Rory Miller's Blog, page 18

Absolute Basics

Trying to brainstorm something for mixed environment (urban/rural, hot/cold, etc.) survival every day carry.  I like working from basic principles forward or from goals backwards.

Completely setting aside the fact that there is no actual need to live (can't be, since there is this inconvenient 100% mortality rate) in order to live, what are your most basic needs?

I learned Tom Brown's Sacred Order long ago: Shelter, Water, Fire, Food.
Shelter, because one of the quickest, surest deaths in the wilderness is from exposure (hypothermia or hyperthermia) and conserving core temperature is more efficient than adjusting it.
Water, because that is the next quickest killer.
Fire for a lot of reasons.  It can make the water safe.  It can make food safe.  It helps to make tools.  It increases morale and acts as a signal.
Food.  Most people have more than enough stored energy (the polite word for fat) to go for some time... but when that time is up, you will die.

The Ten Essentials were taught in a survival class when I was a pup: Map, compass, light, clothes, water, food, fire starter, sunglasses, knife, first aid kit.

The essence of small unit tactics: Move, Shoot, Communicate

My dad was more pragmatic, and minimalist, "A good knife.  A rifle doesn't hurt."

Survival also happens in a context.  Car might break down in the Eastern Oregon desert.  Maximum survival need of a couple of hours.  Possibility of getting iced into the house with no electricity.  Maximum two weeks, but with the whole resources of my house, which has way more stuff than I can carry.  Plane wreck in remote areas?

Any really extreme survival will be voluntary.  I'm never going to get sucked through a wormhole and have to live in a dinosaur infested jungle.  Won't have to create a resistance cell when the commies invade. But might decide to do a week with minimal equipment just for the hell of it.

Personality comes into this as well.  I'm a luddite.  I am slowly coming to like my phone, but I hate the idea of betting my life on anything that needs batteries.  The phone is cool-- If I'm in the right place it can serve at least three of the ten essentials and 'communicate' from the small unit essence.  But if I depend on them to the point I don't carry a map and compass... Badness.

The last factor that comes to mind is portability.  Your house is probably full of useful stuff and it takes little to put a very complete kit in the car and just forget about it.  But I'm not going to carry a ruck to the grocery store on the off chance that the zombies rise.  If it's too much stuff, you won't carry it...and going back to personality, I'd prefer that no one notice I'm carrying anything.  Things are even more restrictive as much as I fly.

Do weapons figure in this?  It's a potential threat profile, and high stakes.  But I won't discuss it here.  That's always a personal decision.  And potentially actionable intel.

Another consideration.  Training is more important than equipment.  There are a lot of things you can do with ingenuity and minimal equipment-- and equipment you don't know how to use is just weight.  But training can influence things another way.  I've been trained up to sutures and administering IVs (way out of practice on sutures, though).  The first aid jumpkit I'd like to carry would be huge... and it was appropriate when I was a medic assigned to an infantry unit.  Knowing how to use cool tools sometimes makes you want to carry more cool tools than you can transport.


More thoughts later.

Take Offense

My favorite used book store is Robert's in Lincoln City, Oregon.  Whenever we make a trip to the coast we make a point to stop by.  I've occasionally found some amazingly rare books there, like a copy of "Caves of Washington" with all of the maps intact or "Judo In Action: Grappling" which was going for hundreds of dollars on E-Bay not so long ago.

This time, I ran across two incredibly cheesy 1970's era self-defense manuals.  One is hilarious.  I may write about it later.  The other is Lt. Jim Bullard's "Looking Forward to Being Attacked."  It has the seventies hair styles and clothes and some odd pictures (exactly how does someone get mugged while playing tennis at the country club?) but most of the advice is spot-on and the gimmick of looking at assaults as fun opportunities is entertaining.

Anyway, all cheese isn't cheese.  Or cheese has some nutrition.  Whatever.  It's a metaphor.

But one of the things Lt. Bullard says again and again is both potentially terrible advice and absolutely dead right.  Boldly go into dark places.  Take offense whenever you are offended against.

Right.  This hits my core.  I don't let bad guys be bad around me. I do go to places I warn others about and hang with people that most shouldn't...and I have committed to a cold math.  Behavior has consequences, including mine.  I will be one of those consequences, if necessary.  And, if necessary, I will pay my own consequences for that decision.

