I found Goedel, Escher, Bach just as pretentious and ridiculous as this paper. As an undergrad, I wrote a paper that was almost that pretentious, and I'm embarrassed about it every time I think of it. How do these things make it past, in GED's case, editors, and in this case, both referees and editors? Someone has to point out the Emperor's unfortunate nudity.
Pulling out my curmudgeon hat for the sake of argument... I read GEB in college and actually bought a copy about 10 years later, to see if it resonated more. But I ended up barely re-reading it.
I don't remember anything that substantive about the connections. "Internal looping" seems like a vague connection.
The Godel sentence is self-referential for sure. That's a concrete and specific property.
All I remember about Escher is that there is the picture of the hands drawing each other. OK, it's a great picture, and a nice analogy. Is it profound? Did I miss something besides that trivial observation?
I don't recall how Bach is supposed to figure in. How is Bach self-referential or how does it display "internal looping"? (And what does that even mean?)
Computer science is full of better examples than Escher or Bach, IMO. For example, C compilers written in C, which lead to the Thompson "trusting trust" attack. Compilers are mentioned in GEB, but it's done in a way that I didn't find particularly helpful (probably because I already know something about the subject.)
I also experienced this with my Python compiler written in Python [1]. There were some interesting cases where knowledge of the variable names used in the compiler "leaked" into the compiled output via, I believe via the string intern table of the Python VM.
But circular != self-referential. Self-referential is a deeper property.
If I have 2 mutually recursive functions, that's circular. For example, most parsers have mutually recursive functions.
There's nothing self-referential about them though. On the other hand, a C compiler written in C is self-referential. It confuses subject and object, which leads to some interesting paradoxes like the number for the "tab" character never appearing in the source code, as Ken Thompson points out.
The Godel sentence is self-referential. It makes a claim about itself.
The movie Synecdoche NY and some of Lewis Carroll's works (which figure heavily in GEB as I recall) are self-referential. The person writing the work appears in the work. Charlie Kaufman does this a lot -- the movie Adaption also has these properties.
But I don't see that Bach's music is self-referential. The music doesn't write more music, or have any awareness of itself.
Escher's two hands is self-referential, because it's confusing subject and object. But the staircases aren't self-referential.
You're not wrong that GEB is grandiose and presumptuous in the material it takes on. But one important difference may be that LJA has started from one person's very particular choices* and tried to tie them up and cast them as universal. That often doesn't come off well: I think it tends to be more about the author than the reader. (Caveat: I say this only having skimmed the paper here, not read the whole thing. And having loved GEB.)
GEB, on the other hand, mostly started from a bunch of universal ideas, and used the author's idiosyncrasies as a way to explore those ideas. I think it comes much closer to hitting its mark.
There's no accounting for taste, though. If you don't like Hofstadter's way of thinking, you probably just won't enjoy his book. I'm sure some people find the Dialogues and their wide-eyed "discoveries" of analogies with the essays' material to be smarmy at best. Personally, I find the language of this paper to be overly flowery and too cooler-than-thou (yes, I've heard of Erik Satie; does it matter?) to enjoy.
----
* I mean, "By introspecting my personal aesthetic sensitivities, I eventually realized that my tastes in the scientific, artistic, and physical domains are all motivated by the same driving forces"...that basically says "I think you're going to love reading my diary".
I certainly disagree that GEB was pretentious. For beings that can understand information, surely computation is the highest possible goal. To that end, a certain seriousness and prestige is available when referring to CS.
We all have our opinions.
Did you find GEB to be a helpful reference? What kind of science were you studying?
I didn't find GEB helpful. It presented its information in a way that, if you're being charitable, sounded like, "Check out this cool thing these interesting people have in common that will tweak your brain!" The problem for me was that it often lapsed into, "Check out how cool I am that I can understand these acknowledged deep thinkers, and impose this pattern on their thought even when it's only peripherally appropriate!". Some of that perception may have been from my assessment of the people I knew who talked about it too much, though, now that I think of it.
The language in GEB can be a bit much, but I find it to be a consistently effective took for opening someone's eyes to the vast universe of computer science.
There should be a GEB for Hackers or something like that, though. Accessibility is an issue. Maybe not accessibility in the sense of grokking the content, but certainly in staying engaged to it throughout the text. It feels like a lot of work.
Humility is important too. GEB could definitely use some more of that too.
> For beings that can understand information, surely computation is the highest possible goal.
That sounds almost like a statement of religion. I am a being that understands information; "computation" is not even remotely close to my highest goals.
Maybe not as an individual, but as a society or as a species, there are few absolutes for us to pursue. History and Math are the only absolutes we really have.
What I'm meaning to say is its a righteous goal compared to pursuing art or literature, because it's universal in nature.
I think Turing will be remembered as one of the few people who changed the course of human thought in its entirety.
I understand what you're saying, and sure, my goal right now this weekend is to get some plane tickets and an airbnb booked, there's no computing mysticism there.
But as a whole, I think we humans have an objective to find four the most information possible and to do the most computing as possible. That's essentially what the singularity is about, a human creation coming to a point of autonomy. That's the next step for humans, I think, abandoning flesh and spreading autonomous machines throughout the cosmos.
Shrug. I found that arithmoquinification of G's uncle stuff to be very helpful in terms of its explanatory power. Puffed up or not, Hofstadter made it accessible without dumbing it down. GED is a good overview of various issues and stimulates thinking.
He kind of lost me when in one of his books, Le Ton beau de Marot, I came across a little diatribe against rock and roll. Fuc...king wanker! :)
Here is another piece of my personal experience with GEB. In GEB, I first encountered SHRDLU and the "blocks world". But, you see, I didn't think it was real; I somehow thought it was a use case document for such a system presented as a fantasy interactive session, haha! There are so many "fantasy fugue" type threads in GEB that you don't know what is real and what is fiction. Hofstadter doesn't go out of his way to make it clear. I don't remember seeing a clear clue that "hey, ignorant reader, this is a real session captured from a program someone actually wrote in Lisp in early 1970-something". At that time, there was no (residential) Internet and no search engine where you could just look up SHRDLU.
I don't know why you are downvoted. This is an excerpt of the abstract:
> By introspecting my personal aesthetic sensitivities, I eventually realized that my tastes in the scientific, artistic, and physical domains are all motivated by the same driving forces, hence unifying Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido as three expressions of a single essence, not so different after all. Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido are governed by a limited set of rules which remain simple and unobtrusive. Conforming to them is a pleasure. Because Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido are inherently introspective disciplines, they also invite you to transgress the rules in order to find your own. Breaking the rules is fun. Finally, if Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido unify so many paradigms, styles, or techniques, it is not by mere accumulation but because they live at the meta-level and let you reinvent them. Working at the meta-level is an enlightening experience
I am hesitant to criticize the author, because I find the text so absurd that I must clearly be missing something. It looks like satire written for /r/iamverysmart.
I'd honestly appreciate being given more context from fellow HNers which upvoted this story and found it interesting.
This is a pretty par-for-course academic paper written on the philosophy of Aesthetics. The writer is using themselves as a subject via introspection, which is perfectly allowed, and attempting to highlight the aesthetic comparison between three of their favorite hobbies.
This isn't supposed to be a hard sciences paper. Aesthetics can, validly, be introspected on a personal level. If reading the paper makes you feel insecure, then you should probably engage in some self-introspection as well.
> that the entire paper was incredibly pretentious
Is it pretentious in it's writing style or it's topic?
Writing style wise it's a perfectly par-for-the-course humanities paper. It's not a blog entry, nor a letter to a friend. It's a formal academic humanities paper.
Topic wise, it's discussing aesthetics. There are plenty of places for criticizing the authors aesthetic arguments (in a formal manner), but in terms of writing about the topics and their relation to aesthetics the author does a perfectly fine job touching on the usual points.
So I'm confused as to how the paper could be pretentious. He isn't making the claim that the only way to achieve aesthetic pleasure is to partake in his particular hobbies, or to argue for some idealized version of these hobbies. He's not glorifying programming, jazz or martial arts as being anything other than rule based frameworks with room for exceptions and growth. He isn't making strong exclusionary arguments in regards to other languages. Nor does he make any claim that he is special, or that his introspection is special or unique.
