While a graduate student at Stanford, we were taught how to evaluate all sorts of written material – books, dissertations, newspapers, research results, etc. The university expected us to one day publish our own books and articles and to perform and publish our own research. So we had to know how to do these properly and present valid conclusions. Many, if not most, research projects are flawed to some degree. Sometimes the experiment was structured or setup improperly. Sometimes there were flaws in their math. And sometimes their conclusions weren’t valid.
For example, someone found that children who could walk balance beams were better readers than those who were poor at it. From that, they concluded that you could improve reading scores by teaching students to walk a beam. So schools all across the country ran out and bought balance beams and required their students to walk them on a daily basis. Reading scores didn’t change. They had erroneously assumed that since those who could walk balance beams were better readers that not just a relationship but a causal relationship existed between the two, that walking beams made people better readers. No such relationship existed. When someone asked me about it, I told them I had a theory about how to defeat cancer. Everyone who came down with cancer wore underwear. So if you didn’t want to contract cancer, you should stop wearing underwear. There was a relationship (everyone who had cancer wore underwear) but not a causal one (wearing them didn’t cause cancer).
Non-research material – magazine and newspaper articles, non-academic books, etc. – are always suspect as literally anyone could write one of these. When checking such publications, we knew to be very careful about using their data, quotes, or results in any serious study.
I once read a book entitled Mind Over Matter. In it, the author gave accounts of several instances in which people‘s minds had been verified to have overcome matter. One such proof was a martial artist who supposedly beat a world champion arm wrestler using only his thumb or one finger (I forget which). It had, according to the author, been verified by Black Belt Magazine. Since I had every issue of Black Belt from the first, I tracked down the article because I knew the martial artist involved and doubted the claim. In the article, the martial artist himself claimed he had beaten the world champion arm wrestler, not some independent and objective observer. It may have been true but was, like “hearsay” evidence in court, not useful in any serious study.
Magazine and newspaper articles are full of errors, misquotes, and outright lies. Some of these are intentional but most are not. The writer is honestly trying to do a good job but lacks the skill or sufficient knowledge of the subject to do it justice.
I tell people that if you don’t want to be misquoted, don’t let anyone do an article on you. If you do, it’s pretty much a given. I’ve had many articles done on me and never had one that didn’t have something – a quote or explanation – that didn’t make me cringe a bit. The writer will hear what they want to hear, mishear what you said, etc.
A local journalist did an article on me several years ago. She quoted me as saying that the nunchaku was developed to beat the husk off of corn. I don’t remember seeing a lot of corn when I was in Okinawa as it was a new world product. But then, I had never said anything about corn. I had said it was used to beat the husk off of rice. But I took some kidding about it for a while nonetheless.
The following was written in a 1987 Karate-Kung Fu Illustrated Magazine article. It was about me and my thoughts on the subject of ikken hissatsu, the so-called one strike kill.
“The Japanese call it the one-punch kill,” wrote the writer of the article, based on information I supplied her. “It’s a blow that brings all fighting elements together with perfect timing to immobilize your opponent with one sudden burst of power.”
Close enough.
“The one-punch kill is tough to teach, since many students believe they can do it naturally without any thought put into the correct power-producing dynamics.”
Have no idea where she got that.
“Some instructors won’t even bother to teach the one-punch kill to women, because they think women don’t have enough power to punch. Then when a female student learns it incorrectly, she proves them right. However, women can actually learn the technique faster than many men because they have no pre-conceived notions about how it’s done.”
This was a mixture of things I had told her, but about a different topic. (Female students often learn how to punch correctly faster than their new male counterparts as they have no bad-habits to unlearn so they improve from day one.) It had nothing to do with ikken hissatsu.
“If the one-punch kill is more difficult than meets the eye, who can teach it correctly? In Japan instructors of the one-punch kill are commonplace. However, in North America, they’re rare. But Jim Mather, who owns and runs the California Karate Academy in San Jose, California, is an American who has put a lot of thought into the dynamics of punching.”
What??? It was true I had given it a lot of thought but so had many others in this hemisphere.
Anyway, just a bit more food for thought to bear in mind when you read a history or article on the martial arts – or someone proposes to write an article on you.
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