The Facts You Don’t Like Still Count

One of the things I love most about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is that the mat has a strange ability to give you humility and confidence at exactly the same time.

You learn what you can do.

And you learn very quickly what you cannot do.

The mat does not particularly care about the story you tell yourself.

Last week I was rolling with Wesley.

Wes is this really cool California surfer dude, almost Lebowski-ish. Big guy. Brown belt. Badass at BJJ.

But he also has this light in his eyes where he always seems happy-go-lucky, like he is just having a good time being there.

During one of our rolls, Wes took my back.

For those of you who do not train BJJ, having a big brown belt on your back is approximately the EXACT opposite of where you want a big brown belt to be.

He started working for a choke.

We were hand-fighting while he grabbed at my lapels, trying to get the grips he needed.

And during that exchange, I started feeling pretty good about myself.

I felt like I was winning the hand fight.

One thing people at the gym have told me repeatedly is that my grips are deceptively strong.

I am 5’2” and about 120 pounds, so people sometimes do not expect it.

But I was an electrician for 35 years.

I spent decades pushing a steel fish tape through conduit, pulling wire, gripping tools, pushing, pulling, and fighting with things that did not want to move.

Apparently that built a pretty decent grip.

So there I was, fighting Wesley’s hands and thinking:

Hey, I am doing okay here.

And that is exactly where things can get dangerous.

Not because I was necessarily wrong.

Because I did not know how right I was.

There is a difference.

A few days later, when Wes and I rolled again, I asked him to turn it up.

I knew exactly what can of worms I was opening.

• I knew that during our previous roll he had probably been attacking me on one front instead of several.
• I knew he was not necessarily setting traps, forcing reactions, and then attacking whatever opening my reaction created.
• I knew he was not using all of his size, strength, experience, and pressure.

In other words, I knew I had incomplete data.

And I did not want my ego turning incomplete data into a comforting conclusion.

I did not want to walk away thinking:

I can defend myself pretty well when a big brown belt takes my back.

Maybe I can.

Maybe I cannot.

But if I am going to believe it, I want better evidence.

So I asked Wes to show me more of reality.

And this time I could feel the difference.

I was no longer dealing with the comfortable little version of the problem where I could focus on winning one hand fight.

His size, strength, skill, and experience gave him options I had not really been forced to deal with before.

The story that I was “winning” suddenly had to survive a much harder test.

And, unsurprisingly, reality became considerably less flattering.

That is one of the gifts of the mat.

You do not get to choose which facts count.

We Have Gotten Very Good at Choosing Our Facts

I have been thinking about this a lot lately because I see the opposite happening everywhere.

People do not necessarily go looking for the truth.

They go looking for evidence that allows them to keep believing what they already believe.

There is even a name for part of this:

​Confirmation bias.​

• We notice evidence that supports our beliefs.
• We discount evidence that threatens them.

And now the internet has given us a tool that makes this incredibly easy.

Whatever you want to believe, you can probably find someone somewhere who agrees with you.

Spend twenty minutes searching and you can assemble a little pile of “facts.”

Then another twenty minutes finding people who share those facts.

Then an algorithm notices what you are clicking on and starts feeding you more of the same.

Before long, you are living inside an information dojo where nobody ever takes your back.

Everybody agrees that your defense is excellent.

It feels wonderful.

It may also be completely detached from reality.

The Scout and the Soldier

​Julia Galef calls the alternative The Scout Mindset, and I love that distinction.

A soldier has a position to defend.

A scout has terrain to understand.

The scout is not asking:

“How do I prove that I am right?”

The scout is asking:

“What is actually out there?”

Those are radically different questions.

And I think one of the hardest things about being a scout is deliberately looking at facts you do not particularly want to be true.

That is what I was doing when I asked Wes to turn it up.

I had a hypothesis:

Maybe my hand fighting is getting pretty good.

Fantastic.

Now attack the hypothesis.

Give me the brown-belt version.

Give me the size difference.

Give me the setup I did not see.

Give me the second attack while I am defending the first.

Show me where my understanding breaks.

Because finding the place where I am wrong is much more useful than protecting the feeling that I am right.

Questioning Expertise Does Not Make You an Expert

This is where I think a lot of modern arguments go off the rails.

Take medicine.

