-knowledge issue than an “actual” problem? In that both types of academies seem valid to me, and it’s just kind of a shame that the latter kind hasn’t found a way to be honest yet (and this creates a lemons problem for people seeking the first kind).
Late edit: boy howdy do the vote ratios between these two comments (and the lack of subsequent acknowledgement or discussion) affirm rather than contradict my sense of LessWrong not being a great place for co-thinking. (This isn’t Cole’s fault.)
Seems like it depends on what you want. When I see discussions of community here on LessWrong (and especially comparisons to dojos) I imagine the implicit claim is “and this is how we build a rationality community, which is able to get its members to accomplish their goals”. In this circumstance, you may say “well many LessWrongians actually mostly just want community for community’s sake, so they lie in the second case”.
However for those of us who do actually want a rationalist community (that is, the former case), this indeed does seem like a problem. If you offer the trade “you can add more grayspaces meaning you will build a stronger community, but get worse at accomplishing your explicit goals”, this does not seem so nice, even if there are some who would eat that trade up.
Edit: I do also think its worthwhile thinking about how this grayspaces concept could be modified to mitigate the fault Cole sees. Even in the typical case, usually people in a dojo are there for some mix of the two reasons.
Yeah, my biggest issue with LessWrong (and the broader rationality community generally) is that there seems to me to be much more of a focus on growth and inclusion and togetherness (at the expense of quality) than, like, Actual Standards (that would require telling some people that they’re not pulling their weight and can’t be in the garden anymore).
^ That’s an exaggeration; one person can think the boundary ought to be at level X of effort/intensity/prowess/commitment/whatever, and another person can think it ought to be at 1.5X, and it’s not immediately obvious which of these people is correct. But I at least have found that engaging with nominal “rationalists” tends to drag me down rather than helping me accelerate up/forward.
In that case I think this should have been your response to Cole.
I’d be curious to hear what particular ways you think the rationalist community is prioritizing “growth and inclusion and togetherness (at the expense of quality)”, in part because I wonder whether you aren’t just looking at the parts of the rationality community which are already actually grayspaces. Eg public meetups, or LessWrong itself. And perhaps what you may actually want is more black-belt spaces around here.
Eg if your problem is with the userbase of LessWrong in particular, I think its hard to make a public forum have the level of isolation you’d need to make the user-base black-belt quality. Especially if you don’t have any objective (or trusted subjective) measures of what “black-belt quality” means. Therefore LessWrong can only ever be a grayspace.
I don’t think this argument is exactly true – we review and reject like 30 people a day from LW and accept 1-3, and most of the time we aren’t that optimistic about the 1-3, and it’s not that crazy that we switch to the world where we’re just actually pretty selective.
(I think you are nonetheless pointing at an important thing where, when you factor in a variety of goals / resources available, it probably makes more sense to think of LessWrong as a grayspace. Although I think Duncan also thinks, if it were trying on purpose to be a grayspace, there would be more active effort guiding people towards some particular way of thinking/conversing)
Also, Duncan’s written a fair amount about this both in blogposts and comment-back-and-forths and I’m feeling a bit of sadness of “this convo feels like by default it’s going to rehash the Duncan LW Concerns 101 conversation” instead of saying something new.
Some recap:
Concentration of Force
Duncan Sabien on Moderating LessWrong
Nit: selection effects can lead to a de facto black belt setting, as I think some would consider LW 1.0 or early LW 2.0.
As the paths here become broader, more numerous, it becomes a gray space.
[I don’t have a strong view on the Actual History; I just want to tell a plausible story pushing back against ‘can only ever be’.]
Seems false for LessWrong 1.0, I’ve read much of the comments on the old Eliezer posts, and they are far far worse than the present forum. I have less to say on early LessWrong 2.0.
I know you said you don’t have a strong view on the actual history, but the actual history does seem pretty central to your argument here. You are free to choose some other argument for your conclusion however.
No—I really did just mean it as an example scenario, and you can plug in ‘x forum’ for ‘lw’. It was a mistake to use something in my example so close to the object level thing being discussed, but I think the argument ‘[forums founded by small communities] can benefit from selection effects that make them something other than gray spaces’ goes through.
