Karate Kid
Peter, Nick and Fraser discuss the the hit 1980s movie, The Karate Kid, and what it suggests about learning and skills development.
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Transcript
Oh, I've got a T-shirt on. Nick, can you read it? It says, I'm an engineer. To save time, let's just assume that I'm never wrong.
Speaker A:I mean, do we really need to comment on this or should we just keep going? Anything you want to say, Nick? No, that's very him, though. Okay. So, The Karate Kid. Let's just start off. Can you tell me, Peter, what is your favourite scene from The Karate Kid? And you don't have to tell us why yet, but can you think of what your favourite scene is? You get thinking as well, Nick.
Speaker C:I think it's probably the scene where, after the first day, where he's been doing all these boring chores, wax on, wax off, painting the fence, up, down, up, down, Mr. Miyagi then reveals to him why he's been doing this. Right, there's this moment of epiphany, right? Yeah, the moment of epiphany where he's unconsciously been assimilating all of this skill, doing these repetitive tasks, and then suddenly it all makes sense. And he can do it without any thought at all.
Speaker A:Good, okay. Nick, your favourite scene?
Speaker B:There's only one scene in The Karate Kid, and Peter has just described it. So, that's really, I think that one scene really epitomises what we're talking about today, I think. Okay, so he sort of stole your thunder there. The Karate Kid stole everyone's thunder.
Speaker A:But my favourite bit, actually, is in the final competition, the climax of the whole thing, where he gets unfairly and illegally kicked in the knee or whatever it is, and looks like he breaks his knee in two, right? And then through some sort of bizarre Eastern sort of mythological... he gets healed somehow, and he's able to go out there hopping on one leg and defeats the other guy. So, that's my favourite bit, but I don't think that's quite necessarily relates to what we want to talk about, which I think you were starting to talk about, Peter, which is, we were talking about the moment that it sort of everything started to make sense. So, can you use that as a springboard? Off you go.
Speaker C:Yeah, well, I mean, I think Karate Kid is a really nice, accessible example of how people assimilate skills, and how they learn things. So, it's a very interesting part of psychology and learning science, is how you assimilate new information and new skills, and then be able to use that to make decisions, or to form beliefs, or to change your behaviours. And it's something that everybody does, and it's something that humans are exceptionally good at. It's sort of one of those things that really defines the human animal, is being able to experience things, think about them, and then translate that into some sort of abstract form that can then be used elsewhere in other situations. But beyond the sort of individual level, I think there's a useful analogue with how businesses and organisations perform. And I don't really see a distinction between single humans and groups of humans in much of the way that they behave. And much of this big business in organisational consultancy and business consultancy, which is doing a very similar thing for businesses, but with a slightly more engineering focus. We take a business and we make it more profitable by changing parts of it, and part of that is re-skilling the people within it. So, you're changing the organisation's behaviours in much the same way as you're changing people. And you're sort of patching, you're sort of mentally patching their cognitive behaviours with training and information.
Speaker A:Nice, and a good tie-in to engineering there as well. But can we take the analogy further, and could it be that an organisation is going, look, you're telling me to move this arm left and that one right and go up and down, but it's stupid, what for? I mean, can we take that analogy a little bit further? Or is it always going to be the case going, look, we're going to teach you some stuff, or we're going to learn some stuff that's going to be really useful?
Speaker C:I think it generally helps to know why you're doing something, to be sort of read into what the ultimate aim of the training is. But I don't think it's necessary. Part of industrialisation is breaking down tasks and things that people have to achieve into as simple steps as possible to try to eliminate error, try to improve throughput, and be able to sort of transfer those skills simply. The simplest example is like a checklist of things you have to do in order to complete a task. I think that strikes a big problem that many people have with the post-industrial era is being in jobs where they don't really know what they're there for, and they're just turning a handle every day. And they're a bit dislocated from the end result. If I turn that handle slightly differently, it doesn't feel like it's having any effect on the overall success.
Speaker A:Okay, well, I know Nick wants to come in, but just before you do, that just makes me think that, okay, so for the karate kid, it was good that he waxed on, waxed off, and actually had an ultimate benefit that was good for him. But in an industrial society, is that you might be that cog in the wheel, and, okay, you might be doing, if you do improve that, it's better for the overall organisation, but it's not necessarily good for you because it's really tedious. Unless we can say that, well, you'll keep your job, or, you know.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think on an individual level, feedback is often much more immediate and visceral incentive for the karate kid. If he wasn't good, he'd get punched in the face. So he's got a very real and obvious incentive to do things, but also the feedback is immediate, so he knows whether or not he did something right because it will...