I tell my students the truth, however, and encourage them to use it.  Bad stuff happens in predictable places, at predictable times.  The targets are predictable and you can simply not  be one of the targets.  But to follow this advice is to cede a certain part of the world to the predators.  To give them some control over our behavior.  To 'give up freedom' as Lt. Bullard phrases it.

Many good strategies (and plans and especially policies and government programs) originally designed to evade a problem wind up enabling.  We don't want people to starve and we don't want being unemployed to be especially demeaning so we set the social safety net at a dollar amount that satisfies those needs...and people who have no intention of ever producing are enabled to be comfortable.

We do the same thing in self defense:  "Avoid, escape, de-escalate, only in the gravest extreme do you use your skills."  This attitude (and it is not just self-defense instructors, society as a whole condones this, which is why we teach it) makes it extremely safe to be a criminal.  It should not be safe to be a criminal.

But we live in a world of liability, where law-abiding people with legal assets have much to lose and criminals almost nothing that can be forfeited.  You can't garnish profits on drug deals.

And so we teach avoid, evade, de-escalate... But I wish we lived in the world that Bullard imagines, where someone who chooses to rob or rape (these are the bad guys for cryin' out loud) is at immediate risk for their lives, sight or motor function.  Where people felt confident to say, "We don't tolerate that bullshit here" and could go a little commando on the gangs and riffraff that ruin a community.  But they fear that they would be punished quicker and more fiercely than the bad guys.  You see, it is safer and easier to punish good guys.  Good guys take the punishment.  Bad guys laugh at you.  Far easier to confiscate weapons or sue citizens than to get the same thing from criminals.  And if you are deluded, it still feels like you are doing something.

The smart thing is to avoid.  But I wouldn't have leaned a damn thing if I'd been smart.  I went into a profession that let me fight the bad guys.  Because they have to be fought.  Not understood-- we understand them well enough.  Not accommodated-- you give them what they want and you have identified yourself as a victim and there is no limit to what they want.  Bad guys need to be stopped.  Cold.  As a citizen, that is legally problematic.

Josh's comments implied that people become cops seeking power and authority.  That's not my experience.  People become cops because they know the victims.  They know that the only way to prevent victimization is to stand up and fight back... and they also know that under our current system that is a very, very risky strategy unless you have the sanction of the government.

I would love if that was just an expected thing, and I think that is what "Stand Your Ground" laws are trying to bring back.

It should be dangerous to be a criminal.

Question for the Regulars

The Conflict Communications Manual is out to the first readers.  Waiting on their feedback, and then the usual boring stuff and the book will be available.  ConCom's big.  I don't think I can overstate how big it is-- a functional taxonomy of all conflict-- but I feel a little animal screaming in the back of my head to not make it available.  The deep parts of your brain, and mine, fears change.  Especially profound and unpredictable change.

So... I need another writing project. It would be entirely too easy to vegetate right now.
The stuff on the table:

Principles-- A manual of the things that make other things work.  Those principles of physics or geometry or mindset that apply to all techniques.  This has been written for a long time, but it would need a lot more work, and pictures.  Working with pictures and photographers is always a pain in the ass.  Can someone genetically engineer a photographer who isn't flakey?

Concepts-- Experienced fighters don't think the way that other people do.  There is an entirely different way of looking at the world.  This might not be long enough for a real book.

Principles and Concepts-- Combine the above two.

Teaching Cops-- A manual on how to teach pros: cops, soldiers and operators.  Will set some people off because, frankly, most people shouldn't.  It's a waste of everybody's time.  But if you have the right stuff or intend to do it anyway there are a bunch of things you need to know: rules and tools, paperwork, vernacular and how not to be a dick to a relatively tough audience.

Awareness-- Want to write it, but, frankly, Terry Trahan would do a better job, so I'm giving him a year to finish.  So I can't write this one.  Yet.

FICTION-
My lovely wife got me writing fiction some time ago and I quit about the time I became a sergeant... but there's some stuff floating around.

Godbox-- your typical science-fiction cowboy medical mystery.

Scars-- working title.  Hard to describe.

Short Stories.

So, what would you like to see out next?  I'm blatantly using you for motivation.  Which will it be?  Or something completely different?

In Reply

Lots of comments on the last post and some of them require more thoughtful answers than I can do in a short space.

Preamble, though:  there is a reason why SD and martial arts are so ripe for misinformation.

One, of course, is that so little of it is tested by so few people.  Of the few who test it, very few will have multiple encounters.  Outside of certain professions, if you have had to fight off bad guys a lot, you need to make some lifestyle changes.  Outside of those professions it would take an extraordinary level of stupidity to get into enough situations to make someone an 'expert streetfighter.'

