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Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2019)
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoPhilosophy 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: https://chat.openai.com/share/03302643-5efc-41e0-a681-6d16990c8aa8 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.
- bongripper 3y agoBroke: Reading books or attending classes on philosophy and cognitive science to learn from hundreds of years of combined research from the world's greatest minds. 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.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoWhat would indicate that the former is not also true?
- jfengel 3y agoI 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 you to add the math". But I can't pick up Kant or Hegel or Sartre without screaming.
- riversflow 3y ago> I can’t pick up Kant or Hegele or Sartre Ah, there’s your problem, at least in my opinion/experience. You have to start at the beginning, read Plato’s Republic followed by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. When you read them don’t take them as fact but as a “living” historical foundation that will help you set the stage for reading increasingly more recent books.
- jfengel 3y agoThat's part of it. I feel like I can't even start without reproducing 2,000 years of back work. I know it's not the same as science, but if someone said "you can't do basic mechanics without reading Archimedes in the original Greek", I'd laugh at them.
- Vecr 3y agoWhat do you think about Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher? I wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146, so it's not perfect, but I haven't found anything that is.
- bongripper 3y ago>I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!” Or, more plausibly, “Shut up I don’t want to talk about this!” > And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. He is admitting he might lose an argument against experts with decades worth of experience in their topic (most humble rationalist.)
- emmelaich 3y agoNot sure if your comment is positive or sarcastic. Are you familiar with Scott Alexander's writings?
- bongripper 3y agoYeah, 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-conditions 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?
- cortesoft 3y agoThe one I enjoy the most is https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
- emmelaich 3y agoThey're dense sometimes but for me the furthest thing from word salad. Every paragraph feels carefully considered and apposite.
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- johnobrien1010 3y ago(2019)
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2013)
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoTake a shot anytime a “rationalist” invokes Bayes. 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?
- subjectsigma 3y agoThis is strangely reductive. The article isn’t very well written but I think the key point is insightful. The article was written in 2019, so before COVID, which was very prescient. During the pandemic the only really reasonable option was to follow CDC guidelines even though they seemed to be unreasonable, constantly changing, and even sometimes conflicting. There were large parts of the population that were smart enough to realize something odd was going on, and so they searched for their own answers, and sometimes the ones they came up with were pretty bad. Obviously we would like to do something about this, but what? What do you think should be done?
- melkor73 3y agoI noticed this too. People that casually drop "Bayesian priors" into conversation seems to be a strong signal for someone who's up their own arse. Sam Bankman-Fried did it a lot.
- EamonnMR 3y agoIt's a shibboleth for the Rationalist community, that's why.
- tehnub 3y agoWell I thought the offhand remark about Bayesian priors was actually the real answer to his question of why we don’t accept arguments. I’m not going to accept some argument that contradicts a lot of what I previously thought was true unless it is very convincing (that can be achieved in a variety of ways). The remark about Bayes should have been front and center.
- joshmarinacci 3y agoIt is 100% a safety valve. Humans have an inherent negativity/risk-aversion bias. Those who didn’t were weeded out of the gene pool. If someone comes up to you with a crazy sounding idea it is far more likely that they are wrong and you shouldn’t trust them. It’s one reason why obvious seeming innovations take so long to become widespread.
- debacle 3y agoThis feels like it belongs on /r/iamverysmart. Most people don't argue within moral frameworks. Most people don't live logic-based lives. Most people prefer happiness to correctness, peace to progress, and quietude to justice. This is a very difficult thing, and not a very good thing, for those who want change.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoI would argue it is a very good thing. Most “bad” things historically have been created by those clamouring for progress and justice. Like Bukowski said those who preach peace do not have peace beware the preachers beware the knowers beware those who are always reading books I would extend it as those who preach justice are not just those who preach rationality are not rational those who preach correctness are not right And those who preach progress are against change /edited for readability
- TOMDM 3y agoEvery new good or bad thing is by definition a change.
- trgn 3y agoHobbes called it. Fully coming to terms with the downstream implications of this assessment, which Hobbes also did, is less palatable.
