and just removed all the moves I deem "too dangerous" or "rude" from my repertoire. I don't do heel hooks, I don't do throat posts, I don't do neck cranks, I don't do anything flying or rolling, I don't slam anybody.
Same. The two big realizations that I try to instill in students regarding intensity:
-
You learn much faster when its "playful" than if its aggressive as if both parties are fighting for their life. The stress response actually inhibits your recall and interrupts the ideal 'flow state' for learning.
-
Getting injured means you can't train. The cost isn't just the injury itself, its the weeks or months you aren't able to work on your technique. You have so little to gain from going all out (in practice), why could it possibly be worth it?
I've got a whole bag of tricks that I only pull out if I'm sparring someone of equal experience, or an opportunity to use one safely is just blatantly presented to me.
Otherwise, I spend about 1/4 of my attention defensively watching out for wild, unexpected moves from the partner since I'm the one who'll get injured if I eat an errant spinning backfist or an unintentional elbow.
Its like they say, a white belt is arguably more dangerous than someone with moderate training since their lack of experience means they throw stuff wildly and without regard for either their or your safety, and they won't even know why something is unsafe, much less how to control it.
Likewise with the newbies, if I can get to a position where I COULD do something that would absolutely wreck their day, I'll 'symbolically' perform the motion to initiate it, but usually just give them the opportunity to escape. And they won't realize how bad their position was had I been intending to do them harm. Big one I do try to point out is people who turn away from a roundhouse kick and present their back. I usually give them a little tap with my foot and then explicitly call attention to the fact that taking a hard kick to the spine or tailbone is both painful and dangerous.
I've been trying to decide if my habit of self-mocking is obnoxious or not.
Reflexive modesty is a better habit than bragadoccio, methinks. The guy who rubs it in is more likely to get embarrassingly humbled. Still, be willing to have confidence in your abilities.
faceh
1d ago
Yep.
Hence why if the video isn't leveraging its advantages as a visual medium to be more engaging/entertaining, I'm backing out almost instantly.
it's about recognizing that in the immortal words of Patrick Swayze "nobody ever won a fight.
Bingo.
And for many I've noticed that realization doesn't kick in until their first big injury. Hopefully not a permanent one. Young dudes have that innate sense of invulnerability, and they bounce back from minor issues so quickly that the idea that they're one bad fall or headkick away from brain damage or at least an emergency room visit seems to escape them.
I have been insanely blessed to have been doing it as long as I have without being sidelined by a serious injury, but that would be because I've been very cognizant of that possibility, and I train accordingly. I have "let" guys with less experience than me win simply to avoid a situation where one of us would probably get hurt, or to not escalate the intensity to unsafe levels. Most of the time they simply don't have the knowledge to realize how easily they can get hurt. On rarer occasions they lack the self control to rein it in where needed.
Likewise, the worst injuries I've doled out are broken noses. I felt HORRIBLE about that in both cases, but in the grand scheme those are easily recoverable.
On the meta level this means finding a gym that selects for high conscientiousness.
faceh
1d ago
I truly do not envy the lives of those whose paycheck and general live trajectory is dictated by an algorithm that is constantly and aggressively being tweaked but uncaring corporate interests to maximize eyeballs on ads, or whatever they call the actual metric they care about.
Arbitrary-seeming changes that often wreck your previous strategy, or even diminish the viability of the very style you prefer to express in.
Your work output dictated by constant compliance with a disinterested (not malicious, but it'd be hard to tell) program that remains, to you, a complete black box which you can only appease by offering up your best efforts and seeing which get rewarded with views and money, then adjusting from there.
It is true that we ALL live under someone else's algorithm (and, if you wish, EVERYONE is living under the meta-algorithm known as "the market"). But it'd be particularly maddening to me when there's a corporate entity that owes me no allegiance, and refuses to disclose the most important standards by which it judges 'success,' meanwhile it doles out the rewards as it sees fit with seemingly no regard for the quality of the creative work.
faceh
1d ago
Ding ding ding.
Its easier to put out volume if you happily compromise on quality, and I have to assume the Youtube Algo doesn't care about quality over minutes watched.
So there's some 'optimal' amount of information/minute that pads out the video without losing the viewer.
Just so happens my preference is on information density is higher than the average youtube viewers. Which is unsurprising.
Feels like it used to be that a 'video essay' was mostly guaranteed to have some insights and interesting commentary on a topic you cared about.
The more recent videos are just as long but less 'useful' information, lazier editing, and even the entertainment value has gone down.
Plus certain topics are getting recycled pretty often, so I'd just as soon go and rewatch older classics.