Related to that (we can call it problem 1a) is that the experience garnered will be in a very specific venue.  Most of a bouncer's experience is with one threat profile (drunk idiot) and two scenarios (breaking up fights or being challenged.)

Problem 1b would be the fact that after a certain number of encounters your internal wiring appears to change and desperate chaos becomes something else.  A lot of us wind up teaching what we would do and can't really remember the first few encounters where it all seemed so fast and chaotic and the brain wasn't working

Second, martial arts is an endeavor that hits really hard at one of the core questions many people share: If things got really bad, who would I be?  Training gives people the illusion of an answer to that question.  It's not an answer-- we've all seen tournament champions choke-- but it feels like one.

And that leads to 2a: When you feel you have an answer but deep down you know it is an illusion, you are almost driven to put all of your mental resources into justifying it.  And so almost every practitioner has long involved rationalizations why their system/training method/teacher or whatever is the best.

It gets really, really tribal very quickly.

So--
Budo Bum wanted to know about wiring to the wrong part of the brain.  Cognition is the slowest part of the brain.  It hesitates.  The more you think in words, the slower your reaction time.  We've all experienced it.  Which means that teaching in words and targeting reason tends to be ineffective in emergencies.  Note- I'm not saying give up logic and reason.  They work very well.  Unreasonable things are unreasonable because they don't work.  But the part of the mind that processes things in that way can't keep up with chaotic action, so use reason in your system and designing your lesson plans, but target a different part of the brain in the actual teaching.

My best practice right now is to concentrate training on conditioning, (not physical conditioning, but operant conditioning) that wires a stimulus/response; or on play with the goal of making effective movement just feel natural.  The human brain appears to be wired to learn faster at play than by rote AND a properly designed game has operant conditioning built into it.

Chiyung disagrees that inbreeding is bad.  Inbreeding happens in every insular art. I have a good attack so you come up with a response to that attack and I come up with a response to your response and you... within three iterations you have created something that only works within your school and for your reasons.  Case in point is the turtle in judo.  Turtling is a defensive position where you are down on your hands and knees, forehead pressed to the ground and your own fingers inside your collar to prevent chokes.  We used to spend a lot of time on breaking the turtle... but the turtle itself could only arise in a venue where you weren't allowed to simply boot the guy to death.

Inbreeding is the perfect word for this, because from the outside we can see the hemophilia and cleft palates and harelips and mental health issues... but from the inside the practitioners (of inbreeding) call it refinement.  Same in pharaonic dynasties as in some martial arts.

Chiyung brought up a lot of stuff and I don't want to pick on him, but I couldn't have made up a series of naive arguments this good.

"It is the warrior who makes the art."  The individual, absolutely.  I have seen natural winners take completely worthless systems and use them effectively.  And I know two instructors in my own favorite system who can't fight worth a damn.  But warrior?  My thoughts on that are here. Have you, working as a team, destroyed a group of other, breathing, human beings?  Have you buried friends?  Have you unwillingly accepted an order to risk your life and done it anyway, to the best of your ability, because other people would die if you weren't willing to sacrifice yourself?  Unless you have done ALL, not some, of those things, you aren't a warrior.  And training in a martial art makes you a warrior to the exact extent that watch a Steven Seagal movie makes you a Navy SEAL.  No more, no less.  And for the record, I don't claim the warrior label.

"I only need to get punched in the face once to know it is painful."  Nope, you don't even need to get punched once to know that.  But here's the deal-- how many does it take before you know you can shrug it off and keep fighting?  How long before you can differentiate between pain and damage and press through pain and adapt to damage?  Because if you can't do that, you can't fight.  You can only play at fighting.

"Do I need to knock someone out to know if I can? I don't believe so because science shows that concussive force to the heard (sic) would probably cause a knockout blow."

Fighting is really idiosyncratic.  The fact that someone believes that concussion=knockout is a sure sign of serious misinformation.  I've had five concussions that I clearly remember (pun) but I had to report seven for a medical in 86' and at least one of the ones I remember was after that... so I've had at least eight severe concussions.  And only lost consciousness from one event.  And only for a second.  Science understands concussions well; unconsciousness less well.  And because science understands something, does that mean you can do it?  Science knows how to go to the moon.

Malc asked about training the difference between dueling and assault.  (Good to see you typing here, BTW) He rightly understands that the hardest part is getting past our social conditioning and wondered if that could only be done by physical drills.

