RCTs versus Bro Wisdom
Who wins?
Team Reality member WolfStrength (that’s his Twitter handle) wrote a substack recently touching on the tension between evidence-based coaching and the real life wisdom of coaches.
He’s a power lifting coach, so his piece is couched in that space, but the issue is quite general, coming up in medicine, art, and pretty much every field. There are always the careful randomized controlled studies which pin down how one variable affects something, and, on the other hand, there are always hosts of other stuff we think we know, none of which has ever been shown by a controlled study of that kind.
In the battle of RCTs versus Bros, who wins?
Here’s how I have long thought about it.
The careful controlled studies cannot get at the full richness done in practice. They can at best handle one or two dimensions at a time. Same for art (for which I’ve written a lot, including my book On the Origin of Art).
My own feeling is that the “art” has culturally evolved into rich local optima, and done so across many many parameters.
The artists (coaches, in this case) often have stories / narratives that justify them, but that’s often post hoc and not whatever the true justification might be.
Cultural evolution discovered it, not any individual.
The artist is embedded in that cultural tradition, and has inherited loads of reasonably optimized solutions within a high dimensional space, as well as “principles” they all believe in which, although not per se rigorous, amount to heuristics that make it fairly easy to infer what’s best in this or that circumstance.
In this way the artist serves as a kind of oracle of the cultural wisdom, with narratives that serve not as truth, but as ways of really elegantly conveying what to do so that it’s easy to absorb.