petter_haggholm

From the Department of Obvious Epiphanies (BJJ Division):

When I first started out in BJJ, I learned early on that whenever I get to the top, it is good to be heavy—that is, to apply as much weight as I can; to ensure that as much of my weight as possible is supported by my opponent rather than squandered on the ground. For a long time, however, I was sort of indiscriminate in this. Take side control, for example: I would get to side mount, apply my cross-face, drive my shoulder in, and lean my weight onto my opponent via my shoulder, my chest, maybe even my other shoulder.

My current thinking is that this is, by and large, wrong. It is wrong because by sticking to my opponent using so much surface area, I am creating two weaknesses in my top pressure:

1. I am distributing my weight over a large surface area, so that he experiences moderate pressure on his jaw and moderate pressure on his chest, rather than really pinning any one part to the ground.
2. I create a lot of attachment points, and a lot of friction, so that although it is admittedly hard for my opponent to move, it is also hard for me to move.

These days I am approaching my top game with a very different strategy. Instead of indiscriminately applying my weight, I try as much as possible to pick one point where I apply it. It might be via chest-to-chest contact. It might be through my shoulder, in cross-face. If my opponent is pushing my hips away, I might pike up and drive all my weight into his chest, or his solar plexus, via my head, until I can get around his arms. But as much as possible, I make my pressure pin-point and localised.

I honestly think that I can today apply more effective pressure when I am up on my toes and driving via the top of my head than I could two years ago when driving indiscriminately with my chest, even though I was then some 20–25 lbs heavier.

1. Because the surface area is smaller, the pressure is greater (provided I don’t get lazy and apply less weight!). Thus though my opponent’s chest may be freer under side mount, his head is even more pinned to the ground from the cross-face, and since he can’t escape unless he releases pressure wherever I apply it, this is more effective.
2. Because I use only one point to pin, the rest of my body is free to move. This allows me to play a much more responsive and mobile top game.

With this has come the obvious observation that the best pin (in the sense of top control pressure and keeping your opponent confined, not the judo-scoring osaekomi sense) is not one that cannot be broken—there is no perfect pin—but instead one that if and when my opponent escapes is one that leaves me in a good place to adapt and stay in a superior position. Having more pinpoint chest-to-chest control, for example, rather than being sort of generically smushed across my opponent, means that if they manage to start turning in to escape, I’m in a pretty good place to pivot around the point of contact, spin to the other side, and stay on top, in the opposide side mount. (Alternatively, I’m in a good position to spin for the armbar, should my opponent expose the far arm.)

For the same reason, I have become extremely fond of knee-on-belly for top control. It’s very much in the nature of knee-on-belly to apply pinpoint pressure (via the knee, obviously), and it’s an extremely mobile top position that very easily lets me switch from knee to knee, or between side mount and knee-on-belly. This is in fact a game I sometimes like to play when I am paired up with a beginner whom I outclass and I don’t feel it’s a contest (or very nice) to apply constant submissions: Just sweep, get to the top, and hone my positional game, where instead of stuffing escape attempts I just go with them, flow with the momentum my opponent imparts, and transition to another top position. That way I get to practice something worthwhile, and they get to practice escapes (in a manner that is admittedly frustrating, but does have opportunity for success).

I do not think that it is a coincidence that this thinking has evolved in a period of time during which I have finished more armbars in an average week than I previously did in two average months.

Ever since I revived that damned RPG project, I cannot help but think about a proper setting, and while I enjoy the venerable old Drakar och Demoner for many of its rules, many of its races and selection of monsters, and most especially its magic system, still the chief campaign setting (Ereb Altor) is an unacceptable patchwork of unrelated adventure settings all tossed onto one big map, and many details are altogether missing, so my campaign setting will be my own. And this is what happens when I start thinking down those lines.

SHUT UP THESE THINGS ARE IMPORTANT FOR AN IMMERSIVE AND CONVINCING SETTING DON'T YOU JUDGE ME

Tell a Christian that you are an atheist because you find the evidence for theism thoroughly unconvincing and the odds are pretty high that you will, at some point, be told that he doesn’t have enough faith to be an atheist, or that you need faith in the non-existence of gods just as much as he needs faith in the existence of his. At first blush, this sounds at once superficially reasonable, obviously false, and profoundly bizarre.

It sounds superficially reasonable, because the objection that my atheism is not founded on an absolute certainty and absolute proof is of course correct. It sounds obviously false because the word “faith” is typically used to describe a positive belief in something for which there is insufficient empirical evidence, and is not a word suited to describe skepticism, whether justified or unjustified. It sounds profoundly bizarre because many Christians use the word to describe a purported virtue of trusting in the existence and benevolence of their god in spite of the lack of such evidence (the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen).

Part of the problem is that the word “faith” is a vague one on which we may both equivocate and have genuine misunderstandings. I use it to describe belief that is not justified by rational evidence, because in any situation where there is evidence we have other words to describe it, but I recognise that anyone who uses the word in conversation with me may mean just that, or equally well something different, such as a religious belief that they perceive to be supported by evidence, as a synonym for “confidence”, or something else altogether.

