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.
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.