Table of contents

Child pages

Related links

• Wikipedia - List of military strategies and concepts

  • I should mine this for ideas to talk about.

Misc ideas

• Link to the coursera course on General Game Playing, and that video in it which describes general principles (increase your options, try to decrease your opponent's options, etc.).

• I need to write about how sometimes there's some heuristic that dominates all other considerations, like when I was playing poker and following a fairly simple heuristic and everyone else was trying to calculate pot odds.

Deny your opponents information / don't show weakness

Bas Rutten's Career MMA Fight #9 vs. Frank Shamrock

And again, like I said before, he's cross-facing me all the time. It's a thing that I really like to do also with opponents because it's really stressing your opponent; you can't look [to] the other side--obviously--if you [are being] cross-face[d]. You see (referring to his getting cross-faced again in the video): now I cannot look what happens to the left of me.

2015.09.27 - NYT - Putin’s Credo: Never Let Them See You Sweat

“We demonstrated weakness,” Mr. Putin said in another context, “and the weak are beaten.”

Divide and conquer

Examples

• Adolf Hitler and Nazism

  • Example 1: The elimination of Nazism's political enemies in Germany.

    • The Nazis, like Stalin in Russia, purged the country of their political opponents as they gained more power. My understanding is that they were actually very successful at doing this.

    • Related: Poem: First they came ...

 Don't unthinkingly follow the advice you get from other people

• People love to talk. People love to opine. A lot of people are willing to give others advice even if they aren't experts. If you lazily accept their advice as being the right answer, you may get screwed.

Frank Zappa

If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.

Bas Rutten's Career MMA Fight #11 vs. Ken Shamrock

And here we are against Ken Shamrock. I gotta tell you this story, I was training three weeks with a person and I said, "Listen, I want you to tell me how to stop me from getting into a knee bar", because I know Ken is very good at a knee bar. He told me, but he told me there was only one way. He should have told me a real easy thing, and I will show you right now what he should have told me...Watch what happens...He breaks my guard...and he goes for a half-guard. Now, the only thing that I have to do right now is grab a hold on Ken's right leg. If I hold that leg, he can never step over. But the person who told me said "No, no, he's gonna step it over your hip." So I was looking at my hip...and not anywhere else...See, I'm looking at my hip...and he swings it now, over my head. So he [the trainer] told me the wrong way. He should have told me, "Just hold his leg, nothing can happen." Anyway, this fight I lost again, but this was the last fight that I lost. After this I listened to nobody anymore. I found my own training partner, and that was it. No more losses for Bas Rutten.

Learn from / Practice to eliminate your weaknesses

Bas Rutten's Career MMA Fight #12 vs. Takaku Fuke

• Bas was trained as a striker in his early career and lost several fights because of his ignorance of ground fighting. He was very smart about learning from his mistakes, though, and this fight was the first where he used his new knowledge of the ground game to win:

Now I'm getting good on the ground. Now I'm training two times a day, ground fighting. [...] See, now I don't let anybody go the side-mount anymore, because I start learning submissions. He didn't know that I was better on the ground now, so he's gonna make a mistake. I go back to the guard, I don't want to make any mistakes, I don't want to take any risks. [...] He's going to go for a leg lock right now but what a strange thing to do, because right now, I know leg locks too. Heel hook on the right, and now heel hook on his right leg. And that's it! Bas Rutten enters the world of submissions, ladies and gentlemen.

[...] He's going for a heel hook but as you can see, I defend myself by stretching my right leg. Now I'm pulling his right leg–his knee I'm pulling down, which exposes his heel, his right heel, and I was just pulling, and it's over, end of the story.

• You also see Bas using cross face in this fight where he didn't in his earlier fights.

Bas Rutten's Career MMA Fight #13 vs. Maurice Smith

• Just 2 fights earlier, Bas had lost to a particular combination. In this fight he uses the exact combination he lost to against a new opponent.

And I learn from my mistakes. You remember the knee bar with Ken Shamrock? Pushing the arm, and making a knee bar? I thought that was a good thing for me to do the same thing. Watch this...I'm gonna push his arm down, exactly like Ken Shamrock did with me, and then I go for the same knee bar that Ken Shamrock did to me. And voila! It actually works. And that was it!

[...]

I'm pushing his arm like I'm going for a figure-four–"distraction" is what they call that. Go around his face, all the way, 180 degrees, and go for the knee bar.

Prefer paths that are likely to achieve multiple objectives

Examples

• Example: Changing my name stood to achieve multiple objectives.

  • It might help me avoid general job discrimination (although that wasn't really a motivator).

  • It might help me have a better chance with the types of women I found attractive.

  • It could later serve as a signal in my professional life that I was willing to do unusual things.

  • It gave me more experience doing things differently from other people, and dealing with the psychological / peer pressure that a person can face when doing something like that.

• Example: My method for lowering my housing expenses stood to achieve multiple objectives.

  • It freed up money to be spent on other entrepreneurial projects.

  • I ended up more mobile than I was before.

  • It gave me experience being frugal.

  • It gave me experience working on an entrepreneurial project.

  • It gave me experience betting a lot of money on an idea and having it pay off.

  • It might later serve as a signal in my professional life that I was willing to do unusual things.

Prefer paths that are likely to leave you with more options

Examples

• Example: My inclination to start a company that will let me live from anywhere.

Spend time thinking about which potential actions will actually affect your state