That's the hardest part and in a lot of ways the big question.  Every aspect of physical self-defense violates social taboos.  Every touch in a self-defense situation is a bad touch.  One of the things that sometimes makes martial arts ineffective is an attempt  to play at self-defense while keeping everyone safely within their social boundaries-- and so you get blackbelts who are uncomfortable with close contact.  Does that make any sense at all?

Even the physical drills for this must concentrate on the mental aspects.  Grabbing faces is physically easy but for most people psychologically hard.

My soundbite right now is that SD training has a progression: First, you have to make an emotionally safe place to do physically dangerous things.  Then you have to make a physically safe place to do emotionally dangerous things.

The second thing is that the mechanics of a physical assault are entirely different than the mechanics of a duel or sparring match.  So a lot of training (for assault survival) goes into conditioning immediate action to a stimulus and after the first half-second fighting by touch instead of sight.  There are a lot more drills that help.  There's a reason why I'm partial to blindfolded infighting.

And another prizewinner from Malc-- what constitutes experience?  It's all experience.  Experience in a dojo is experience in a dojo.  Experience in a ring is experience in a ring.  Experience working the door or as a soldier or as a cop is all what it is.  But it isn't any more than it is.  So if you Monkey Dance with people every Friday night at the bar, you can have a lot of experience and be really good at that... but have absolutely nothing to teach a person who is being dragged to a secondary crime scene.

As for flipping the switch, I don't know a training method that provides the real thing.  The training method that mimics it though (and that is often good enough) is a conditioned response to get you through the first half second.

Chiyung again: "It's a false assumption that you have to train with a hot stove to know how to be able to touch it."
Correct.  But you have to touch a hot stove to know if what you have learned is correct.  That is one of the big dangers with martial arts being ripe for myth.  This statement is factually correct, and also serves as a perfect foil so that your students don't test and question.  If your students accept this one statement, you can teach them utter crap and they will never, ever figure it out.  That's the danger.

Chiyung also seems to believe that hard conditioning is a myth.  There are some things you can't condition.  You can't make your belly impervious to blades and concussions make you more susceptible to later concussions. Can't toughen the brain.  But you can toughen bone and muscle.  More importantly, pain is almost entirely imaginary and exposure to pain makes it easier to deal with.  And people who sit back and imagine pain don't do nearly as well with it as people who have pushed through before.

Wrap up.  I know this has been long.  More important than the martial mistakes-- what do you tell yourself to pretend that they aren't mistakes?  What is the narrative that allows you to do something you know is wrong?  And how do you justify passing it along to your students?

Charles hit it on the head when he said (paraphrase) that the people who most need to challenge themselves, to question, are the ones least likely to do it.  Dunning Kruger isn't just a phenomenon, it is the mechanism.

Martial Mistakes

The list won't be exhaustive, and I wish all of the things on here were simple and had simple solutions.  Most martial arts training isn't effective for SD purposes.  Some of it is on the teaching end, and some of that is on the learning end, and some is in the culture.

That last sentence might take a long time to sink in, so examples:  Teaching by rote wires the reactions to the wrong part of the brain for use in a fight.  Bad teaching.  The most exciting aspect of training feels the most realistic, even if it requires the most artificiality to maintain safety.  The student will take away the wrong lesson.  Bad learning.  And a hierarchical cult of obedience is exactly what an exploitive predator dreams about.  Sometimes the culture farms victims.

The dueling paradigm.  Other than for fun or sport or balancing things within a social group, people don't square off.  Because it's dumb.  If you had to take out the biggest, scariest martial athlete you can imagine, how would you do it?  Exactly.  From behind with a weapon.  And maybe friends.

This has a lot of implications for MA/SD.  The paradigm sets you up to expect distance, time and warning, none of which will exist unless you are monkey dancing.  People who are successful at dueling or sparring believe (sometimes, I hope rarely) that the skills will transfer to ambush survival...and they don't.

Unarmed.  With the exceptions of corrections, hospital security, and secure mental facilities, almost no profession goes hands-on unarmed.  Because it is stupid.  If you know things are going to go bad, you get a weapon.  And friends.  And intel.  And surprise.  Crime, by the way, is another profession that uses weapons.  And this goes back to the dueling/sparring paradigm.  To get good at unarmed dueling is to develop skill at a very bad strategy, a strategy which has the sole purpose of stroking your ego.  Don't quit playing.  I love to play.  But don't make it something it's not.  If someone was trying to kill someone you loved would you tap them on the shoulder and step back so that they could face you at the appropriate distance?  Or would you hit them in the back of the neck with the best tool you could find?  Your choice, but one choice is stupid and that choice is the one you have likely practiced most.

