Absurd Extremes in the Name of Realism:

 when bad science meets bad martial arts.

Scholastic Roach

This is going to be an on-going feature and we'll keep adding to the list. If you deal with martial arts long enough, someone will pull in a scientific law, principle, or rule of thumb, and then twist the meaning into something else entirely. This can be done by gross simplification of the problem, by applying the principle to areas outside of where it was developed, or by simply baffling with bullshit. An example that is almost too obvious comes from the attempts to justify moral relativism (the idea there is no real right or wrong) with the Uncertainty Principle of Quantum Mechanics or with Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Neither of this physical laws or principles actually say you can't know anything or everything is relative.

Practical: Despite what New Age thinks, heh?

New Age: Well, Bell Theorem proves telepathy works because <smack>

Troll: Not understand Bell Ther-rum, but know bullshit when hear it.

Like Chaos Theory, another commonly misstated idea, both actually increase our understanding of how things work. So let's start looking at some specific examples, and a good rule of thumb for considering this, is that if they are pitching fancy terms and rules at you, check the references.

The Hick's Law Claim:

Too many options make for slow decision making and weaken your martial art.

First off, let's look at what Hick's Law actually says. It does not say "response time increases with options." It says, very precisely, that when looking at a number of choices in a menu, the response time increases with the log of the number of choices. Mathematically that is:

T =k H  where H = log₂(n+1)

where T is the decision time, k is a constant of 150 msec, H is the information-theoretic entropy of a decision, and n is the number of equal choices. There is another form of the law that address unequal choices. Now this is developed and discussed using models and is specifically focused at menu or icon choices on a computer. Many reports of exceptions exist and they all involve familiarity with the options and training. Related ideas are Fitt's Law, which deals with moving to a target, and the Power Law of training, which expresses how time to perform a task decreases with training.

How does this relate to martial arts and self-defense? Well, in the pure cases, it shouldn't apply at all, unless your martial art takes place on a computer screen and does not train you to defend against realistic attacks. Even accepting the unscientific and imprecise way it is normally expressed (making choices increases reaction time), Hick's Law deals with untrained responses and unfamiliar choices. So assuming your martial art or self defense system is something that has been around longer than a week and hasn't been created by some twenty-something who hasn't been able to find a system that suits him, said training should actually reduce your reaction time.

Practical: So when choked, the trained person reacts with confidence, having seen it before...

So why is Hick's law invoked then? Well, sadly, the answers are found in studies on Hick's Law, Fitt's Law and GOMS. If training is ineffectual, or the subject is untrained, each response requires evaluation and thought. Proper training reduces the reaction time , because the subject recognizes the options and then goes "seen this, need to do that." In addition, with body skills, working from a systematic set of movements (a style) means that some similarity of response occurs in all cases. So when someone attacks in a new and interesting way, your response is to first get off line if possible.

  Practical: Kinda like the idea of "defend your perimeter first" as someone is known to say.

If you can't, a decent system will have given you both the situational awareness to know it first and the skills to have another response up to choose. We arent' talking a million options here, just a couple. Those couple or few are familiar as types of movements and because they are part of a complete whole don't require the amount of choice that answering the question "should I use my mu thai or wrestle" does. The under-trained subject, or the person from the system cobbled together from hundreds of bits, has to evaluate and choose, hence for him one or two choices is all he can deal with. Add to that the likely hood that they have never experienced as adrenalin dump and everything goes to hell.

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