Oh, sure. Kicking my ass is no big thing.
I've already expressed my view on the ass-kicking thing at length in the past.
Otherwise, I agree with most, although am probably more open to reasoning about human behaviour that takes evolutionary biology as input.
I thought from what you've said about savate that you specialized in head-, rather than ass-, kicking. But as a meek and non-violent person, the difference to me is moot.
Wow. Just reading that post was invigorating.
I thought from what you've said about savate that you specialized in head-, rather than ass-, kicking
Assuming Megan did Olympic style TKD she also specialized in head kicking.
re: 4
Heh, it wasn't a savate versus anything viewpoint.* More a 'really big & aggressive beats small & skilled [irrespective of particular martial art] as near 100% of the time as makes no difference'.
* In this context I have no particular axe to grind for my own martial art. It has good things about it and bad things about it just like anything else.
3. I didn't read Megan as denying evolutionary biology as input, but as stressing the fact that the great evolutionary trick of H. sapiens is to be able to act outside the constraints of instinct or conditioning. People already refuted the "back on the veldt" argument, by leaving the veldt.
The list looks right to me.
I'd probably be more specific on the math one, and say that population differences in math ability (unless the populations are already sorted by an academic ability) are mostly a function of social constructs. Person-to-person variation in math ability I'd still chalk up mostly to natural variation/inherent ability, though training certainly makes no insignificant difference.
Also, I really like meat.
But otherwise, bravo. It is a massive shame you had to have moderated comments to say that without horrendous bigoted trolling.
Vox Day, Goldberg, I can never keep them straight.
Yeah, I have no actual opinions about combat. Although at the little-kid TKD level, the big-strong-maybe-not-quite-so-fast-and-skilled approach does seem to work -- watching Sally spar is hysterical. She's not taller than the kids she's fighting, but she's just a solid, strong kid. So you end up with someone running in circles around her doing these neato moves but kind of bouncing off her, and then she connects and they fall down. Presumably she'll pick up some more speed and skill before she loses her raw power advantage.
re: 11
I think that the claim that H. Sapiens is able to freely act outside those constraints isn't a settled issue. Crude ev-psych is laughably false. That doesn't mean that humans have transcended our evolutionary past. That's nit-picking on my part, though.
Right, the idea that humans can reflect on inclination doesn't mean that humans' inclinations might be a certain way in part b/c of the way they evolved.
Refusing to let a malevolent jackass spread ego-stroking, self-serving generalizations on a blog is not censorship or intolerance. It is protecting the discussion for people who want to read more than repetitive inane arguments that devolve into personal attacks.
I don't disagree with the above, but I disagree with the fact of the explanation. I think "My blog, fuck off," is all the explanation that should initially be provided.
14: That's awesome. I'm imagining Sally with a puzzled look: "You hit me. You do nothing. Stab.. in his liver!"
15: That's probably right on the nit-pick level, but I think Megan has in mind the Pop-Sci Veldt of the 1950s, which prove that women are meant to wear pearls and do housework because math makes their brains overheat.
Sorry, 16 is wrong. I meant to make the point that capacities for reflection, etc. are compatible with interesting ev psych explanations of preferences.
Well, and it's nitpicking that rests a whole lot on "freely" and "transcended". Someone living in an apartment building in Reykjavik is living a life that's pretty far removed from the plains of East Africa -- you don't need to say that there's no evolutionary influence on human behavior at all to think that for any particular behavior, there's no good reason to assume that it's constrained to behavior similar to that of a Pleistociene hunter-gatherer.
15: IOW, though we may be capable of rational thought, we nevertheless continue to make totally irrational choices?
21: Observationally, that sounds pretty accurate.
Yeah, what I had in mind was similar to F in 19.
I suspect that any perfected future psychology is going to involve a lot of explanations that are rooted in our evolutionary past.
That doesn't mean that Megan's dismissal of dumb-pop-evolutionary-psychology is wrong.
21 is a good example, right? Isn't the best explanation for pervasive Tversky/Kahneman sorts of errors an evolutionary one?
pervasive Tversky/Kahneman sorts of errors
Link or summary for the undereducated?
20: Ex recto, but I think a good evolutionary psychology explanation would look like a good evolutionary biology one, where the science is there down to the molecule and it isn't explaining some phenomenon that is only true of Western societies since the invention of the television.
23 is making me think about how many fields are like EP -- theoretically valuable areas to explores, that are nonetheless totally poisoned in my mind because the vast, vast majority of proponents, arguments, explanations, etc. I've run across have been in profoundly bad faith.
I don't think there are a lot -- but of course I wouldn't want to, since I like to think of myself as a fairminded, clear-thinking person who doesn't dismiss entire fields.
Maybe zero-population growth.
Much research on conscious awareness argues against the idea that we really are consciously choosing our behavior most of the time.
Swell list otherwise, although I would advise against getting in too many bar fights.
24: yes, although those are a lot more fine-grained than most evpsych knuckleheads are talking about.
but I think a good evolutionary psychology explanation would look like a good evolutionary biology one, where the science is there down to the molecule and it isn't explaining some phenomenon that is only true of Western societies since the invention of the television.