So if reading a perfectly standard academic humanities paper leads you to think it's incredibly pretentious, then that says something of the beholder.
It's not great for entertainment value either. I mean it's an art that has at its very essence the eschewance of conflict.
I can't speak for the efficacy of Aikido against an actual trained fighter in some other code, but if it worked the way it was meant to you'd pretty much be watching one guy dodging another guys attacks until eventually he pins him in an arm lock. Fight over.
I had a feeling someone was gonna post this argument: that Aikido is in actually too effective to be used in MMA. It's in fact so good defensively that there is no point in even using it :^)
Something not being used in MMA doesn't necessarily mean it's completely useless, it just means it doesn't fit MMA. The sport isn't static, instead it changes as new ideas and techniques come and go.
If my memory serves me right, Jiu-Jitsu wasn't used in
the professional (western) fighting scene for quite a while. Today it's pretty much a must-have for MMA.
The same goes the other way around. Being an expert in Jiu-Jitsu means squat when your opponent is holding a gun, and standing 10m away from you. In other words: different flavours of martial arts/self-defence have different applications, though I would certainly consider some to be very ineffective in most situations.
> Something not being used in MMA doesn't necessarily mean it's completely useless, it just means it doesn't fit MMA. The sport isn't static, instead it changes as new ideas and techniques come and go.
We agree about that. The thing is, if Aikido could deliver what it promises, namely that you are able to effortlessly throw people to the ground when they try to strike you, then you could be sure fighters would use those techniques.
> You throw a hardened fighter through the air and he'll hit the fence or the canvas and bounce back up.
> This is precisely what you don't want to do, Aikidoka or otherwise.
I'm sorry, but are you joking? I don't think you have even watched 5 minutes of MMA (and I'm certain you've never trained) if you actually believe that.
Thing is, given a number of actual fighting contexts, jiujitsu is super effective. Not so much with aikido, it's like the air guitar of the martial arts world. The gun argument is meaningless. Anything of any use and effectiveness can always be imagined in a context where it wouldn't be useful.
There wasn’t really any MMA-style professional western fighting scene before jiu jitsu. Boxing is strikes only, and (traditional, non-WWE) wresting is very close to jiu jitsu in a lot of key ways. MMA as we know it was literally invented by one of the pioneers of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a venue to promote BJJ by showing its effectiveness against other martial arts.
The complaints are usually made against the training methods not the moves. Aikido moves are hard, the training partners response is usually rehearsed, and there’s much less focus on competitive sparring. It’s hard to learn something for real when the reactions are rehearsed. Other self defence focussed martial arts (Judo, Brazilian jiu-jitsu) have a lot more emphasis on live sparring. I’ve done all three at different points in my life. Only as a jiujitsu practitioner am I confident that I could handle myself without injuring the other party.
What's even better is that there is no longer the need to theorize about which of the martial arts work and which don't, because we already ran that experiment (UFC). Turns out that what actually works is a combination of kickboxing, wrestling, and jiujitsu. Everything else is just basically hollywood acrobatics.
UFC is a contrived scenario as well. A "real" environment is rarely so uniform or open. Jiujitsu is the best approach for the Octagon because most fights in this kind of environment end up on the ground, and ground-based grappling is what this art is optimised for.
I’ve done Krav for years, and while the principles are strong the lack of sparring makes it nearly useless in most real combat situations. For example, we’ll drill kicking someone in the groin repeatedly on pads but ignore the fact that it’s actually really, really hard to land a kick to the groin of a resisting opponent. I’m glad that I have the striking experience I’ve picked up from Krav, but I’d trust my jiu jitsu training way more in a real fight.
If your goal is to beat another guy in a cage, you may be right. But many "self-defence" situations in the real world rely much more on your approach and behavior. De-escalating a situation verbaly is the prefered way of "fighting" your opponent, at least to me.
If you want to fight for real, look at aggressive combat styles, like Krav Maga or Systema, which try to deal as much dammage as possible, in the shortest ammount of time, without considering the concequences to the opponent (= possible death). By the way, these are banned in UFC, beacuse they are too dangerous to the opponent. UFC is still a spectator sport.
Note: I'm an ex aikido practitioner and a current krav maga practitioner.
the "my art is too dangerous" argument as been disproven so many times, many of the BJJers would happily fight any of the krav or systema guys ( and have done ). The thing most of the "my art is too dangerous" guys fail to understand is becomes hard to do anything "effective" with someone who knows what they are doing, who works on establishing control and position and then works at finishing. It's a hard progression to stop if you don't know what they are doing.
“Systema” is Russian aikido dressed up in a bunch of mysticism about how it’s ~so deadly~; there’s no meaningful distinction between the two. Krav is some useful principles crippled by the lack of sparring in most (but by no means all) schools. I’ve trained both Krav and BJJ (and traditional karate), and the only one of the three that I think would be actually useful in a fight is BJJ because I actually DO use it in combat situations as part of regular training. Fighting someone is a physical task just like any other, and like any other physical task the more practice you have doing it the better at it you’ll be, no matter how good the theoretical aspects of a different art that doesn’t get that practice are.
Here is good Aikido in combat story from Terry Dobson who studied directly under the Morihei Ueshiba: "Aikido In Action - Doing combat with the essence of love" By Terry Dobson https://www.context.org/iclib/ic04/dobson/
Aikido covers a rather wide spectrum of practitioners/practices - with widely varying levels of "effectiveness in real life". The key is to understand what you want and then work out if the way you are studying it (and/or with whom) will give you that.
I used it to great effect in a bar brawl once. I was working security, some guy swung at me and I went straight into an arm lock pinning him to the ground. Nobody hurt, no problem and I was able to restrain him with a minimal amount of effort til the other guys came and escorted him out.
Aikido is great in self-defence situations where someone is coming at you. Of course the drills are contrived, their purpose is to train your muscle memory not actually to prepare you for combat.
It's not great for performance really.
The whole "come at me bro, but no not like that" thing is really something that only new practitioners will do because they're amazed by the power of these techniques.
The real weakness of Aikido is the pressure on the joints. I'd love to do it still but my knees can't take it any more.
"I used it to great effect in a bar brawl once."
My opinion is - you were lucky.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KUXTC8g_pk
I don't know the guy from the video but I think his assessment is very honest and balanced.
Perhaps you should try a different teacher. I know guys who started training in their 50s and 60s, so it's entirely possible if you pace yourself, and not exceed the current limits of your body. Little by little, these limits get stretched and your physical condition improves. Of course it's easier if you're fit and flexible to begin with, but that's not a requirement.
I do Crossfit, weightlifting and run occasionally; my weight is slightly below average. I wonder if maybe my joint issue is just something with my own body? That said — the class was an all-levels class with full tumbling. Maybe an intro class would be better...
Try a different class/teacher - there are a whole host of ways to approach/practice aikido, and taking care of health should always be paramount according to my line of teaching.
I am still not very flexible - but with lots of practice I am softer than most of the flexible people who join the dojo :)
Things like wrists/ankles/knees need time to (many months) to adapt/get conditioned.
One of the ideas behind Aikido is to not get in a fight in the first place. In real-life scenarios, it is often very possible to de-escalate a situation and prevent it from deteriorating into violence. Over time, practicing Aikido lets you see these opportunities and solve conflicts without resorting to violence.
I studied Krav Maga and it taught me nothing like that ... I had to quit it because it was having a detrimental effect on how I was approaching real life conflict ...
This might differ between countries and schools. I practised it for several years, and we had many classes that involved techniques useful for avoiding conflict (some as simple as just running away), keeping people at distance, and so on.
Well, yeah that was the fundamental principle alright. This even, isn't always the best approach in day-to-day life ... but even then once you go beyond that it's "smash their face til it's bloody". It's the space between this, and the nuance that Aikido explores that I found very beneficial.
Just like aikido, the teaching of other arts also varies... and yet those who like to badmouth us at every opportunity will assume the worst aikido school in the world is exactly representative of all of us.