- wait_a_minute 3y ago> Most people don't argue within moral frameworks. Most people don't live logic-based lives. Yes they do. You may contest aspects of the foundation of their logical and moral framework of choice, but most people on earth adhere to a moral or religious framework. Those are logic-based and that is what apologetics and natural theology and philosophy are for.
- nineplay 3y ago>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 woolly headed academics with no practical experience.
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- 0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago> Creationism was nice and neat and logical Also requires less faith
- stuaxo 3y agoHow?
- peteradio 3y agoGod exists or he doesn't, 50/50 chance.
- nineplay 3y agoTo 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 being Right while others are Wrong.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago> Of course it really just rolls the question uphill since you're now faced with 'Where did the Creator come from?'. Creationists aren't actually faced with that question - not Creationists who believe in a God who is eternal, anyway. Things without beginnings don't have origins. If you want to actually attack that belief, you need to either 1) show that God isn't eternal, or 2) show that eternal things are impossible. Or you have to do the hard work of 3) persuading them that a purely naturalistic process fits the available evidence better than a Creator does.
- scooke 3y agoSo where is gHeadphone on this? I'd like to read why they shared this. The writer though may actually be less egotistical than it seems. By the end of post they are saying that their ability to not believe a good sounding argument is exactly the same approach an uneducated person has... Saving them both from believing the wrong things. The funny thing is he gives up trying help the reader discern just what the right thing might be.
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- RationalDino 3y agoI am strongly reminded of https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/rationalists-and-the-cultic-milieu https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/rationalists-and-the-cu..., which concluded that the kind of person who believes complex irrational arguments is also the kind of person who falls for conspiracy theories, weird cults, and various kinds of whacky beliefs. That said, I would advocate a more systematic version of the article's conclusion that we should accept that we can't think. Instead borrow an idea from Superforecasting. One way to get better at predictions is to start by constructing an outside view, and an inside view. Suppose we want to predict the odds of a thing happening. First we make a tally of roughly comparable situations. In how many did the comparable thing happen? The inside view is a detailed analysis of how the thing could happen this time. You can analyze this to a Bayesian analysis. The problem with the inside view is that, confronted with a way something could have happened, we overestimate all of the probabilities. We wind up too certain that it did. Conversely if we don't think of a way that it could happen, we wind up being too certain that it could not. So the inside view has too much variance. We fix that by adjusting the inside view towards the outside view. How much you should do this takes some practice to figure out. But actually doing this makes your predictions more accurate. Instead of calling this epistemic learned helplessness, I would call the need to adjust to the outside view as estimated epistemic uncertainty. And yes, people who practice doing this really do become a lot better at predicting what will prove to be true in uncertain circumstances.
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- philip1209 3y agoThis 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 trend, especially among junior staff, to quickly seek help upon encountering any obstacle. The fear is that being “blocked” under-utilizes an expensive team member. However, the nature of knowledge work is solving ambiguous, complicated problems - so the expectation of constant availability can lead to a culture of learned helplessness, which shunts professional development. https://www.contraption.co/essays/digital-quiet/ https://www.contraption.co/essays/digital-quiet/
- Swizec 3y agoAs a tech lead I would rather see a team member ask me questions early than never. Nudging them in the right direction before they waste 3 days going down a path that’s never going to work is at least half my job. But it’s important that they’ve done enough research to formulate the question. A little struggle helps the learning stick.
- arcbyte 3y agoAgree. I think about 4 hours is a good rule of thumb for how long you should be stuck before getting help.
- steveBK123 3y agoMy problem is I see this most frequently with debugging. It's like no one knows how to debug anymore. Read a runbook, google an error, try a few things.. no, just pester a senior. When I find myself responding to juniors/mids with the same list of rote, problem agnostic, runbook responses .. and it actually helps them, it's unnerving. It's like the socratic method of debugging without them actually learning anything from the experience.
