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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

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Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#91

Post by cortesoft »

bongripper wrote: post #16
emmelaich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if your comment is positive or sarcastic. Are you familiar with Scott Alexander's writings?

Yeah, I read some of his essays. I like some of the ones where he stayed in his area of expertise, like "Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics" ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-con... ). The other ones I've read are big fancy word salad unfortunately. Can you recommend others like the series I linked above?

The one I enjoy the most is

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#92

Post by photonthug »

makeworld wrote: post #51
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?

Comparing them requires sometimes rejecting new ones. This is different than being someone who is convinced by all arguments they hear.

If the people are convinced by all arguments they hear, at that point it comes down to which argument they heard most recently, so let's hope the media is autonomous, ethical, independent, & responsible

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#93

Post by scotty79 »

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.

Is there solid evidence against aquatic ape? The only argument I've seen was that it's unnecessary because multitude of previous explanations of every single feature work just fine, thank you very much.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#94

Post by ketzo »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #27
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…

It does seem like odd phrasing. It's correct to not fully trust anything until it's gone through a long verification process.

Don't you have to put some amount of trust in an idea to even consider verifying?

And have even more trust in the idea to perform your experiments in the first place?

Even in medicine, there has to be someone willing to challenge status-quo ideas, or there's nothing to feed into the "long verification process" in the first place. How do you decide when to be that person?

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#95

Post by Loggias »

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…

[dead]

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#97

Post by naasking »

krapp wrote: post #39
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?

Because the most convincing argument is not necessarily the most correct, nor does comparing one argument to another discriminate truth from lies.

Not necessarily, but it's arguably as good as you can get after aggregating over a set of people independently analyzing the same question.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#98

Post by smeej »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #67
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 distinction between trying to solve a problem yourself vs ask for help is: are you figuring out a new problem, or figuring out the system? If you're trying to figure out the system, you should probably ask for help ASAP and build up some knowledge. Over time you'll need to ask questions about the system less frequently. If you're trying to figure out a new problem related to your work, slogging away at it for a w…

I had a manager when I was a new hire who had no concept of this difference at all, and it led to his firing me in my 4th week because I "should have been coming in with more knowledge."

He actually told me I should have just come in and started doing things whatever way seemed best to me, like he did, when he was the first employee in the company in the role.

Never mind that it was a compliance-heavy role in risk analysis and I was the 5th person on a 5-person team.

Sure, I knew plenty of ways to solve the problems. What I didn't know were what systems they had (or, in most cases, didn't have) in place to document investigations, which absolutely must be done.

I know plenty about what I'm doing. What I need to know is how you want it recorded. And in fact he had reinvented the entire documentation system during my 2nd week, on a whim.

Firing me that fast was the best gift that company could have given me, because things would not have improved between us.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#99

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ilovetux wrote: post #49
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.

But the alternative, waiting to apply new-but-actually-correct hypotheses until totally, absolutely proven, also causes lost lives.

And as is usual with "Type 1" vs "Type 2" errors, saving lives by avoiding one problem costs lives due to the other problem. The trick is to sit in the minimum of "lives lost due to Type 1 errors plus lives lost due to Type 2 errors". Unfortunately, that's not an analytic function with a known formula and computable derivative...

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#100

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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