And there is some utter nonsense out there, definitely. But we're hardly unique in that.
(a) Then how should Sun Tzu have entitled his famous work, if not "The Art of War"?
(b) Krav Maga is clearly a highly time- and energy-efficient tool for hand-to-hand combat; why should any martial art strive for any different metrics? (other than coping with exceptional circumstances via malicious compliance, such as that old French martial-art that focuses entirely on kicks not fists)
I have no response for (a) except to say that there’s an exception to every rule.
(b) has been treated extensively in many discussions. These usually are usually oriented around the role of conflict in daily life and the suitability of these arts as a way of dealing with them, for instance.
> conflict in daily life and the suitability of these arts as a way of dealing with them
Good grief! I can't imagine the amount of paperwork that would accumulate if fighting was a day-to-day occurrence in my life (except in Army during wartime, where assault is the job instead of a crime).
Mars being the god of war, calling something a Martial art denotes that it is suitable for conflicts that have escalated all the way to war/violence. My previous statement meant to imply my hope that martial arts are not suitable for the vast majority of conflicts that occur in daily life.
There's no question that Krav Maga is effective, but whether or not it teaches you to solve conflicts non-violently depends very much on the teacher. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if all you know is how to knock your opponent out, that's probably what you'll attempt to do in a conflict.
It should be stated that it there are PLENTY of questions about the effectiveness of Krav Maga. Any martial art that cannot be trained at high intensity against a resisting opponent should be looked upon with a healthy amount of skepticism.
> One of the ideas behind Aikido is to not get in a fight in the first place.
I have heard many martial-arts instructors voice this same point. -EDIT: I do not know whether this may be emphasised more in Aikido- but it is hard to regard it as a serious argument when the amount of time spent on learning about this aspect, and practice of how to apply this aspect and the techniques to achieve it seems to be almost invariably a few minutes a year at most.
I had more practice 'de-escalating' tense situations on a 1-term clinical skills paper at medical school than in the 6 years I studied across two different martial arts (one Korean, the other Chinese). The medical school paper amounted to about 2 hrs on that subject that year - 1 theory, 1 practice.
I did some aikido lessons for maybe 6 weeks (studied Shotokan for 8 years, but that was a while ago). The classes I did spent a lot of time on understanding the intentions of the opponent and trying to find a mutual solution, and a lot of time on mastering one's own emotions. It was some of the best training in "diplomacy" I've had, where by diplomacy I mean "the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions" (Churchill?).
Maybe it will never help YOU in a fight. I don't get into fights, but have had a couple of physical confrontations where instinctive reactions based on my aikido training, have helped me change the dynamic. So my view is different to yours. Ditto for a few friend's experiences.
That said - if you want to learn to fight, then learn to fight!
That a martial arts is "working" or "not working" is irrelevant to some of the parallels the author tries to highlight.
From p9 :
> The question of adequacy in martial arts is equally nonsensical — although a frequently asked question. Is such or such martial art adequate (efficient) in a real fight? You trained bare hands so what do you do in front of a knife? You train with a knife, but then what do you do in front of a gun, or an atomic bomb? Back in the middle ages, martial techniques could be considered adequate or not in such or such situation, but today, the point is different. In the modern sense, the purpose is education and self-development through martial techniques. This is what led Japan in the transition from martial techniques (Bu Jutsu) to martial arts (Budo) during the Meiji era. So just as a piece of music is adequate as soon as there is one person to enjoy it, a Budo is adequate as soon as there is one person to enjoy it for personal development
The question of adequacy in martial arts is equally nonsensical
Well, it is nonsensical since MMA proved beyond a shadow of doubt that BJJ beat everything else... We haven't yet settled on what programming language beats everything else however... But it is not LISP!
MMA showed the BJJ is a requirement to win but it's no longer sufficient. The sport has evolved. Plenty of non-BJJ guys win. Demian Maia is one of the best BJJ guys (and has been super successful) and he's gotten KO'd by strikes and had his BJJ neutralized by guys like Woodley.
Back when tournaments like UFC started, ground fighting and grappling were not part of the standard repertoire of tournament fighters so those guys won. Now it is. Back in the heyday of Pride, champions like Mirko CroCop were definitely not BJJ guys. Of course they trained BJJ but it's not their only tool.
BJJ beats everything else when fighting as a sport. Krav Maga practitioners have no problems dispatching BJJ fighters in the real world where there are no rules of illegal contact. That's what the author was differentiating between technique and art. If you think Lisp isn't the programming philosophy that beats everything else then read Paul Graham's article Beating the Averages - http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html.
> Aikido is that fantasy martial arts. The kind that only works when the opponents are in on the ruse.
This is the biggest fallacy people spout when evaluating Akido because they only see it being used in practise situations.
Your partner has to be 'in on the ruse' so they don't get hurt! Aikido is full of extremely damaging techniques and if your partner doesn't go where you're leading them or if they don't flip and fall as you want, they would end up with a broken wrist or neck.
Your partner has to be in on it because otherwise you'd never have the opportunity to apply the technique; no one's going to let you e.g. just grab a wristlock off of their punch.
This is all down to how it is trained, training with no resistance leads to fantasy land bullshit.
Watch black belt level Aikido randori. Contrast with judo, wrestling, bjj sparring. The difference is obvious, one group is dancing in response to choreographed zombie attacks, the other is learning how to really apply techniques against resisting opponents.
Have done judo, and it’s just as fictitious. It just operates by a different contrived set of rules.
And yes, of course aikido is choreographed. That choreography is hard as hell. On the other hand I’m pretty fearless about getting thrown. I’ve been to judo dojos and traditional jujitsu dojos where my training partners had breakthroughs because I was willing to commit completely to my attack rather than hedge my attack for fear of “losing.”
Aikido is metal, because the curriculum is sprawling and deep, the ukemi is far and away the hardest part of the practice (harder than applying the techniques), and the psychology of the practice is often inscrutable to people who are fixated on an incompatible model of instrumental utility.
Jeet kune do teaches speed and improvision. If you can react to your opponent, your at an advantage. If your opponent cannot react to you, you are at an advantage. Simple and true.
While knockout/stamina/appearence of futility/tap out may be a path to a win condition, there is nuance to when you have multiple opponents, are in grab/hold positions, when you want to be in a location and/or keep your opponent(s) in a location.
Aikido offers a way to use momentum and joints against your opponents allowing you to have more control over space and situation you normally would. This is also helpful for transitioning into submissions or broken limbs more elligently than punch, tackle and look for an opportunity.
My experience is that aikido is often taught with a delicateness and with less importance on competition/hunger. While I certainly enjoy adrenaline, winning i believe favors the adaptable which aikido seems to provide
More or less zero, yeah, because in general aikidoka don't train to fight in the UFC.
This comes up again and again. Aikido's useless in MMA competitions, useless in cage fighting, useless in UFC. So what! If you want to do these things, do them. Find the best path to success in them. Don't expect me to want the same things out of life and my training and my art.
Aikido gives me physical and mental discipline and training. It gives me something deep and rich and fascinating to explore (but based on very, very simple rules with a lot of emergent complexity). It gives me a very solid, very reliable self-defence system if I want it. All these things are taught at my dojo - the latter starting with how not to have a fight in the first place. Conflict de-escalation is a vitally important part of self-defence. Why would I go to a competition where fighting is the purpose if I don't want to fight? That's why we do aikido.
Someone's going to think they're being witty by claiming that we don't want to fight because we can't. I have no illusions on my ability to "deal with" attacks from a skilled boxer, that's going to be fast, accurate, relentless and full of misdirections and feints designed to get an opening against someone else with the same kind of skillset. They're also highly unlikely to be the person who's accosted me in a dark street demanding I hand over my wallet. That scenario I can do something about. Or at least attempt to - who says I'm going to win? But I can give it a really good shot.
So don't judge my aikido against your arbitrary standards. Those standards are not why I'm doing it, and ultimately "successful in the UFC" means nothing in the world I'm interested in. For what I want it for, aikido works.