Then again, a disingenuous approach some debaters will use is to conflate them intentionally, a logical fallacy known as equivocation. You might say that I have “faith” that if I sit down my chair will bear me up, just as you have “faith” that your god exists—but they are clearly not the same kind of faith, since I have ample evidence that my chair will support me, and furthermore this evidence is available to anyone who wants to inspect it: You could (if you truly doubted it) have photos, videos, contemporary eyewitness testimony, or if you were truly dedicated you could come visit me and see for yourself. Moreover, the supportive quality of chairs is not contrary to anything in common experience; it’s not (as Sagan would say) an extraordinary claim. This approach is apparently used to justify the evidence-free kind of faith by implying that it is equivalent to obviously rational forms. It is not. My confidence in chairs is based on facts and observations that could be amply supported against someone skeptical of chairs; unless you can provide facts and observations in favour of your deity, it’s not the same thing at all—and if you can then let’s talk facts and evidence, not “faith”.

More promising is the notion that I need faith to be an atheist—faith not quite supported by evidence, that is—just as the theist needs faith to be a theist. Some theists, indeed, are known to dismissively quip that “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” (by implication of which faith is a bad thing, since more of it leads to us sinful atheists—but that is by the way). However, this also falls down flat on closer inspection.

First of all, we all subscribe to most of the same basic premises or assumptions in dealing with the world, theists and atheists alike. We all operate on the assumption that the external world is real and that our senses provide us with systematic information thereof. Even a hypothetical, reductio-ad-absurdam biblical literalist has no choice: Without the empirical evidence of his eyes and ears, he could read no scripture and hear no sermons. So clearly, in terms of the basic appreciation of what exists, we start from the same position.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, as Occam’s Razor slices, and I choose to stop there. I accept the truth of premises that cannot be denied without resort to solipsism, but thereafter I demand evidence before I accept anything as true. This post goes into more detail, but in brief, since it is always possible to invent an infinitude of ideas, explanations, and purported entities, my choices are always going to be either refusal to accept any without evidence, attempting to accept all of them, or picking and choosing in an ad hoc fashion.

This all sounds rather abstract, so let’s consider this tweet from @repenTee:

@haggholm as I think about it ur conjectures are based on faith no evidence 2 prove that God doesn't exist somewhere in the universe.

(Pardon his spelling; it’s a tweet.)

The problem with this protestation is that although it is true that I have no direct evidence that no such thing as his God is floating about somewhere in the interstellar void, nor do I have any evidence that there aren’t two gods. Or three. Or ninety-six point four. Or, for that matter, a giant magic space-duck ’round whose mighty bill six supermassive black holes revolve. This shows the insufficiency of “there is no direct evidence against it” as an argument to accept any proposition: It opens the gates to all manner of silly things. I want to remain intellectually consistent, so I must approach all these disparate and sometimes contradictory claims (there is exactly one, are exactly two, three, four gods… cannot all be true) with the same approach. I do, and so accept only the ones whose existence is supported by good evidence. Therefore I am an atheist.

(This is of course what Russell’s Teapot was created to illustrate, along with its more modern successors—the Invisible Pink Unicorn, Sagan’s invisible dragon, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and so on.)

So as Bertrand Russell observed,

…I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

I believe that this sufficiently deals with equivocation, and dismissing the idea that the lack of positive disproof of a proposition (in spite of lack of positive evidence for it) is sufficient grounds to believe in it. We’re left, then, with the notion that the atheist’s confidence that there are no gods is on par with the theists’s faith in his because both positions have evidentiary support. The same @repenTee provided this frank and illustrative example in a blog comment:

…The faith we've entered into is not without evidence. Much as biologists observe cellular structures so we have observed nature and from it conclude that these things have been created by God. As we have observed people, places and things we conclude that something greater than ourselves must exist. Who this God is from that point we may differ but the theist never concludes that God exists apart from evidence....

Unfortunately, the analogy with biologists falls rather flat when we consider that the biologist’s inference from observation is only the first stage of scientific investigation. In the canonical simplification of scientific inquiry, this is observation leading to hypothesis formation. A biologist might for example observe cells in agar, see some interesting things, and conclude that cells reproduce by fission…but it doesn’t end there. If a biologist submitted a paper to a journal with no more substance than “here’s what I saw and here’s what I conclude”, it would be rejected and might not even receive the grace of a note explaining why. Rather, the biologist must use this point as a starting point only and ask questions. If I am right, what does that imply? What else should I be able to see? Can I follow up on that, and do I see what I expect? More importantly, what if I am wrong? What should I expect to see if I am wrong, and can I check up on that?

Indeed, some very great scientific truths have been discovered thanks to ideas that were arrived at in very ad hoc fashion, but turned out to be true. August Kekulé famously arrived at the structure of the benzene molecule from a dream of the Ouroboros, a snake biting its own tail. Einstein developed a lot of ideas from Gedankenexperiments and his sense of scientific aesthetics. The ultimate source of an idea is not so very important, whether empirical observation or irrational impulse—you may observe nature and draw the wrong conclusions; you may hallucinate and by chance have a correct idea. The key is not where the idea comes from, but how we can tell if it’s correct or erroneous.