I just don't watch 'em anymore.
Don't have time for a full response but my point would be that Martial Arts Gyms are one of the few places where MUTUAL respect is both expected, observed, and enforced.
Because the only thing that actually gains you respect is competence, and competence in martial arts can be tested very objectively, and corners can't be cut. Yeah, a McDojo can hand you a belt, but abilities can be tested and frauds identified with a simple sparring session. And generally speaking, people who are capable of actual physical violence, but also understand why you want to avoid it are going to be more respectful of each other, both from recognition of the shared skill AND the avoidance of conflict.
I dunno, I keep coming back to this point. If you're not training some kind of physical skill, even if it isn't a martial one, why would you expect to get respect from those around you. Crossing you has no cost if you are incapable of doing them any harm. And on the flip side, if you are training a physical skill but the others who train it don't offer respect in return, why would you want to train it?
Although the Cobra Kai model does exist in some places, where people prefer to be verbally abused and consider that the mark of quality instruction.
I don't think we need to return to a full on honor culture... but I do think that social etiquette might improve if (nonfatal) dueling were allowed.
Also I think my baseline experience is that most people show certain respect to each other since I've grown up in the South.
Yeah.
It used to be comprehensible. You more or less knew the sum total of your realistic options. And presumably knew your approximate position in the rankings.
I did undergrad on a small campus, and thus it was generally known who was dating whom, who was available, and you crossed paths with potential partners a lot. For better or worse.
Did law school on a MUCH LARGER campus, which felt like jumping from a fish tank to a large lake. Couldn't track everybody, but could at least know where to look for potential partners.
And while I was in law school, Tinder became a thing. And over the next couple years it was like swimming out of the lake into the Pacific Ocean.
But now there was literally no way my tiny little guppy brain could appreciate the entire biodiversity I was being exposed to, and eventually you have to collapse everyone down to their shallowest representation. "Oh that's a rainbowfish, a clownfish, a barracuda, a tuna... and oh so many whales."
At which point I could genuinely FEEL myself unable to care about the people flashed in front of me. Rather than a comprehensible set of people I sort of knew and cared about... it was an endless stack of nobodies and whatever infinite 'opportunity' these represented was overwhelmed by pure ennui/apathy of any individual connection becoming meaningless.
Only exception was early OKcupid, which let you go "spearfishing" for the exact types you wanted to see. But that didn't last.
I've just met too many ordinary, average people in what appear to be genuinely happy relationships to be able to entertain this model of the world.
I've seen too many statistics from the last ten years about the rapid decline in relationship formation (among the young) and the womens' constant complaints about a lack of men worth marrying to pretend there's not an actual trend that mostly swamps the anecdotes.
The women will tell you this themselves:
EDIT: @erwgv3g34 found a working Archive link
Like I said, the hypergamy is baked into the culture. Women aren't 'hiding' it per se, but don't like being reminded that its their choices creating the outcomes.
Dating apps and social media in particular have led to a situation where the local 'social system' a woman is observing is no longer her school, or even her local village, but every single guy in a 20 mile radius.
faceh
5d ago
High status males DO need to be reined in since they're the ones setting the social trends for most everyone below them in the totem pole.
If they are deigning to eschew monogamy and go around banging and impregnating various women with no intentions of marriage, guess what norms end up ascending?
Of course, we could just let those new norms dominate.
faceh
5d ago
There would be ways to monetize it, but yeah, you'd have to accept losses unless you want to be subject to the exact same pressures that lead to influencers putting out braindead, controversy-baiting content.
faceh
5d ago
According to the wiki he's a Cinematographer that's a bit more prestigious and less blue-collar coded than just being a camera guy.
Still, she's been with him for 20+ years, not bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Moder
Bit more research shows that she met him while she was working on a movie that ALSO STARRED BRAD PITT so yeah, good on him for outshining the most chad actor in modern history.
faceh
5d ago
This is probably a solid way to put forth a pro-marriage, pro-natalism agenda.
But happy people in good relationships ostensibly don't feel much need to flaunt how good it is, and talk about what makes things work.
Would definitely need to be an outside observer intentionally tracking them down and publishing their observations from the outside.
In general, people react negatively to anything which is unflattering to women as a group.
Take it one level deeper.
Why would it be 'unflattering' for women to actively seek out the best specimen as a potential partner/mate? Not very romantic, granted, but its not like that's a BAD strategy!
Part of it is because it DOES lead women to stray, cheat, and betray 'good' men due to perceived better options.