Background: I'm a 2nd dan in Yoshinkan aikido, taking 3rd dan this July, hopefully. I do a mix of my own training and some teaching.
You should take a look at Rokas Leo's journey on youtube. I feel his journey is identical to what any open minded aikidoka will go down eventually. He trained for 13 years before beginning his journey and only recently got to the tail end and made a few important distinctions about why he will keep training aikido and how his teaching techniques will change, similar to a lot of the stuff you have echoed here.
edit: with some exceptions, he no longer believes aikido can help with self defense in any form (including against untrained attackers) at this point but does believe it has great benefits for other reasons.
Not to mention the use of bokken (wooden sword), which I believe is still issued to LAPD mounted units for crowd control.
Or jo, which I reckon would be pretty hard for your average UFC to defend against. I mean, I get a nice whooshing sound out of my jo on a kesa strike... can't imagine that feeling good on the side of someone's head.
EDIT: My point isn't to disparage MMA (though I don't like it for philosophical reasons), it's to point out that MMA is LARPing just the same as aikido. If you want to LARP about hammering, don't bitch about the people LARPing with screwdrivers.
Sure aikido straddles the boundary between open handed and weapons. Kendo is going to do way better at ken than aikido. On the other hand, most aikidoka will have spent more time training bokken takeaways.
against canonical aikido bokken waza. I never seen any aikido technique which could be applied against "small men" - most popular kendo strike. The same is applied for boxing jab, and wrestling legs takedown.
In my views the main aikido problem for self defense is that it is too focused on 80 years old canonical techniques, while world around continues progressing..
I’d say this is an over-broad generalization. Weapons work is where aikido differs most from lineage to lineage in my experience.
But your point that a style that trains ken exclusively is going to be more effective at ken than a style that trains a mix of ken and open handed techniques is not contested.
On the other hand, I reckon that the worst aikido dojo spends a lot more time on ken than the any BJJ dojo. Point is, it’s what you choose to spend time on.
I was somewhat recently visiting a judo dojo where an instructor recommended that I don’t bother training myself to throw ambidextrously. The rationale was that the opportunity cost of training my non-dominant side was larger than the competitive benefit I’d get from polishing more techniques on my dominant side.
I won’t deny that approach is probably more effective at winning, but it’s also not helping me improve what I want to improve.
Again, when people tell me the “problem” with aikido, I’m open and receptive, because I’ve got my own pet list. But where I start eye-rolling is when I hear people fundamentally misunderstanding why it is that many of us train and what we “should be” optimizing for as part of our own practice.
It is not about time spent on training, it is about progress. In Aikido, you practice bokken techniques from 100 years ago, as they were trained in old ryu schools. Kendo is modern competitive martial art, where many old techniques died because they are not efficient in actual fight.
If Aikido schools would adapt even basic but modern kendo footsteps and strikes, Aikido practicioners would have much better view on efficient sword fight.
this just doesn't work out in practice, I have cross trained with aikido guys, trained with ex aikido black belts who now do BJJ, they struggle to make anything work. Most of it just doesn't work with a resisting opponent, and the time you take to try and do whatever it is you wanted to do tends to cost you losing position or being joint locked or choked out. About the best thing from aikido once you learn BJJ and learn to establish position and control is some nice wrist locks
This depends a lot on the lineage. Most dojos won’t remotely throw a new person until they are sure the new person can take good ukemi.
I came to my current aikido dojo from a background in judo and jujitsu. I already had pretty solid ukemi—good enough to protect myself in judo shiai. But... my ukemi wasn’t remotely up to snuff for the intensity that senior members of my dojo are prepared to throw.
I only know this in retrospect because, with judo-level ukemi as my starting point, it’s taken me three years to get to the point where I can take most of our ukemi at intensity.
Most people never learn how hard aikido ukemi can be because they don’t stick it out long enough to be trusted not to get hurt. Again, I walked into my current dojo with solid breakfall fluency, but had someone popped on the chicken-wing variation of shihonage? I’d certainly not have been using that shoulder again for some time. Can I throw myself in an arcing breakfall when that happens today? Yeah, but I worked up to it with a lot of sweat.
Also, I’ll say that there are some lineages and dojos that do practice a very soft form of aikido. There’s nothing wrong with that practice; it’s simply that they are working on a different problem.
If anyone wants to try an athletically challenging lineage of aikido, I currently train in a dojo that is a mix of USAF (Yamada) and Birankai (Chiba) lineage. Yoshinkan aikdo looks like pure terror-sauce to me, but also looks to be high on physical / light on metaphysical.
> Aikido is that fantasy martial arts. The kind that only works when the opponents are in on the ruse.
Agree to a good extent. But less so after going to a few sessions and sparring with the sensei. Had to throw myself around in all kinds of spectactular ways to avoid the pain as he put pressure on my joints. For a spectator, it may have looked like he was throwing me around and I was playing along and exaggerating.
This was something I enjoyed about practising Aikido. As a 15 stone man you don't get an opportunity to be thrown around like a rag doll very often. Sensei I suspect picked on me for just that very reason :)
I'm always fascinated how the mention of aikido brings out the venom of the "real" martial artists.
Always it is the same tired arguments of how "it'll never work in a fight", "mma yada yada".
I can only assume these people are somehow threatened by super mean aikidoka, or they're worried that there will be a mass slaughtering of aikidoka when they go defending justice in the night.
it's just the same reaction as when flat earthers or anti vaxxers come out of the woodwork, they seem super serious about their convictions, but it's just ridiculous. It's the same tired arguments that get used because they still remain true.
I have also noticed a particular venom toward aikido in particular from people who train modern martial arts. I think this comes from the high level of arrogance associated with aikidoka (true or not, it is associated). It's frustrating when you encounter someone who does not spar or test themselves in any meaningful way yet is still completely convinced that they can defend themselves against trained or untrained opponents and is willing to share that belief in an arrogant way.
> Aikido is that fantasy martial arts. The kind that only works when the opponents are in on the ruse.
Similarly Lisp only works when used with a cooperative compiler. And jazz is most effective when played with fellow jazz musicians, and/or for an audience that appreciates jazz.
Your claim, if true, would only strengthen the analogy.
I don't think comparing it to lisp is meaningful. But if you were going to compare, it's not if it had a cooperative compiler, it would be as if it had a cooperative problem. A problem that was super simple, that caused no errors or exception cases, or complicated special cases. Didn't have to be solved real time.
The goal of many modern martial arts is to bring the discipline and training to a civilian population. These are fighting techniques that were made more kind, then taught to the population as a mix of exercise, discipline and training.
Not all martial arts follow this, but many do. The goal isn't to teach you how to win a street fight (take krav maga if you want to learn that), but to keep you active and help instill discipline through a fighting art.
A good test is this - if there are competitions, it's probably a civilian-ized fighting form. If you used serious fighting moves on someone in a competition, it would be unsafe and you would hurt your partner.
The best explanation I had for the existence of the (on the surface of it preposterous) martial art of Aikido was that it was a kind of post-graduate martial art for tough guys who already knew a bunch of other stuff.
Frankly most Aikido guys seriously have no clue about how to handle any real situation. Whining that real fights aren't like the UFC is ridiculous, as being ineffective in a civilized gym fight (i.e. 1:1, no weapons, etc) is not some magic predictor of being effective in a real fight unless your training is markedly more like the real situations somehow.
Aikido's defenses against blows are contingent on highly telegraphic, committed lunge punches and the like, and their technique against even unsophisticated grappling is wildly overoptimistic unless the Aikidoka in question has a really serious background in other martial arts. I've met some guys with savage wrist locks and some nasty tricks from Aikido and generally good movement, but these guys were serious cross trainers and knew what a real attack looked like (non-telegraphic and semi-competent).
As for the bogus versions of Aikido:
Generally the process seems like a process of mutual hypnosis. Uke is taught - by pain compliance - to go along with ineffective techniques (rather than go completely off script and win), and gradually becomes more and more hypnotized. Thus those ridiculous videos of super-senior people 'throwing' Aikido people by sketching out the barest minimum of a throw in front of them.
