Is Jiu Jitsu Really As Effective As The UFC Makes It Appear?

 Dispelling Bullshit

I'm not a person who tends to be very interested in watching sports, and while this is also true when it comes to The Ultimate Fighting Championship, I have a lot of respect for one huge benefit that it has had: UFC has been revolutionary in dispelling fighting technique bullshit.

When it comes to effective fighting techniques, there is so much misinformation and misconception out there, that for years no one really knew which martial arts really were effective and which weren't. The problem is largely that fighters typically train with very strict rules to avoid injury, and frequently only train with other practitioners of their martial art, making it very hard to gauge effectiveness in the real world. This also makes it easy for people to delude themselves or intentionally deceive others about their techniques without ever really getting a chance to be proven wrong.

The extent of bullshit out there really is staggering, and when occasionally a good debunking has happened, it's hard to accept that the people involved were able to fool themselves so fully and for so long.

Check out these examples of decades long practitioners of martial arts that claim to be able to knock people down without even touching them.

A chi master demonstrates his amazing techniques but is unable to use them on a "non-believer", coming up with some stunningly lame justifications for the failure:

And this very popular video of a Kiai master who finally fights someone who isn't a student engaging in self-deception:

While these examples of ineffectiveness won't surprise most people, problems like these exist within serious martial arts too. So the UFC, particularly in its early days when it had less rules, has been a great proving ground, bringing practitioners of different disciplines together and forcing them to demonstrate the hard way which is more effective. It's brutal, people have been killed and permanently injured, but the fighting arts have massively benefited as a result.

If you wonder why most martial artists today are mixed martial artists, it's because of the UFC.

The Rise of Grappling

One big result that has come out of all of this is the rise of grappling and jiu jitsu. It became quickly apparent to everyone how often fights end up going to the ground, and when this happens, the person trained in grappling always dominates. Most traditional martial arts have little or no ground based techniques, so any well rounded fighter needs to incorporate these into their martial art. Questions like "Is karate better than kung fu?" were answered with "The jiu jitsu guy will probably beat them both."

Most modern UFC fighters include grappling or jiu jitsu training into their routine, and many fighters base their strategy on trying to get the fight onto the ground where they can dominate.

But could this effectiveness of jiu jitsu actually be misleading?

One of the most interesting things about grappling martial arts is that, because they are not strike based, people can train in them with a much lower risk of injury. Striking martial arts require literally "pulling your punches" and heavy use of pads and protective gear for practitioners to not end up permanently injured immediately.

Grappling, on the other hand, involves choking out or putting the opponent in a hold they can't escape, which they tap out from (or pass out from). The technique does not have to be watered down in training, meaning that all of those hours of fighting practice are much more directly applicable to real fights. It also means that a fighter is much more likely to be able to gain years of experience and skill without receiving a major career ending injury.

Skydiving and Effective Training

A friend of mine (Hi Paul!) who is an experienced skydiver and wingsuiter once explained to me the problem with become highly skilled with wing suits. With skydiving, you can clock up training hours not just by jumping out of planes, but also using indoor wind tunnels. Jumping out of planes takes a lot of time and money for every few minutes of air time you get, so being able to clock up hours more efficiently indoors allows skydivers to improve their skills much faster.

But with wingsuits, you can't effectively fly them indoors. The only real way to gain experience in a wingsuit is doing a jump. This means that it takes much longer to gain skill and experience, and learning new tricks and techniques is much slower than with skydiving.

This is similar to the problem with grappling versus striking martial arts. Safe but highly effective training is much easier with jiu jitsu than with kick boxing, and the injury rate much lower. Jiu jitsu practitioners can clock up hours of realistic training much faster than other martial arts, and are less likely to be interrupted by injuries. This also means that over the course of time, striking martial artists will tend to get more injured and forced to retire, so we should expect to see the best martial artists appear to be strongly grappling focused.

So this means that jiu jitsu might not be as effective as it appears. It might just mean that someone is more likely to be able to practice jiu jitsu and engage in real fights for 20 years than with other martial arts. We might be seeing an example of what's known as the survivorship bias, where we notice the examples that have survived long enough to be counted, but forget about all the cases where bad luck made them disappear from our radars.

The Future of Martial Arts

At the end of the day, it might not really matter if jiu jitsu is as effective as it appears, or if it is largely benefiting from a lower injury attrition rate. For a person who wants to learn effective martial arts, it might simply be more pragmatic to engage in an art that is less effective, but doesn't require luck to be able to practice it long term without serious injury.

But what about the future? Right now a striking martial artist can use various tools to try and train as effectively as possible with the limitation that they can't just pummel the shit out of other human beings in order to refine their technique. It helps to an extent, but it's clearly a disadvantage. However, as robotics technology improves in the next couple of decades, we are going to be able to make training partners that people will be able to engage against fully without having to modify their techniques to avoid hurting their partner, and also not have to risk receiving injuring blows themselves.

When this kind of training becomes possible, I think we're going to see another revolution in martial arts training.

Have We Finally Hit Peak Excessive Camera Effects in Games?

Over the last few years we've been seeing an increase in the use of various camera effects in games, particularly in cinematics, designed to mimic effects that we see on real cameras. I want to argue in this post that this is a bad trend that we need to move away from, but that it's also a necessary evil we need to work through in order to get to the other side, where games develop their own visual language independent from film and real world cameras.

But first, in order to better make my point, let's talk briefly about UIs (User Interfaces).

The Transition to Flat UIs

For quite a few years, UIs on computers gradually evolved fancier looking 3D designs. One of the main reasons for this was that flat, 2D UIs looked simple and cheap to most people's eyes. It was hard to tell the difference between an intentionally simple UI and a cheaply made one.

But it started getting to the point that people were feeling the the 3D was becoming excessive and wondering how far it could go.

A big change then happened when Microsoft started promoting its Metro UI (there's a longer history there that's not worth going into) and Apple introduced iOS 7. Finally it was acceptable to have flat, minimalist UIs. This has been largely helped by more sophisticated UI toolkits that allow for heavy use of animation and transforms of different kinds to keep the UI interesting without having to resort to gaudy 3D elements.

Camera Effects

I would argue that this is the same process that games have been going through, and I think we might finally be getting to the point that UIs got to when the switch to flat occurred.

Games have always tried to introduce fancy visual effects as a differentiator between budget and AAA titles, and camera effects are a big part of that. Particularly as games have become more mainstream and have had higher production quality trailers made for them, the language of film has also been brought across as a way to make them look slicker and more expensive.

Some of this language is arguably good and improves games:

• Camera cuts
• Angles and positioning
• Simulating focus and depth of field can tell the player what they should be looking at and communicate things like disorientation
• Camera movements like shaky cam can add to immersion

But some of the stuff that we've brought across are just artifacts from real world cameras that often don't even make any sense in a game like a first person shooter where people are supposed to be looking through human eyes:

• Lens flares
• Dirt and grit on the lens
• Chromatic aberration

And there's also the problem of limiting the language of games by using the language of movies. Games are their own medium and need to develop their own camera language. When games mimic film in cutscenes by doing the "handheld camera" effect to appear more gritty, or limit themselves to the pan, zoom and rotation limits of real physical cameras, they miss an opportunity. Games can certainly be interactive movies if they want, but they can also be so much more than that.

The "Flat UI" Of Camera Effects

I think the industry might finally be ready to accept simple visuals as deliberate design choices rather than a sign of cheapness. Now that free games engines like Unreal Engine, CryEngine and Unity make good looking graphics accessible to indie developers and not just AAA developers, graphics are become less of a product differentiator, and certainly a less reliable way to tell a cheap game from an expensive game.

Games like The Witness have shown how you can have simple but gorgeous graphic design without using gaudy camera effects. The introduction of Virtual Reality devices to the mainstream will also force developers to not be able to rely on camera effects, as these can be quite jarring and sickening in VR. Things like shaky cam are no longer a crutch that can be relied on!