Inbreeding.  You train together and you get used to dealing with each other.  When I taught at a dojo, my class were infighters.  They were really good at doing all the things that infighters do.  But nature of a class setting, they were spending all of their time practicing against other infighters, which is a pretty rare category.  Frankly, this is a slight problem for infighters and grapplers.  It takes very little to close range, especially at ambush distance.  But it can be a huge problem for strikers.

Bad metrics.  How do you measure if something works?  The military has a "Lessons Learned" program.  My team, and Search and Rescue and even the Reception crew when I was sergeant there used After-Action Debriefing protocols.  This will get you better continuously-- provided you have actions to debrief.  Without those actions, it is much harder.  I wonder what percentage of students of an SD instructor are attacked on average, how often...  but I feel the numbers are too low.

When people don't have a reality check they have this really stupid tendency to make up a reality check.  'Make up' and 'reality' rarely belong in the same thought.  I almost always pick on karate for this.  When I look at their kata and kihon, they have possibly the best body mechanics for infighting that I've seen... then they choose to test it at sparring range, where it sucks.  Or, worse, point contact range where it sucks AND it screws up everybody's sense of distance and time.

Scenarios can be solid gold to test some things, but only if the scenarios are incredibly realistic (ideally based on real events) and the role players are superb actors and the facilitator really knows his stuff, especially the debrief.  Without that it can ingrain incredibly bad habits.  Doing the instruct's fantasy at high speed is still doing fantasy.

The Safety/Effectiveness scale.  Fighting, especially recovery from ambush, is a very dangerous thing.  One of the biggest challenges is training people to fight without injuring them.  Straight up, if neither you nor your opponent are scared or need medical attention, it's not a fight.  It has nothing to do with fighting.  Trying to approximate the skills without the injuries is a very fine line.  Weapons arts have the advantage in that they can make the weapons safe.  Much harder to do with throws and neck twists.  MA tend to make the techniques safe...and more safe the higher speed the training.  And so the safety artifacts ingrain right along with the techniques.

Modality.  Related to metrics.  The measure of effectiveness is how much damage something does.  Do bones break?  Does the guy go down?  Again, less of a problem in grappling arts, but a hellish issue in striking arts.  When you can't actually do what you are supposed to do (collapse tracheas or cause concussions, say) the instructor's default seems to be whether it looked right.  Fighting is about touch, not about looks.  Pretty, crisp, geometrically clean can be seen.  Power and structure need to be felt.


There's tons more here, but this is a start.

Too Close

I'm editing on the Conflict Communications manual.  As always, I hate editing.  By the time you get to this stage of editing, you've read the damn thing so many times that you everything sounds redundant and you hate every word.

It feels a little different this time.  I love teaching the ConCom class because I can actually see the lightbulbs go off, feel the energy in the room change as people become conscious of a new power.  That sounds overblown, but it isn't.  Just like the physical stuff we do, ConCom is completely natural, and because it is natural it is intuitive.  The class just makes it conscious.

Reading it over, it doesn't have that impact to me.  It is a way of thinking that I've become accustomed to over the years, so it reads like a reminder, not a revelation.  Not sure if naive readers will get that or not.  Probably not, but it is so hard to be sure in the editing process.  I fear that a lot of good stories and books are killed in editing.  The temptation to make it exciting to me (on the umpteenth reading) would make it incomprehensible to anyone else.

Still to do:
One more time through and expand a few bits
Read for continuity
Create the Table of Contents
Create the internal links for the e-version
Expand the bibliography, bios and add a contact page
Send out to first readers for critiques
Send out for blurbs
Get Intros (I have two great people in mind)
Copyedit pass
Get K to do interior design and cover
Upload

That's the work part of writing,  It's a chore but like any job you just do it.  And most of it won't take that long.  Longest will probably be waiting on the first readers and intros.

