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

Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

slatestarcodex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 232 posts

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#41

Post by freedomben »

Swizec wrote: post #22
philip1209 wrote: post #18

This article talks about learned helplessness in a learning context. I talked about it in a work context, and the two could be linked. I think social media is training people for everything to be quick, but learning + work aren't necessarily quick. > This insistence on constant availability disrupts the essence of focused work. Rather than encouraging employees to tackle complex problems independently, there’s a tren…

As a tech lead I would rather see a team member ask me questions early than never. Nudging them in the right direction before they waste 3 days going down a path that’s never going to work is at least half my job. But it’s important that they’ve done enough research to formulate the question. A little struggle helps the learning stick.

I agree, but in practice now I've come to see that this is an extremely difficult point to discern. As the vast majority of findings flow in as a trickle, there often isn't a large enough delta to identify as a launching point for asking for help. For example, if one continues to search, they will keep finding breadcrumbs leading them to the solution. It is painful to me when someone spends 3 days looking for a solution to a problem that is very custom and unique to our system (so they're not gonna find the answer anywhere on the internet), and one I could solve in 5 minutes, but you don't know what you don't know, so as a new person learning it is almost never clear at what point it is ideal to ask for help. Compounding all of this is that many personalities don't like to be bothersome to other people, and that can cause them to hesitate to ask for help, which further sends them on the search between small deltas. It's a very hard problem.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#42

Post by helicalmix »

twelfthnight wrote: post #30

Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas? Wouldn't that type of person become iteratively closer to the truth every time they hear a new argument and compare to the others they've heard?

> This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore it and stick with my prior.

If two diametrically opposed arguments are equally convincing, it's not intuitive to me that the "correct" solution is a middle ground. Especially if both argument state that a middle ground is not possible.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#43

Post by Aurornis »

> I’ve heard a few good arguments in this direction before, things like how engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae,

Whenever the rationalist writers start talking about engineering, programming, or machine learning in technical terms I have a sudden Gell-Mann Amnesia realization that these people's primary domain is writing and pontificating, with little to no actual experience with engineering, programming, or machine learning.

I don't know any engineers who would characterize the world as being simply defined by "a few simple formulae"

Meanwhile, the rationalist community has an abnormally large reverence for engineers, programmers, and machine learning experts as if they were superhuman:

> But to these I’d add that a sufficiently smart engineer has never been burned by arguments above his skill level before,

Really? Sufficiently smart engineers have never encountered arguments above their skill level? Are we to assume that engineers are at the peak of logic and reasoning and skill? Is this an attempt to pander to an engineering audience? Or an actual belief that engineers have superhuman levels of logic?

Finally, I'm growing tired of the way rationalist writings go out of their way to self-congratulate rationalists while placing the rest of the population into the unenlightened normie category that we're all supposed to look down upon:

> The people I know who are best at taking ideas seriously are those who are smartest and most rational

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#44

Post by trgn »

debacle wrote: post #9

This feels like it belongs on /r/iamverysmart. Most people don't argue within moral frameworks. Most people don't live logic-based lives. Most people prefer happiness to correctness, peace to progress, and quietude to justice. This is a very difficult thing, and not a very good thing, for those who want change.

Hobbes called it. Fully coming to terms with the downstream implications of this assessment, which Hobbes also did, is less palatable.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#45

Post by zaphar »

twelfthnight wrote: post #30

Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas? Wouldn't that type of person become iteratively closer to the truth every time they hear a new argument and compare to the others they've heard?

I think at some level for certain topics and areas there is a minimal level of knowledge and information you need to know in order to evaluate or even understand advanced arguments about the topic. In a sense you won't become closer to the truth until you reach that minimum level of understanding and before that you will just ping pong between positions without a real understanding of whether you are correct or not.

Many arguments especially advanced ones are building on a presumed level of knowledge that many people do not have or are even aware that they should have. Doing the work to adequately evaluate an argument in every domain is probably not worth their time.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#46

Post by thriftwy »

JackFr wrote: post #35

I have to admit a weakness for reading not-quite-crackpot-but-likely-wrong theories. In particular, big fan of Julian Jaynes and The Development of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind, and the aquatic ape hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis I get that they're probably not true, but I do enjoy reading novel thinking and viewpoints by smart people with a cool hook.

I can read a novel idea, get excited by it, remember it and return to it later without being convinced.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#47

Post by jfengel »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

Philosophy is so hard that most people don’t ever start In fact in my experience people who can push past this “epistemological learned helplessness” also tend to have significant problems with day to day living In a manner of speaking, I boil this down to how often you spend in different levels of thinking. I’m gonna go ahead and share a back-and-forth chat I had with ChatGPT on this precise topic the other day: htt…

I have a hard time engaging deeply with philosophy. I've tried to get a good overview, but whenever I read the real scholarly work I find an assumption I hate on page 3 and cannot bear to engage with that assumption for a thousand further pages of close reading.

I don't want to be the philosophical equivalent of those guys who pester physics professors with "I've unified gravity with quantum mechanics and I just need you to add the math". But I can't pick up Kant or Hegel or Sartre without screaming.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#48

Post by meindnoch »

Swizec wrote: post #22
philip1209 wrote: post #18

This article talks about learned helplessness in a learning context. I talked about it in a work context, and the two could be linked. I think social media is training people for everything to be quick, but learning + work aren't necessarily quick. > This insistence on constant availability disrupts the essence of focused work. Rather than encouraging employees to tackle complex problems independently, there’s a tren…

As a tech lead I would rather see a team member ask me questions early than never. Nudging them in the right direction before they waste 3 days going down a path that’s never going to work is at least half my job. But it’s important that they’ve done enough research to formulate the question. A little struggle helps the learning stick.

Cool! I'll send them to you then :-)

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#49

Post by ilovetux »

thadt wrote: post #25

> The medical establishment offers a shiny tempting solution. First, a total unwillingness to trust anything, no matter how plausible it sounds, until it’s gone through an endless cycle of studies and meta-analyses. Isn't this just... science? We learned from the ancient philosophers that really smart people can reason powerfully about a whole lot of things. But - if we want to know whether that reasoning holds up, i…

You are correct, it is science.

The differentiator that I see is that the medical community are under pressure to apply the most cutting edge science in real life-and-death scenarios, so they are uniquely positioned to be burned by trusting a new hypothesis which appears correct but is subtly but completely wrong which could absolutely cause someone to lose their life.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#50

Post by astura »

philip1209 wrote: post #18

This article talks about learned helplessness in a learning context. I talked about it in a work context, and the two could be linked. I think social media is training people for everything to be quick, but learning + work aren't necessarily quick. > This insistence on constant availability disrupts the essence of focused work. Rather than encouraging employees to tackle complex problems independently, there’s a tren…

This just has not been my experience at all.

I've never had a problem with a junior asking too many questions. Never.

I have, however, had issues with them not asking enough questions.

Post reply on HN