Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)

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:

https://chat.openai.com/share/03302643-5efc-41e0-a681-6d1699...

To me it boils down to an intersection of raw IQ and experience. If you’re generally “thinking fast” in Kahneman-language then that would be “type1” thinking that most people do most of the day.

Much beyond that and thinking becomes exponentially harder with every level of “simulation” your brain has to do with more complex, multi variable simulations walking up the abstraction stack.

The downside to that, however, is that if you don’t have accurate perceptions, or there are flaws in reasoning, then you come to conclusions that don’t fit because your perceptions are off. This is the other side of genius, which is typically some kind of very iconoclastic position on something political social or personal.

I think it fits with what the author said to conclude:

“ It seems to me that although these people are more likely to become terrorists or Velikovskians or homeopaths, they’re also the only people who can figure out if something basic and unquestionable is wrong, and make this possibility well-known enough that normal people start becoming willing to consider it.”

Most people however have neither the IQ nor the experience to actually have coherence for almost anything at the 4th or 5th order.

Usually only in one area of their life like work or a hobby do anyone actually have the attention and focus to get to that level of coherency - and worldwide that’s extremely rare as most people aren’t secure enough to have the time and resources to gain the experience needed.

Long article for him to basically say nothing insightful.

Crazy people will say seemingly true things that attract more crazy people.

OK. Thanks I guess.

The two paragraphs about how good at arguments he is and how other educated people might be able to out argue him in topics if they’re specialists _maybe_ was so stupid I closed the tab, but then I decided to be adult and read the rest to see if there was anything redeeming.

There wasn’t. Don’t bother.

Why do people read this guy’s crap? Did he not bother to share this with a trusted friend first to see if he sounded like an idiot?

Woke: Pulling up a new theory of intelligence and for why everyone else is too damn stupid for "fourth order thinking" out of thin air, talking to it about an LLM and deeming it so important it has to be shared with an online community.