Someone spends an hour on Google, reads a handful of articles, watches some videos, and suddenly believes they have uncovered something the FDA, NIH, WHO, universities, medical researchers, and thousands of practicing physicians somehow failed to notice.

Now, should those institutions be questioned?

Of course.

Institutions are run by human beings.

Human beings have incentives.

Organizations become bureaucratic.

Research can be poorly designed.

Experts disagree.

Industries lobby regulators.

Government agencies make mistakes.

Science itself progresses precisely because previous conclusions get challenged.

So “an authority said it” is not the end of an argument.

But the opposite mistake is just as foolish.

Questioning expertise does not magically make you an expert.

A casual internet search is not automatically equivalent to decades of specialized training.

One study is not automatically equivalent to a body of research.

One doctor disagreeing with thousands of specialists does not automatically prove the thousands are corrupt.

And to be clear, sometimes the dissenter turns out to be right.

Scientific consensus has changed before and will change again.

But being the dissenter is not, by itself, evidence that you are right either.

That is the part people seem to miss.

Consensus is not scripture.

Contrarianism is not courage.

Your personal experience is evidence.

A research paper is evidence.

Expert consensus is evidence.

Institutional recommendations are evidence.

None of those things should be accepted blindly.

But neither should they all be treated as though they carry exactly the same weight.

The scout asks another question:

What weight should I give each piece of evidence?

That is harder.

It does not fit into a meme.

And sometimes the strongest available evidence points toward something we really do not want to believe.

Those facts still count.

Every Tribe Does This

This cuts in every direction.

Political tribes do it.

Religious tribes do it.

Atheists do it.

Liberals do it.

Conservatives do it.

Business owners do it.

Martial artists do it.

Scientists do it.

I do it.

You do it.

That is the uncomfortable part.

Confirmation bias is not something stupid people suffer from.

In fact, intelligence can sometimes make it worse because smart people are really good at constructing arguments.

Give a smart person a conclusion they emotionally want to defend and they can build an impressive fortress around it.

That fortress can still be sitting on bad ground.

And social media gives us another option.

If reality becomes uncomfortable enough, we can simply change neighborhoods.

Block people.

Unfollow them.

Join another group.

Subscribe to another channel.

Listen only to commentators who tell us that we are the sane ones and everyone else has been brainwashed.

Eventually we create an intellectual gated community.

Everyone inside agrees.

Everyone outside is an idiot.

And because everyone around us shares our beliefs, those beliefs begin to feel self-evidently true.

That is not the scout mindset.

That is hiding from the terrain.

Who Is Your Wesley?

The better question is not:

“What facts support what I believe?”

Try this instead:

What would I expect to see if I am wrong?

Or:

What evidence would actually cause me to change my mind?

Or even:

Who is the Wesley in this situation?

• Who knows more than I do?
• Who can turn the difficulty up?
• Who can expose the openings I am not seeing?
• Who can attack my belief from more than one direction?
• And am I willing to invite them to do it?

Because that is the funny thing about confidence.

Real confidence does not require you to protect yourself from inconvenient information.

Real confidence says:

Turn it up.

Let’s find out.

If my grip really is good, it will survive increasingly difficult tests.

If my argument is good, it will survive strong counterarguments.

If my belief is true, contradictory evidence should help me refine it rather than terrify me.

And if I am wrong?

Good.

I would rather discover that while rolling with a friendly brown belt than spend years confidently defending something that was never true.

The facts that make us feel good count.

The facts that make us feel stupid count.

The facts that reinforce our worldview count.

And the inconvenient ones count too.

Reality does not owe us a version of itself that makes us comfortable.

Our job is to get better at seeing the terrain as it actually is.

The mat taught me that.

And every once in a while, the rest of life offers the same lesson—

If we are willing to ask someone to turn it up.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Listening Drill

In your next conversation:

Listen twice as much as you speak.

📚 Leader’s Library

​The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef​

Why?

Galef draws a useful distinction between two ways of approaching the world:

• The soldier defends a position
• The scout tries to understand the terrain
• The soldier asks how to win
• The scout asks what is actually true

We need both.

There are moments when you have to commit, act, endure, and hold the line.

But there are also moments when strength means becoming curious enough to discover that your map is wrong.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck