Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

slatestarcodex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 64 posts

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#11

Post by mannykannot »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #2

I'm curious to query the HN crowd: How do we mesh this learned helplessness on subjects for which there are no definitive studies for? (eg. is the purpose of a human life to produce more humans? How does one formally prove that, and how does one prove those proofs are valid, and the organizations that prove the proofs are valid are also valid?)

It seems to me that these issues would fall into the author's category of things you need not take seriously: in the first case, don't look for proofs of a proposition that is not well-defined enough to be amenable to either proof or refutation, and in the second, don't expect to reach the end of a line of inquiry that you can see will never end.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#12

Post by gjm11 »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #5

> I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Everyone thinks they are better than average ;)

True, but if you read a bit of Scott's writing it will become apparent that in this respect he is better than average, by a long way. Of course being good at writing is not the same as being good at talking, but I am willing to trust his opinion that he's good at talking too. (He's a psychiatrist by profession and presumably does a lot of Talking To People About Stuff.)

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#13

Post by Geimfari »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #5

> I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Everyone thinks they are better than average ;)

Scott Alexander (SlateStarCodex) is most definitely above average when it comes to writing and argument-making. He might be the most convincing writer I know of.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#14

Post by cjbprime »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #2

I'm curious to query the HN crowd: How do we mesh this learned helplessness on subjects for which there are no definitive studies for? (eg. is the purpose of a human life to produce more humans? How does one formally prove that, and how does one prove those proofs are valid, and the organizations that prove the proofs are valid are also valid?)

You can't do that, because any proof relating to how humans should live would have to start from axioms like "suffering is bad" or "other people are probably real rather than imaginary" or "suffering is bad, and other people are real, and it's bad when I suffer, and it's also bad when other people suffer", and you're not going to get everyone to agree on those.

The best you can do is to make arguments like "if you accept all the axioms I mentioned above, you should also accept this conclusion".

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#15

Post by maxerbubba »

abakker wrote: post #8

There is a connection in his last paragraph to entrepreneurship - I can't place a finger on the exact phasing but I've seen before on HN an essay about the need for an entrepreneur to be "all in" and genuinely swayed by their own arguments. I've definitely observed that in successful business people around me, and observed that I can't seem to do that to myself. While I'm not an entrepreneur, I've often thought to st…

See also: FYRE Festival, Elizabeth Holmes

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#16

Post by ppeetteerr »

Geimfari wrote: post #13
ppeetteerr wrote: post #5

> I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Everyone thinks they are better than average ;)

Scott Alexander (SlateStarCodex) is most definitely above average when it comes to writing and argument-making. He might be the most convincing writer I know of. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/

He's certainly convinced you ;)

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#17

Post by stupidcar »

stcredzero wrote: post #6

"Epistemic Learned Helplessness," is simply shorthand for, "We are all finite and have an incomplete understanding for everything, yet we must still pragmatically make our way in the world." You don't have to instantly believe arguments. Sit back and gather data to assess the predictive power of the model.

Except the problem the author identifies is that in many fields, such as history, there's no way for the lay person to judge the predictive power of competing theories, short of expending outsized effort to become an expert themselves.

Since they cannot judge theories scientifically, and they cannot judge them based on how well they're presented, they can only fall back on social consensus and instinctive sense of weirdness. "Trust the academy", would seem to be the more accurate shorthand.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#19

Post by mannykannot »

acbabis wrote: post #3
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #2

I'm curious to query the HN crowd: How do we mesh this learned helplessness on subjects for which there are no definitive studies for? (eg. is the purpose of a human life to produce more humans? How does one formally prove that, and how does one prove those proofs are valid, and the organizations that prove the proofs are valid are also valid?)

I feel like people who study subjective topics like the value of human life (philosophers) have already internalized "learned helplessness". It's empirical-oriented people like us who have a harder time grappling with the idea of not knowing everything

I think that being empirically-minded requires, in part, accepting that not everything is known. Science differentiated itself from the rest of philosophy when it put aside big but unanswerable questions in favor of smaller questions that could be addressed empirically.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#20

Post by thaumaturgy »

Happy to see this here again.

I suspect that argument from authority, like "goto considered harmful" and Moore's Law, have entered the public consciousness in a warped popular form that barely resembles the original.

In topics in which I am not a subject matter expert, I can and should defer to the actual subject matter experts, absent very compelling evidence to the contrary. I'm not perfect at this, but I first read Epistemic Learned Helplessness at about the right time several years ago and it re-appears unbidden in my consciousness to hit me in the back of the head any time I start thinking an expert might be wrong in their area of expertise.

Reluctance to do this because of misguided applications of the argument-from-authority fallacy is probably one of the root causes of antivaxx, climate "skepticism", flat-eartherism, and other hot political topics with a vocal population who have convinced themselves that authorities are not to be trusted. You can never successfully argue for instance that "AGW is probably true because 98% of climate scientists agree with its foundations", because the answer is always, "that's the argument-from-authority fallacy", even though reliance on authority is the correct approach. What you inevitably get instead is two or more laypeople clumsily trying to debate the nuances of a subject that they have no academic background in.

Post reply on HN