The other factor, I think, is that their instincts for what to look for in a guy, which were honed in the ancestral environment, run into some massive issues b/c traits that are adaptive in the modern world are different than those that were necessary to survive the ancient one. This unfortunately leads to them getting into abusive and one-sided relationships because a guy who is physically aggressive, risk-seeking, craves power, and flouts social rules would be very appealing on an instinctual level... and is less likely to care what an individual woman feels about him... and will likely want to have more than one woman. Modern prosperity likewise makes it easier to fake those traits long enough to knock up a woman before she figures out the truth.
Not that I would want to cull high-T males from the population.
So I'd argue the 'unflattering' part arises because women's instincts, even if pointed in the correct direction, lead them to sub-optimal choices when applied. We've given women almost full discretion to pick who they screw, who they marry, and who is even allowed to interact with them. And their choice-making has left much to be desired, even to themselves. And some large part of this is due to the actively deceptive males who are optimized for getting laid with minimal investment, who have figured out how to attract women while having few of the actually desirable traits.
In our modern society, which option is more palatable? Obviously the second. As I alluded to, there is a taboo against saying anything negative about women as a group. And that's why people push back against hypergamy.
Oh I know.
I've put up too many comments reflecting on and arguing that pretty much every single problem in the dating market today can be traced to women's behavior shifting, whilst mens' has remained largely the same... except to the extent they have to interact with women.
faceh
5d ago
I mean, a huge portion of women who get enough wealth to be independent just end up never settling at all, is the observed outcome, with large downstream impact on TFR.
faceh
5d ago
The crass side of me wants to know how big that guy's schlong is. He isn't just a blue collar type, he had kids from a prior relationship, he got the bona fides.
But I choose to accept it as the feel-good story about finding true love in unlikely places that it appears as.
I've wondered if having a hard-working, weathered-but-handsome, otherwise well-put-together tradesman for a beau might become a status symbol in its own way, but that doesn't seem to have panned out.
It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."
The idea that women are selecting for the highest status male in their local social system is integrated into virtually every aspect of human culture. There are exceptions in media (Disney's Aladdin had a princess fall for the street rat rather than an uber-powerful, and not bad-looking sorcerer sultan who wanted to keep her as his slave).
I would argue that reality is more exacting than fiction, here. Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former.
And biologically its perfectly sensible. I don't think there's any other way for a woman to operate if she wants to ensure her offspring's success and her own long term security. Completely fair to acknowledge and accept this biological imperative.
The "blackpill" is that this factor doesn't get turned off if a woman gets married and has kids, so a guy is never fully safe from being supplanted if he loses status or a higher status male sets eyes on his woman. The high status males need to be reined in as well!
There is actual research showing that women who acquire more wealth use that to acquire independence, men who acquire wealth use it to start families.
But we are currently seeing what happens when all cultural guardrails and guidelines that limited that factor are removed:
Approximately, women will start demanding outsize displays of wealth, status, power, physical fitness in exchange for mating privileges, and thereby controlling more and more actual wealth, which leads to further inflation of demands.
This is at least one explanation for why females have gotten less satisfied with their status, even as they've been given more wealth and power.
Women's satisfaction dropped 15 points spanning the emergence of #MeToo, while men's fell five points. The latest reading among women, 44%, is the lowest on record, although it is not statistically different from the 46% readings in 2018 and 2020. At the same time, men's satisfaction with the treatment of women has remained flat at 61% to 62% since 2018.
Find me a single person who can argue with a straight face that females are on balance worse off, socially or politically speaking, than 2002.
And so China is rapidly plunging down this dystopic slope and trying to aggressively re-establish the guardrails from the top down.
Interesting to see if they can get to any sort of agreeable equilibrium. At least they are willing to do things that might upset women.
I would still guess that South Korea is the one plumbing the deepest depths of how far things can fall, but even they are showing the slightest glimmer of things turning around.
faceh
6d ago
Its something I noted a few months back, OpenAI is screwed for lacking any supporting infrastructure for their core product.
They're up against companies with unlimited cash flow (Google), integrated social networks (META, xAI), or a noticeable edge in performance (Anthropic), or maybe all 3. And China.
They literally only had first-mover advantage. They gained a tiny edge by throwing out somewhat undercooked models that were nonetheless marginally better than others and got name recognition. But the cost of switching is, basically, zero.
Sora was their attempt to build some infra from scratch, a very dubious proposition. And then Sora got eclipsed by other SOTA video models. This keeps happening to them.
It looks like the Pentagon deal might have saved their bacon for the time being.
I'm just saying that broadly speaking, everyone is mostly chasing incentives dictated by a black box force they have limited ability to control.
If you're in the gig economy or working as a streamer, you know where the Algo is and who controls it, at least.
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