Notes on the Cal Jones and Mike Israetel Discussion

Progress sort of but not really (but it's still a good thing)

I want to say first I’m really glad this discussion happened, and it’s on the radar of someone as big as Dr. Mike. Second, I’ve consumed a lot of Dr. Mike’s content and consider myself a fan.

With these things in mind, my gut reaction while listening to this debate is Dr. Mike showed up just to (politely) play a sort of “mean girls” game where he (nicely) lays down the law of what the science is, and what it says, and that we’re not in that clique.

He does not apparently understand the scale of study of the ecological approach (many don’t—we’ll discuss this more), and, just like any rank and file martial artist, is not willing to learn or use terminology specialized to a discipline outside his own.

Summary

The halo effect of the PhD looming overhead was much more pronounced in this discussion than his one with Greg Souders.

Dr. Mike makes unilateral pronouncements from the standpoint of an exercise scientist that do not even begin to acknowledge the variety of credible positions extant in the skill acquisition discipline, including more recent developments in schema theory via researchers like Gabriel Wulf. It frankly amounts to a great deal of question-begging, and it felt like an attempt to simply shut out Cal's attempts to merely explain the ecological psychology position.

At one point, he asks Cal about language specialized to skill acquisition -- IP vs ecological approach -- and rather than sus out the differences, attempts to declare all things information processing. Dr. Mike seems to want to drag everything back into exercise science terminology instead of talk skill acquisition on skill acquisition terms (where have we seen that before?).

We’ll dig into specifics in the body of this article, below.

My big overall question:

Does Dr. Mike believe there are any credible alternative views to motor control than schema theory’s version of information processing?

13:30 - Is Dr. Mike Stating his Understanding as the Final Word?