This is of course the principles of falsifiability and (implicitly) replicability, two of the great cornerstones of the scientific enterprise. We accept no one’s word that something is true just because it seemed reasonable from what they saw. We expect them to explain in quantitative detail what difference their idea makes, so that we can make predictive statements and check whether it’s correct. Note that this goes beyond merely looking for consistency. I can make up all kinds of crazy ideas that are consistent with facts. I can claim that the world is such as it is because the giant magic space-duck willed it to be so, and this is consistent with facts. But it’s not an idea to be taken seriously because I cannot say “If the space-duck exists then we should observe X; if it does not then we should observe Y.” Before I accept the truth of a proposition, the existence of any entity, it must be clearly meaningful to say that it is false—and of course that meaning must turn out to be counterfactual.

So let us return to the quote from above:

…The faith we've entered into is not without evidence. Much as biologists observe cellular structures so we have observed nature and from it conclude that these things have been created by God.

At this stage, what’s been described is hypothesis generation. There’s nothing wrong with generating hypotheses, and no wrong way to do it (only more or less productive ones), but hypotheses must not be mistaken for validated theories, for truth. How do you know that your idea of divine creation is correct? What predictions have you (or any theist) ever made that would detect divine agency—what evidence should be sought to verify that your god created something rather than just natural processes? If you have not looked for it, then it’s not comparable to what a proper biologist does at all; it’s the brainstorming phase, not the publishable work that actually gets a scientist respect and tenure.

This is also the big problem with a deist god. Certainly it violates no evidence, but nor does it leave any evidence or make any predictions. To say that there is a god, but it leaves no traces of itself for us to find, only sounds less crazy than to say the same of a magic space-duck because we are culturally conditioned to take gods more seriously.

The objection to deism is also applicable to certain views of theism—that is, those that fall into the trap of the God of the Gaps. Over the centuries, some defenders of religious faith have insisted that what we cannot scientifically explain must be the work of their god—the orbits of the planets, say, or the origin of life. As Kepler, Newton et al explained orbital mechanics, these defenders of faith had to admit that the planets weren’t pushed along by their god—but “ah”, they’d say, “gravitation itself is surely the power of God”. Along comes Einstein and explains gravitation as geometry, the consequence of deformations in spacetime, and gravitation turns out not to be an intangible force after all. “Ah!”, exclaim the defenders (or their intellectual descendands), “but then spacetime must be due to God.” And so on—with every new discovery, their god is redefined so as not to conflict with facts. But this god can never generate a meaningfully falsifiable prediction, because every falsification is inevitably explained away with a new redefinition.

Indeed, earlier versions of these beggar-gods, deities who would hide in any nook or cranny that science had yet to illuminate, did generate falsifiable hypotheses, such as “the planets could not remain in stable orbits but for the mystical power of God”—which turned out to be false, neatly disproving them.

The only gods that remain to be dealt with are the ones with more meat on their bones—ones who generate falsifiable claims: Gods such that their followers ought to be able to come up and tell me: “These are the verifiable (or falsifiable) differences between two models of the world: One such as it is or would be with my god in it; one such as it is or would be without him.” That is a god that needs to be evaluated on an individual balance, the evidence for and against it weight—especially that against it (as attempted falsification yields better evidence than mere consistency-with-established-facts).

I’d welcome such falsifiable evidence.

The last time I blogged about my general position and progress in BJJ was around Christmas (well, on Christmas Eve, in fact). I’d like to take a moment to introspect and take stock, as it were. At the time, I was reflecting on the breakthrough (at long bloody last!) of attitude—of making it a habit to roll to win at least some of the time, because it’s a mentality I need to be able to switch on, and a focus on fighting between the canonical positions rather than just in them. I’d also just started playing a bit of open guard.

Shortly before that, I had made a list of skills I have and lack in various positions. Notably, I decided that I really needed to work on

• armbars, triangles, and pendulum sweeps from guard
• standing guard passes (emphasised by my failure in my second tournament)
• butterfly guard, where my skills were nil to none
• taking the back, and improving my attacks from there
• more armbars from top (mount and side mount)

Over the past few months, one of the natural developments of my game has been to stay much more active and mobile in my top game. I ascribe this largely to two factors: One, I have made an effort to be more active in guard passing and being ready to switch from side to side. Two, I have had occasion to roll more with very new and inexperienced people, not least since joining judo, where the focus is evenly divided between standup and groundwork rather than heavily on the latter, and where much of the groundwork addresses turnovers—so that, per mat hour of total experience, I have just done a lot more groundwork. When rolling with people whom I can more or less submit at will¹, I’ve taken to doing other things: Giving up positions to work from inferior ones, providing advise and/or opportunities to my partners…or focusing entirely on positional control, moving from knee-on-belly to mount to knee-on-belly on the other side; pivoting side mount from side to side… And while I have sometimes done this mostly because it seemed gratuitous to force someone brand new to the sport to tap out ten times in a round, it has in fact rapidly translated into a skill in its own right.

