At the moment, centralized human command-and-control norms make large militaries similarly fragile. They've gotten around this in recent decades by letting smaller, more autonomous parts take over when there are enough dead bodies, but this does not last long. The same problems in policy elsewhere continue within militaries. While elements of the military have seen this problem (it's an old problem best explained by the writing of David Hackworth, Erwin Rommel, and B.H Liddell-Hart), they can't really change it from the inside, so there's been a shift toward retirees who've started consulting firms with an implicit aim of changing culture from the outside.

Progress in technology will yield the same problems that it did in the 60s (when militaries had access to better radio communication, they used it to try to enforce tighter control on their units while avoiding the ground- commanders literally flew in helicopters instead of having their boots on the ground): militaries will attempt to use that technology for more central control, which will continue making its systems more rigid and vulnerable to a sudden catastrophic failure.

If you're still experimenting with this, glutinous rice flour choux is even less error prone than regular choux.

Fights provide more salient feedback (in the form of the threat of bodily pain and injury) than artistic or sports performance.

Fighting is fundamentally a faster version of existing interactions. At slower speed you might say it's not violent, and call it 'politics'. As such, the most consistent fighters win by noticing and making use of the preferred patterns in their opponents. We might call these patterns 'bias'. In other words, fighting is won by prediction and surprise. As all cognition uses analogy, to understand coordination at a grand strategic level (like you would want in a question like this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/47pqaDPCmzQBTFija/great-power-conflict), it is useful to understand individual coordination. As such, combat sports and street fights provide a relatively accessible training ground for models of human behavior- a value, after all, is what someone wants, and if not all of you wants to hit the other person, you will not hit the other person. 

You're saying that your ability to win a fight is based on physical strength?

How may they be learned without the actual fighting? What's the relative speed of the loops and clarity in sports and performance arts? For example, how is a musical performance judged? Is it more or less clear than a fight?

Second this. This is where the katas are. 

Also seconding Matt Goldenberg's point on katas. A kata is akin to learning by rote memorization for an academic test instead of learning to approximate causal models on the fly for use in practical projects. 

Thank you for posting this! Do you have any thoughts on how this might relate prediction to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity (http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html)? Is forecasting fun?