Johannes is trying to open up some new markets to teach ConCom in Germany.  A university asked about the "table of contents" of the program.  The book is way more detailed, but this is the overview:

Maslow's  Hierarchy of Needs as a model for sources of conflict
Group needs of humans as social primates
Goals and purposes of social conflict
Goals and purposes of asocial conflict
Triune Brain Theory as a model for reactions to conflict
The Lizard Brain (hindbrain) and survival threats
the Monkey Brain (limbic system) and social threats
The Human Brain (neocortex) and problem solving
Conflict scripts
How to recognize when the limbic system has taken over
How to turn off your limbic system so that you can use the power of your neocortex
How to use the neocortex to evaluate and soothe the other person's limbic system
Followed by a collection of specific tactics.

The book will go into overt violence as well.  One of the programs covers dealing with emotionally disturbed people (EDPs) but I think I covered that as well as I could in "Talking Them Through."

So, that's where my time is going.

CCA:
I'll be teaching a session at this year's "Water and Steel" Kelly Worden's annual camp.  Professor Trigg will be there as well, and he's one of the Old Dragons I haven't met.  Bonus.
Information is here:
http://www.kellyworden.com/water-and-steel-2013

Community

Talking with Wayne A. for the last couple of days... good talks-- he's smart, skilled and comes from a very different background (martially, upbringing, and professionally) than I.  So lots for me to learn.
One of the conversations was about community, inclusiveness and exclusiveness.  I'm almost paranoid about groups and organizations in the martial arts.  They stagnate or splinter, dissolve or become dogmatic.  I can think of a single martial organization that lasted beyond the death of its founder and stayed both coherent and effective (judo).  But even my beloved judo appears to be changing.
In martial arts instruction, a lot of people have observed that people come for self-defense but stay for other reasons.  Wayne says that they stay for the community, and I see that.  There was a time when I would talk about my 'martial arts brothers'-- we bled and sweat together.  We were tight. So I get it.  the judo team was tight.  Direct interaction with pain and sweat.  Also, nature of judo, it was hard to get away with being a poser.  Everybody rolled with everybody every practice. But add one layer of abstraction... College politics or the AAU or the Olympic community all appeared fragmented, political and nasty.  There were at least three organizations all vying to be THE umbrella organization for judo in the US (two big ones, actually and a couple of fly-by-nights).  All hated each other and it was all about power... if you can consider writing rules for sweaty strangers to be power.
I think it's worse in martial arts that don't have a strong competitive aspect.  Doesn't make sport better, but it makes it clear about what you are doing.  If you have competition, and you aim for competition, you have immediate feedback on whether your stuff works for competition when you compete.  If you aren't sure on what you are measuring or what you value, there's a lot more weasel room.
Self-defense?  How can you know when such a small percentage of your class will ever use it?  Deadliness? You can't know unless you kill people.  Authenticity/lineage/etc.  --hard to measure, even assuming you have actual documents and can read an archaic version of a foreign language. And even harder to show that it matters in any real way.
When people don't have a good metric, they tend to rely on received wisdom.  On dogma. When you can't know, you want to feel sure.  Dogma makes you feel sure.
That was mostly a tangent, but it ties back to community in a big way.  People want to be sure and have identifiers.  "We are the (insert name here)."  Once you have chosen your tribe, your tribe must be the best, and since no tribe (or style or school or method or nation or family or team) is or can be the best (too many different measurements of 'best' for that to be possible) your excuse-making brain goes into overdrive.
And a big piece of that process is coming up with an excuse to deny any information from a different tribe.
There is an exception, though.  Certain high end teams, the VPPG, and the valued friends that I refer to as 'honorable enemies'-- all have the same concept. We exist to challenge each other.  To push and shatter illusions.  "A man sharpens a man as steel sharpens steel."
I don't think it will ever spread very far.  Don't think a group like this will ever get very big or last beyond a small group at a certain time of life.  Most people want comfort and certainty.  The few I know who seek discomfort and doubt tend to be the men and women who bet their lives on their skills and can't afford certainty, comfort or similar illusions.
I believe it is completely incompatible with teaching subject matter (may be wrong about that-- competition teams are an obvious exception).  Preparing for high-chaos, high-risk environments, I'm confident you can't be dogmatic and continuously improve.
Would it be possible to create a long-term community dedicated to challenge?  I wonder, because the people who seek groups also seem to like to crystalize them.

Multi-Dimension

I've written a basic intro to risk management before.  You can find it here:
http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/20...

The part I want to focus on is the levels of risk versus levels of frequency.
You can categorize things into High Risk and Low Risk.  For self-defense purposes, High Risk means you are likely to get hurt or killed, Low Risk means those things are unlikely.  You should put more training time into high risk events than low risk events.  You really don't need extensive training in how to protect yourself from a toddler attack.

