One of the things that I have struggle expressing that can be viscerally felt is the idea that certain frameworks reduce reality in useful, good ways, while others do not.
Learning to differentiate between the two becomes important if you want to accelerate expertise.
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One example (and I’m sorry about this example, because it’s useless to anyone who isn’t a Judo player) is that ALL of Judo grip fighting can be reduced to a system of four rules.
Once you learn the four rules, you can see way more when observing a high-level match.
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The four rules:
1. Don’t let your opponent get a usable grip.
2. If your opponent gets a usable grip, break it.
3. If you can’t break it, attack.
4. If you can’t attack, get ready to defend or counter.
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The four rules pretty much becomes a syllabus for accelerating expertise.
For instance, what is a ‘usable grip’? This is different for Georgians vs Japanese vs Russian style players. Some Japanese players prefer grabbing two sleeves.
Learning ALL the usable grips becomes a goal
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In business, 7 Powers is probably the framework I think about the most that has the same ‘feel’.
The argument: the purpose of business strategy is to resist margin compression over the long term; there are really only 7 ways to do that.
Strategy is finding some path to the 7.
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I don’t mean to say that you can just learn the framework, and be immediately good. What I mean to say specifically is that good framework with this ‘feel’ allows you to filter reality in useful ways.
It allows you to observe real, messy examples and pick out cues that matter.
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For instance, in Judo you’ll quickly realise that some Japanese fighters have a very particular instantiation of the 4 rules — they don’t break grips unless absolutely necessary!
Instead, they nullify existing grips with movement and positioning. This is difficult to observe!
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In fact, as a novice, there’s probably no way that you’ll pick up on the minor, minor things that top Japanese players are doing unless you have the 4 rules to guide you.
You’ll instead be like, “hmm, that’s odd, the opponent doesn’t seem to be able to attack at all. Why?”
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With the 4 rules, you are (or at least I am!) able to go “ahh, so this is Rule 1 and Rule 3 in action.” Whereas to the uninitiated the whole match is just a flurry of unstructured action.
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In business, I’ve written before how the instantiations of 7 Powers in real world cases are just so *damn weird*: commoncog.com/7-powers-in-pr
Again, the point is that you have the framework to guide your observations.
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I struggle with articulating a generalisable property for such frameworks.
Why are some frameworks useful and others are not? Why do some feel like they’re carving reality at the joints, while others feel contrived and stupid?
I … don’t know. But I want to find out.
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Ok, I have a first stab: frameworks that work this way are a) universal, and b) exhaustive.
The four rules works because every grip fight in every judo match may be reduced down to the four rules.
7 Powers work this way because the Powers are exhaustive.
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A corollary: frameworks that are a 2x2 matrix of some kind are nearly guaranteed to not be as useful because of these two properties.
Reality rarely fits neatly into 2x2 matrices.
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This makes me think of Social Practice Theory… variations in practice (skill or materials) can be localized (social) but still create closure of the practices “meaning”…
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