Agreed.
26 cont: e.g., an evolutionary explanation that explains why people jump to conclusions based on little evidence.
Also, Ttam is right about actual fights & training. Training helps. Training can help you do better than you would otherwise. Training can help you against bigger people. But the bigger person doesn't have to be as trained or as lucky to win.
31: actually that's pretty darn well understood as far as cognition goes (which isn't saying all that much).
I don't think there are a lot -- but of course I wouldn't want to, since I like to think of myself as a fairminded, clear-thinking person who doesn't dismiss entire fields.
Yeah, I had a life-changing experience in high school, working as a research assistant for someone doing social science research. And she was relying on an untrained 15-year old to do work I wasn't competent to do, and she didn't understand the statistics she was relying on at all. Like, less than I did. And the paper was published in a respectable journal.
Without that, there's a good shot I would have headed toward some sort of social science career. As it was, while I didn't think about it as much or as consciously as I should have, the experience really turned me off the social sciences -- anything that wasn't either hard science, or straightforward humanities, struck me as unmitigated bullshit. I've gotten over it some since then, but it had a serious effect on my college choices.
There is a disconnect in her list. She says that men benefit from feminism because they are able to express a wider range of ways to be. Then she goes on to talk about all the "extravagant, promiscuous, incredibly good sex" she can have as a liberated woman.
Obviously, the main way men benefit from feminism is that it empowers women to seek "extravagant, promiscuous, incredibly good sex." I know that's the main reason I'm a feminist(*)
(*) that and, you know, a basic respect for human dignity.
the experience really turned me off the social sciences
Silly LB, you should have thought "this field is full of idiots, I'll be a superstar."
Much research on conscious awareness argues against the idea that we really are consciously choosing our behavior most of the time.
Somewhat related, I remember reading something a long while back (I think it was "Emotional Intelligence") where the author talked about how emotion was as critical to good decisionmaking as reason -- based on brain injury studies where the portion of the brain controlling emotion had been destroyed, but the portions controlling language, mathematical reasoning, etc. remained intact.
36: why get over it? You were mostly righ, after all.
Man, I can't wait until they start moderating Unfogged threads.
40: Well, it's stuff I'm interested in, and would, in retrospect, have liked to have had more training in.
41: Oh, my occasional descents into incoherent rage are in fact a tightly planned moderation technique.
As someone at least nominally 'in' the humanities, I think that most people in the humanities and social sciences* are full of shit, also. So, I don't think you're alone.
* that said, some of the most consistently interesting stuff I've read in the course of my doctoral work has been by social scientists.
36: so you became a lawyer to get away from the unmitigated bullshit?
Demonizing fat people is hilarious.
I just happened to read Twisty Faster's policy on comments and I completely agree (except that ROTFL doesn't bother me). I also like Twisty's manner of expression. We do have substantive differences of course.
Not that Megan is like Twisty or anything. Or unlike Twisty either. Megan is Twisty-neutral as far as I am concerned.
I'm just saying that site owners can moderate as aggressively as they want and no one should complain. I've voluntarily left sites with no hard feelings, and I've been banned without hard feelings too. (I've quit trolling Crooked Timber BTW. You see, the whole time I was just trying to get them to ban some of their other trolls.
I agree with ttaM about ev psych. In particular, when you see pervasive odd individual behavior that doesn't really make sense in the contemporary world, including odd gendered behavior, amybe there's some kind of ev psych component.
It's not all negative stuff, either. Gintis and others have produced an ev psych argument that the "economic man" ruled by self-interest is a bizarre fictional construct, and not descriptive. (There were already plenty of arguments that it should not be normative, but economists countered that with the claim to be scientific and realistic.)
Likewise, a recent ev-psych claim that there are five hard-wired sources of morality (fairness, aversion to harm, solidarity, purity, and respect) helps account for lot of the resistance to seemingly-logical progressive proposals (both free-market type and socialist type).
Progress often consists of overriding and suppressing deeply-rooted behavior patterns (e.g., revenge killing, sexual possessiveness, and resentment of outsiders), but progressives often assume that the original human material is neutral, which it isn't.
so you became a lawyer to get away from the unmitigated bullshit
Unmitigated, but openly acknowledged bullshit. Not having to pretend your bullshit is empirical truth really opens you up to new and exciting heights of bullshit.
As an aside, I've seen "ex recto" on this site so many times, that I'm worried that I'll accidentally use it in real life. I could easily say it in an affected way in conversation where a simple "out of my ass" would work better, but I wonder whether I might not use it in written form too.
36, 44: But, see, for me at least the interestingness of the field is separate from the incompetence of the practitioners. That is, I've read thousands of pieces of social science research that I thought were poorly reasoned or badly supported or whatever, but it wasn't anywhere near bad enough that I thought the field was not worth paying attention to or trying to improve.
It's the difference between griping about the faults of the NYT and refusing to read some nutty newsletter that says HIV is a myth.