Speaker A:Okay, I think actually, so we'll come on to Nick, but I think we should probably treat it as just good for the film, right? It was a nice little narrative arc and that he just,
Speaker B:that he didn't know what he was doing this for, so. Well, that's actually, I mean, that's the question. So the Miyagi method, which has probably been trademarked by a consultant somewhere, is obviously not to reveal the point of why he's doing what he's doing. Now, the question is actually, would it have been better if he had known? And I'm going to, we're stepping way beyond what we're told in the film here and pointlessly speculating, which is, you know, that's always fun. But I, there are, you know, there are findings from sports science in which trying to get people to think about what they're doing makes them worse at it. And it's quite well documented that, you know, if you take, for example, a golf champ and you ask them to describe what they're doing when they're about to take a part, you know, what are they thinking about? Where are their eyes? Where are their legs? It just totally throws them and they can't perform as well. And the question here is, you know, I think perhaps Miyagi is trying to get straight to his unconscious, trying to train his unconscious without him being focused on that actually he's learning to fight. Obviously, it makes great cinema as well. But it's also, there could be, it could be that actually, that is a better way of saying it, that if he knew he was training to fight, he might have been more directed about it. And therefore, it may have been harder for him to learn. And I'm just thinking about, you know, if you are learning, for example, a piece of music on an instrument, or let's say practicing, taking penalty kicks or something, if you're doing it, because you know, there's going to be a big game, that may well make you make you worse at it.
Speaker A:Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, you know, despite the fact me saying, hey, maybe this was just good way of doing a film, actually hearing you say that makes me realise that no, it's not. And that's so just to say, because actually learning through experience is probably, you know, one of the most powerful things there is. And that's really what was happening in this case. I remember once, and I think there's lots of, I think there's generally knowledge that, you know, learning through experience is a good thing. And I remember once I was asked in a survey, you know, what did you wish you knew when you were 20? And what would you have done differently? What would you teach your younger self? And I said, wouldn't be in any point teaching me because I wouldn't have listened. You know, I have sort of, you know, learning through your mistakes and learning through experience. I mean, I think we're all nodding
Speaker C:our heads. I think we all agree. And I think there are other there are other examples, real life examples. I think there's a there's a, I think it's Middle East somewhere, China, maybe that farmers teach their their prodigies how to sex chicken, chicken chicks. Isn't that illegal now? Without not to have sex with them, but how to pick one up and quickly decide whether it's male or female. I've got a feeling it's Vietnam, the world capital of chicken sexing. We can look at that very quick. Is this the point you're building to? Yeah, but the and it's all done through, through sort of heuristic type teaching rather than principles. So they say, pick up a chicken and check for this, these indicators and then decide based on those indicators. The students just start picking up chicks and then go to put the chick into bucket male or bucket female. And then their their their supervisor just says yes or no. And then they correct based on that. How does the supervisor know? But anyway, he knows because he was taught. I know, but how can you I'm sure it's lots of it has to do with feeling not just looking. No, I think I think it's just done on site. Really? Yeah, it's just done on site. So they took it turns it over so both can see and then goes to make a decision and then gets immediate feedback whether or not that's right or not. Okay, but doesn't have there's but none of the none of these experienced chicken sexes are able to quantify what it is they're looking for. They just know when they pick one
Speaker B:up and look at it. I think I think I now I'm not claiming to be an expert on chicken sexing. But I've got a just I believe that what you do is squeeze the chicken and then something happens to its to its cloaca. And that tells you whether or not it's male or female. Okay, obviously, I've only learned about it learned about it from books. And if someone you know, someone gave me a chicken to sex, I would, I would not have a clue. Okay, so it really underlines the point Okay, we need to get hold of some chickens, right or some chicks. Okay, well, I've got so just I think, just I know, we're, you know, we're on an interesting topic here with the chicken sexing, but just to relate it to something a bit more fundamental. Yeah, I think this goes back to actually to something you were saying about Peter was talking about the the question of whether, you know, as a business, you can either get people who are highly skilled and let them make their own minds up, yeah, or you can stick a load of processes in that that minimise the possibility of error, but, you know, are probably quite boring for people. Okay, now, this is, I think, exactly like this makes me think of the of the difference between of the trade off in in evolution, as well as lots of other things between hard wiring and learning, okay, and humans are very have got a lot of learning software, which actually hinders them. I mean, as you'd expect, it hinders them early on, which is why children take, you know, a year or two years to learn to walk, whereas animals can just do it within five minutes, because they have hard wiring for walking. But in humans, we've we've traded away some of that hard wiring to have a more more plasticity in the brain. And of course, that is, as Peter said earlier, you know, it's something that makes us uniquely human. That plasticity means that we can end up doing things which are totally which have absolutely no analogy in the in the in the sort of the evolutionary environment. So we can do things like play the violin. Yeah, it's not something we evolved to do. But you know, the price we pay is that we are useless at doing things for several years before it takes us, you know, let's say a decade or so to get good enough to really to live.
