Breaking down excellently all martial arts and how to make them effective. Excellent rational and thought out series if arguments.
Yeah, I saw that. Excellent stuff. The only bit I took issue with was when he talked about competition. It's a common rhetorical device to use etymology to give the impression of deeper meanings in words, but really it's just the case that words change meaning. Competere in Latin does not share the same meaning as competition in English. It really bugged me when he said that science is a competition. Competition is generally deleterious to science; it leads to reputations being staked on academic work instead of academic work being staked on evidence (exactly the kind of thing he dislikes about "fantasy martial arts"), and taken to the extreme leads to awful behaviour such as 19th Century palaeontologists blowing up dinosaur bones with dynamite so that the competition couldn't dig them up. What he was really talking about was collaboration, he just used etymology to make it seem as if competition somehow also means collaboration. While winning competitions is the motivation for innovation in combat sports, it is the collaborative efforts of those within a gym that produces refinement and innovation. Competition is not the place to refine, experiment and innovate; that happens with friends and colleagues in a non-competitive environment. Small nit-pick really, the rest of it was gold.
...there's an interview that Aikido kid just released with Peter Boghossian that is interesting too, but there's too much swearing for me to embed the video.
WARNING: BAD LANGUAGE IN THIS VIDEO Peter Boghossian, faculty member at Portland State University, talks about critical thinking, both generally and specifically in relation to martial arts:
