Silver Bullet Fallacy

We are biased to assume our problems can be solved with a single, straightforward solution.

Jiu-Jitsu can be super frustrating sometimes.

This sport excels at presenting you with a problem you really want to solve — like learning to escape bottom side control — and making you train for years before you become half decent at solving it.

The search for easy answers

When I was a blue belt, bottom side control was my nemesis. I'd get stuck there so long, I debated having my mail forwarded.

I remember asking my coaches to teach me a simple technique I could use to escape. I wasn't getting results trying to solve this puzzle alone, so I was ready to give up and ask the teacher for the correct answer.

To their credit, my coaches tried to give me what I wanted. I remember them unhelpfully yelling, “Just hip escape!” as I was getting pancaked by some ultra heavyweight. 🤣

Unfortunately, I never learned that one magic technique to get out of bottom side control. That's because it doesn't exist.

When I finally learned to escape bottom side control, it was through years of training how to move my body so the person on top is never comfortable. The solution wasn't simple. There's no way a coach could have packed all that knowledge into a single soundbite.

Jiu-Jitsu, much like life, doesn't offer many easy answers. This leads to the topic we're covering today.

The silver bullet fallacy

There's a term for our bias toward simple answers: the silver bullet fallacy. The name derives from old folk tales about werewolves that could be killed by a single silver bullet.

Here's how I like to define the silver bullet fallacy:

We are biased to assume our problems can be solved with a single, straightforward solution.

In reality, complex problems often require complex solutions.

Moreover, sometimes a single solution isn't enough; we may need several solutions acting together before we see results. Progress often comes from marginal gains rather than big wins.

Or perhaps our solution requires patience. Maybe it requires time and hard work to see results. The desire for immediate results can lead us to abandon good solutions too early.

Because we're prone to believe in silver bullet fallacies, we should be all the more suspicious when we're offered simple solutions to complex problems. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Jiu-Jitsu has no easy answers

The sooner we accept that there are no “silver bullets” for learning Jiu-Jitsu, the better.

Silver bullets are attractive because we want quick results. But this sort of endgame, results-oriented thinking is a fundamental misunderstanding of how we learn: by consistently following a skill development process.

If you want to get out of bottom side control, don't “just hip escape.” Instead, train that position hundreds of times with a diverse group of training partners. It's not satisfying to hear that, but it works.

Jiu-Jitsu is not a problem to solve, it's a process to be practiced.

If we hunt for easy answers, we'll always be miserable because there will always be new problems. But when we abandon the hunt for silver bullets and focus on enjoying the process itself, it's much easier to find the joy in every training session.

On the podcast:

• Ep. 107: Information Literacy, feat. Robert Degle
• Ep. 134: Bullshit Inoculation, feat. Phrost

Further study:

• Certainty Heuristic