Personally, I've always been a sucker for graphics, and so I've enjoyed the excessive camera effects just as much as I've enjoyed seeing clean, simple visuals. But I do think games need to develop their own voice and identity separate to film and television, and ditching the camera effects will be a step in that direction.

Why Do We Respect Queues?

We come across queues in all kinds of places in society. When we recognize that there are several people who all are waiting for something, we will generally agree that it's fair to get it in the order of arrival. Whether it's waiting for the bus, going into a theater, lining up for the next iPhone or getting ice cream on a hot day, most people tend to respect the queue.

Some people certainly will queue jump or just barge straight in to the front of a line, but generally as long as it isn't a case of scarcity and people being afraid to miss out, most people will play along. If there is scarcity, like American Black Friday sales for example, then you tend to see the normal good behavior break down and it's everyone for themselves. There are limits to politeness for most people!

But why do we do this at all? Pushing in on a queue isn't breaking any law. For the most part, people won't stop you either. There's a typical range of responses you'll get:

• Nothing at all
• Glares and angry faces
• Muttered objections
• Direct objections
• Direct objections with an order to get to the end of the queue
• Physically being pushed from the queue
• A physical fight

Now obviously, depending on where the queue is and who is on it, the probabilities of those different responses can vary wildly. Pushing in on a queue of drunk football fans lining up for beers is typically going to get a different response than a queue of old ladies lining up for bingo. But even in the much safer cases where any kind of real retaliation is unlikely, people will still usually do the right thing.

Social Pressure

What it all tends to come down to is social pressures and shaming. Society has long relied on people taking cues from those around them as to what is normal and acceptable, and various kinds of pressures to keep people in check. Most of us have a desire to be seen as a decent person, not an asshole, so usually mild pressures are enough. Getting told off once for jumping a queue is often enough for most people to not do it again.

Imagine if we had to turn every act of queue jumping into a matter that involved the police. Imagine if we needed the police to step in every time someone littered. A huge amount of what allows society to work with some degree of smoothness is the part that we all play in observing cultural norms and applying mild pressure to each other to keep to them.

This is one reason why a lot of the feel-good motivational slogans that say things like "You shouldn't care what other people think", "Do what you want to do, not what other people want you to", and "Give zero fucks" are actually really terrible advice that makes society much worse. If everyone did that for real, we'd quite literally have a society of sociopaths, people who don't care how their actions impact on others.

Crossing The Street In Vietnam

If you've ever seen a video like the one above, showing how you cross the street in Vietnamese cities like Ho Chi Minh City, you know that the key is to move slowly and predictably. If all the vehicles can predict where you're going to be when they get to you, they will avoid you and you'll be fine. But this only works if everyone plays along. If people had a tendency to be unpredictable, the whole thing would fall apart. It's like the system is a chaotic but well oiled machine, and unpredictable movements by pedestrians are friction that slows the whole machine down.

The same tends to be true of society in general. While we don't like to push people to conform completely, and everyone loves to be an individual, we rely on people fitting in to social norms an expectations for the most part, because it makes social interactions more predictable, and in the end that tends to reduce friction. People don't have to worry all the time about how they should behave in different situations, or whether they came across as an asshole to someone else because they each had different social expectations.

Shaming and Retaliation

The problem with all of this, though, is that the same mechanisms that help society can also be misused to make people conform unfairly. The pressures of social norms can be used to ostracize people who dress differently, have different religious or political views to the majority, or have different interests. As a simple example, the UK is heavily a pub culture, based around the idea that everyone likes to drink alcohol and is interested in watching/discussing sports.

Further is the problem that these localized social pressures can now, thanks to social media, become global scale shamings. Our society hasn't caught up with this yet, and so the mechanisms that work fairly well on a small scale when only a few people are involved can cause massive problems and destroy lives when those social communications are shared online with the entire world.

Finally, society also hasn't found good ways to deal with the fact that technology makes the usual retaliation methods not work. When a person pushes in on a queue in real life, there are more subtle options available like a glare or a simple verbal challenge. In social media, it's mostly text, and so people tend to overcompensate and become incredibly rude incredibly fast, because they don't have any subtle ways to provide pressure.

