The real tie-breaker is experiment. It's telling that his primary example of "epistemic learned helplessness" is historical narrative. Historical narratives are

The 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.