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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

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Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#181

Post by pdonis »

digital-cygnet wrote: post #137
pdonis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scott specifically though, has an established history of thinking through arguments that I find much better than most He has an established history of writing down detailed articles about arguments, yes. Unfortunately, a significant number of his articles contain schoolboy errors that anyone who wants to claim they are better at thinking through arguments than the average person should never have made. I'll mention…

While Scott does make errors, I've found he works hard to avoid making them and forthright when he does (e.g., not everyone has a Mistakes page in the main navigation bar of their site[1]) What you're missing in your example is that, in context, the state-sponsored violence he's talking about is "against one's own people" (e.g., he also refers to it as a "reign of terror" a few times, like those of Robespierre, Stali…

> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have

There's another point about this as well. Scott claims in the article that his "alternate model" makes better predictions than his "Reactionary model" (which is something of a straw man, but let that pass). But if we look at the cases he cites, here is how they actually stack up against the models:

French Revolution: Ended up with Napoleon taking power as Emperor, i.e., a monarch. Sure looks more like the Reactionary model to me.

Russian Revolution: While the USSR did end up falling apart of its own weight after decades of terror gradually morphing into somewhat less terrifying bureaucracy, what has happened to Russia since looks more like "repressive monarchy" than "government mellows out and does pretty okay".

Chinese Revolution: I suppose that the fact that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted some features of capitalism in order to allow the country to actually have some economic growth might count as a sort of "mellowing out", but it would still be very hard to make a case that China's government is closer to "doing pretty okay" than it is to "strong repressive monarchy".

In other words, even if we agree that the US and UK have reached Step 6 of Scott's "alternate model", historically, those countries (and other countries in the British Commonwealth, like Canada and Australia) are the only cases where that has happened. Historically, reigns of terror brought on by repressive regimes have in all other cases led to new repressive regimes.

(Btw, this is not to say that the Reactionary model's claim that the new monarchy in its last step is an improvement, is correct. The actual historical facts are that the new repressive regimes are often worse than the old ones.)

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#182

Post by pdonis »

wharvle wrote: post #179
pdonis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> haven't gone through the kind of reign of terror that Scott's interlocutors claim they should have I'll comment on this separately because it goes deeper into the central claim of the arrticle. If you're going to make this claim, you need to ask whether the UK and US have actually avoided such things, or merely made sure they happened in other countries instead. The US under Woodrow Wilson enabled the Soviet Union…

I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece . Re-read the pieces Scott is responding to if you want to see what I mean—the topic of this piece is fairly narrow, and most of what you're proposing to bring in is non-sequitur without some pretty wild connective tissue added, which connective tissue I doubt you…

> I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece.

I disagree. See the other comment I just posted upthread about what happens when you compare the actual historical events in the cases Scott cites to the two models he describes, the "Reactionary model" and his "alternate model". The fact that the particular "liberal democracies" Scott references, the US and UK, do their "state-sponsored violence" by proxy instead of directly is not a coincidence: it is what allows those countries to claim that they are "liberal democracies" and don't have "state-sponsored violence" for the benefit of their voters, while blaming those "repressive regimes" for all of the mayhem in the world--when in fact the "liberal democracies" themselves are just as much to blame.

> Stuff like "leftward-trending liberal democracies tend to become more and more permissive of egregious domestic political violence in other countries over time"

While I think this is actually true (the US has caused far more mischief recently in the name of "spreading democracy" than it did in the 19th century, for example), it is not the argument I was making. The argument I was making is simpler than that, and is summarized above.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#183

Post by nineplay »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #180
nineplay wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some degree the idea of a Creator is easier to wrap one's head around than the idea of nothing-->something. Of course it really just rolls the question uphill since you're now faced with 'Where did the Creator come from?'. Happily there are no academic theories on this matter so there's no need to engage with it. Ultimately satisfaction doesn't come from the belief itself, satisfaction comes from the feeling of be…

> Happily there are no academic theories on this matter Why happily? Evolution seems like a good academic theory. Is Pascal's wager academic enough? What about Occam's razor?

To clarify, there are no academic theories about where the Creator came from. Academic research on the matter would have to pre-suppose the existences of a Creator, and so far as I know there is no research group willing to take that as given.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#184

Post by spenczar5 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #111
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…

Flipping the script a bit: As a senior developer, avoid cultivating learned helplessness. You can push back on this in a couple ways: 1) Instead of answering questions, give a nudge to where the solution is documented ("Hey I'm swamped, but I'd recommend checking X for more info. If you haven't read through X yet, that's a good resource to skim"). Keep tabs on how much your junior team members are expected to know, n…

This is just all excellent. There are a lot of strange attitudes elsewhere in this comment section, ones that I don’t recognize from good senior engineers. Good ones realize that a lot of their job is improving the whole team. If junior engineers are constantly asking trivial questions, maybe they need to be taught to learn!