And if you've ever wondered why road rage exists, it's for the same reason. When someone pushes in front of you in their car or does something else socially rude, they are protected inside a big metal box from normal social retaliation. You can't glare or tell them off like you could if they bumped into you walking along the street. People feel that their usual mechanisms for providing social pressure aren't there, and they also feel that it's unfair that the person gets away with it, not even knowing that they pissed people off, and so people tend to perform more extreme retaliations. It's not that people are assholes, it's that in cars the subtle retaliations are taken away from them.

Conclusion

If we want society to keep running smoothly as technology changes it, and as social norms themselves change and evolve, we need to remember that pressures to conform to social norms are the lubrication that keeps social interactions running smoothly. They can be used for good or bad, but society can't function without them, at least not in any way that we've figured out yet. We need to stay vigilant to their abuse, but we also need to accept that unless we want to live in some kind of Orwellian surveillance state with no freedom, abuses will happen sometimes, and as long as they're not too serious or damaging that might be the necessary price of a working society.

Are People Still Not Realizing How Different The US 2016 Election Is?

At the time that I am writing this, Donald Trump is looking to be the clear leader as the Republican candidate for the general election, while on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are still competing strongly for the lead. The general opinion seems to be that a lot of Democrats want Bernie Sanders, but feel that Hillary Clinton is the only one of the two who has a real chance of winning a general election.

This situation will probably largely sort itself out in a little over a week with the Super Tuesday elections, when we'll see if the Bernie Sanders idealists win out, or the Hillary Clinton "she knows how to play the game" / "it's time for a female president" crowd do.

I've been a Sanders supporter from the start, and I've found it interesting and amusing to watch the mental contortions of people during this election cycle, both on the Democratic and Republican sides, as they've constantly had their beliefs on how elections work be challenged, and then struggle to make sense of what they're seeing and make meaningful predictions for the future.

Go back about 8 or 9 months when candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump announced their intention to run for president. So many people were constantly saying that these were unelectable candidates, they weren't serious candidates, that it was a waste of time to pay attention to them.

I watched with disappointment as people like Bill Maher would say things like (paraphrasing) "I love Bernie Sanders, but he'll never be president", and then with amusement recently as he now endorses Sanders and criticizes all of those people who won't take him seriously as a candidate!

The right wing media has tried so desperately to make Donald Trump go away, and he just won't go away. He's a mostly self-funded billionaire candidate, and he can afford to stick around as long as he wants. He doesn't need to pander to the media, he knows how to manipulate the media, and they're completely unprepared for dealing with this.

Back in August, I wrote a blog post about how we're at a point where needing lots of money to pander to big media is no longer necessary for a candidate to get noticed. It's now Facebook, Twitter and Google that are largely determining what news people are seeing, and that's why Bernie Sanders became a viable candidate. His supporters have made him go viral despite all the money being thrown at the media in support of Hillary Clinton.

So here's the interesting thing: for all of the people who insisted that Trump and Sanders couldn't possibly become serious contenders for the presidency, you were wrong. Whatever your intuitions or arguments were, they've already been proven to be invalid in this election cycle to some degree. Given this information, do you now keep making predictions based on your previous intuitions, or do you step back and admit that if you were so wrong in your predictions about the election up to now, then maybe your future predictions are going to be just as unreliable?

For all of the people insisting that Bernie Sanders can't possibly win a general election, you may of course be totally right. But if you also insisted that he couldn't even get to this level of popularity, then you already have good evidence that you don't understand this election cycle. Having your predictions proven wrong and then being convinced your new predictions will be right is simply not being willing to adjust your views to new evidence.

Basically, if you were previously saying that there couldn't possibly be a Sanders vs Trump general election, then you should probably shut up about whether Sanders can win a general election. And if your main reason for preferring Clinton over Sanders is because you think only she has a chance at winning, then please, have the intellectual integrity to step back, notice just how wrong your and most other peoples intuitions have been about this election, and stop continuing to make bad predictions that will lead to bad decisions.

