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Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

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Re: Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

#31

Post by quietplatypus »

Guy makes a shitload of basic philosophical errors, like most rationality training people. They are all centered around conflating logic with reality and ignring computational costs. If you cant connect a theory with reality that is rooted in specific, observable, actionable things, without requiring strong AI with a O(1) time complexity of synthesizing respinses, the theory is a nonstarter. If he was more aware of this, he would never get close to buying into claptrap like pascal's wager or mugger. So what if you believe in god or not? What does doing that or not actually get you?

It's amazing how many of these "rationalists" are using the concept as an emotional band aid against their resentment and other uncomfortable feelings.

And its not about compartmentalization. Ideas vary in their usefulness or actionableness. Sure, it takes instinct to distinguish them. But that is what "rationalists" are scared to death of, there being things like instinct and unconscious processing that, honed right, is often much superior to their laborious, droning but logical attempts to count every outcome, but requires faith in oneself.

It's really just a huge inferiority complex that they have. They are so insecure that they need universe-circumscribing systems of Bayesian logic to do anything. The truly rstional thingg to do is to put down the fucking rationality handbook, stop running the fucking expected value computations, go outside, live life, dare for the world to correct you, and get stronger or die trying. Thats it.

Re: Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

#32

Post by greendestiny »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #30
greendestiny wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought down these paths a lot, and I came to similar but different conclusion. It's not simply that I don't trust argument - I weight arguments with evidence. If you take the simulation argument for instance - if you're contemplating the probability that we are living in a lifelike simulation you must factor in the number of lifelike simulations you have seen.

>> you must factor in the number of lifelike simulations you have seen Right. I take the position that there are problems that are unsolvable by technology; simulating the universe seems likely to be in that category. That position is fundamentally unprovable, but call it a hunch. Also, Occam's Razor argues against it, FWIW.

Yes the full simulation probability has to be something like the probability simulations are possible and the probability that simulations have been discovered and the probability that simulations are numerous and the probability that simulations are 'unaware' times the then (n-1) in n probability that you are in a simulation. The size of the (n-1) in n part of the probability is pretty irrelevant vs the other parts.

Re: Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

#33

Post by rictic »

paulsutter wrote: post #29
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be very surprised if he hasn't read Kahneman. And even if he has, knowing about cognitive biases is a completely different skill than avoiding them. It's basically why the Center for Applied Rationality exists.

Well if he read it, he certainly didn't understand it. > When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, This guy believes in PROVING PSEUDOHISTORY. It's hard to understand what that even means, but let's look at specifics: "Noah's Flood couldn't as a cultural memor…

Poor form to base such scathing criticism on the author's admission of weak thinking as a youth.

Speaking of probabilities, I would bet at 6:1 odds that the author would find nothing new in your comments.

Re: Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

#34

Post by chipsy »

danteembermage wrote: post #4

If I find myself being convinced by the argument, does that mean I should adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response or not adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response? I'm partly being facetious, but it would be interesting to try to use a non-argumentative approach to persuade to use one, I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like. As a kid I remember being told "brush your teeth in circles, it'…

It depends on what you want out of life, I think.

If you try to rapidly see and comprehend an ultimate truth head-on, you pay the price of only being able to think about and express such truths in forms which look insane to outsiders(terrorism, fascism, conspiracy theory, etc.) and with correspondingly drastic consequences to the well-being of you and others.

But if you want to live a healthy, ordinary life, you shade yourself from some of those truths, knowingly or not. You express them cryptically and meditate on them in a deliberately obfuscated way, or dismiss them for the moment. You do not allow that knowledge to throw you around. That doesn't mean that you don't act on the knowledge at all(which is how epistemic learned helplessness is presented here), so much as it does that you can proceed to find paths to acting on it that are indirect and do not trip your insanity alarms.

Culture itself demonstrates this property. It changes rapidly enough, but it does so gradually, most of the time. Reality in the year 1985 meant something recognizable yet quite a bit different - in food, fashion, and music, in cultural attitudes, politics, and should-you-says, and in everyday usage of time and activities. Some of the things that were taken seriously then are dismissed now, and some of the things that were laughable then are taken very seriously now. And in the 30 years that transpired, many of the same people are still around, but nearly all have changed their status and outlook in some way. Many have led reasonably content lives while doing so. Isn't that amazing?

Re: Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

#35

Post by noonespecial »

danteembermage wrote: post #4

If I find myself being convinced by the argument, does that mean I should adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response or not adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response? I'm partly being facetious, but it would be interesting to try to use a non-argumentative approach to persuade to use one, I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like. As a kid I remember being told "brush your teeth in circles, it'…

Interesting that you still accepted without question that brushing at all was important. You didn't simply say "well then, who can know?" and quit brushing altogether.

No comment on that really, just hmmmmm.

Re: Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

#37

Post by puredemo »

tbrownaw wrote: post #20
CarVac wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if the right answer is to be generally more open to changing your mind. There are far too many things to be worried about: the danger of AI, religion, the environment, other political views, the results of scientific papers in dozens of fields... epistemic learned helplessness is a defence against wasting literally all of your time taking every argument seriously. At the end, the author notes that we sho…

The other solution is to not really care all that much about most things. There's some new physics result about how black holes interact with the quantum foam? I can't build anything practical with it, so beyond "that's interesting" it doesn't really matter to me. Some food is suddenly found to cause cancer in rats? Unless it's fairly new, the effect on humans can't be all that strong or we'd have noticed by now. Som…

>Someone's claiming that some particular aspect of modern diet causes obesity? It would have to either make you feel lethargic (lower calories out) or make you hungrier (raise calories in). Both of which are directly observable and easily correlated to the contents of recent meals, without having to argue over mechanisms and confounders and personalized gut bacteria and such.

This is extremely facile. Take trans fats scarring arteries and causing systemic inflammation, for instance.

Re: Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

#39

Post by nabla9 »

This is related to things that people like Robert Axelrod have been studying. It's innovation vs imitation dilemma in social learning and evolutionary game theory.

Science. 2010 Apr 9;328(5975):208-13. doi: 10.1126/science.1184719. Why copy others? Insights from the social learning strategies tournament. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20378813

Related xkcd http://xkcd.com/1170/

Re: Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)

#40

Post by fa »

nabla9 wrote: post #39

This is related to things that people like Robert Axelrod have been studying. It's innovation vs imitation dilemma in social learning and evolutionary game theory. Science. 2010 Apr 9;328(5975):208-13. doi: 10.1126/science.1184719. Why copy others? Insights from the social learning strategies tournament. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20378813 Related xkcd http://xkcd.com/1170/

Like all good philosophy, this idea has a long history. I encountered it in Taleb's Black Swan as Pyrrhonian skepticism, which flourished in Greece as the Aristotelian Academy. Very down to earth and actionable advice on living and doing. Many Pyrrhonians were doctors and that colored their philosophical views—at a time when philosophy was taken very seriously and meant more than it does today (see it as a precursor of today's science).
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