Speaker A:Well, that's a really wide subject. I think I think that's probably quite a rich scene there. So I think we should pick up in another podcast. But that makes me it's not just humans, right? It's I think primates in general are good for that for that kind of thing. And and but maybe humans all the more so than other primates, because I know that, for example, chimpanzees are kind of got this semi hard wiring as well. Anyway, and I'm sure there's probably other animals beyond beyond primates. I don't know. Okay, but look, we've drifted away from the karate kid, we've already talked about one thing that we're fairly close to, you know, we haven't got much time left. What else anything, anything else brilliant we can we can sort of take away from the karate kid?
Speaker C:Well, to bring it back to sort of what what we do, I think that analysis and decision making are in the class of things you can get better at through training and learning and practice with feedback. So I think I just wanted to, you know, bring that up because previous previous work and previous organisations I work for, often decision makers are sort of held up as the kind of the fight pilot of the profession. They sort of they're born with some kind of gift about being able to make the call and make good decisions. But actually, I think that's just mainly luck. They they have they happen to have had a good string of good decisions, which mean that they rise through the ranks and get senior positions. And if their luck continues, then they're great. But actually being rational, making good decisions and, and, and collecting and using the information to form belief to make those decisions is something you can that can be practiced, it can be can be developed.
Speaker A:I say often we sort of come back to this, as I mentioned previously, this sort of, I think we should have a new tagline for our podcast, which is, and to borrow something from from the Buddha, which is Aleph Insights, the truth about the way things really are. Nick, anything else? Any other karate kid? No? What about? I think there's things like, actually, I should have referred to this great quote, first learn stand, then learn fly, nature rule, Daniel Sand, not mine, which I think is quite a good one. And I think, I think also not about trying, yeah, do or do not. There is no try,
Speaker B:which is quite nice. It's always bothered me that because it's not a very reliable guide to learning stuff. It actually reminds me a bit of the problem with magic in Harry Potter. Right. If you look at the way that magic appears in good, in good, you know, fantasy fiction, if you look at something like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, the magic is very, very sparing. And it's not clear what people are doing when they're summoning magic. And it's, you're meant to kind of assume it's either very, very difficult, or very costly in some way. The problem with Harry Potter is that it's really not clear what they're doing when they're learning to cast. What makes Neville worse at casting spells than Hermione? I, I've got no idea, you know, one of the, they're both doing the same set of actions. But one of them is good at casting spells and one isn't. Now, that's, that's the problem with do or do not, it doesn't really get you very far. What if you can't do? No, but hold on, that's if you're just taking
Speaker A:as a point, look at what can we learn? Or how can our learning be improved? Right? You know,
Speaker B:I want to actually, I actually want to see, I would love someone's, I'd like to see Mr. Miyagi and Yoda in a, in a, in a fist fight. Well, no, but Miyagi would just go, do not, I presume,
Speaker A:or he would do, he would do one or the other. Right? He wouldn't sort of sit around going, oh, should I fight this little green fellow or not? He would just go, no, I'm out of here.
Speaker B:I mean, if Yoda wasn't allowed to use magic, I think it'd be a toss up actually. But hold on, is it magic? If you're a Jedi, I think it's a whole different thing. Is it magic or is it science?
Speaker A:Yeah. Another, another topic for another day. So on that sort of, on that sort of question, I think we should leave it. Well, let's suffice to say, wax on, wax off. Don't forget to breathe. Very important. That is the advice from Aleph Insights. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Peter Coghill from Aleph Insights. We'll, we'll leave it there and, and until the next episode. Thanks.