There is actually a real chance at a US election where people can vote for an idealistic candidate who genuinely wants to change things rather than just seeking power. He may not succeed with the things he wants to achieve, but the US political system is desperately in need of a shake up, and a shake up towards idealism rather than cynicism. People's confidence in anything useful actually getting done is at an all time low, and voting in more of the same type of people is probably just going to get more of the same type of results.

Why Liquid Democracy is a Terrible Idea

If this was democracy it would be terrible.

In recent years the concept of liquid democracy, aka delegative democracy, has become popular, and I've heard it advocated by a lot of smart people. The basic concept is that, rather than electing a single individual as the representative of your community to act on your behalf on all matters, you can choose individuals to vote on your behalf on specific areas of governance. In other words, if someone is recognized as a particular authority on some area of legislation, people will delegate their vote to that person on those issues. The hope is that votes on particular legislation will be made more intelligently and with less party politics, corruption and other issues undermining the whole system.

Like many things, I think this is an idea that sounds great in theory but is probably terrible in practice (or at best, just as bad as representational democracy). I think it is mistaken in much the same ways that people in the 90s gushed about how the internet would level playing fields and give a voice to everyone, and how the wisdom of the crowds would make all the important news and information rise to the top, rather than the advertising driven, clickbait, mob virality ecosystem ruled by large corporations such as Google and Facebook that we actually ended up with.

If you see elected representatives as simply there to stand as a proxy for the people who elected them, a simple sum of what each of those people would have voted for on a particular issue, then it's easy to see why people might consider them an unnecessary burden. But elected representatives aren't just opinion accumulators. Their job (at least when they actually do it properly!) is to spend the time to understand issues and vote on behalf of the people who elected them. Individual citizens don't have the time to have deep understanding of all of the issues that are part of running a society. It's good to have some awareness of issues so you can better judge if your representative is doing a good job, but the point is to pick someone who you trust to act on your behalf and spend the time you don't have to hopefully make better decisions.

Now, given this, it would seem like liquid democracy might give better results. The main problem is that most people are lazy, uninformed, and unwilling to spend much time.

For liquid democracy to work, it requires people to typically pick a greater number of delegates. Some people will take the time and effort to do that, of course, but most people probably wont. They will pick one or a very small number of people. And how will they decide? Rather than any kind of nuanced investigation, they'll just tend to go with whomever their peers go with.

So let's consider a particular area that is contentious, like reproductive rights. Do you think that most Americans will delegate their vote on these issues to scientists? Or do you think they think the relevant authorities on these issues are rather their pastors and priests? And how progressive will those results end up?

Or how about climate change. How many people will delegate to respected climate scientists, and how many will delegate to that "maverick" climate scientist that Fox News told them to delegate to?

The problem with delegating to authorities is that most people don't have a clue who the authorities are! They take their cues from biased news organizations, their religious leaders, and whatever shows up in their Twitter/Facebook feed, so these are the actual authorities they're effectively delegating to. And the result would be shit.

Liquid democracy considers its agility to be a virtue, but in a lot of ways, the relative slowness of our current systems can actually be useful. Having people in power for a certain length of time allows them to actually get things done without constantly worrying about having their "authority" revoked, which is considered a feature of liquid democracy. If there's anything we should have learned from social media in the present, it's just how quickly stupid shit can become viral and huge numbers of people get obsessed with it, and then just as quickly disappear and the next viral thing becomes the most important thing ever. Having a system that can smooth out these opinion spikes as people jump on different bandwagons is becoming increasingly important, and liquid democracy seems particularly fragile to it.

Perhaps I've just become very cynical. Where some people see citizen journalism and an internet where every voice can be heard, I see clickbait, virality of articles that arouse anger and outrage, and no one wanting to pay for real journalism. Where some people see the sharing economy and apps that empower people, I see corporations exploiting people and avoiding regulations and legal obligations. And where some people see the empowerment of individuals to play a greater role in the democratic process, I see a small number of individuals taking the time and effort to do it right, and the majority making terrible delegation decisions that result in an even worse system than what we currently have.

Are Fines Unjust?