27, 36: For me at least, I would say at this point in our development as a species just about any field of science or inquiry that ends up attempting to explain any individual or group behavior of human beings above the purely physical level (other than some very basic reflexes) is fraught with problems*. We just have not gotten very good yet at any disciplined self-examination**. Even sciences like geology and basic biology were "delayed" by centuries in comparison to physics and chemistry because of their indirect relationship to our beliefs and behaviors.
*There is a lot of good work, absolutely it is not all statistical errors or sloppiness, I just thing teasing out causes and effects and unintentional bias etc. etc is a bit beyond us.
**And it is a real issue that people (marketers etc.) have developed naive yet effective strategies that exploit some of our behavioral tendencies when we do not have coherent and universally accepted explanations that we can use to build effective countermeasures.
48: Exactly. I'm highly skilled at producing bullshit, but that's explictly my job as a lawyer -- the thought of a job where I was formally supposed to be expanding the scope of human knowledge, but was nonetheless rewarded for producing bullshit, is kind of horrifying.
I was hoping you'd be proud of that outburst, Emerson.
Also, the troll that's after me? He's mean. Can you talk to the troll guild about reassigning him?
I worry about people with Megan's ass-kicking confidence: unless she's actually been in a fight (and I don't know either way), much martial arts training can be very misleading. TKD spars, but does so under such a restricted ruleset that it encourages unrealistic assessments of ability. Overconfidence can be lethal
26: It isn't explaining some phenomenon that is only true of Western societies since the invention of the television.
In a lot of ways, though, modern Western societies are the progressive ones. For example, in XIXc China the Protestant missionaries were sexually progressive, because they encouraged young people to choose their own spouses and allowed unmarried couples to appear in public together.
Is the trolling still visible? I poked around and didn't see it. If not, what's his issue?
And science reporting is uniformly awful. A study finds a tentative link between coffee consumption and miscarriage, and the paper trumpets it as That Latte Is Why You Are Infertile, Bitch. Since no one reads the study, the latter is what sticks in everyone's head. Then two years later Oops, Lattes Are Okay. And then people conclude that scientists don't know anything and Turn Themselves Purple With Colloidal Natural Silver.
As an aside, I've seen "ex recto" on this site so many times, that I'm worried that I'll accidentally use it in real life.
I have deliberately started using ex recto IRL.
57 - it is that guy from back in October. He stayed around for a month that time. Wrote me this, after a week of trying to pick fights in other ways:
***
Great post! Except it doesn't contain a passive-aggressive attack against men, whitey, breeders, or Christians; do you still get paid your nickel from the Soros fund?
Friend to men my clavicle. I took the time to read some of your posts and holy fuck it's worse than I thought.
And your blogroll? Did you consciously apply a filter to weed basic human decency from it? You're hideous, everything you stand for is hideous, and that is the precise reason why you are such a control freak on your blog: you know bloody well I am right.
Nihilist cunt. You are a cancer on humans and earth.
***
I am sortof delighted that he thinks I am a Korean lesbian, but...
unless she's actually been in a fight (and I don't know either way), much martial arts training can be very misleading.
Man, is that ever true. They have weight classes for a reason. It would take a big training advantage for the average 5' 9" 150 lb guy to win a fight against the average 6' 2", 220 lb guy.
Anyway, I'm off for a while. You'll use your troll connections, right Emerson?
Holy smokes, Megan, talk about Trolly McTroll. Dude needs to be hiding under a bridge somewhere.
Someone should be writing the fairy-tale analogy for managing online communities. Maybe Teresa NH already has...?
BAA I CHALLENGE YOU TO STEP INTO THE SQUARE CIRCLE WITH ME, BROTHER!
36: I've had two friends who did statistics work for scientists (psychologists and medical biologists). Both were unimpressed with the scientists' understanding of statistics and scientific method. (One of the statisticians was a sociologist, BTW. Sociologists actually can be statistically more sophisticated than "harder" scientists, because sociologists are less respected and have to prove more. Someone at Crooked Timber has mentioned this. Cosma Shalizi has written stuff about misuse of multiple regression, etc., as have some heterodox economists).
Another friend was asked to add a statistical section to his ESL / Applied Linguistics thesis. His first statistician told him that his data disconfirmed his conclusions, but rather than rewrite from scratch he just found another statistician. He knew that the head of the program had no understanding of statistics.)
dooce used to have a policy of publishing hateful e-mails in their entirety, including the person's e-mail address.
Yow. What a freak. Have you thought about disemvoweling, if he keeps it up? I have a sense that it's more effective than deletion unless you're really on top of making sure nothing gets through undeleted -- deletion turns into a game, but disemvoweling does less so.
That's not trolling, that's just nastiness.
It would take a big training advantage for the average 5' 9" 150 lb guy to win a fight against the average 6' 2", 220 lb guy.
You might enjoy this.
68: It's trolling because it's a performance for the other men (he imagines) who are reading. If it were nastiness, it would be an e-mail.
I don't think Emerson is rightly classified as a troll: he's more of a Clarke-ian elf, inviting you down hithertofore unseen paths, dangerous and mysterious.
