jiujitsu

I don't know martial arts stuff. Is fencing a martial art? Is paintball? I think Jiujitsu is the one where you use your opponent's strength against them. But maybe it's Kendo? No clue. In anycase, using your opponent's strength to their disadvantage is an appealing idea, and it's especially cool when the other guy actually winds up on the ground. 

But what if you could get the stronger side to perceive that their strength is actually weakness and get them to give up before even fighting? That'd be impressive for real, and probably kinda baffling. 

Take the idea that things are getting worse. I've heard people say this about all sort of things: music, movies, I guess a lot of art-related things, but also politics or morality or family ties and so on. Heck, I've been the person making this sort of claim a lot of the time. And a super common response is something along the lines of: People have been saying that things have been getting worse forever, even in the 1700s or whatever people were lamenting the worsening state of things.

And this is is taken to be an argument *against* the idea that things are getting worse. How in the world is that supposed to make sense? Like, the fact that more people agree with your statement is taken to be a reason why it's not true. The more people whose experience lines up with yours the more you should doubt it. A chorus ringing throughout history: Things Are Getting Worse!   <-- you see? that's why you should think that things aren't getting worse. lol

I think this is a dumbass mindless cliche and I have no clue how it works on people. Noting that other people have said the same thing should be at least prima facie evidence in support of the claim, as far as I understand how reasoning works. I basically interpret this sort of argument as: shut up, stop complaining

Another one of these things has to do with so-called conspiracy theories. I really love the sorts of things called conspiracy theories I take that stuff seriously as a means to keep focused on the big questions of life, control, reality, etc. It’s hard to really take those questions seriously if you don’t take different answers seriously. Anyway, there are of course people who are trying to make things called conspiracy theories out to be a really bad thing, using whatever arguments they can.

One argument that they use makes no sense to me. When someone ties together disparate bits of information to show some pattern in a conspiracy sort of way, a common retort is something like: humans evolved a heighten capacity for pattern finding, and this claim you're making is an over-extension of that natural capacity.

But to me, noting that we've evolved to be highly skilled pattern recognizers seems to be an argument *in favor* of whatever pattern the person is talking about being real. It's not like I necessarily buy this evolutionary claim, what the hell do I know about the evolution of pattern recognition? But to say that humans are good at finding patterns doesn't make sense to me as a way to say that a pattern someone found is spurious. 

I know there are versions of this where the claim is that humans are by their very nature overactive fake-pattern recognizers and therefor xyz conspiracy is not real, but that's a different matter. And if it's actually hard for us to adjudicate which patterns are legit and which ones aren't, then I'm not sure how that idea says one thing or another about any given claim, though it does seem to grant that there even is an apparent pattern in the first place. 

Anyway, I think we're so immersed in this idea that takes a bunch of different forms like: reality is counterintuitive, you don't actually know what you feel or want, common sense leads people astray, etc. that it sort of turns shit on its head to such a degree that people wield these weird cliches all the time