Even a $10,000 fine is cheap for a millionaire

In society we generally consider several different types of punishment acceptable for different crimes. We have (in some places) the death penalty, imprisonment, community service, and monetary fines as the most common types. All of these are intended to serve one or more of the following purposes:

• Keep high risk people from being able to re-offend (imprisonment, death penalty)
• Have some kind of cost to the offender so they are less likely to do it again, and to deter potential offenders (all types)
• Provide a feeling of justice being served to the victims (all types)
• Provide rehabilitation to the offender to reduce chances of re-offending (imprisonment)
• Raise revenues for the police and the state in general (fines, community service in an indirect way)

Fines are used very frequently as a punishment for non-violent crimes and in particular, crimes that are often committed by "regular" people: speeding, parking violations, minor property damage.

What I want to argue here is that monetary fines are an unjust form of punishment and that we should consider replacing them in all cases with community service, imprisonment, or something similar.

Resource Deprivation

Monetary fines differ from the other forms of punishment in one significant way: all of the other punishments effectively deprive the offender of time. You take a certain amount of time and force the offender to do something they don't want to do with that time: some sort of community service, sit in a jail cell. And what is significant about that is that everyone, rich or poor, has (roughly speaking) the same amount of it, and can't create more.

A billionaire can have orders of magnitude more money than a homeless person, but even paying for all the best medical services money can buy, can't really get more than a few years of extra time. And time lost can't be replaced. The opportunities that are missed are often missed for good because time keeps moving forward and can't be re-experienced.

So a punishment that involves time deprivation is much more likely to be an equal deterrent to all people than one that involves monetary deprivation. A $500 fine for illegal parking isn't going to deter a millionaire in a rush anywhere near as much as a minimum wage worker, but 40 hours of community service will.

Equal Punishment

Some countries, such as Finland, use a model for some fines that is based on the income of the offender, rather than having an absolute value to the fine. This is definitely an improvement, since it means a rich person will get a proportionately greater fine, but it still doesn't solve the problem. After all, a millionaire can typically get by losing, say, 10% of their income better than a person who is struggling to make ends meet. The simple fact is that even if you hit a wealthy person with a proportionately larger fine than a poorer person, it's never going to affect them in the same way.

I suspect that the very reason fines exist for many of the (non-violent) crimes that a rich person is likely to commit is because the rich and powerful push for it. Monetary fines just become a cost of doing business. To a rich person, an illegal parking fine is just an expensive parking space. A speeding ticket is an "express lane" fee. Even when we look at the crimes committed by investment banks over the last decade, tens of billions of dollars have been paid in fines but generally no jail time or even admitting guilt by any of the parties. The fines are literally just treated like an extra tax for their line of business.

Time based penalties change all of this. It equalizes the punishment and costs something that is precious to everyone. And when it comes in the form of community service, it also allows things to get done that are often hard for local government to justify when they have to explicitly pay for them. It effectively serves as a form of cheap labour, so it's like revenue raising, except that it's done directly in the form of labour, so there's no opportunity for monetary revenues to be siphoned off inappropriately by government departments.

Perverse Incentives

The other very useful feature of time based punishments is that it removes the perverse incentives that monetary punishments create for law enforcement. When the police can directly generate revenues via fines, then there is an incentive to allocate more resources to the types of policing that generate revenue, rather than the policing that is most needed by the community. There are plenty of stories of police being given quotas for things like speeding fines, and this sort of situation is unlikely to result in the best outcomes for the community.

Of course, police services are often underfunded, so it's not surprising that they will overpolice in ways that generate revenue. But it will also be the case that when it's known that the police have this revenue source available, they are also less likely to receive direct funding in government budgets, which creates a vicious cycle. So they will also probably be better off to have this revenue source closed off, so the government has to accept that it must directly provide 100% of the funding, and the police can get back to doing what's best for the community.

Are Blue Zones Worth Paying Attention To?

Life in a Blue Zone

Blue Zones are a concept being promoted by the company Blue Zones (surprise!). The basic premise is that they looked at longevity statistics around the world, and found several places where longevity is unusually high. They then looked at what things these places have in common, with the hopes of coming up with rules that can be applied in other places to increase average human life expectancy.