If it were nastiness, it would be an e-mail.
Oh, sorry, I thought it was an email.
39: That's Damasio's big argument.
All social scientists (and psychologists) have a vested interest in proving that non-scientists are stupid and don't really know what they're doing. They have to delegitimize folk understanding in order to establish scientific understanding. Sometimes this is justified, but this ploy has also been used to steam-roll valid objections to socially-scientifically based programs. (And for a specialist, all non-specialists are "folk", even if they have Nobel Prizes in some other science.)
58: not uniformly, but probably within the margin of error, yeah.
61: Not really, we just have to train in the right things. I sprint, for example. It's only apo who's screwed.
Labs, did you see that the latest wwe gimmic will be Floyd Merriwether fighting ... The Big Show.
As we know, it's about the excellence of execution.
I'm sure he meant to say "Kantian nihilist".
Joking aside, ew.
Baa, I *did* see that. Didn't Show get his nose broken?
You know, I hate trolls, but after a while I acquired the taste for insulting them. I cut back on commenting at Crooked Timber because I was spending more and more time thinking of insults.
Physicists are comically naive about statistics, but they can always do another experiment, so it doesn't matter. This makes their total confidence that they automatically understand it better than any social scientist kinda funny.
About the fighting thing: I used to believe, thanks to HK action movies, that a trained kung fu person could kick the ass of a much bigger but untrained person. Since then, I've seen people confidently assert that training cannot overcome a large disparity in size and strength. Does anyone really know? Has someone done a study or something?
"I don't know karate, but I know crazy and I'm willing to use it!"
Yow. What a freak.
What she said. I'm always kind of amazed by the sort of person who'll put time and effort into seeking out people to say nasty things to. I think "My Blog, fuck off" is a sufficiently explanatory comment policy, too.
79: A lot depends on context. In a kung fu match? Probably. In a bar fight? Too many variables.
unless she's actually been in a fight (and I don't know either way), much martial arts training can be very misleading. TKD spars, but does so under such a restricted ruleset that it encourages unrealistic assessments of ability.
I am curious about this issue.
I have no doubt that Megan is tough, but I wonder whether she could kick the ass of a man who is much bigger and significantly stronger.
We need some demonstrations. Megan v. anyone other than me.
You got a Tversky link, but here is a good introduction to the work he did with his frequent collaborator Daniel Kahneman on the many, many problems with rational choice theory. (You'll have to scroll down a bit.) Among many other more important things he did, Tversky and a non-Kahneman collaborator wrote the paper that attempted to prove the existence of hot streaks in basketball, which is in mind the best and most comprehensible introduction to the totality of his work, most of which sums up as, "People are wired to find patterns, even when they're not there, and judge based on gut instinct, even when it's totally wrong."
I want to add that I have tremendous respect for female athletes. I've trained with many amazing women who were incredibly tough.
Hot streaks exist and anyone who says different is an idiot. I didn't realize it was that guy.
I don't see how any amount of training could help someone defeat a moderately-well-trained who was not only stronger but also had a significantly longer reach. The bigger person would have to be terribly slow and unwary to lose.
Martial artists of any size have a big advantage fighting people with no training or experience at all, and also people who don't fight except when they've lost their temper. And some big strong guys are easy to beat because they just don't fight.
79: My entirely unexperienced sense, from listening to people who sound like they know what they're talking about, is as follows. The biggest difference is between someone who actually gets in fights on some reasonably regular basis and someone who doesn't -- someone with a clear sense of how hitting people works practically and socially has probably clubbed you unconscious with a bottle while you're still wondering what's going to happen next, and this effect probably overcomes a whole lot of raw size and strength disparities. Once people are on a rough level in terms of knowing what's going to happen next, size and strength which depends a lot on size are the biggest factors -- you need a whole lot of skill to overcome a big strength disparity. And then high-level skills come into play.
Take this for what it's worth -- my experience with hitting people or getting hit is very minimal. It's just an attempt to boil down what credible sounding people bullshitting about this stuff have said that I remember.
LB plays the Bas Rutten video over and over, studying it in preparation for the next Unfogged meetup.
Hot streaks exist and anyone who says different is an idiot.
Technically the argument is "if hot streaks exits, they occur no more frequently than would be expected in a random distribution."
So, the days when you are visited by the "shot fairy" (h/t truehoop) may happen, and may feel subjectively different at the time, not just after the fact, but they are not enough to make the distribution different from a random distribution in a statistically significant way.
85: "Clavicle" in that sentence looks like "I could be battering you into submission with the incredible of force of abusive profanity at my fingertips, but I won't, because I'm a classy person who's better than you." Given that the comment went on to call her a cunt, it doesn't really make sense, but in isolation I'd read it like that.
I love insulting trolls. To me it's a harmless hobby, albeit socially useless. Like collecting knick knacks, or playing foosball (the bar game). At CT this habit of mine infuriates frequent-commenter Lemuel Pitkin.
I've noticed that. I find Lemuel's reactions kinda hilarious. It's like he lives in a different, much politer, social world than the rest of us.