- freedomben 3y agoI agree, but in practice now I've come to see that this is an extremely difficult point to discern. As the vast majority of findings flow in as a trickle, there often isn't a large enough delta to identify as a launching point for asking for help. For example, if one continues to search, they will keep finding breadcrumbs leading them to the solution. It is painful to me when someone spends 3 days looking for a solution to a problem that is very custom and unique to our system (so they're not gonna find the answer anywhere on the internet), and one I could solve in 5 minutes, but you don't know what you don't know, so as a new person learning it is almost never clear at what point it is ideal to ask for help. Compounding all of this is that many personalities don't like to be bothersome to other people, and that can cause them to hesitate to ask for help, which further sends them on the search between small deltas. It's a very hard problem.
- thadt 3y ago> 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, it has to be tested. Modern science is the current unit testing framework for philosophy. At least, for the thoughts that lend themselves to unit testing.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt does seem like odd phrasing. It's correct to not fully trust anything until it's gone through a long verification process.
- ketzo 3y agoDon'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?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThis seems to be responding to a different comment?
- helicalmix 3y agoOne counterexample for why I think it's not always the best approach is that there are sometimes disproportionate rewards for being right when everyone else is wrong. Doing so, however, requires you to take an idea seriously before it has gone through analyses so extensive that everyone else believes the same idea too.
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- twelfthnight 3y agoWhy 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?
- krapp 3y agoBecause the most convincing argument is not necessarily the most correct, nor does comparing one argument to another discriminate truth from lies.
- naasking 3y agoNot necessarily, but it's arguably as good as you can get after aggregating over a set of people independently analyzing the same question.
- helicalmix 3y ago> This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore it and stick with my prior. If two diametrically opposed arguments are equally convincing, it's not intuitive to me that the "correct" solution is a middle ground. Especially if both argument state that a middle ground is not possible.
- twelfthnight 3y agoI guess if I encountered two diametrically opposing arguments of equal validity I would increase my uncertainty, not just stick to my prior. That's super different to just ignoring new arguments, right? Like going from "I think X is the best candidate" to "I don't know who the best candidate is".
- helicalmix 3y agoOh, that's a good point, and I think you're idea is a better behavior model vs. the "stick with prior" idea. What if the conclusion forces behavior though? For voting, you can abstain from voting if you're unclear, but what if you're in a position where you have to choose two distinctly different options. In this case, I think you pretty much have to stick with your prior, but I'm curious if you have a more nuanced approach here.
- thriftwy 3y agoIf you are an ordinary person, this is the way to go. You are not in business of evaluating arguments. You need to live your life and for that accept the most reasonable view on everything, verified by your peers. However, if you have a shot at being intellectual elite of your society, having epistemic helplessness renders you unfit. And we see a lot of people who look like intellectual elite, paid for taking its place, but not doing any reasoning, evaluating and believing of their own. That's why we seemingly only get problems piled up on us. Imagine a judge who have a popular preoccupation of who is right and who is wrong, before hearing the actual case and using their own experience.
- JackFr 3y agoI 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 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.
- thriftwy 3y agoI can read a novel idea, get excited by it, remember it and return to it later without being convinced.
- jerf 3y agoI think if you want to start down that sort of road, it's important to read lots of them. Read zero, you're probably fine. Read lots of them, you're probably fine. "One or two" is where the danger is maximized. And I would agree with "likely" wrong. Some of them probably aren't entirely wrong and may even be more correct than the mainstream. Figuring out which is the real trick, though. Related to the original article, I tend to scale my Bayesian updates based on my ability to test a theory. In the case of something like the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind, it ends up taking such a deduction as a result of that heuristic that it is almost indistinguishable from reading a science fiction book for me; fun and entertaining, but doesn't really impact me much except in a very vague "keep the mind loose and limber" sense. I have done a lot of heterodox thinking in the world of programming and engineering, though, because I can test theories very easily. Some of them work. Some of them don't. And precisely because it is so easy to test, the heterodoxy-ness is often lower than crackpot theories about 10,000 years ago, e.g., "Haskell has some interesting things to say" is made significantly less "crackpot" by the fact that plenty of other people have the ability to test that hypothesis as well, and as such, it is upgraded from "crackpot" to merely a "minority" view. So my particular twist on Scott's point is, if you can safely and cheaply test a bit of a far-out theory, don't be afraid to do so. You can use this to resolve the epistemic learned helplessness in those particular areas. It is good to put a bit down on cheap, low-probability, high-payout events; you can even justify this mathematically via the Kelly Criterion: https://www.techopedia.com/gambling-guides/kelly-criterion-gambling https://www.techopedia.com/gambling-guides/kelly-criterion-g... If there is one thing that angers me about way science is taught, it is that it is something that other people do, and that it is something special that you do with either the full "scientific method" or it's worthless. In fact it's an incredible tool for every day life, on all sorts of topics, and one must simply adjust for the fact that the lower effort put in, the less one should trust it, but that doesn't mean the total trust must necessarily be uselessly low just because you didn't conduct your experiment on whether or not fertilizer A or B worked better on your tomatos up to science journal standards.