Thus my top game has changed from a fairly indiscriminate effort to be heavy, placing as much weight as possible on my opponent’s upper body, to a more focused control that allows me to stay more mobile. To use side control as an example, I used to apply pressure with my chest and my shoulder and pretty much any part of me that goes on top of my opponent in that position. Now, I try to apply all the pressure with the cross-face shoulder. (Or I might be applying pressure to just one shoulder or one quadrant of the upper chest from side control or N/S; or I might apply my weight in mount differently than just being heavy down the center—and so on.) My working hypothesis is that this is not a less effective pin, in fact it may be more effective in that my weight is less distributed and can be focused more on a mechanically weak point (if I’m doing it right). At the same time I’m not so glued to the ground or to my opponent, so I’m better able to move and take advantage of any opportunity that arises.

This has lead to a radical increase in the amount of armbars I catch (successfully or not). If my standard response to a bridge in sidemount was to just remain heavy, it’s now becoming increasingly mixed up with allowing my opponent to get onto his side, but with me pivoting to the opposite side and attacking the arm. (Of course this means that I need to catch the arm, and not leave space for it to escape. Thus using more focused pressure is no excuse to play looser!) Armbar quotas in general seem to go up quite a lot as I stay more mobile on top, whether in mount, side mount, or knee-on-belly. It also feels like a more effective smaller-man’s-game, which I need to work on: I’m not tiny, but neither am I one of the bigger or stronger guys at the gym. Exploiting bridges and bottom defences rather than blocking them takes less strength. (And is more ju, as it were…)

I have also, very recently, started working on butterfly guard. The breakthrough came from one of those obvious things that needed just the right kind of clear and explicit statement, unsurprisingly from Kabir, who talked about going side to side with the standard butterfly sweep. If I try to sweep left, and fail because my opponent posts or bases out, that’s OK: I can just quickly switch my hips and sweep for the other side. Heureka!, or as Huxley might have said, how extremely stupid not to have thought of that: but there you are. I’m not yet having much success with the standard butterfly sweep, as I find the sitting-up position difficult to maintain, but I’m having much better luck with half butterfly guard, and using butterfly hooks to lift and sweep whenever my opponent bases out to block any sweep. And doing this—constantly attempting sweeps with butterfly hooks—is allowing me to keep my hooks much stickier, making not just my butterfly guard but my open guard in general much harder to pass.

This is an area that needs a lot of work, but then I’ve only been focusing on it for a couple of weeks. I feel pretty encouraged with my success so far.

In some ways it’s kind of startling how different my game looks right now compared to, say, when I wrote my last introspectives in December. At the time, my bottom game was mainly closed guard and a bit of basic, feet-on-hips or maybe half-arsed spider guard stuff thrown in; my top game focused on getting to mount for the cross choke, which was by far my most frequent finish. Now, my guard game is mostly butterfly guard (admittedly because it needs work rather than because it’s my A game), and by far most of my finishes are by armbar, though I’ll still go for cross chokes when I see them. I’m very happy with this transition, because butterfly is something I’ve long known I need to work on but never felt I had enough of a handle on to even begin; and because I knew damn well my armbars were lamentable from disuse. Additionally, I like armbars because they transfer so well to everything: Gi, no-gi, judo…

I think I’m mostly in a phase where I should keep doing what I am already doing. I am currently working on several of the areas that I knew needed work: I do a lot of butterfly; I go for a lot of armbars; and if I’m passing the guard, 80% of the time I’ll stand up for the pass. All this is as it should be: I have put a lot of hours into weak areas, and while they need more work, they’re nowhere near as bad as they were half a year ago.

If I look at my list of four months ago, the main thing I see there that I should be doing, but am not doing often enough, is attacking the back. Especially against larger opponents, I have a tendency to get stuck on my back (in guard) or (worse) in bottom turtle, unable to finish anything. I’m not good at guard submissions, and it’s my current thinking that the short-legged man’s attack on a 30–40 lbs heavier opponent probably should not be the triangle. I need to get better at taking the back, notably climbing to the back from guard and very notably via arm drags from butterfly and similar as well as from half guard. I also jotted down baseball chokes from side control, which are perhaps not a bad idea but don’t currently feel like a priority. So in summary,

• keep working on butterfly guard
• keep working on armbars
• increase focus on taking the back
• start working arm drags from butterfly
• start working for the back from bottom half guard
• start working more sweeps from bottom half guard

Novum cingulitis (“the new belt blues”) is a psychogenic condition generally contracted on obtaining a new belt in a martial art, such as BJJ, where the patient’s abilities are constantly tested against those of their peers. Typical symptoms include tenseness, a sense of guilt and unworthiness, and constant low-grade nervousness, and may include a period of mild depression. Other common symptoms include paranoia (though this is controversial as some argue that everyone is, in fact, out to get the patient).

Novum cingulitis has no cure, but the condition is self-limiting and will resolve on its own, typically ⅓–½ of the way to the next belt (when a new outbreak may occur). Common home remedies include sandbagging (q.v.) and practicing martial arts without hard sparring, where the additional measure of “pulling rank” may also be employed. Modern medical science recommends against these extreme measures, however, and suggests a healthy diet, vigorous exercise, plenty of rest, relying on your teammates, and colloquially, “manning up”.