Engaging trolls is actually pretty annoying, but we've given up trying to reform you, Emerson.
By far the nastiest thing that's ever been said/written to me was in response to a misdirected e-mail. My longtime therapist left town, and after a year or two I wrote to her to give her an update. I told her, among other things, that I had started dating men (I had been dating women the entire time I saw her) and that my mother had died (she already knew my mom had cancer).
I accidentally sent it to someone with a similar yahoo address, who felt compelled to respond at length, telling me I was a disgusting queer and that he didn't give a shit what had happened to my mother, etc. What could possibly motivate someone to go out of his way to be so gratuitously mean to a complete stranger I can't begin to understand.
I had forgotten all about that until reading this thread. Sometimes my lousy memory is quite a blessing.
#96. Emerson is driven to engage trolls, Ogged. It's part of his Nordic heritage.
I've seen people confidently assert that training cannot overcome a large disparity in size and strength. Does anyone really know? Has someone done a study or something?
There are some examples that I think lead some credence to this. There's Bob Sapp in K1, a huge roid-freak who took on fighters from all over the world and was fairly dominant, despite little skill. In Boxing, there's Nikolai Valuev, a 7'1" 320lbs Russian who has, apparently, poor skills but is 47-1, going up against other very large, skilled boxers. Also, I think I read somewhere that Bruce Lee couldn't defeat his student, Kareem Abdul-Jabar.
On the other hand, there's a lot of money in fighting, and obviously there are a lot of really big guys not fighting. Maybe the money's not enough, or size still isn't everything.
96: You damn well better have, motherfucker.
What could possibly motivate someone to go out of his way to be so gratuitously mean to a complete stranger I can't begin to understand.
If the internet has taught us anythings, it's that many, many people have a tendency to go out of their way to be gratuitously mean to complete strangers.
On the other hand, there's a lot of money in fighting, and obviously there are a lot of really big guys not fighting. Maybe the money's not enough, or size still isn't everything.
Or, you know, inflicting and enduring violence isn't everyone's cup of tea.
There are boxers with long arms and not much power who can win fights just by keeping the other guy away. They need a lot of quickness but sometimes you can see the shorter guy swinging wildly over an over again, and always missing because his arms are 3" shorter.
102. I thought of that, but, you know, back on the veldt sparring with one's species was a good thing, so guys must like fighting. And there are worse jobs.
Superheavyweight boxing has apparently been taken over by enormous Soviet-bloc guys. During the period of black American domination, the biggest champ was about 220 lbs. I've never seen an explanation: are boxrs now relying on beef over skill, whereas the smaller more-skilled boxers of old could have beaten them? (Joe Frazier: little guy). Or were they just not recruiting giants in the old days?
101: Yeah, it has. Which is one of the reasons I can't get into engaging trolls as a bloodsport. I don't really need any further evidence of that.
It has been argued that the earliest human hunters hunted with such crude weapons that they often ended up wrestling, kicking, and punching the game to death.
Many of the most highly athletic big men are going into sports like basketball, rather than boxing. Somehow earning much more money while not getting your face punched seems appealing.
I'm an aspiring social scientist who lives with an ex physicist/statistician/computer scientist (yes all those things) who is far from hostile to any of those fields, and was extremely successful in one of them and wants to get back to one of the other. Anyway, much as I see a lot of statistical incompetence at least in the smaller applied psych publishing shops I've been in, and much as I indignantly complain to him about questionable interpretations of data in articles I read, or about lit reviews that dishonestly summarize previous articles to work them into a grand narrative, when I do this he doesn't say, yep, those social sciences, they're more bullshit than the hard ones, he says, "welcome to science." In his experience, the hard sciences are filled with a lot of self-deception and bullshit (string theory he says is especially problematic in this regard). Psychology, he says, might be lower signal to noise because it's younger. I've never heard him opine on other social sciences. Just thought I'd contribute that not all hard scientists would defend their own fields against the charges leveled against the social sciences.
105: There simply are a lot more giants then there were a hundred years ago?
107: When I was a lad there was an oft-repeated tale of someone's cousin's friend's totally badass father/uncle/grandfather/elder brother chasing a deer into a river or lake and killing it with a Bowie knife.
Anyone whose done any fairly hard-contact sparring against someone much bigger than them [or much smaller, for that matter] gets a fairly rapid education in the difference size, reach and strength make.
re: 105
That said, there is the Dempsey versus Willard fight [which is on youtube]. Where a much smaller man won.*
* although there are those who claim Dempsey was cheating.
re: 108
Yeah, I think there are quite good socio-economic explanations to be had.
I'd think that using the expletive "cocksucking ratfucker" is at least as satisfying as throwing a good punch. Plus, you can do it over the Internet.
On the Social/hard sciences debate, I know a computer scientist who worked at a research lab, and wasn't at all impressed at the data manipulation/statistical skills of the biologists.
Silly LB, you should have thought "this field is full of idiots, I'll be a superstar."
I've never been good at that move.