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- Aurornis 3y ago> I’ve heard a few good arguments in this direction before, things like how engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae, Whenever the rationalist writers start talking about engineering, programming, or machine learning in technical terms I have a sudden Gell-Mann Amnesia realization that these people's primary domain is writing and pontificating, with little to no actual experience with engineering, programming, or machine learning. I don't know any engineers who would characterize the world as being simply defined by "a few simple formulae" Meanwhile, the rationalist community has an abnormally large reverence for engineers, programmers, and machine learning experts as if they were superhuman: > But to these I’d add that a sufficiently smart engineer has never been burned by arguments above his skill level before, Really? Sufficiently smart engineers have never encountered arguments above their skill level? Are we to assume that engineers are at the peak of logic and reasoning and skill? Is this an attempt to pander to an engineering audience? Or an actual belief that engineers have superhuman levels of logic? Finally, I'm growing tired of the way rationalist writings go out of their way to self-congratulate rationalists while placing the rest of the population into the unenlightened normie category that we're all supposed to look down upon: > The people I know who are best at taking ideas seriously are those who are smartest and most rational
- pixl97 3y agoI call this the "Rationals spend a whole lot of time and effort ignoring their irrational parts"
- SkyBelow 3y agoTo further expand on the "a few simple formulae", many of those experienced in these fields will note that complexity can emerge from simplicity. Conway's Game of Life is my go to example. Following some of about the simplest rules you can have, you can create a fully Turing complete system able to emulate itself.
- EduardLev 3y agoThanks for finding the exact words for how I also feel about the rationalist community. Source: sufficiently smart chemical engineer
- brlewis 3y agoThe world's lack of good tools for assessing the truthfulness of arguments is my fault. Some things came up that stopped my work on the next iteration of https://howtruthful.com/ https://howtruthful.com/ but only temporarily. Expect some big changes in 2024.
- esafak 3y agoIf you think you have good ideas write a position paper and open it up for comments. A wiki even. Your site currently has little food for thought.
- brlewis 3y agoThere's an "intro" link to a video at the bottom of the site. Comments can also go on this essay: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f2CftRRndH97RpAwL/how-i-got-so-excited-about-howtruthful https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f2CftRRndH97RpAwL/how-i-got-...
- monsecchris 3y agoEveryone is convinced they arrived at their ideas rationally.
- scotty79 3y agoEveryone is not right. Yet again, some are.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoOne downside of the specialization in a service economy is that people no longer are as resourceful as the older generations. Older people could fix and build anything. To me some of the things they do is totally McGyver level shit.
- pixl97 3y agoI think there is some partial issues here... It is not just about people, it is also about devices. Most of these people you're talking about today, if given an old device and a simple set of instructions could fix said device. Now, I like to think I can pull off some McGyver level shit, but when the first step of fixing a modern device is "Heat the device to 250F to break the epoxy bond and then take it to your solder station" then actually fixing this stuff is closer to galaxy level brain.
- rini17 3y agoIt'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.
- more_corn 3y agoThis is a terribly negative take on a very useful skill. Perhaps a better description would be: “Recognizing the limits of our own powers of discernment” We have to acknowledge that we don’t have sufficient understanding and expertise to differentiate truth from bullshit in all fields. It is reasonable therefore to turn to scientific consensus and to disregard the arguments of bullshitters.
- picometer 3y agoSummary: Scott Alexander recounts his gullibility to various well-reasoned crackpot arguments on a topic, and describes how he to decided to trust experts instead of investing time into learning enough to assess the topic for himself. Then he reflects on the nature of argument-accepting and its relation to rationality. I don’t think the term “learned helplessness” fits well here. It suggests a lack of agency, whereas he exercised much of it, employing his skill of critical thinking to arrive at the right epistemic stance. A better term might be “bounded agency”, to pair with the concept of “bounded rationality”. We recognize that we cannot know everything, and we choose how to invest the capability and resources that we do have. This is far from any type of “helplessness”.
- bluetomcat 3y agoHe talks about the pitfalls of pure rationality. There can be competing explanatory frameworks for the same thing, and they often contradict each other. Rational arguments may seem rigorous like math, but are in practice standing on shifting sands. It ultimately comes down to what you decide to believe in. This is where traditional values and religion come at play.
- fooop 3y agoI, for one, am glad that the rationality-bubble is popping.
- joe_the_user 3y agoYes, It's not "gullibility", it's believing things in terms of the mechanism of standard argumentation. The basic thing is that arguments involve mustering a series of plausible explanation for all the visible pieces of evidence, casting doubt on alternatives, etc. Before Galileo, philosophy had a huge series of very plausible explanations for natural phenomena, many if not all of which turned out to be wrong. But Galilean science didn't discover more by getting more effective arguments but by looking at the world, judging models by their simplicity and ability to make quantitative predictions and so-on. Mathematics is pretty much the only place where air-tight arguments involving "for all" claims actually work. Science shows that reality corresponds to mathematical models but corresponds only approximately and so given a model-based claim can't be extended with an unlimited number of deductive steps.
- scotty79 3y agoStrongly disagree. > Anyone anywhere – politicians, scammy businessmen, smooth-talking romantic partners – would be able to argue them into anything. Epistemically helpless people are the easiest targets because conmen don't try to convince you to something you don't believe. They use what you already believe against you. The vaccine against bad arguments is not ignorance. It is curiosity and inquisitiveness. It's always searching for debunks against every well argued thesis you encounter. And evaluating both the thesis and the debunks. After few such excercises about varied subjects you start to notice the patterns and you can learn to separate personal charm and attractiveness of the idea from the truth. People lie and con and speak absurds the same way all the time about everything. You can learn to spot it if you put your mind to it.
- shove 3y agoDidn’t this guy get outed basically admitting that he launders racist ideology into something more palatable to liberals? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305570
- javajosh 3y agoThe 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.
- latchkey 3y agoDiscussions on similar submissions: Epistemic Learned Helplessness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32369238 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20118865 (June 6, 2019 — 146 points, 60 comments)
- Retr0id 3y agoI'm curious what the author really means by "average uneducated person". It's rare for someone to be truly uneducated. Less knowledge of the domain(s) in question?
- speak_plainly 3y agoAfter 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 than others but everyone has good reasons for what they argue for and there is a genius to the collective thoughts of humanity even if it seems like insanity most of the time. The best starting point is one of ignorance and asking other people what they think, you don’t need consensus but you should be looking for clues, solid ground, and inspiration. Everyone should get more comfortable andmitting to and saying that they truly ‘don’t know’. Taking a position of ignorance will open the doors to real possibilities and actual progress.
- ineptech 3y agoThis is probably true, but not very helpful. We can shrug over historical curiosities, but in a lot of cases we have to make a decision. Consider Linus Pauling's claim that you can prevent cancer with megadoses of vitamin C. It was never widely accepted, but Pauling is a titan of science with two Nobels and he wrote books with convincing-sounding arguments, so it's tempting to think maybe this is a case where the status quo is wrong (esp. if you have cancer). I think that's the sort of thing Alexander is trying to navigate here - no matter how comfortable you get saying "I don't know", at the end of the day you need to take the vitamins or not take them.
- speak_plainly 3y agoThe same argument can be turned against you, someone can wait for absolute expert certainty and die in the process due to lack of action. We all act pragmatically when making decisions and simply blindly trusting people is no way to live for a thinking and intelligent being. I was not suggesting this sort of Burdian’s ass scenario where everyone is so gripped by ignorance that they can’t act. I’m suggesting instead that ignorance is a starting point, to drop your preconceived notions and opinions or at the very least challenge them and not be afraid to come to no conclusions at all— keep everything open. To see there is gold in the common opinions of people and in the arguments of experts, that no one has a monopoly on truth. You don’t need to work yourself up to absolute certainty over the world to make a decision. You don’t need to blindly trust experts and you don’t need to be gripped by fear of uncertainty and you don’t need to be forced into action because of arguments. You really don’t need to do anything at all. There are bigger questions to ponder and a life to live that’s worth living.
- jodrellblank 3y ago> "Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!”" That isn't making them look like an idiot, reducing them, or demolishing their position. That is completely failing to demolish their position! While also failing to convincingly explain your position. > "If you have a good argument that the Early Bronze Age worked completely differently from the way mainstream historians believe, I just don’t want to hear about it. If you insist on telling me anyway, I will nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change my mind or admit even the slightest possibility that you might be right. (This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way. I should ignore it and stick with my prior.)" Maybe the correct action is to see that how the Early Bronze Age worked has so little effect on your life, no testable hypothesis to confirm one way or the other, that it doesn't matter which one you believe, or if you believe both (even if they are contradictory, that's a thing humans can do). Instead of doubling down on one, let go of all of them.
- oh_sigh 3y agoIt also ignores the question of how the person even got their prior in the first place. Presumably they heard a convincing argument at one point and accepted that - but then later changed their standards to not accept convincing arguments. In fact, how do they even know "if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way"? Presumably they were convinced of it at some point.
- Jensson 3y ago> Presumably they heard a convincing argument at one point and accepted that - but then later changed their standards to not accept convincing arguments No, many people base their views on what their friends thinks, they never reasoned themselves into it. It is rational to base your beliefs on your friends, and to keep those beliefs to ensure you can continue to fit in with your friends. That is less work and less risky than changing your mind, only few really go against the grain and try to think for themselves, it isn't helping them but some people has to do that for the benefit of our pack.
- pjungwir 3y ago> I’m glad that some people never develop epistemic learned helplessness, or develop only a limited amount of it, or only in certain domains. What always struck me about famous philosophers is that almost none of them ever changed their minds. They grasped a main idea, turned it into a supreme principle, built everything around it, and defended their system against all critiques their whole life. I know this is simplifying but I think it's pretty close. And yet when I read their works, it's easy to see flaws in their position. So I've always wondered how they could have such tenacity. I'm glad they did though. But it feels like they sacrificed their own life for the rest of us, so that we could see where one idea goes: what it looks like when it's fully developed. When I play chess, I can never go very deeply down a single line before I get distracted by alternatives. But I guess some people are doing a depth-first search. I don't get it, and they may be wrong, but it's like a service to us all.
- demondemidi 3y agoI think it is a trope that engineering is "black or white". Having been a professional engineer for 35 years, it is anything BUT. Everything is a threshold for negotiation, there is give and take in every design decision. There is no black-white anywhere I've ever seen, except freshman-year logic texts. Even with digital logic, in reality, there is no such thing as digital: slopes, thresholds, manufacturing variations, it's all analog. Where does this notion come from?
- KineticLensman 3y agoExactly. Engineering often involves choosing a solution within some time / cost / performance envelope. I’m inclined to think that if you can’t see where trade-offs might exist, it’s because you don’t fully understand the domain.
- Verdex 3y agoI suspect it comes from when engineers try to problem solve with non-engineers. At the very least I've been in the room a few times when this happened. The engineer says a few things. The non-engineer suggests something outside their wheel house. The engineer explains why it won't work or would be too expensive to work. Non-engineer accuses engineers of living in a colorless world without imagination. The black and white thinking accusation is similar to the 50-50 chance of winning the lottery (either you do or you don't). That is, engineers only say if something can work or won't work so they're black and white. It kind of misses the nuance in what's happening.
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- kbutler 3y agoHe makes a convincing argument to (checks notes) not be convinced by convincing arguments.
- growingkittens 3y ago> You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try. Replace "the arguments" in this sentence with "complexity" for a more universal statement on human nature. Some people deal with complexity through science. This sounds great, until you realize that science is currently systematic (step by step) and not systemic (whole picture). Reality is made of interconnected systems. A systematic approach leaves blind spots. For instance, look at medicine. Traditionally, men were seen as less complex to study because of the lack of a (regular) hormone cycle. Our medical system is largely based on authoritatively treating women as "smaller men". This results in systemic ignorance of women's health. Even in veterinary medicine, kittens are often treated as "smaller puppies". This results in needlessly dead kittens. The difference between essential complexity (complexity created to handle complexity) and inessential complexity (complexity driven by another purpose) is also important. Some people rely on inessential complexity to derive authority: they sound like an expert when they talk about their "complex" system. Understanding systems and system dynamics is useful for discerning between good information and bad information. If you can visualize an argument as a system (and as part of a system), it is easier to avoid getting lost in the details.
- com2kid 3y ago> Some people deal with complexity through science. This sounds great, until you realize that science is currently systematic (step by step) and not systemic (whole picture). Reality is made of interconnected systems. A systematic approach leaves blind spots. The counter argument is that human minds are limited and very few people in history are able keep even a large % of the entire system in their head. A huge problem we face as a species is that as the amount of information that needs to be connected to each other in order to make progress grows, fewer and fewer people are able to make large contributions, meaning we'll accumulate knowledge and understanding at a slower rate. Hopefully technology will help here, and people have been working at using computers to try and connect those points, but I am not aware as to how successful those efforts have been.
- growingkittens 3y ago
- danbruc 3y agoI know nothing about that guy, but several commenters point out that debating here does not mean making correct arguments but only making convincing arguments. If that is the case, why would anybody care? I can imagine a few situations where this might be a useful skill, for example if you have some ideological predisposition and want to convince others no matter the truth, but that does not really sound like a good goal, it essentially amounts to manipulation.
- ranprieur 3y agoThis discussion is completely about propositional statements, as if that's the only way to know anything. I would say, don't let mere words change your sense of what's real.
- camdenlock 3y agoWhy must these rationalist / atheist / EA people come across as the most smug teen debate club nerds?
- k__ 3y agoMaybe, because the rest is so in love with their opinion.
- brindlejim 3y agoWhen 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.
- noqc 3y agoI think this article is badly argued, but about a topic which interests me greatly. There are basically three epistemologies. There's the constructive (mathematical, proscriptive), the empirical (science, emotional), and trust. The constructive and empirical epistemologies don't separate as neatly as we would like them to, but a constructive argument basically looks like: "here's a thing that you definitely believe, and here is an implication of that, therefore you believe in the implication" aka modus ponens. The empirical epistemology goes: "You have made a lot of observations, here's a simple explanation for all of them that you may go check", more or less the scientific method. The trust based epistemology is just: "If I can establish facts about you, then I can establish facts about the things that you claim to believe, without having to see the receipts" Each of these epistemologies has its own definition of argument, and they're all similar, but they're distinct, and the author isn't being clear about which one he means. In my estimation, the passages about ancient history are a reflection of him mistaking trust based arguments for empirical ones. This is a very common mistake. An empirical argument is of the form "Here is the test that I used to differentiate my explanation from other explanations, and why I think this is a good test", whereas the trust based argument for the same explanation would be "Here is the data that my theory explains".
- leshow 3y ago> Even the smartest people I know have a commendable tendency not to take certain ideas seriously. Bostrom’s simulation argument, the anthropic doomsday argument, Pascal’s Mugging – I’ve never heard anyone give a coherent argument against any of these, but I’ve also never met anyone who fully accepts them and lives life according to their implications. Maybe you ought to think about why that is? I wonder why "smart" people don't live their lives according to magical situations with no bearing in reality?