Though poorly documented in the literature, novum cingulitis is a very common condition. If you yourself practice BJJ and have never suffered from the new belt blues, you probably know someone who has.

Re. that promotion:

Gracie Barra Vancouver, March 8 2012. Receiving my purple belt from my instructor, Rodrigo Carvalho.

I may not feel like I really deserve it for a while yet, but it’s definitely legit and very official.

I won’t pretend to have an attempt at a full-fletched epistemology, but something I often ponder and would like to set in words for my own clarification is my opinion on what knowledge can be based on. As someone who occasionally gets into arguments over religion or philosophy, I consider it important to know what fundamental basis I am really attempting to argue from.

First, let us recognise that a superior epistemology should make as few assumptions as possible. If we are to reason, we must use logic, but logic is but a way of taking facts (premises) and figuring out what other facts (conclusions) are implied by them. It can’t introduce new knowledge per se, and while it can point out problematic premises by showing inconsistencies, it cannot supply correct ones. Thus on some level we have to simply assume some premises—as few as possible (the more we have, the more we risk error) and as safe and inarguable as possible.

To me, the most fundamental source of knowledge is and must be physical reality. This may sound uncontroversial or at least unsurprising coming from me, but let me clarify: I believe that physical reality must hold epistemological primacy even over logic (and its broader-scope cousin, mathematics). Logic is important and a critical tool for reason, but it follows from reality, not the other way around. (You might recognise this as the opposite of what the ancient Greek philosophers generally held.)

Some have held that perception of physical reality can’t be accepted as fundamental, because our senses are flawed. Certainly no one can prove to every pedant’s and solipsist’s satisfaction that we do not, for example, live in a computer simulation, or in Plato’s cave; that reality isn’t in fact with our perception of consistency an illusion. All these notions, though, seem to share in common the attribute that they are completely unproductive. If my mind is randomly recomposed moment by moment, with memories and perception of continuity mere illusions, then ipso facto I cannot effectively reason about anything.

If you tell me that I should trust in your words, or the words of some sacred writ, because my eyes and ears deceive me, I will respond that if my eyes and ears deceive me, I surely cannot trust words either written or spoken. If you tell me that I should believe in something or other because my ability to reason is limited and fallible, then why should I be convinced? If I find that argument convincing, I am ipso facto convinced by means of faulty reasoning.

No, surely to say anything meaningful about anything at all, we must accept that there is an external reality and that, for all their flaws, our senses and perceptions at least provide some kind of systematic picture thereof. It may not always be correct—in fact we know of lots of ways in which our perceptions often fail us—but if it is at least basically systematic (within the margins, as it were, of measurement error), then this gives us a chance to address the truth, aided by statistics and probability, augmenting our memories with records (so long as we can read them), our senses with instrumented perception (so long as we can read the dials with reasonable fidelity), our fallible reasoning with formal logic.

I believe that everyone (at any rate, anyone who is not insane) essentially believes this (in part because I believe that people who argue that reality is an illusion and our memories may well be recreated moment by moment are really just playing word-games, actually living their lives quite in accordance with conventional notions of continuity and cause-and-effect). Even people who relegate empiricism to a distinctly secondary position after, say, faith in some religious dogma still accept this, whether they admit it or not. Without accepting the testimony of their senses, they wouldn’t have any cause to know that any scripture exists or what it says.

Very well, so we accept a sort of basic empiricism: The world exists, and our senses report on it, if not perfectly then at least systematically so that we can by dint of intellectual effort untangle systematic errors and gain a clearer picture. What else do we need? Until recently I should have said logic—an argument needs premises and a valid formulation; empiricism gives us premises; logic provides the formulation; ergo we need both.

However, as my second point, I believe that logic is secondary to physical reality and need not be taken as a fundamental.

Perhaps my biggest light-bulb moment in formulating this thought was rendering explicit the fairly obvious observation that the logical syllogism is really no more than a mathematical restatement of the physical principle of cause and effect.

In other words, I conclude that logic is simply a description of cause and effect, just as F=(m₁×m₂)/G is a description of (Newtonian) gravity, rather than itself (qua formula or idea) anything fundamental. Reality would go on as usual even if nothing within it had any concept of logic. However, if reality did not proceed according to the laws of cause and effect, there could be no logic: If we existed, we should have nothing to base it upon, nor would it be applicable to anything. It could at best be a self-consistent but meaningless system of symbol manipulation.

Third and finally, I believe that we need nothing else at the very bottom of our epistemology. There is reality. It is necessary (because without observation of reality there can be no knowledge); it is also sufficient. Observing reality naturally generates the laws of logic, which however complicated they get ultimately flow from the basic syllogism, which is itself a statement of the empirically observed principles of cause and effect.