89:As the Duke said:"It ain't the quickness or the accuracy [that makes a good gunfighter] but the willin'"
I was all intimidated and stuff until I read 60 which was kinda comforting and then 68 scared me again.
116: But it's accuracy that makes for a surviving gunfighter, after two willin's have clashed.
89: That's true, and it works the other way, too. If all of someone's fighting has been done in a gym, they might be able to take down the bigger, stronger guy given a clear start, but might not be able to recognize the signals that lead up to the fight.
117:1) All things are very rarely equal.
2) "Willin" could have two simultaneous meanings:willin to hurt or kill, and willin to be hurt or be killed. That most people, as said above, just don't think about breakin the bottle on the other's head, are so hesitant to thro a punch, is pretty interesting to me.
Uhh, goes to politics, of course. Most "revolutions" fizzle out with little harm done. But the serious threat/possibility can be very useful.
105: No, this is 20 years ago. In his prime Tyson was 220 or so. Before about 1990, unless I'm mistaken, no heavyweight champion weighed more than 225.
As of 20 years ago, the size advantage seemed to end at about 220 pounds. In boxing, anyway, but boxing is highly stylized and maybe in free fighting the giants would again have the advantage.
All things are very rarely equal.
Sam Colt did his best to rectify that, though.
"Willin" could have two simultaneous meanings:willin to hurt or kill, and willin to be hurt or be killed.
I wonder whether any professional fighter or killer's thinking about being hurt or killed is much different from a professional baseball player's thinking about striking out: will acknowledge the existence of the possibility if pressed, but willfully or constitutionally incapable of assimilating the possibility into his quotidium*.
* Made-up word. Sorry.
What could possibly motivate someone to go out of his way to be so gratuitously mean to a complete stranger I can't begin to understand.
It is often easier to send destructive bombs to far away places than it is to stab someone standing in front of you.
I try to keep that in mind in divorce cases and try to remind people of that.
the size advantage seemed to end at about 220 pounds
You start having to trade in quickness for the extra power, and that turns into a disadvantage pretty fast in boxing. The most striking (ha) difference between boxing and MMA is that even mid-level boxers tend to have superhuman hand speed.
incapable of assimilating the possibility into his quotidium*
I propose plenum in honor of Barthelme
...Now it may have appeared to you, prior to your receipt of this letter, that the universe of discourse in which you existed, and puttered about, was in all ways adequate and satisfactory. It may never have crossed your mind to think that other universes of discourse distinct from your own existed, with people in them, discoursing. You may have, in a common-sense way, regarded your u. of d. as a plenum, filled to the brim with discourse. You may have felt that what already existed was a sufficiency. People like you often do. ....
Umm, this analysis of fighting also goes to blog commenting, I think. That there are what, 10, 100? lurkers for every commenter doesn't necessarily say anything bad about lurkers. For size in boxers we could substitute education, professionalism, eloquence on blogs.
Emerson, you just aren't that tough. Farber, with twenty years in communities, can kick a troll's ass right off a blog.
I remember reading about George Chuvalo that he had everything a boxer needed -- strength, power, toughness, skill, endurance -- except hand quickness. His trainer or someone comparably knowledgeable said that Chuvalo always knew what he was supposed to do, but his hands were a fraction of a second too slow.
He became famous for his ability to stand up after being hit in the face dozens of times. He got a reputation as a no-talent human punching bag, but according to what I read he only had that single weakness.
Alas, young people today haven't heard of George.
But I don't want the trolls off the blog. I want 100-comment threads, like the one between me and the Troll of Sorrow over at Kotsko's.
123:Like I said, I have been thinking about this for decades, tho not very hard and with about as much real experience as most people.
Do people not throw hard punches because they are conditioned against violence, or because, maybe on a pre-concious level, know that if they throw the punch they will possibly catch a return?
Umm, my 75 pounders back away from Chihuahas, and we have a lot of them in my neighborhood, on a daily basis. Not worth it?
re: 130
There's also the whole (justified) fear of breaking-your-hand thing.
130: Speaking from personal experience (all sparring, no actual street fighting) when you are trying to keep you face and body back away from someone else's fists, your power and commitment suffer. Also, most people don't know how to throw a hard punch.
A martial-arts friend of mine says that punching is an unnatural act and needs to be learned. He contrasted kicking, which is almost instinctive. An untrained puncher at any weight will not get much quickness or power into his punch, even if he's very athletic -- my friend said.
So is someone going to fight Megan or what?
I want to see her take someone down.
I'd volunteer, just to make you happy, Will, but it would be far to easy.
I am sure Megan is bigger than me, so a fairer fight must include my dogs.
135: but it would be far to easy
And close to difficult.
"Your powers are weak, old man," she began, shaking loose her brilliant locks before tying them back with a fillet of gold, shrugging her Amazon shoulders like a bull. "Now I am the master."
"Only a master of evil, Megan," said [Will/Bob/one of Bob's dogs].
Thanks Di! But, that isnt really the kind of fight for which I was seeking volunteers.