I’m objecting to the ‘only ever’ in your initial statement as too strong.
Maybe SL4, Extropians, or something else is better here (like my former-favorite internet music space, llllllll.co, where all the senior members have now moved to Discord).
I think if I’d used a different example you’d be (rightly) dinging me for relevance rather than accuracy, but I really did mean to say the maybe-irrelevant thing and then reached too far for an existence proof (or not far enough, depending on how you see it).
I agree that if nobody knows about your forum other than the black-belts, then your forum will be black-belt quality.
For my two cents, I enjoy dinner parties full of rationalists where we talk about fanfiction and D&D and bread recipes. I would also enjoy having a dojo full of rationalists where I trained how to think faster and make fewer obvious mistakes. Trying to do that with roughly the same people seems likely to work just fine. Trying to do that at the same time (that is, train thinking faster while eating dinner and talking about D&D) sounds like it would not work.
My guess is I’m not disagreeing with Duncan or Garrett here.
I don’t know if I’m disagreeing with Cole. I actually have an idiosyncratic beef with MMA specifically around its very specific set of rules (at least in the MMA scenes I’ve run into) which made it worse at teaching me to fight than some other arts, though I do think MMA is probably more useful than a randomly selected more ritualistic martial art.
Probably this can be fixed by evaluations- I do like the idea of tossing a few masters from different arts into a ring and seeing what happens, I just think in practice a lot of reasonable-at-first-blush-sensible rules around how that gets done wound up distorting things.
I’m kind of skeptical of this claim because in my experience MMA schools are literally mixed and will take stuff from many different systems, and do tend to be mostly focused on winning real fights. But I would be interested in hearing where you think this falls short.
Most people who train MMA are not training to become professional fighters, so I don’t think the rules of the sport tend to effect the training system that much.
Where I trained, we did ground fighting, kickboxing style sparring, takedowns, and then eventually combined everything, and including in live sparring. Also a little weapons defense. That’s been my experience at most MMA gyms I visited, with some minor variation. I don’t know how a system can train more realistically and still be safe—like Krav Maga guys talk about going for the eyes and argue MMA isn’t hardcore enough basically, but we actually also trained that kind of thing a bit and the reality is you just can’t actually go for the eyes in a sparring match so you mostly focus on the other stuff.
Your skepticism seems warranted! I can’t tell how the rules of the sport affect the training system, and I haven’t studied MMA in depth so maybe it has more answers to problems which I just didn’t find.
Yeah, that’s the kind of reasonable-at-first-blush rules that come to mind. This is a tangent to the grayspaces post and if we get more than another back and forth into this I might just try to write this up as its own post. I don’t think what I’ve said above or what I’m saying in this comment should be convincing. Training to completion against a resisting opponent usually means training with moves that won’t put someone in the hospital. I don’t know that’s the wrong tradeoff, training against a resisting opponent is pretty useful.
The circumstances I needed martial arts for were mostly across a weight difference, with varying number of opponents, in an environment full of hard abrasive surfaces. There was a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class that said it was pulling in some MMA techniques (yeah, I know calling MMA a style is a bit weird, pretty sure it was mostly Muay Thai) I tried to learn from, and it proved a trap. Later on I learned a bit more about MMA and the parts that felt like traps seemed to come from assumptions like the ground being okay to land on.
Circling back to the grayspaces-as-worrying-insulation-from-tests; if I imagine a bunch of skilled scientists and a bunch of skilled debaters talking about who has better discussion norms, I could see the scientists saying “look, we’re not going to spar with you by your rules, and we’re not going to let you come in and spar with us either unless you spend some time understanding what we think sucks about your rules.” Maybe the scientists have allowed themselves to become too insulated from someone asking the right questions or from outside perspectives. That does seem like it can happen! But also the debaters are focused on a different purpose and that could be an actual problem.
Meh, the debate team and the scientists know they’re aiming at different things, that’s not a great example on my part.
Did I miss something? Curious what the observation was.
(the current vote totals are like 38⁄28 and 12⁄7 for me, which seem unremarkable).
