Extreme Wing Chun
Terence Niehoff, December 17th, 2007
No, Extreme Wing Chun is not a new MMA league. It’s not new at all, though the internet has no-doubt breathed new life into it. Extreme Wing Chun, or more properly Wing Chun Extremists, like rabid politicos or tech fanboys or celebrity gawkers are simply so devoid of their opinion, they latch onto whatever fringe group they can find and adopt as radical an opinion as they can with as much passion and as little logical consideration as possible.
The article (and quotes) below cover some general points on extremism in the internet age.
A key consequence of this kind of self-sorting is what we might call enclave extremism. When people end up in enclaves of like-minded people, they usually move toward a more extreme point in the direction to which the group’s members were originally inclined. Enclave extremism is a special case of the broader phenomenon of group polarization, which extends well beyond politics and occurs as groups adopt a more extreme version of whatever view is antecedently favored by their members.
Also:
The second explanation, involving social comparison, begins with the reasonable suggestion that people want to be perceived favorably by other group members. Once they hear what others believe, they often adjust their positions in the direction of the dominant position.
And finally:
The final explanation is the most subtle, and probably the most important. The starting point here is that on many issues, most of us are really not sure what we think. Our lack of certainty inclines us toward the middle. Outside of enclaves, moderation is the usual path. Now imagine that people find themselves in enclaves in which they exclusively hear from others who think as they do. As a result, their confidence typically grows, and they become more extreme in their beliefs. Corroboration, in short, reduces tentativeness, and an increase in confidence produces extremism. Enclave extremism is particularly likely to occur on the Internet because people can so easily find niches of like-minded types — and discover that their own tentative view is shared by others.
WCK a meme - a virus of the mind.
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html
The story of the monkeys cracked me up!
To misquote another meme:
Like the typings of 1000 angry chimps… minus 999 chimps…
I don’t think WCK itself is necessarily one of Dawkin’s “viruses of the mind” but I do think that it encompasses many of the “viruses” from traditional chinese (martial) culture. And those “viruses” act to make TCMAs/WCK psychologically unhealthy and martially unviable. In my view, the challenge is to identify these “viruses”, eliminate them, and practice and/or teach “virus free” WCK. That can only be done by ruthlessly and objectively examining what we do in the cold light of application/results and critically analyzing that evidence using critical thinking.
But many people don’t want to eliminate those “viruses”: it is precisely those “viruses” that attract many to the TCMAs in the first place. Those people are more interested in the “viruses” than the WCK. WCK is just a means — or a host — to practice those “viruses”. The extreme “group think” that the article I cite discusses describes one of the psychological processes that both indoctrinates and reinforces those “viruses”.