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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

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Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#81

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

pixl97 wrote: post #57
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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law >Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas? To put this a different way, if humans actually behaved in this manner in any significant numbers then humanity should have discovered the sciences and been uplifted a long time ago. Instead that's not what we see at all. A more likely reason is Bullshit Asymmetry, that is, humans th…

> Bullshit Asymmetry

If we could solve the Bullshit Asymmetry problem, imagine the progress we could make as a species.

Someone reads that "ACKCHYUALLY, if you're operating a car for personal reasons, and not for hire, then you're not actually 'driving', you're just traveling, and you're not legally required to have a driver's license or car registration! The cops and the courts have it wrong!" just one time, and it's now a permanent belief, and absolutely nothing you do or say can convince them otherwise, and now you've got another Sovereign Citizen.

That's just one example. Flat Earthers, various conspiracy theories, some anti-vax beliefs...

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#82

Post by SkyBelow »

spencerchubb wrote: post #55
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 junior dev, sometimes I've been blocked for hours because I want to show that I can solve problems independently. But I've definitely had cases where I should've asked questions early. A question that takes 1 minute to answer could have saved hours. For instance, I was stuck on figuring out how to send an email through AWS. Turns out we have a lambda function that handles all the authentication and security thin…

If you lost hours digging through the code and trying things to solve the problem, they aren't really lost. The knowledge you gain from this, the code you dug through, etc. all help builds up the experience that leads to one day no longer being a junior. Being given the answer is fast, but it doesn't lead to as much learning, especially in a career where knowing how find answers is more important long term than knowing the answers.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#83

Post by scotty79 »

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…

Medical thickheadedness sometimes makes them performing useless, harmful procedures for many years after the harm became known. So it's not a virtue the article postulates.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#84

Post by wins32767 »

NhanH wrote: post #72
spencerchubb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a junior dev, sometimes I've been blocked for hours because I want to show that I can solve problems independently. But I've definitely had cases where I should've asked questions early. A question that takes 1 minute to answer could have saved hours. For instance, I was stuck on figuring out how to send an email through AWS. Turns out we have a lambda function that handles all the authentication and security thin…

The nuance here lies within the “hours” quantifier. A junior member being blocked for 3-8 hours semi-regularly is expected. Once every other month you probably should be blocked for several work days as well. In your example, the challenge would have been realizing you wouldn’t have been the first one trying to send an email in the team. Recognizing that and it is very easy to know that you should just ask the questi…

This is really bad advice. Don't let yourself be blocked for several days. Try for 2-3 hours and ask for help.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#85

Post by naasking »

rini17 wrote: post #65

It's the rule of excluded middle misapplied to everyhing. When you think you have to decide an argument is either completely true or completely false, while in reality no argument is.

> When you think you have to decide an argument is either completely true or completely false, while in reality no argument is.

Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like an argument that is either completely true or completely false...

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#86

Post by javajosh »

The real tie-breaker is experiment. It's telling that his primary example of "epistemic learned helplessness" is historical narrative. Historical narratives are solutions to a boundary value problem where the boundary is simply "the world at present". There are infinite numbers of plausible stories that are consistent with "the world at present", but they can't be tested unless they overtly predict something, and even then they generally can only be tested over relatively long periods of time.

The disturbing trend that I see is that stupid people stubbornly cling on to falsifiable beliefs, like flat Earth theory, to satisfy some external incentive, like the need to belong, or the need to push against consensus. This is both an expression of Isaac Asimov's famous quote "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." That is, an attack on knowledge itself. It's harmless enough until it generalizes. Meanwhile, smart open-minded people run the terrible risk of a similar generalization, which also ends up functioning like an attack on knowledge itself.

The solution is to weight knowledge in inverse proportion to proximity to you in time and space. That is, I can know what is near to me, but far things are less known. If you adopt this posture toward knowledge then you can approximately partition rational learned helplessness, associate it with far away things, and yet maintain a rational confidence in knowledge that is close to you. And if you run across an historian that speaks with utter confidence about a historical narrative, run.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#87

Post by scotty79 »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #21
nineplay wrote: post #12

>engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae, and this meshes with fundamentalism better than it meshes with subtle liberal religious messages. Back in the usenet days it was taken as given that any creationist was also an engineer. Creationism was nice and neat and logical unlike that handwavy big bang thing that was probably dreamed up by woo…

> Creationism was nice and neat and logical Also requires less faith

Fantasy always requires less thinking than knowledge.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#88

Post by latchkey »

Discussions on similar submissions:

Epistemic Learned Helplessness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32369238 (August 6, 2022 — 17 points, 1 comments)

Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118865 (June 6, 2019 — 146 points, 60 comments)

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#89

Post by Vecr »

jfengel wrote: post #47
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…

What do you think about Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher? I wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146, so it's not perfect, but I haven't found anything that is.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#90

Post by jewayne »

nineplay wrote: post #12

>engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae, and this meshes with fundamentalism better than it meshes with subtle liberal religious messages. Back in the usenet days it was taken as given that any creationist was also an engineer. Creationism was nice and neat and logical unlike that handwavy big bang thing that was probably dreamed up by woo…

I think of it as lowering the cognitive dissonance. Highly analytical individuals are going to tend to be more highly sensitive to any contradictions in their belief system. On which side you land might be remarkably random -- one might become an atheist, and another a Christian fundamentalist. The key is getting to a place where they see no contradictions.
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