Of course any meaningful argument about anything whatsoever, unless it be epistemology itself, is naturally going to invoke much higher-level principles. The rules of logics are the atoms of arguments, syllogisms the molecules; only when we care about the subatomic do we need to bother to point out that the logic-atoms are really made up of empirical nucleons. However, I am aware of no good reason why I should take seriously any argument that does not render down into this empirical nucleon soup if sufficiently picked apart.

I don’t pretend to be able to reduce most arguments to their nuclear details, but this does not mean that I abandon the idea. I don’t pretend to be able to explain every minute detail of a burning match down to the level of atomic interactions and changes in valence electron layers, either—this does not reduce my confidence that the standard model of physics is in principle perfectly capable of explaining that burning match without having to involve phlogistons. If someone attempted to convince me of the reality of phlogistons, my ignorance of details would not be sufficient grounds for me to accept it: They should have to directly demonstrate the reality of phlogistons, or that my physical theory is in principle insufficient to explain fire.

Similarly, i you introduce any other principle into an argument—faith, for instance, or curious notions such as epistemological relativism—I shall regard any such principle as a phlogiston, whose existance and relevance you shall have to substantiate before I take any part of your argument seriously. Unless you can do that, explain yourself in terms of observable reality, or be dismissed.

My earlier post, Science and epistemology, contained the germs of this idea. In How I try to think, and how I try not to I muse on how to apply the idea, and common pitfalls to avoid.

To change one’s mind when presented with sufficient evidence is a hallmark of a rational person. This is the ideal of the scientific method, and the failure to pursue it is the bane of human rationality. We are burdened with various cognitive biases and shortcomings that make all us humans naturally bad at it: We tend to seek out observations that confirm our beliefs and credit them when we find them; we tend to be more critical and skeptical of observations that contradict what we believe to be true. I often speak at length about this, criticising others when they insist in the face of evidence.

So what about me, then? When do I change my mind?

I must regretfully admit that I can’t think of a great many examples. Probably no small part of this is due to the fact that no one, however much they may appreciate the importance of evidence and perniciousness of cognitive biases, is actually immune to those biases. I do my very best to re-examine my beliefs when rationally challenged, but I suspect that every one of us carries a great many beliefs obtained for irrational reasons that, correct or incorrent, we just never come to critically re-examine. As a child you were taught a thousand thousand things, and as a child you had no choice but to absorb them, no framework for critical evaluation. Probably you will not re-examine all of those beliefs in your entire lifetime.

I’d like to think that another significant part of this is that I try not to form beliefs without a rational basis. I like to think that I rarely say anything that is flat-out wrong, because I try to avoid making claims that I’m not confident about. Maybe there’s something to this—I hope so—but no one is infallible; I am inevitably wrong about some things, ergo there must be beliefs I ought to change, but have so far failed to.

Maybe the most obvious example of an area where I have changed my mind is religion, but it seems kind of trivial. It was only as a child that I was capable of blind faith, the conviction of things not seen; I grew up and grew out of it when I realised that there just wasn’t anything supporting it, and I was firmly atheist long before my voice changed. For a long time I held the curious faitheist position that although it’s mistaken, it’s still somehow noble and worthy of respect to have committed faith; I have changed my position here too, recognising that holding irrational beliefs is inherently bad (and in fact intellectually a much worse crime than happening to reach erroneous conclusions). But all that is rather trivial; the total dearth of supporting observations makes it childishly easy to discard.

A much more recent, complicated, and difficult belief was upset some time last year or the year before, when I first started reading and learning how little parents matter to the personalities of their children. Steven Pinker summarises it in this video; the gist of it is that for most behavioural metrics,

• up to 50% of the variation in the trait is genetic;
• 0%–10% of the variation is due to parenting/upbringing;
• the rest is due to culture, peer groups, &c.

This is illustrated by facts such as

• adoptive siblings are hardly more similar than people picked at random;
• monozygous twins reared apart by different parents tend to have very similar personalities, even if they are raised in very different environments and never meet.

I found this surprising. Indeed, if a fact could be offensive, this would be pretty close to it. Parenting doesn’t matter? Intuitively this makes roughly no sense at all to me. My parents matter intensely to me. Surely they shaped me? I can identify many, many traits, beliefs, and tendencies that correlate incredibly well with my parents. For better or worse, I think of myself as very much my father’s son, and I share many of his strengths and weaknesses. I have the same intellectual bent that he had, and many of the same interests.

And I value my parents. My father was a very flawed man, but he was always good to me, I got along well with him, and I loved him in spite of all his many flaws. My mother is wonderful, and I often consider myself very lucky in that she is so accepting, so ready to have a grown-up parent/child relationship with me, even when we deeply disagree on things. The notion that their influence on me was much less than I had thought seems…disparaging.

But the fact of the matter is that surprising and counterintuitive though it may be to me, that doesn’t alter the truth one whit, and I know damn well that intuition does not trump evidence. There are various studies on the subject, and I gather many are summarised in The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, which I really ought to read at some point… If the evidence contradicts my intuition, then I should discard my intuition, not the evidence.

