Intellectuals vs. Engineers. What type of martial artist are you?

[Nomad]

Great article on the differences between idealogues / intellectuals and scientists / engineers.

Reform-minded intellectuals found the low-on-facts, high-on-ideas diet well suited to formulating the socially prescriptive systems that came to be called ideologies. The beauty of being an ideologue was (and is) that the real world with all its imperfections could be criticized by comparing it, not to what had actually happened or is happening, but to one’s utopian visions of future perfection. As perfection exists neither in human society nor anywhere else in the material universe, the ideologues were obliged to settle into postures of sustained indignation. “Blind resentment of things as they were was thereby given principle, reason, and eschatological force, and directed to definite political goals,” as the sociologist Daniel Bell observed.

While the intellectuals were busy with all that, the world’s scientists and engineers took a very different path. They judged ideas (“hypotheses”) not by their brilliance but by whether they survived experimental tests. Hypotheses that failed such tests were eventually discarded, no matter how wonderful they might have seemed to be. In this, the careers of scientists and engineers resemble those of batters in major-league baseball: Everybody fails most of the time; the great ones fail a little less often.

When ideologies were put into action, the results were disastrous. During the twentieth century alone, ideologically inspired regimes — mainly Communism and its reactionary brother, Fascism — murdered more than thirty million of their own citizens, mostly through purges and in the state-sponsored famines that resulted when governments adopted reforms based on dogma rather than fact. That this is not more widely known and appreciated, but instead is so often brushed aside as somehow irrelevant to the argument at hand, demonstrates the extent to which the dead hand of ideology still grips many a mind.

Meanwhile the world’s grubby, error-prone scientists and engineers toiled away. And what did they produce? The greatest increases in knowledge, health, wealth, and happiness in all human history.

This article, IMHO has a lot to say about the current political gridlock in the US (let's face it, we're really seeing continuous showdowns and posturing by two opposing ideologies rather than any amount of pragmatism being applied to solve some of the huge problems facing this country), as well as any number of other topics.

Does anyone else see a parallel with different approaches to teaching martial arts?

A trap many traditionalists fall into is getting locked into what "should" work based on imperfect information passed down through multiple hands, or becoming obsessed with the perfection of the appearance of a technique rather than pressure testing their hypotheses in a more realistic venue... essential becoming a martial arts intellectual in this context rather than an engineer. I am not bashing traditional martial artists here (& am one myself), and understand that many do various forms of pressure testing (although what constitutes a valid pressure test or a realistic venue is open to debate).

I do think that all of us need to practice our martial arts with an approach closer to that of a scientist or engineer, and validate or invalidate the ideas and techniques we are given to the best of our ability.

 

[Sukerkin]

A most entertaining article indeed I have to say - much enjoyed it, tho I must now go to put a higher shine on my "posture of sustained indignation" :chuckles:

 

[billc]

If you want a good read on the topic, try Thomas Sowell's "Intellectuals and Society."

 

[Flying Crane]

I think the error falls in trying to label people "this" or "that", an ideologue or a scientist, or an engineer, and pretending that their world view is specific with no overlap and no gray areas. I think that is not realistic nor accurate. I would be very surprised if these people didn't share some amount of commonality in their views. But pigeon-holing them makes it easy to say, in essence, "those people failed because they are stupid". I'd say the truth of the matter is that there are a whole lot of variables that go into this and it's not so simple and easy to analyze as people would like it to be.

My gut tells me that people like to demonize. In most cases it simply isn't appropriate nor accurate.

 

[HammockRider]

It seems like he's saying idealists= bad and scientists= good. So idealists like Mahatma Ghandi, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, these people are bad? I think this article was written to increase the divisions between people even more.

 

[Buka]

I don't know, call me old fashioned, but he seems to write more to impress rather than enlighten.

 

[elder999]

Well, I dunno. I'm an intellectual, and an engineer.

I mean, scxience says that eugenics works, but would you really wanna?

Some people just have too much time to think on their hands.....