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#185

Post by ziroshima »

speak_plainly wrote: post #116

After spending many years studying philosophy I think that the right approach is that you don’t need to come to any conclusions about anything. Aristotle often started with common peoples’ viewpoints on any given topic, along with looking at what experts thought and built his own ideas from there, and of course was very successful with his methodology. Arguments are interesting and obviously some are more correct tha…

Agree completely. I think the author misses the big insight here. Rather than universal deferment to authority, I think the insights here are a) that people overstate their confidence and b) not all science should be treated equally.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#186

Post by brindlejim »

When I consider how much specious, fallacy-riddled reasoning is produced by EAs, all hunkered in their AI bomb shelters praying for and against the end, I suspect that the "problem" that Scott's friends face is not learned epistemic helplessness, but the simple fact he cites that other people just don't want to spend the time on their apocalyptic verbosity.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#187

Post by nuancebydefault »

jodrellblank wrote: post #155
_armchair wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That isn't making them look like an idiot, reducing them, or demolishing their position. I think he's saying that he can reduce his opponent to those words - i.e., the author's argument fits together, the opponent says "it's just wrong" and gets frustrated.

I agree that's what he's saying, and I'm saying that is not demolishing the opponent's position. Scott is going up to a castle, talking to the walls until he thinks they should collapse, then when they don't collapse he's declaring victory by "making the walls look idiotic" and telling people he "demolished the castle walls". If you haven't actually convinced your opponent, and you haven't changed their mind, and you…

The thing is, often people cannot be convinced of some statement, not because they are so convinced of their own stance, but because leaving their stance feels bad and might even question their own identity (what they stand for).

Only after all those years i came to that conclusion, after a lot of arguing and debating.

And that relates to what the article says, we just nod and still keep our position because the other's arguments feel concise at first sight but just feel weird. Any rebuttal attempt very often feels futile and useless.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#188

Post by wharvle »

pdonis wrote: post #182
wharvle wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece . Re-read the pieces Scott is responding to if you want to see what I mean—the topic of this piece is fairly narrow, and most of what you're proposing to bring in is non-sequitur without some pretty wild connective tissue added, which connective tissue I doubt you…

> I think you'd have to make some outlandish claims if you wanted to connect most of the material you're trying to bring in to the direct topic of this piece. I disagree. See the other comment I just posted upthread about what happens when you compare the actual historical events in the cases Scott cites to the two models he describes, the "Reactionary model" and his "alternate model". The fact that the particular "l…

But the argument you'd prefer to focus on isn't connected to the topic in Scott's piece, because Scott's writing to address specific claims with predictive power (as in: we can "replay the tapes" of history and see if what we'd expect to see, if they're true, is evident—and they're strong and confident claims, so we'd expect it to be pretty clear if it is) in a couple other pieces, to which pieces the argument you want to make also isn't connected.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#189

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #138
staticman2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With boxing you know who won because the judges say so. If Scott argues something at a party, and the other person says "I don't know why you are wrong but you are." Who is to say who "won"? Scott comes away thinking he's an amazing thinker. The other person comes away thinking he is a contrarian good at inventing plausible sounding nonsense. Who won here?

I think part of the trouble many here are having is that they don't even understand why Scott goes to the party, or argues, or wants to convince people of his arguments. Surely, if no one reading my comment here ever agrees with me, my life doesn't change for the worse at all. And if people do agree with me, again, my life doesn't change for the better. I'm mostly here to learn from you people, you sometimes say inte…

Consider the idea that some people feel that they benefit internally from having the experience of becoming less wrong than they were at some earlier time.

There are many ways of attempting to become less wrong, and without doubt many of those who follow those ways have other motives. But I do think that there is room for people for whom there is an intrinsic motivation in seeking out the experience of discovering that what they used to think is less correct than something they've just been introduced to.

Re: Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

#190

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

pdonis wrote: post #177
hindsightbias wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Left? You mean the GOPs modern definition of a leftist, or the vast majority of the times definition of a leftist? https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Norman_Thomas/

The Democratic party in the US, at least since Woodrow Wilson, has been on the Left. I don't think that is a matter of any serious dispute.

It's a matter of very serious dispute if you were to read people who are actually on the left, or who live outside the USA.

The stated policies of the US Democratic Party barely correspond to those of leftist parties worldwide. Their actual policies when in power are even further from those of leftist parties worldwide.

So .. are they left of the US Republican Party? No question. Are they "on the left" in any broader sense? That depends very much on your conception of the nature and scope of the political space. For most people in most parts of the world, the US Democratic Party is a completely centrist party that would never be termed "leftist".

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