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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

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Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#51

Post by skybrian »

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?)

The online version is just to avoid believing things. We don't have independent knowledge of most of what gets reported on the Internet and we're not here to accomplish anything much, so we don't have to commit to any beliefs.

(This is the opposite of the "instant expert syndrome" to which many people seem susceptible, where they are certain they know which side to take about whatever was recently in the news.)

In real life, you probably do have commitments and decisions to make.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#52

Post by mistermann »

abecedarius wrote: post #50
mistermann wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any time I start thinking an expert might be wrong in their area of expertise But on the other hand.... Why Most Published Research Findings Are False https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

Yeah. A well-functioning civilization would be epistemically like an efficient market. In ours, it's relatively hard to get rewarded to improve the consensus estimate about most things: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/scientis...

That's a very interesting approach in the article, and yet something like that will likely never see the light of day. In my opinion much of the blame for the decrease in public trust of experts lies with the experts themselves for their lack of epistemic honesty and apparent disinterest in self-improvement.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#54

Post by HNLurker2 »

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

>feel like people who study subjective topics like the value of human life (philosophers) have already internalized "learned helplessness".

This.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#55

Post by ggm »

I dislike the name, but I can't think of a better one for the mental condition.

I find the easiest way out of the "we're in a simulation" conundrum is to ask why you would behave differently, ethically, inside a simulation to outside: doesn't the fact you display consistency on your behaviour define you as you?

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#56

Post by DigitalTerminal »

Pascal’s Wager seems trivially countered by pointing out that there’s an equal amount of evidence of the opposite hypothesis.

Or, in a more refined way: There is an effectively infinite number of theories that have equal evidence (namely: none), and consequently you should give each one only (1/infinity) attention, i.e. epsilon, i.e. basically zero.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#57

Post by skrebbel »

> But to these I’d add that a sufficiently smart engineer has never been burned by arguments above his skill level before, has never had any reason to develop epistemic learned helplessness. If Osama comes up to him with a really good argument for terrorism, he thinks “Oh, there’s a good argument for terrorism. I guess I should become a terrorist,” as opposed to “Arguments? You can prove anything with arguments. I’ll just stay right here and not blow myself up.”

Wow! This explains why so many antivaxxers and the likes are highly educated people, often with engineering-like background. I never realized that until reading this. They're smart enough to never have developed a thick enough skin against convincing-but-wrong arguments, which means that once someone does convince them of something (despite their smartness), they're (we're?) all-in.

Makes me wonder how vulnerable I am to all this. I'm sure in the target demographic here. Maybe Osama would turn me into a suicide bomber too? Or into an antivaxxer :-)

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#58

Post by majewsky »

stcredzero wrote: post #10
acbabis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's empirical-oriented people like us Translation: People who have spent so much time playing with highly abstracted and greatly simplified models, they've lost their grasp on how messy and complicated the real world can be.

More than that, we're used to dealing with maps when the territory may be inherently unmappable. It may not just be hard to produce an accurate map for the entire territory, it may be impossible.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#59

Post by nordsieck »

taneq wrote: post #31
thaumaturgy wrote: post #20

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 rea…

I think the (or at least an ) underlying issue is the conflation of arguments with their respective fallacies. Saying "98% of climate scientists agree that AGW is happening" IS an argument from authority, but it's not an argument-from-authority fallacy, because they are in fact authorities and we should listen to them. It's only argument-from-authority if there isn't sufficient evidence that this authority is most li…

> Saying "98% of climate scientists agree that AGW is happening" IS an argument from authority, but it's not an argument-from-authority fallacy, because they are in fact authorities and we should listen to them.

That is the claim that people make when they make an argument from authority. That doesn't make it not a logical fallacy.

> It's only argument-from-authority if there isn't sufficient evidence that this authority is most likely correct on this count.

Sometimes this works (the Earth orbits the Sun) and sometimes it doesn't (sanitizing hands/scalpels is actually a good idea between dissecting cadavers and doing c-sections).

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

#60

Post by pdpi »

nordsieck wrote: post #59
taneq wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the (or at least an ) underlying issue is the conflation of arguments with their respective fallacies. Saying "98% of climate scientists agree that AGW is happening" IS an argument from authority, but it's not an argument-from-authority fallacy, because they are in fact authorities and we should listen to them. It's only argument-from-authority if there isn't sufficient evidence that this authority is most li…

> Saying "98% of climate scientists agree that AGW is happening" IS an argument from authority, but it's not an argument-from-authority fallacy, because they are in fact authorities and we should listen to them. That is the claim that people make when they make an argument from authority. That doesn't make it not a logical fallacy. > It's only argument-from-authority if there isn't sufficient evidence that this autho…

> That is the claim that people make when they make an argument from authority. That doesn't make it not a logical fallacy.

This is the point where branding things as fallacies breaks down, and is very much the point of the article.

Calling “argument from authority” on somebody’s point is one of the weakest rebuttals you can provide, because you’re not really tackling the substance of the argument.

In this case, “98% of scientists agree that AGW is happening” implicitly says “and I have all the arguments provided by those 98% on my side”. Presumably, if AGW isn’t happening, their arguments are wrong somehow, and you should be able to point out how. It’s not just appeal to authority, it’s saying “here’s a big body of research, tell me where it went wrong”.

Ultimately, nobody is an expert on everything, and heuristic thinking has to take over at some point. Overwhelming expert consensus is a damn good heuristic to go by.

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