The other thing that gripes me about the bogus type of Aikido - aside from the fact that is has been the single greatest source of overconfident people convinced they could "take care of themselves" - is the number of people I've met with Aikido injuries. "OK, so you separated your shoulder when someone did a shoulder lock on you that wouldn't even work against a resisting opponent". Sigh.
Having trained Aikido for a while (and stopped, for reasons not relevant to this discussion), I have met zero people who trained it in order to be good in a fight - be it "civilized gym fight" or "real fight". I also never encountered anybody who actually had Aikido related injuries (with the possible exception of scraped feet among beginners, from poor shiko walking technique).
Reading the discussion here, I get the feeling that many seem to think that practitioners of Aikido somehow think that it's for fighting. Given the demographic of Hacker News, I'm honestly beginning to suspect that this is an American mindset.
Do you also rant like this about basketball, tennis, or golf? The most efficient way to win a tennis match would obviously be to shoot the opponent with a handgun and win by walkover. Yet, nobody complains that this never happens during tournaments, but, astonishingly, are happy that the tennis players... well, play tennis.
Why, then, complain about Aikido being Aikido?
I've met countless people who thought Aikido was (imagine this) a martial art. In a shocking development, this seems to have something to do with being good in a fight. It has certainly been sold to people as a way of making oneself less vulnerable to unsolicited physical aggression (a skill that has a fair bit in common with the ability to fight, even though these skills are not entirely congruent). I've also met a couple people with fairly serious (i.e. permanent life-changing shoulder injuries) as a direct result of Aikido.
No-one has ever claimed basketball, tennis, or golf makes you better at subduing attackers and for a fact, the techniques practiced in said sports don't seem to have anything to do with that. If you want Aikido to be judged against these sports, or, say, dance forms, this seems reasonable. In this case Aikido is a really shitty sport with no rules, no score, and no fun practiced by basically nobody, or a really lame dance that no-one wants to do.
In defense of Akido, I know some very good martial artists (I'm talking military trained) who have been using Akido to focus their muscle memory on less violent methods, primarily for it's control techniques. It was interesting to hear the conversation go over time from removed disdain for being non-combat... to respectful admiration of how technique properly applied could control but not permanently damage an opponent... because that's not always what you want to do.
I assume you are drawing your opinions from practitioners in random dojos in strip malls and from the Internet. But the same can be said about most karate and tai chi studios. Yet no one disputes that there are karate and tai chi practitioners who are very proficient fighters.
System matters less than practitioner. When people ask me who to study with in my area, I send them to a goju ryu practitioner I know. Does it matter than my core mechanics come from pa kua zhang? Not in the slightest. He's an amazing practitioner and teacher.
If you have rolled with Didier Verna or have examples of problems in stuff he has written or otherwise posted about martial its, then point those out. Discussion of systems is never helpful.
Is BJJ not fantasy? Give me my aikido-whackin’-sticks and I’ll reckon I could bludgeon most any BJJ practitioner within an inch of his / her life.
Is judo not fantasy? What good is your throw when someone punches you in the face or pops on a wrist lock?
Is krav maga not fantasy? When do you really get to practice your eye gouging for real?
Is MMA not fantasy? I find it aesthetically distasteful, but what little I’ve seen, there were clear opportunities to kill the other person, which would have expediently ended the match.
All martial arts are fantasy, and if you think one is “better” than another, that’s your problem, as you haven’t even figured out the rules of the game.
I train aikido 6-10 hours a week. It’s my third martial art. Why do I train aikido? It’s not because I intend to use it for self-defense. I train it because it’s wickedly good aerobic exercise that allows me to push my own body and mind harder than anything else I’ve done. I never in my life thought I'd be able to respond to as wide a range of physical attacks—not necessarily martially, but certainly athletically and safely!
I jokingly refer to my own aikido practice as “fight cult” and “samurai LARPing.” All martial arts is LARPing, and people who say otherwise just haven’t figured out what they’re doing yet.
I think the hate for aikido is mostly due to the delusions of many aikidoka that their martial art does effectively address self-defense.
I trained in aikido long enough to get a shodan, and what made me leave the art was seeing my instructor trying to teach some utterly ridiculous knife defenses to a prison guard. The guard didn't stay in the class long (thank God), and my gentle questioning of the instructor (had he actually practiced these techniques against a resisting opponent?) fell on deaf ears.
Indoctrinating students with the belief that they are learning effective self-defense when they are not is morally indefensible. It gets people hurt and possibly killed.
No martial art can perfectly recreate the real-world conditions under which it be used - not without compromising student safety - but some disciplines do a better job than others. To claim that aikido has flaws that are equivalent to many other more realistically-taught ones (krav maga, some schools of systema, judo, bjj, etc.) is to indulge in false equivalence. There is simply no substitute for a resisting opponent, even if the resistance takes place under sport-like rules.
In science, no models are perfect, but that doesn't mean that the historical geocentric model of the earth is equivalent to the modern heliocentric one.
Absolutely. I think that any martial art claiming to offer reliable protection from weapons is comical. The only good way to survive a knife fight is to not get in a knife fight.
Want my wallet? With my complements! Cell phone? I'll unlock it for you! Would you also like me to loosen my bowels as a show of respect? You got it!
I am glad to be training in a dojo that is realistic about what martial arts do and do not teach. I feel like there's so much value to aikido (and other martial arts!) training for people who understand this.
We've had people walk through our dojo door who are clearly wrapped around the axle of self-defense. I recommend those people take a self-defense course. In other words, find the style of martial art that shares your threat model.
My threat model is that I'll get old and flabby and die of social isolation and heart disease. Being in my late 30s now, I can't imagine another art being as good at helping me address that threat model.
From the very start I have to object strongly to his definition of Art as being "what we don't understand", and science being "what we do".
An "Artifice" is a subject of human creativity. Science is such an artifice. The actual effective practice of science is "an art" and one that many people simply don't get.
Science is the art of developing a better understanding of that which we don't know by applying that which we do ...
For me, science goes back to the root of the word. It originally goes back to the scalpel, which was used to divide living tissue from dead tissue. That which is objective vs that which is subjective.
Also, I wouldn't confine art to the purely aesthetic.
>For me, science goes back to the root of the word. It originally goes back to the scalpel, which was used to divide living tissue from dead tissue. That which is objective vs that which is subjective.
I think I know why you say that, but I didn't communicate that something can't be equally oriented toward both knowledge and affect; in fact I'd say that's exactly what people are experiencing when they characterize a theorem, equation, proof, or algorithm as "elegant." And I'm not calling the OED an "arbiter of all knowledge," I'm merely making sure my eccentric use of "affect," isn't being taken as a mistaken "effect."
Couldn’t you have just said emotion then? I mean perhaps you would lose some precision but if you have to use a dictionary maybe that precision is lost anyway?
It is expression-based, provides extensive control structures, is machine-independent, can solve problems fast avoiding side effects and comes with a convenient boken system (Not to mention looping fabulous in elegant male skirts).
Interesting. I program for a living, love Lisp and my hobbies are playing Jazz guitar and training in Tae Kwon Do (the art, not the sport) where I'm a 2nd Dan. I never considered the similarities between the three things. What's really interesting is the concept of transgression. In the end you don't learn Lisp, Jazz or Tae Kwon Do. You learn techniques and then learn how to create your own art. I've watched many students struggle with that concept through the years with Jazz and Tae Kwon Do. Never thought about that applying to Lisp as well.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadIn any other language adding aspect oriented, context oriented or pretentious extensions requires writing a whole new language.
I don't remember anything that substantive about the connections. "Internal looping" seems like a vague connection.
The Godel sentence is self-referential for sure. That's a concrete and specific property.
All I remember about Escher is that there is the picture of the hands drawing each other. OK, it's a great picture, and a nice analogy. Is it profound? Did I miss something besides that trivial observation?
I don't recall how Bach is supposed to figure in. How is Bach self-referential or how does it display "internal looping"? (And what does that even mean?)
Computer science is full of better examples than Escher or Bach, IMO. For example, C compilers written in C, which lead to the Thompson "trusting trust" attack. Compilers are mentioned in GEB, but it's done in a way that I didn't find particularly helpful (probably because I already know something about the subject.)
