When I saw the headline "5-year-old 'Karate Kid' earns black belt" my first thought was "How is that even possible?". It took me about 3 and a half years of continuous study to earn my brown; had I been able to continue in that particular system I would (hopefully) have passed the 1st degree black belt test after an additional year. From where I stood, and apart from any other considerations, the aforementioned 5-year-old had hardly even been alive long enough to get a black belt.
I had, of course, fallen prey to the same fallacy which no doubt prompted Alex Thomas to write the article in the first place: that the phrase "black belt" has some sort of fixed and universal significance. Hearing that someone has "earned a black belt" is analogous to learning that someone has been nominated for a Nobel Prize; it sounds impressive, but when you dig a little bit you find out that it doesn't mean all that much.
The CNN article provides little detail of what Varsha Vinod did to earn the rank; the cursory treatment provided there and elsewhere makes it sound like she learned a bunch of forms. There's not a whole lot more context to be had; neither her school (the KoInChi Academy of Martial Arts) nor her instructor (VZ Sebastian) have a web presence apart from passing mentions in articles about Ms. Vinod. So what we've got is an unknown instructor from an unknown school saying that he's awarded a blackbelt to a fairly young child. Fine, good for her; she may genuinely be a prodigy. But... well... meh... not newsworthy.
The interesting bit about all of this is not Ms. Vinod but rather the fact that people find it newsworthy. The rank of blackbelt has become something akin to Paris Hilton in the popular imagination; notable primarily for being notable. It requires hardly more than a cursory understanding of the martial arts to realize that a 5-year-old 1st degree is not going to have the same capabilities as an adult of the same rank; if they did that would be something to write home about. As such is obviously not the case here you'd expect a good journalist to stop and ponder that disparity for at least a paragraph or so.
Two morals to this particular story:
- Journalists are insufficiently skeptical about the martial arts.
- Saying that someone has a black belt means absolutely nothing without context.