There are also perfectly good explanations for the observed correlations under the working theory above. Of course I resemble my parents in many respects: I share 50% of my genetic material with each of them, and just as I look quite like my father did when he was young, demonstrating that he contributed to my visible phenotype, so he surely contributed to my behavioural phenotype, as well. And while I wasn’t brought up in quite the same environment as my parents were, still there were surely similarities.

Additionally, I can think of hardly anything more conducive to confirmation bias than an informal analysis of a child’s resemblance to its parents. Of course I can think of commonalities: After all I spent eighteen years living in the same house as my parents, and had extremely ample time to learn just what traits and behaviours I shared with them.

Finally, I think that the deep personality traits that psychologists measure—agreeability, neuroticism, and so on—are probably less tangible, less open to obvious observations, than more superficial behaviours. It’s surely true that I read Biggles books as a child because my father had done so when he was a boy, had saved the books, read them aloud to me for a while. But this is a very superficial behaviour compared with whatever personality traits make me someone who enjoys shutting himself in with a book.

Of course, all of this is just reinterpreting old data in a new framework: Take the observations I made under the paradigm of “I am this way because parenting so made me”, and reinterpret them under the paradigm of “Parenting doesn’t matter nearly so much; genes and social environment are more important”. This is a fine thing to do, but were I unable to account for these data, still I should have to bow to the evidence: My personal, anecdotal observations do not trump the data.

I should add that I am not convinced that no kind of parenting can have fundamental, important effects. I vaguely seem to recall reading, and at any rate I have seen nothing to contradict this belief: That a truly poor environment, such as abusive parents, can have deep and terrible effects on a child. I do not base this on any real data, so I will not vouch for its truth at all, but until I read otherwise this is my working hypothesis: Terrible parents can psychologically damage their children and have disproportionate influence, for the worse. Parents who aren’t terrible, though, have surprisingly small effects on personality, and while a good parent is a very different creature from a terrible one, the differences in outcome vary surprisingly (disappointingly!) little between mediocre, good, and great parents.

Here, though, more data are needed.

(You may protest that people who are particularly good and responsible tend to have children who grow up to be particularly good and responsible. To this I say: Recall that these are people who may be genetically predisposed to be particularly good and responsible, and with up to 50% heritability in most personality traits, it’s no wonder if that is passed down.)

Yesterday—March 8, 2012—Gracie Barra Vancouver hosted a pretty remarkable seminar. Sadly, two of the five guest instructors weren’t able to make it, one due to illness and the other due to the fact that life is busy and shit happens. I am not too disappointed, though, because we still had Flavio Almeida, Marcio Feitosa, and Luca Atala (who incidentally runs Gracie Magazine) all on the mats—all three world champions, I believe—which is skill and knowledge enough for any seminar. Additionally we had three of our own established blackbelts—Tim, Rodrigo, and John—and two brand new blackbelts: Will and Evan (both of who rather amply deserve them). It’s not often you see eight BJJ blackbelts on the mat all at once.

I also received a promotion, though a less dramatic one—I’m now, after about 4½ years of training (started in October 2007), a BJJ purple belt. I’m not sure how to feel about that. On the one hand I am proud, because it’s been a long journey and I have gained a tremendous amount. On the other hand I feel awfully self-conscious because I feel very strongly that I don’t really deserve it yet. But then, I gather most people feel that way when they get promoted…and it’s been said that a new rank isn’t something you get when you are the level that belt represents, but rather something you need to grow into. And that makes sense, of course—obviously even the average purple belt must be better than the average brand new purple belt! I started feeling like I deserved my blue about two stripes in: Halfway. Maybe this will be the same.

When Rodrigo was awarding the belts, he said a few words about everyone who received one—most for the blackbelts, of course, who have been at it for about a decade, but some for us new purple belts, as well. He recounted how, early in his tenure at the school, I had come to him depressed and dispirited, and complained how I felt my game was not improving at all; how I would never get anywhere; how I was close to quitting. I’m pretty sure he misremembered that last part: I don’t recall ever wanting to quit or give up. But it’s certainly true that it felt for a long time like there was a plateau I would never rise beyond, and it was a pretty low plateau to be stuck on, at that. Time (and Rodrigo) have certainly proved me wrong on this point. Regardless of what I or anyone else might think of my skill relative to what a purple belt ought to be, I’ve risen a very great deal above that level—in skill, in confidence in the skills I have, and in confidence that I will continue to grow and improve. I’m still very aware of my limitations, but I no longer feel like I’m stuck. I’ve spent too much time improving to think that there’s an end to that road.

So whether (as I am told) I deserve it now, or whether (as I feel) I have quite a lot of growing into it left to do, it remains a milestone on that journey, and I know that I will fully deserve it—grow into it, and eventually even outgrow it. Some day.

I got a chance to roll for a bit with Flavio Almeida, which was quite an experience. I’ve rolled with a couple of very, very good guys, but not very much. “Supa” Dave Rothwell, but that was so early in my whitebelthood that I had no ability whatsoever to judge what he was even doing. Rodrigo, obviously, much more recently. Now Flavio. It was a very different experience.