I also experienced this with my Python compiler written in Python [1]. There were some interesting cases where knowledge of the variable names used in the compiler "leaked" into the compiled output via, I believe via the string intern table of the Python VM.
[1] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/03/04.html
Bach’s music is circular in terms of scales. A up to G and back to A.
If I have 2 mutually recursive functions, that's circular. For example, most parsers have mutually recursive functions.
There's nothing self-referential about them though. On the other hand, a C compiler written in C is self-referential. It confuses subject and object, which leads to some interesting paradoxes like the number for the "tab" character never appearing in the source code, as Ken Thompson points out.
The Godel sentence is self-referential. It makes a claim about itself.
The movie Synecdoche NY and some of Lewis Carroll's works (which figure heavily in GEB as I recall) are self-referential. The person writing the work appears in the work. Charlie Kaufman does this a lot -- the movie Adaption also has these properties.
But I don't see that Bach's music is self-referential. The music doesn't write more music, or have any awareness of itself.
Escher's two hands is self-referential, because it's confusing subject and object. But the staircases aren't self-referential.
GEB, on the other hand, mostly started from a bunch of universal ideas, and used the author's idiosyncrasies as a way to explore those ideas. I think it comes much closer to hitting its mark.
There's no accounting for taste, though. If you don't like Hofstadter's way of thinking, you probably just won't enjoy his book. I'm sure some people find the Dialogues and their wide-eyed "discoveries" of analogies with the essays' material to be smarmy at best. Personally, I find the language of this paper to be overly flowery and too cooler-than-thou (yes, I've heard of Erik Satie; does it matter?) to enjoy.
----
* I mean, "By introspecting my personal aesthetic sensitivities, I eventually realized that my tastes in the scientific, artistic, and physical domains are all motivated by the same driving forces"...that basically says "I think you're going to love reading my diary".
We all have our opinions.
Did you find GEB to be a helpful reference? What kind of science were you studying?
Not to invade your privacy, I was just curious.
There should be a GEB for Hackers or something like that, though. Accessibility is an issue. Maybe not accessibility in the sense of grokking the content, but certainly in staying engaged to it throughout the text. It feels like a lot of work.
Humility is important too. GEB could definitely use some more of that too.
Thanks for your insight
That sounds almost like a statement of religion. I am a being that understands information; "computation" is not even remotely close to my highest goals.
What I'm meaning to say is its a righteous goal compared to pursuing art or literature, because it's universal in nature.
I think Turing will be remembered as one of the few people who changed the course of human thought in its entirety.
I understand what you're saying, and sure, my goal right now this weekend is to get some plane tickets and an airbnb booked, there's no computing mysticism there.
But as a whole, I think we humans have an objective to find four the most information possible and to do the most computing as possible. That's essentially what the singularity is about, a human creation coming to a point of autonomy. That's the next step for humans, I think, abandoning flesh and spreading autonomous machines throughout the cosmos.
I guess it IS my religion.
He kind of lost me when in one of his books, Le Ton beau de Marot, I came across a little diatribe against rock and roll. Fuc...king wanker! :)
> By introspecting my personal aesthetic sensitivities, I eventually realized that my tastes in the scientific, artistic, and physical domains are all motivated by the same driving forces, hence unifying Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido as three expressions of a single essence, not so different after all. Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido are governed by a limited set of rules which remain simple and unobtrusive. Conforming to them is a pleasure. Because Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido are inherently introspective disciplines, they also invite you to transgress the rules in order to find your own. Breaking the rules is fun. Finally, if Lisp, Jazz, and Aikido unify so many paradigms, styles, or techniques, it is not by mere accumulation but because they live at the meta-level and let you reinvent them. Working at the meta-level is an enlightening experience
I am hesitant to criticize the author, because I find the text so absurd that I must clearly be missing something. It looks like satire written for /r/iamverysmart.
I'd honestly appreciate being given more context from fellow HNers which upvoted this story and found it interesting.
This isn't supposed to be a hard sciences paper. Aesthetics can, validly, be introspected on a personal level. If reading the paper makes you feel insecure, then you should probably engage in some self-introspection as well.
Nice projecting. He said nothing about him feeling insecure. He (rightfully, imho) said that the entire paper was incredibly pretentious.
Is it pretentious in it's writing style or it's topic?
Writing style wise it's a perfectly par-for-the-course humanities paper. It's not a blog entry, nor a letter to a friend. It's a formal academic humanities paper.
Topic wise, it's discussing aesthetics. There are plenty of places for criticizing the authors aesthetic arguments (in a formal manner), but in terms of writing about the topics and their relation to aesthetics the author does a perfectly fine job touching on the usual points.
So I'm confused as to how the paper could be pretentious. He isn't making the claim that the only way to achieve aesthetic pleasure is to partake in his particular hobbies, or to argue for some idealized version of these hobbies. He's not glorifying programming, jazz or martial arts as being anything other than rule based frameworks with room for exceptions and growth. He isn't making strong exclusionary arguments in regards to other languages. Nor does he make any claim that he is special, or that his introspection is special or unique.
So if reading a perfectly standard academic humanities paper leads you to think it's incredibly pretentious, then that says something of the beholder.
(your implication of insecurity is rude and dishonest dismissal somewhat spoils it)
Blockchain is like the Aikido of technology.
I can't speak for the efficacy of Aikido against an actual trained fighter in some other code, but if it worked the way it was meant to you'd pretty much be watching one guy dodging another guys attacks until eventually he pins him in an arm lock. Fight over.
It's like using a slipper to bang a nail into a wall. Yeah it kind of works but that's not what it's for ...
If my memory serves me right, Jiu-Jitsu wasn't used in the professional (western) fighting scene for quite a while. Today it's pretty much a must-have for MMA.
The same goes the other way around. Being an expert in Jiu-Jitsu means squat when your opponent is holding a gun, and standing 10m away from you. In other words: different flavours of martial arts/self-defence have different applications, though I would certainly consider some to be very ineffective in most situations.
We agree about that. The thing is, if Aikido could deliver what it promises, namely that you are able to effortlessly throw people to the ground when they try to strike you, then you could be sure fighters would use those techniques.
You throw a hardened fighter through the air and he'll hit the fence or the canvas and bounce back up.
This is precisely what you don't want to do, Aikidoka or otherwise. You want to gain control and retain it for the full 5 minutes.
> This is precisely what you don't want to do, Aikidoka or otherwise.
I'm sorry, but are you joking? I don't think you have even watched 5 minutes of MMA (and I'm certain you've never trained) if you actually believe that.
I think dulcimer would be a more appropriate analogy.
In the real world, if you want something really effective without any pretensions to being a sport or an art or anything, do Krav Maga.
If you want to fight for real, look at aggressive combat styles, like Krav Maga or Systema, which try to deal as much dammage as possible, in the shortest ammount of time, without considering the concequences to the opponent (= possible death). By the way, these are banned in UFC, beacuse they are too dangerous to the opponent. UFC is still a spectator sport.
Note: I'm an ex aikido practitioner and a current krav maga practitioner.
Correct. Self defense should more or less follow this pattern:
1. Situation Awareness (being aware of danger)
2. Avoid (leaving before trouble occurs)
3. De-escalate (using words)
4. Evade (run)
5. Force
Aikido is great in self-defence situations where someone is coming at you. Of course the drills are contrived, their purpose is to train your muscle memory not actually to prepare you for combat.
It's not great for performance really.
The whole "come at me bro, but no not like that" thing is really something that only new practitioners will do because they're amazed by the power of these techniques.
The real weakness of Aikido is the pressure on the joints. I'd love to do it still but my knees can't take it any more.
I'm a wuss I should never have been doing security ever ...
I am still not very flexible - but with lots of practice I am softer than most of the flexible people who join the dojo :)
Things like wrists/ankles/knees need time to (many months) to adapt/get conditioned.
And there is some utter nonsense out there, definitely. But we're hardly unique in that.