This sounds like a noble goal, but how useful is it in practice? Am I just being a big bringdown by questioning the value of the project?

The obvious first point to consider is that Blue Zones is a for-profit company, so we should at least be careful about assuming that they're acting in our best interest. This doesn't necessarily have to mean that they are sinister or imply malice on their part, but it's important to be aware that if they didn't come up with useful answers as a result of the project, they'd be out of business.

Now, on to the Blue Zones themselves. What are the regions that are considered Blue Zones?

• Sardinia, Italy
• Okinawa, Japan
• Loma Linda, California
• Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica
• Ikaria, Greece

These places all have unusually high life expectancy. So we just see what they have in common, and that should tell us how to replicate the results elsewhere, right?

Sample Sizes

Not so fast. One important thing to consider first is sample size.

Say you were looking at the statistics of your country, and you wanted to see where the highest rate of, say, renal cancer was. You will almost certainly find that it's in some small town somewhere. Now, check the stats for where the lowest rate of renal cancer is. You will probably find that it, too, is in some other small town. One of these towns must be doing something really right, and one must be doing something really wrong, right?

Not at all. The problem is that whenever you have samples with a small number of components, it's very easy for luck to throw off the sample. In a small town, you only need a couple more or less cases of something to throw off the stats for the whole town, because the sample is so small. So a couple of extra cancer cases make it look like something is going on. In a big city, you'd need a lot more cases of something to affect the overall stat in a noticeable way.

Applying this knowledge to Blue Zones, we need to be careful if any of the locations has a small population. What do we find? Well, Ikaria has a population of only around 8000. Loma Linda is around 23000 people. Nicoya is around 25000. Okinawa and Sardinia, on the other hand, are both above one million people.

So of these five locations that everything is being based on, three have very small populations that could easily get skewed statistics. That doesn't mean that they do, of course, but it's not a good sign.

Transferable Traits

One big problem with the whole concept of Blue Zones is that when looking for the things that each location has in common, by necessity the researchers are only looking at traits that are transferable to another location. Since the very goal is to replicate the results elsewhere (and sell some books in the process), if it turned out that, say, high altitude was responsible for longer life expectancy, this would end up being ignored because you can't transfer that.

Or, noticing that several of these populations are quite small, what if the very fact of living in small villages rather than big, crowded cities is a major reason for longer lives? Again, you can't sell that as a solution, so it has to be ignored.

It could well be that many of the common traits being promoted are actually just coincidental and have no value in increasing longevity on average (assuming that there is even a genuine longevity increase in these places to begin with), and that the things that actually matter were completely overlooked.

Isolated Traits

Consider another issue, which is whether or not you need several traits working together to get the desired results. Can you just identify several things that these places have in common and assume that each one individually is useful? Maybe without several working together you get no results, or even worse, negative results? Imagine if you found, say, that drinking alcohol and living at a high altitude worked together to increase longevity, but just alcohol on its own actually decreased it? Well, you would now be exporting shorter life spans and bad advice!

And the even more interesting thing could be that there are common traits in these different places, but they need to be combined with some other thing to get the right results, but the identity of that other thing is actually different in each location, like in Loma Linda they eat lots of beans, while in Ikaria they bathe in hot water a lot. And if you do one of these things along with drinking alcohol, you live longer (let me be clear that this is just a hypothetical). Well, these wouldn't be identified by Blue Zones, and so once again you'd actually be exporting bad advice to others.

Quality of Life

Finally, there's the actual question of whether Blue Zones is even looking at the right thing. Longevity is obviously nice, all things being equal, but are all things equal? Living a long life is not the same as a life worth living, and most people would probably choose a shorter, happier life over a longer, more miserable one.

If living a year longer involved decades of eating bland food, or painful exercises, or being sedentary and expending as little energy as possible, etc, maybe that wouldn't be a worthwhile tradeoff for most people. Rather than looking for the places on Earth where people live the longest, perhaps we should be looking for the places on Earth where people are happiest, and try to replicate those results?