On the other hand, you definitely have the mean, go-for-the-jugular aggressiveness.
you definitely have the mean, go-for-the-jugular aggressiveness
ha! Actually, I would have envisioned it as Megan walks into room, gives me fixed, intimidating glare, I curl up whimpering into the fetal position.
People need to go out and watch the first five Ultimate Fighting Championships, which are available on video. Before people learned how to fight. It's really funny to watch all the TKD / Karate people get bowled over by boxers, wrestlers, judo people, and just general barroom brawlers.
On the other hand, Royce Gracie did beat Dan Severn, proving that if you really know how to choke people you can beat people much bigger than you.
140:
Watch out Megan. Di is trying to hustle the crowd. She is vicious. Mean as a snake. Heck, she was married to a German.
But the actual truth is that the ability to kick peoples' ass is mostly just a matter of will to harm and the availability of weaponry. Fair fights are artificial social rituals.
There are some examples that I think lead some credence to this. There's Bob Sapp in K1, a huge roid-freak who took on fighters from all over the world and was fairly dominant, despite little skill.
OTOH, when he did fight a smaller but very much more skilled opponent, it ended with a broken orbital. (NB: despite that, the video is not particularly graphic.)
There's also the whole (justified) fear of breaking-your-hand thing.
Yeah, most people really don't know how to punch correctly. The Krav Maga class I took was good on that score; they demonstrated the anatomy behind a proper punch, and why you only want to strike with your first two knuckles.
145: That may be the ideal, but when you're fighting anything more mobile and less uniform than a punching bag, there is very little control over which part of your hand you strike with.
An untrained puncher at any weight will not get much quickness or power into his punch
Yeah, if you watch videos of random people fighting, they're all punching with their shoulders. If you watch trained fighters, any decent power punch is all driven by the legs and butt.
I'm still wondering whether the dominance of gigantic ex-Soviets is a sign that skill levels are down, or whether they've developed a new boxing paradigm over there. Could Tyson beat all these 275-lb guys?
I know a tall boxer has more to protects, too. It would seem that the ideal boxer would be quick and very stocky, but with long arms.
148: I think it has more to do with the steady decline of boxing in America. Young people just aren't entering the sport the way they once did.
It is often easier to send destructive bombs to far away places than it is to stab someone standing in front of you. I try to keep that in mind in divorce cases and try to remind people of that.
Wow. I knew you were a cutthroat divorce lawyer, but I didn't realize that extended to advising clients on the most effective methods of violence.
147: This is a common point of confusion, but I believe you've been watching videos of people doing the Hustle.
I know how to throw a punch, but I'd still rather kick. My feet have shoes, my legs are not delicate and my shoulders and arms are small.
I would fight Megan, but she's taller than me and trained, so she'd probably kick my ass.
I, on the other hand, am probably pretty close to Megan's size (strength, no. But size). But I would flee, if threatened. By pretty much anyone.
Physicists are comically naive about statistics, but they can always do another experiment, so it doesn't matter.
You only need sophisticated stats if you don't have experiments. Basically, high-level stats are methods for drawing conclusions in cases where you mostly shouldn't.
Also, how can Megan say "free choice" disproves evolutionary psych? Does she have a lot of free choice? I don't, I mostly just go where I'm pushed and pulled.
The real argument against ev psych is that so much of what pushes and pulls us is culturally specific.
147 - It is true. There's a guy teaching one of his clients to punch at the gym. It makes me incredibly nostalgic for having someone hold pads for me. It also makes me want to stand behind her and show her how to drive with her knees and punch from her center of gravity.
I don't want to fight anyone. I just wanted to agitate a mean troll.
LB. I don't think I have the ability to disemvowel in blogger. I haven't seen a way to edit comments.
I don't want to fight anyone. I just wanted to agitate a mean troll.
WHAT?!?!?!!?
What happened to that streak of violence and outrage?
We demand to be entertained by violence. Fight Cala.
LB. I don't think I have the ability to disemvowel in blogger. I haven't seen a way to edit comments.
Ah. I don't know jack about the various software options -- we can edit comments here (and I do all the time! Bwahahahaha!) so I assumed all blogging software had the capability. There goes that idea.
It really seems to work amazingly well for the bloggers who do it, though. I've never seen someone keep coming back after being disemvoweled.
Fight Cala, like with a pillow on a giant bed, with lots of giggling and maybe some wrestling too?
Fight Cala, like with a pillow on a giant bed, with lots of giggling and maybe some wrestling too?
Are you calling Cala out as a weak, girly-girly?
Those sound like fighting words!
Cala isnt some sissy like Ogged for you to pick on, you meanie:
I know how to throw a punch, but I'd still rather kick. My feet have shoes, my legs are not delicate and my shoulders and arms are small.
For freedom of movement, I understand shortie pajamas are key.
No, I want to see her fight Labs.
160 - You're in, LB!! Three way cage match! Where cage = king sized bed. In quite short pajamas, lest they restrict our fighting moves.
Given my entire lack of combat skills, this can only lead to tickling.
It could be like Riggs against Billy Jean King. But inside an octagon.