(b) Krav Maga is clearly a highly time- and energy-efficient tool for hand-to-hand combat; why should any martial art strive for any different metrics? (other than coping with exceptional circumstances via malicious compliance, such as that old French martial-art that focuses entirely on kicks not fists)
(b) has been treated extensively in many discussions. These usually are usually oriented around the role of conflict in daily life and the suitability of these arts as a way of dealing with them, for instance.
Good grief! I can't imagine the amount of paperwork that would accumulate if fighting was a day-to-day occurrence in my life (except in Army during wartime, where assault is the job instead of a crime).
I have heard many martial-arts instructors voice this same point. -EDIT: I do not know whether this may be emphasised more in Aikido- but it is hard to regard it as a serious argument when the amount of time spent on learning about this aspect, and practice of how to apply this aspect and the techniques to achieve it seems to be almost invariably a few minutes a year at most.
I had more practice 'de-escalating' tense situations on a 1-term clinical skills paper at medical school than in the 6 years I studied across two different martial arts (one Korean, the other Chinese). The medical school paper amounted to about 2 hrs on that subject that year - 1 theory, 1 practice.
That said - if you want to learn to fight, then learn to fight!
From p9 :
> The question of adequacy in martial arts is equally nonsensical — although a frequently asked question. Is such or such martial art adequate (efficient) in a real fight? You trained bare hands so what do you do in front of a knife? You train with a knife, but then what do you do in front of a gun, or an atomic bomb? Back in the middle ages, martial techniques could be considered adequate or not in such or such situation, but today, the point is different. In the modern sense, the purpose is education and self-development through martial techniques. This is what led Japan in the transition from martial techniques (Bu Jutsu) to martial arts (Budo) during the Meiji era. So just as a piece of music is adequate as soon as there is one person to enjoy it, a Budo is adequate as soon as there is one person to enjoy it for personal development
Well, it is nonsensical since MMA proved beyond a shadow of doubt that BJJ beat everything else... We haven't yet settled on what programming language beats everything else however... But it is not LISP!
Back when tournaments like UFC started, ground fighting and grappling were not part of the standard repertoire of tournament fighters so those guys won. Now it is. Back in the heyday of Pride, champions like Mirko CroCop were definitely not BJJ guys. Of course they trained BJJ but it's not their only tool.
This is the biggest fallacy people spout when evaluating Akido because they only see it being used in practise situations.
Your partner has to be 'in on the ruse' so they don't get hurt! Aikido is full of extremely damaging techniques and if your partner doesn't go where you're leading them or if they don't flip and fall as you want, they would end up with a broken wrist or neck.
Find your nearest dojo, have a go and see.
Can confirm it is "that fantasy martial art".
Your partner has to be in on it because otherwise you'd never have the opportunity to apply the technique; no one's going to let you e.g. just grab a wristlock off of their punch.
This is all down to how it is trained, training with no resistance leads to fantasy land bullshit.
Watch black belt level Aikido randori. Contrast with judo, wrestling, bjj sparring. The difference is obvious, one group is dancing in response to choreographed zombie attacks, the other is learning how to really apply techniques against resisting opponents.
And yes, of course aikido is choreographed. That choreography is hard as hell. On the other hand I’m pretty fearless about getting thrown. I’ve been to judo dojos and traditional jujitsu dojos where my training partners had breakthroughs because I was willing to commit completely to my attack rather than hedge my attack for fear of “losing.”
Aikido is metal, because the curriculum is sprawling and deep, the ukemi is far and away the hardest part of the practice (harder than applying the techniques), and the psychology of the practice is often inscrutable to people who are fixated on an incompatible model of instrumental utility.
While knockout/stamina/appearence of futility/tap out may be a path to a win condition, there is nuance to when you have multiple opponents, are in grab/hold positions, when you want to be in a location and/or keep your opponent(s) in a location.
Aikido offers a way to use momentum and joints against your opponents allowing you to have more control over space and situation you normally would. This is also helpful for transitioning into submissions or broken limbs more elligently than punch, tackle and look for an opportunity.
My experience is that aikido is often taught with a delicateness and with less importance on competition/hunger. While I certainly enjoy adrenaline, winning i believe favors the adaptable which aikido seems to provide
How many Aikido practictioners are successful in the UFC. I'm guessing ZERO.
This comes up again and again. Aikido's useless in MMA competitions, useless in cage fighting, useless in UFC. So what! If you want to do these things, do them. Find the best path to success in them. Don't expect me to want the same things out of life and my training and my art.
Aikido gives me physical and mental discipline and training. It gives me something deep and rich and fascinating to explore (but based on very, very simple rules with a lot of emergent complexity). It gives me a very solid, very reliable self-defence system if I want it. All these things are taught at my dojo - the latter starting with how not to have a fight in the first place. Conflict de-escalation is a vitally important part of self-defence. Why would I go to a competition where fighting is the purpose if I don't want to fight? That's why we do aikido.
Someone's going to think they're being witty by claiming that we don't want to fight because we can't. I have no illusions on my ability to "deal with" attacks from a skilled boxer, that's going to be fast, accurate, relentless and full of misdirections and feints designed to get an opening against someone else with the same kind of skillset. They're also highly unlikely to be the person who's accosted me in a dark street demanding I hand over my wallet. That scenario I can do something about. Or at least attempt to - who says I'm going to win? But I can give it a really good shot.
So don't judge my aikido against your arbitrary standards. Those standards are not why I'm doing it, and ultimately "successful in the UFC" means nothing in the world I'm interested in. For what I want it for, aikido works.
Background: I'm a 2nd dan in Yoshinkan aikido, taking 3rd dan this July, hopefully. I do a mix of my own training and some teaching.
edit: with some exceptions, he no longer believes aikido can help with self defense in any form (including against untrained attackers) at this point but does believe it has great benefits for other reasons.
[1]: http://www.ufc.com/discover/sport/rules-and-regulations#15
Or jo, which I reckon would be pretty hard for your average UFC to defend against. I mean, I get a nice whooshing sound out of my jo on a kesa strike... can't imagine that feeling good on the side of someone's head.
EDIT: My point isn't to disparage MMA (though I don't like it for philosophical reasons), it's to point out that MMA is LARPing just the same as aikido. If you want to LARP about hammering, don't bitch about the people LARPing with screwdrivers.
against canonical aikido bokken waza. I never seen any aikido technique which could be applied against "small men" - most popular kendo strike. The same is applied for boxing jab, and wrestling legs takedown.
In my views the main aikido problem for self defense is that it is too focused on 80 years old canonical techniques, while world around continues progressing..
But your point that a style that trains ken exclusively is going to be more effective at ken than a style that trains a mix of ken and open handed techniques is not contested.
On the other hand, I reckon that the worst aikido dojo spends a lot more time on ken than the any BJJ dojo. Point is, it’s what you choose to spend time on.
I was somewhat recently visiting a judo dojo where an instructor recommended that I don’t bother training myself to throw ambidextrously. The rationale was that the opportunity cost of training my non-dominant side was larger than the competitive benefit I’d get from polishing more techniques on my dominant side.
I won’t deny that approach is probably more effective at winning, but it’s also not helping me improve what I want to improve.
Again, when people tell me the “problem” with aikido, I’m open and receptive, because I’ve got my own pet list. But where I start eye-rolling is when I hear people fundamentally misunderstanding why it is that many of us train and what we “should be” optimizing for as part of our own practice.
If Aikido schools would adapt even basic but modern kendo footsteps and strikes, Aikido practicioners would have much better view on efficient sword fight.
I came to my current aikido dojo from a background in judo and jujitsu. I already had pretty solid ukemi—good enough to protect myself in judo shiai. But... my ukemi wasn’t remotely up to snuff for the intensity that senior members of my dojo are prepared to throw.
I only know this in retrospect because, with judo-level ukemi as my starting point, it’s taken me three years to get to the point where I can take most of our ukemi at intensity.
Most people never learn how hard aikido ukemi can be because they don’t stick it out long enough to be trusted not to get hurt. Again, I walked into my current dojo with solid breakfall fluency, but had someone popped on the chicken-wing variation of shihonage? I’d certainly not have been using that shoulder again for some time. Can I throw myself in an arcing breakfall when that happens today? Yeah, but I worked up to it with a lot of sweat.