The next paradigm is frequency.  This may be counterintuitive, but you don't need to train for high frequency things that much.  Reason being that you get a lot of practice.  Driving is almost surely the most dangerous thing you do on a regular basis, but very few people get continuos training (unless they go into special jobs or get told by a judge they need some remedial lessons).  If you actually do something four hours a day, there isn't a lot of gain in training it two hours a week.

The low frequency stuff is where you need good information, good training and a plan.  You should have a plan for how to get your family out of your house in a fire (HR/LF).  You probably don't need a plan or rehearsals on how to drive to the gas station (HR/HF).  Or a plan/rehearsals on how to deal with pet hair in the carpet (LR/HF) or how to deal with a gerbil overpopulation problem (LR/LF).

There are more dimensions, though.  Not sure how they affect risk management, but they are very powerful in how you must train and what you can analyze and learn.

One of the biggest is time compression.  The basics of how Toby and I teach survival are almost identical.  Train awareness, use your brain and body, instincts... the biggest difference is that Toby teaches wilderness survival where many of the dangers require hours or days to kill you.  I teach assault survival, in which the dangers are measured in seconds or fractions thereof.

This is one of the biggest, and I'm not sure I'm willing to write about time yet.  Not ready, because so much of it is hard to explain.  Working through the ConCom manual it is really apparent how much of the communication skills are really counter-assault skills... just brains instead of bodies.  And how much I would never have noticed except for the  combination of High Risk + Compressed Time.

Dealing with conflict as opposed to violence, it can be spread over a long time and much of the nuance can be hidden in the thousands of other acts of communication all around.  The patterns in ConCom are incredibly obvious once you see them, but it took the filter of fast violence to screen out the white noise.

The second dimension is intelligence.  Information.  And that further breaks down into low and high quantity, clarity, breadth and reliability.

If you know a lot about the problem, that is usually better than knowing little or nothing. Quantity.

But you may know a lot of facts about the big picture but not details. E.g. You might know the names and histories of the local gangs and their territories and business; but not be up to speed on the current members.  A problem that a lot of people who leave an active job and go into training run into.  Clarity.

You may know a lot about a piece of a big subject or a lot about a related subject and just miss this subject.  A degree in zoology with a concentration on marine mammals may have big blindspots dealing with reptiles.  Bouncers know what bouncers know, not what cops know...and vise versa.  Same with victims, perps and enforcement.  Breadth.

And reliability.  This one is endemic in the martial arts.  It is possible to know an awful lot of things that aren't true.  It is always hard to measure the reliability of your own beliefs.

A high risk, low frequency event where you have years to plan and prepare is different, both in training and response from one where you have seconds.  Obviously.  And it changes even more when you are well-informed, clueless or deluded.

More to think about here.

Structure, Space and Orientation

Good playtime with KJ yesterday.  He wanted to work infighting defense against elbows, specifically elbow flurries. Ergo, we both had bloody lips and big smiles before we broke for lunch.

Infighting is not like fighting at striking range.  As I use it, it is also different than the other player's concept of infighting.  It's not the range where you can comfortably hit with your elbows.  Infighting, for me, is the range at which our torso's are in contact range.  Maybe a fistwidth between, at times.

And that has huge implications for how you fight and think-- and this is hard for me to write.  Because the range is so close, the speed is high, far too fast even in play to think.  I don't infight mentally with words or pictures, it is almost all by touch, which makes it very hard to write about.

KJ has a lot of skills, but his default is a striker.  And so he envisions incoming attacks as things that must be intercepted before they reach him.  That is how you fight in space.  But at infighting range, that's not necessarily true.  None of those attacks are separate from the body and brain controlling them.  The attacks are physically linked.  And it's not like an octopus, either.  It is bone.  Hand bone to forearm bones to humerus to shoulder girdle to spine (and rib cage) to pelvic girdle to femur to lower leg bones to feet.  All bone, all connected.  And every one of those bones is a lever arm.  And if you displace any of the core bones (spine, rib cage, shoulder girdle--rarely pelvis) you affect what all of the other satellite bones can do.

So if that elbow comes in, I don't have to intercept it.  If I can modify the position of the ribs, the spine or the humerus, I don't have to worry about it...and if I am already in contact with any of those parts, a light push in the right direction will not only be easier, it will be much faster, require less strength/speed and be infinitely more sure than trying to intercept an attack in space.