It’s hard to judge, of course, what part is style, what part is what he felt like doing at that particular time, and what part is him going easy on us poor noobs. Still, Rodrigo plays a thousand-ton crushing top game, moving about half an inch at a time and giving me less than that to work with. He moves very slowly for the most part—but will explode with huge, quick transitions as soon as the moment is right. Flavio’s game, on the other hand, was extremely smooth and yielding. There was, as I had occasion to remark, a lot of “jiu” in his jiu-jitsu: Jujutsu (the more modern Romanisation) is often translated as “the gentle art”, but I gather ju doesn’t quite mean “gentle”, but refers to something that yields before and adapts to a stronger force rather than opposing it directly. This was very much how Flavio rolled: When he chose to, of course, he got on top and put on as much pressure as he wanted, but he spent a lot of time allowing his opponent to push or pull, simply going with that energy and momentum to transition into some other position, giving the opponent a brief moment to reflect on what a bad idea it was to provide that impetus, before moving on to the next one.

I had the opportunity to watch him do this before I rolled with him myself, and in consequence I played a very conservative game. Since I could tell he’d go with every push and take advantage of it, I tried to make my own game one of inches; if he would turn every bit of energy I supplied against me, then I should give as little energy as possible. At the level he chose to go on against us mortals, I lasted a while, even earning one of those Nice! exclamations one issues in response to something good and unexpected, when I managed to block a sweep. Afterward I was told I had a nice, tight defence—which was very pleasing regardless of how well I realise that he was of course being very nice and generous about it; if someone like Flavio really wants to get me, I don’t think my defence would even register.

I really liked to see (and feel) that ju part. It’s something I want to include more of in my own game, and I sometimes try in my own halting manner when rolling with beginners.

Quite a bit of the seminar was taken up by various speeches and thank yous and promotions, but still the bulk of the time was technical instruction. I took a few hastily scribbled notes during water breaks in order to help me remember what had been taught, which I will set down here in order to hopefully cement them a little better in my mind. I doubt it’ll be terribly helpful to anyone who didn’t get to see the demonstrations, for which I don’t apologise—this is chiefly for my own reference!

• Perhaps my favourite part of the seminar was an extremely simple way Luca Atala demonstrated to defeat the spider guard. On the one hand there’s an element of “Why didn’t I think of that?”; on the other hand he emphasised and demonstrated some details that I hope will stick with me for a long time. In particular, he emphasised the need to tuck your elbows in, and showed how the spider guard can largely be neutralised simply by tucking your elbows, gripping if possible just below the knee. Nothing revolutionary, but solid, and the demonstration helped remind me or inform me of some details I was missing.

  The pass from here was very simple: Once you have neutralised the spider guard, transfer to a two-on-one grip on a leg and stretch that leg out while passing, keeping two-on-one until you’ve established side control.

• Flavio and Marcio demonstrated different pieces of the spider guard game they’d picked up from Romulo Barral (I’m afraid I don’t recall who demonstrated which part; I think maybe Flavio showed the sweep?). It was based on a spider guard grip where one arm was released and that grip was transferred instead to a deep collar grip. Hip out to turn, so that my far leg is on the opponent’s bicep; shift under them to get lifting power. (This was a tricky part for me.) If they don’t base out, this is a slow but sure sweep in its own right, shifting them over me.

  If they do base out, here’s where the sneakiness begins: If I have a right spider hook, turned so my left side is toward them, then pass my left leg around their right leg, angled so that the front of my knee can collapse the back of theirs. Pinch my knees together for leverage, push forward—and over they go.

  If, on the other hand, they base out far, using their right arm, the submission off this setup presents itself: Square back up and slip the right leg under their (non-controlled!) arm, while sliding the right spider hook over the shoulder: Triangle.

• Another part focused on posture control from top side or half guard. The emphasis here was that if the opponent’s head is driven down, it breaks their posture and takes away most of their power. One application was: Opponent turns in; I place my top hand high on their head, and swim my other hand under their arm for an overhook, reaching for my own wrist. If I now walk around their head, I will flatten them back out. (For drilling: They turn back in; I repeat going in the other direction.)

  From here was a half guard submission that I’ve seen before but never mastered. Sadly I didn’t master it last night either. It involves stuffing the half guard in just the same manner as above, then using my right hand to feed their left lapel to my left (cross-face) hand. Then, dive my right hand through an overhook and under their head to reach that lapel—this is hard; you have to reach very deep and I found it tricky to have enough gi material to grasp. If this is accomplished, there’s a trianglish choke achieved by sprawling out, using my chest on their triceps to force their arm into their neck.

  A simpler but very interesting option from here is to stuff the half guard in just the same fashion, then swim my right hand for an underhook and flatten them out (into a fairly standard top half position). Then, keeping control of the arm with that underhook and blocking their head with my left hand, step over and hook the head with my left leg—locking my ankles together if at all possible (kind of like a triangle about their head and right arm). From this control position, the straight armbar on their left arm is trivial. My drilling partner and I played a bit with this from a regular half guard setup (rather than coming off the head/posture/stuff thing), and found that it works though it’s harder; when it doesn’t come off a flattening action, the bottom person may be in a position to shift to his left side and escape out the back door.