For a while it was like 31⁄21 and 2⁄0 with no further commentary.
@Duncan Sabien (Inactive): given the updated totals @habryka mentioned does this increase your sense of LessWrong being a great place for co-thinking?
(Current totals are 42⁄39 and 16⁄11.)
LessWrong is still a really rough place for me to try to do anything other than “present complete thoughts that I am thoroughly ready to defend.”
The fact that some other comments trickled in, and that the vote ratios stabilized, was definitely an improvement over the situation in the first 36h, but I think it’s not super cruxy? It was more of a crisp example (at the time) of the larger gestalt that demoralizes me, and it ceasing to be an example doesn’t mean the gestalt went away.
One of the things that hurts me when I try to be on LessWrong is something like ….…
A person will make a comment that has lots of skewed summaries and misinterpretations and just-plain-wrong claims about the claims it says its responding to (but it’s actually strawmanning)
Someone else will make an effortful rebuttal that corrects the misconceptions of the top-level comment and sometimes even answers the steel version of its complaint
The top comment will continue to accrue upvotes at a substantially faster clip than the lower comment, despite being meaningfully wrong, and it won’t ever get edited or fixed and it just keeps anchoring people on wrongthoughts forever
The lower comment gets largely ignored and often people don’t even engage with it at all
...all of which lives in my soul as a sort of despair that might be described as “yeah, so, if you want to give people a platform upon which to strawman you and then gain lots of local status and also infect the broader crowd very efficiently with their uncanny-valley version of your ideas such that it becomes even harder to actually talk about the thing you wanted to talk about … post it on LW!”
A whole other way to gesture at the same problem is something like, out in the real world I often find myself completely alone against the mob, fighting for either [truth] or [goodness] or both. And that’s fine. The real world makes no promises about me-not-finding-myself-alone.
But LessWrong, by its name and mission and sometimes by explicit promise or encouragement, is “supposed” to be the sort of place where I’m not completely alone against the mob. For one thing, the mob is supposed to be good instead of bad, and for another, there are supposed to be other people around who are also fighting the good fight, and not just me all by myself.
(There’s some hyperbole here, but.)
Instead, definitely not all the time but enough times that it matters, and enough times that it’s hurt me over and over again, and enough times that it produces strong hesitation, I’ve found myself completely alone with even high-status LWers (sometimes even senior mods!) just straightforwardly acting as the forces of darkness and madness and enacting mindkilledness and advocating for terrible and anti-epistemic things and it just hurts real bad. The feeling of betrayal and rug-pulled-out is much worse because this was supposed to be a place where people who care about collaborative truth-seeking could reliably find others to collaborate with.
I can find people to think productively with on LessWrong. But I can’t rely on it. More than 20% of the time, it goes badly, and “do an expansive and vulnerable thing in an environment where you will be stabbed for it one time out of five” just … kinda doesn’t work.
I have tried thinking about what’s the best way to avoid the groupthink that exists on most social media forums and also on lesswrong. I’m not yet convinced it can be solved at the level of software, the underlying social graph is fucked up.
There is no agreed upon definition of “good” on lesswrong. Theres people pro and against:
various AI alignment research agendas
various AI governance agendas
human genetic engineering
utilitarianism
longtermism
transhumanism of various types—such as human genetic engg, whole brain emulation, etc
Getting questions like this right or wrong is going to affect everything. Literal billions of people may well end up living or dying based on how these discussions go. (And yes I mean present day people, not hypothetical future people.)
I’m morally against a majority of the ideas proposed on lesswrong so I’m well aware it’s a hostile place for me.
I understand you are not here to discuss longtermism or whatever, but I’m just making you aware that’s what the “mob” also does at this place so ofcourse the same behaviour carries over to your replies.
I don’t really have firsthand knowledge of the academies which are not focused on fighting—I always assumed they wanted to be about fighting, so i found this an interesting point, though I can’t really assess its accuracy. Plenty of the students who ended up in MMA from other traditions did seem to be looking for real fighting skills, but that’s possibly a selection bias.
Dojo storming. Tournaments.
Essentially ritualistic exposure to the outside world, with different norms from internal interaction