Also, I’ll say that there are some lineages and dojos that do practice a very soft form of aikido. There’s nothing wrong with that practice; it’s simply that they are working on a different problem.
If anyone wants to try an athletically challenging lineage of aikido, I currently train in a dojo that is a mix of USAF (Yamada) and Birankai (Chiba) lineage. Yoshinkan aikdo looks like pure terror-sauce to me, but also looks to be high on physical / light on metaphysical.
Agree to a good extent. But less so after going to a few sessions and sparring with the sensei. Had to throw myself around in all kinds of spectactular ways to avoid the pain as he put pressure on my joints. For a spectator, it may have looked like he was throwing me around and I was playing along and exaggerating.
Always it is the same tired arguments of how "it'll never work in a fight", "mma yada yada".
I can only assume these people are somehow threatened by super mean aikidoka, or they're worried that there will be a mass slaughtering of aikidoka when they go defending justice in the night.
Similarly Lisp only works when used with a cooperative compiler. And jazz is most effective when played with fellow jazz musicians, and/or for an audience that appreciates jazz.
Your claim, if true, would only strengthen the analogy.
> Blockchain is like the Aikido of technology.
This is the owl of analogies.
Not all martial arts follow this, but many do. The goal isn't to teach you how to win a street fight (take krav maga if you want to learn that), but to keep you active and help instill discipline through a fighting art.
A good test is this - if there are competitions, it's probably a civilian-ized fighting form. If you used serious fighting moves on someone in a competition, it would be unsafe and you would hurt your partner.
Frankly most Aikido guys seriously have no clue about how to handle any real situation. Whining that real fights aren't like the UFC is ridiculous, as being ineffective in a civilized gym fight (i.e. 1:1, no weapons, etc) is not some magic predictor of being effective in a real fight unless your training is markedly more like the real situations somehow.
Aikido's defenses against blows are contingent on highly telegraphic, committed lunge punches and the like, and their technique against even unsophisticated grappling is wildly overoptimistic unless the Aikidoka in question has a really serious background in other martial arts. I've met some guys with savage wrist locks and some nasty tricks from Aikido and generally good movement, but these guys were serious cross trainers and knew what a real attack looked like (non-telegraphic and semi-competent).
As for the bogus versions of Aikido:
Generally the process seems like a process of mutual hypnosis. Uke is taught - by pain compliance - to go along with ineffective techniques (rather than go completely off script and win), and gradually becomes more and more hypnotized. Thus those ridiculous videos of super-senior people 'throwing' Aikido people by sketching out the barest minimum of a throw in front of them.
The other thing that gripes me about the bogus type of Aikido - aside from the fact that is has been the single greatest source of overconfident people convinced they could "take care of themselves" - is the number of people I've met with Aikido injuries. "OK, so you separated your shoulder when someone did a shoulder lock on you that wouldn't even work against a resisting opponent". Sigh.
Reading the discussion here, I get the feeling that many seem to think that practitioners of Aikido somehow think that it's for fighting. Given the demographic of Hacker News, I'm honestly beginning to suspect that this is an American mindset.
Do you also rant like this about basketball, tennis, or golf? The most efficient way to win a tennis match would obviously be to shoot the opponent with a handgun and win by walkover. Yet, nobody complains that this never happens during tournaments, but, astonishingly, are happy that the tennis players... well, play tennis. Why, then, complain about Aikido being Aikido?
Okay, I get it, Aikido is not for fighting.
Given this information, however, why do we still call Aikido a _martial_ art? Perhaps we should not grant Aikido such designation?
Please don't take HN threads into national provocations. It makes discussions turn nasty.
Depending on how you measure it, HN's community is about 50% in the U.S.
No-one has ever claimed basketball, tennis, or golf makes you better at subduing attackers and for a fact, the techniques practiced in said sports don't seem to have anything to do with that. If you want Aikido to be judged against these sports, or, say, dance forms, this seems reasonable. In this case Aikido is a really shitty sport with no rules, no score, and no fun practiced by basically nobody, or a really lame dance that no-one wants to do.
System matters less than practitioner. When people ask me who to study with in my area, I send them to a goju ryu practitioner I know. Does it matter than my core mechanics come from pa kua zhang? Not in the slightest. He's an amazing practitioner and teacher.
If you have rolled with Didier Verna or have examples of problems in stuff he has written or otherwise posted about martial its, then point those out. Discussion of systems is never helpful.
Is BJJ not fantasy? Give me my aikido-whackin’-sticks and I’ll reckon I could bludgeon most any BJJ practitioner within an inch of his / her life.
Is judo not fantasy? What good is your throw when someone punches you in the face or pops on a wrist lock?
Is krav maga not fantasy? When do you really get to practice your eye gouging for real?
Is MMA not fantasy? I find it aesthetically distasteful, but what little I’ve seen, there were clear opportunities to kill the other person, which would have expediently ended the match.
All martial arts are fantasy, and if you think one is “better” than another, that’s your problem, as you haven’t even figured out the rules of the game.
I train aikido 6-10 hours a week. It’s my third martial art. Why do I train aikido? It’s not because I intend to use it for self-defense. I train it because it’s wickedly good aerobic exercise that allows me to push my own body and mind harder than anything else I’ve done. I never in my life thought I'd be able to respond to as wide a range of physical attacks—not necessarily martially, but certainly athletically and safely!
I jokingly refer to my own aikido practice as “fight cult” and “samurai LARPing.” All martial arts is LARPing, and people who say otherwise just haven’t figured out what they’re doing yet.
I trained in aikido long enough to get a shodan, and what made me leave the art was seeing my instructor trying to teach some utterly ridiculous knife defenses to a prison guard. The guard didn't stay in the class long (thank God), and my gentle questioning of the instructor (had he actually practiced these techniques against a resisting opponent?) fell on deaf ears.
Indoctrinating students with the belief that they are learning effective self-defense when they are not is morally indefensible. It gets people hurt and possibly killed.
No martial art can perfectly recreate the real-world conditions under which it be used - not without compromising student safety - but some disciplines do a better job than others. To claim that aikido has flaws that are equivalent to many other more realistically-taught ones (krav maga, some schools of systema, judo, bjj, etc.) is to indulge in false equivalence. There is simply no substitute for a resisting opponent, even if the resistance takes place under sport-like rules.
In science, no models are perfect, but that doesn't mean that the historical geocentric model of the earth is equivalent to the modern heliocentric one.
Want my wallet? With my complements! Cell phone? I'll unlock it for you! Would you also like me to loosen my bowels as a show of respect? You got it!
I am glad to be training in a dojo that is realistic about what martial arts do and do not teach. I feel like there's so much value to aikido (and other martial arts!) training for people who understand this.
We've had people walk through our dojo door who are clearly wrapped around the axle of self-defense. I recommend those people take a self-defense course. In other words, find the style of martial art that shares your threat model.
My threat model is that I'll get old and flabby and die of social isolation and heart disease. Being in my late 30s now, I can't imagine another art being as good at helping me address that threat model.
An "Artifice" is a subject of human creativity. Science is such an artifice. The actual effective practice of science is "an art" and one that many people simply don't get.
Science is the art of developing a better understanding of that which we don't know by applying that which we do ...
Art is aesthetics with elements of intellect - Science is an intellectual pursuit which can contain beauty.
https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article-abstract/30/1/...
Also, I wouldn't confine art to the purely aesthetic.
But that's just me!
The word "shit" has the same origin, btw.
It’s also present in “Schism”
[0] OED 5b: "A feeling or subjective experience accompanying a thought or action or occurring in response to a stimulus; an emotion, a mood."
You must get a twinge of dissonance whenever people mention Knuth.
If dictionaries were the arbiters of all knowledge we wouldn’t need encyclopaedias /s
Thanks, but no thanks.
But It lacks a decent debug system in real time.
Your first grab failed, what do you want to do?:
:R1 TRY AGAIN
:R2 ABORT
:R3 EXIT THE BAR AND RETURN TO YOUR DESKTOP