You have to understand structure and part of this is counterintuitive.  Generally, I want to apply my strong structure to the threat's weak structure.  But infighting, if I apply structure and some power to the threat's strong structure with the right leverage and at the right angle I control his whole body.  If I apply the exact same motion against his weak structure, he simply twists or folds.

We have a couple of games to start developing this skill-- puppetmastering and elbow chi sao.  Structure and leverage are intertwined and damnably important to both offense and defense at this range.

At this range, you and the threat are both working structure, trying to smother or drag potential attacks.  One of the key offensive skills is the ability to find or create pockets of space in which you can strike.  There are some systems of power generation that require zero space, but I'm not that good at them.  Most of mine require about three inches (the one-inch punch requires about three inches too).

Aside-- don't want to get in a long debate.  I can put my top knuckle in contact with the threat (zero space) and hit hard, but the hit comes from the bottom knuckles-- which move about three inches. Zero space hitting means (to me) no visible movement, basically accomplished with skeleton bounce.--Aside ends.

So creating the pockets is critical and, again, has to be something you develop an intuitive feeling for.  Not so much for when you create or find space.  That comes easily.  But defensively, you have to be able to sense when the threat has opened a dangerous space, because something very bad is going to move through there very quickly and into your hurty parts.

And this goes back to manipulating structure.  You can make the space go away. You can try to fill the space (block).  But frequently you can merely tug or push on the shoulder (or neck or whatever you happen to be touching) and change the threat's orientation.  He still has that pocket of space, but it is no longer aimed at you.

You have an orientation.  You are facing a certain way.  So is the threat.  The positional battle in infighting (or any good fighting) is to get to the dead zone, the point where all of your weapons are on line and all of the threats are pointing the wrong way.  Attack from behind or the rear flank, in other words.  But for infighting this isn't just a matter of your motion, but what you can do to the threat's orientation, via his structure.

Probably too technical, but Mick has challenged me to try to put infighting into words.  Working on it.

Writing Advice

My lovely and talented wife is working on a non-fiction book.  It is about becoming a writer.  Not another how-to book, more like pathnotes.  Anyway, she asked me to expand and write down something we were talking about:


The difference between editing a book and herding cats is that cats are way less insecure and neurotic than writers.
Maybe my experience won’t fly here—I’m not a fiction guy.  The books I’ve published and edited are non-fiction.  Intense subject matter, violence and criminals and things, but not stories.  Which means that a lot of the people who write this stuff are subject matter experts first and writers second. Sometimes a distant second.
I noticed a few things editing.
These subject matter experts, the best of the best, would shyly and hesitantly ask if maybe, just maybe, they might have an idea that might make a story that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t hate.  As if I was doing them a favor.  These hard-assed violence professionals turned into shy teenagers asking for a date.
There is a lot of insecurity about writing.  It’s something that you have not just done since grade school, it is something that has always been judged.  Always evaluated.  If you weren’t the one who got the gold star you felt bad and told yourself you weren’t a good writer.  If you did get the gold star, you worried you wouldn’t be that good again.  If your parents told you that you might be a writer someday it seemed like such a huge impossibility…
So they would send me the manuscript, and in every single case, the manuscript was good.  Just because you are insecure and just because you have been judged doesn’t mean you can’t write.  For the most part, most of us have been writing since we were six years old.  Odds are you’re actually pretty good at it.  Writing is just like talking, once you get the insecurities out of the way.
So I got a good manuscript and I would send a little note saying, “Great! Thank you!”  And many of the authors would send me a note saying, “Oh, wait.  That wasn’t the real article.  That was just a rough draft.  Here’s the real article.”
Out of insecurity, in some weird and misguided act of ego-defense, most had sent a draft, not the finished manuscript.  You see, that way, if I rejected it, I wasn’t rejecting their best work.  I wasn’t rejecting them.
And here’s the part that writers need to hear: In every single case the amended article they sent me was worse than the original.  In the draft, they were experts just communicating something they felt passionate about.  It was brilliant and raw.  In the second drafts, they were trying to be writers and it sucked the soul out of each and every piece.
Assuming you have basic writing skill, if you feel passionate about something you will write something raw and powerful.  It will be good.  If you feel nothing about a subject but have basic writing skill (and intelligence), you will write something very clear.  It will be good.
Both are good.  Both are different types of good.
If you try to edit the passionate to make it more clear, you will ruin it. If you try to edit the clarity to make it more passionate, you will ruin it.
Run with the type of good that you have.