You're in, LB!! Three way cage match! Where cage = king sized bed. In quite short pajamas, lest they restrict our fighting moves.
Ok, this is getting more interesting now.
Wait, this is a trap, isnt it?
I am completely helpless in the face of tickling.
You wouldn't take advantage of that, would you?
If I ever found myself having to fight you, I wouldn't have much choice, would I? Tickling, or getting my ass kicked, would be the only options. at which point I'm all about the tickling.
Take it to Megan's smutty shorts!
Isn't that the fighting technique LB was describing?
Man, you've got an awfully direct approach to tickling there, Di. Me, I generally start with the feet.
Isn't that the fighting technique LB was describing?
Dirty fighters often go straight for the groin.
Man, you've got an awfully direct approach to tickling there, Di. Me, I generally start with the feet.
Give Di a break. It has been a while since she has been in a fight. Maybe she can take her time on her second or third fight.
the other day i was going home and saw a homeless man sitting on the bench reading newspaper in very dim street light
i felt so sorry for him, his loneliness and nowhere to going, imagined what he must be thinking etc
but did not give him money or talk to him b/c it was late, dark and i did not want to provoke anything may be
i read somewhere in psychology literature they explain as if one feels compassion, pity to feel better about self, the thought that would never occur to me like independently
i wish to not know that knowledge, now i suspect myself of that everytime i'm moved, though i'm sure my feelings are genuinely only what it is, nothing multilayered
Nuh uh.
Six hours later and a hundred miles away, you're feeling pretty confident about that. If you were East Coast would you have spoken up sooner?
I had to let the thread run its course. I've got the reach on you, man. You can't get through my jab. Jab! Jab jab!
So I am glad that the statement "making blustery noises about fighting people on the internet is pretty silly" is now gender blind.
Megan you should get some wingnuts wound up with that one; they go crazy for it.
Ogged: Is your jab better aimed than your forehand frisbee throw, or should I just stay inside and to your right a little?
Sifu: I'm doing my best to make outrageous internet claims about who could beat up whom a non-gendered activity.
Vox Day's dad just got seriosuly busted, BTW. He's been a fugitive for several years.
Expect to hear from Vox. he's tough, mean, Christian, and probably now broke.
I'm not sure what throwing the communist hippie flying disk has to do with ancient American activity of pounding someone's face.
185.2: you are doing fabulously.
186.2: plus he has angry hair!
Just noticing some things about your coordination. It might be useful to expect that you throw late jabs across your body and to my right.
I'll be darned: hi, Vox Day's dad!
the communist hippie flying disk
Preach it. Ray Lewis killed a man for asking him to join an Ultimate game.
Okay, so I run down to the box to get the puppies their 50 lbs of kibble and this mature lady catches me checking out Avril Lavigne in Maxim and gives me her sternest "Old man, you should be so shamed of yourself" look. Damn, she coulda kicked my ass.
What a drag it is growing old.
That guy is Vox Day's dad? Too fucking funny.
An engineer and graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Beale faces a maximum of five years in prison for one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, five counts of tax evasion and one count of failure to appear for his trial in federal court.
Great product placement there. Didn't one of our regulars here go to MIT?
Christ, ogged, check the archives before commenting, would you?
A few years back I went on a binge of reading about the Mafia, and something that turned up in several of what seemed the best-informed studies was that organized crime groups are distinguishable by their members' willingness to resort to violence first, in arguments. It's not that they're innately tougher, or better fighters in other ways, or anything else that these folks and the studies they cited could measure, it's just that they felt less compunction about shifting from words to violence. (This is also why they failed time after time, whenever they tried to muscle in on basically legitimate enterprises. When your target can call the cops and will do so, and you have no other real advantages, going to violence first doesn't actually help.)
I gather that this is true in general of people who fight other people for real.
199: A lot of inner city gangbangers are basically auditioning for jobs in the drug biz. The most interesting part of "Freakonomics" was about the economics of the drug trade. (Of course, it was a writeup of someone else's research.)
I'm almost feeling sympathy for Vox Day.
Oh, man! World O'Crap! I had completely forgotten about that blog.
192: What a drag it is growing old
"Kids are different today,"
I hear bob mcmanus say
A man needs something new to fret about
And though he's not really scared
He thinks that we should be prepared
So he posts about Obama and the coming doomsday drama
And it helps him on his way, gets him through his busy day
Unfog-ged please, I've more of these
Warnings of war, I'll post four more
What a drag it is growing old
Thanks, dad.
I have an image of Vox Day alone in the tv room of his father's mansion, face-down on the bumper pool table, listening to "Hi Dad, I'm in Jail!" over and over again as he sobs and occasionally punches his mom.
that sounded strange as if i was comparing myself to the homeless man
i would never feel the need to feel better at someone else's expense
i do not like to complain generally
even may be look always content from the outside like GW's happy ex irl
just wanted to support Megan's thoughts about evolutional psychology
+ed, ry
god should check words first
i saw the clip i posted earlier got a thousand more clicks, scary heavy traffic here
i thought may be there are 30 or so people