[Errancer]

This article seems to relay on the idea that by default we can take no action and therefore we don't acquire helplessness as it is the default. But it doesn't seem to make sense? The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected. When one loses their agency then we are talking about learned helplessness. If we want to say "Oh, in fact those people did not learn helplessness since there is nothing like this to learn, it is more accurate to say that they find their circumstances so dire that all actions seem to them unreasonable effort as it won't allow them to change those circumstances." then I guess that true but it seems trivial. It is like saying that if you are so depressed that you don't eat then it is not depression but a default state since you need a reason to eat and you just fail to have that reason. Which is like, the point? We expect healthy people to take care of themselves and if they feel like there is no reason for them to do so then they are not back to some natural state which is fine. So I feel like there is no big discovery here. It is just terminological adjustment so that we can avoid possible misinterpretations plus some new fact from the neuroscience which doesn't change anything about our psychological understanding.

So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.

[TeMPOraL]

> So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.

Wait, what?!

This post is summarizing and then (past the sponsor blurb) literally citing the paper on this. Not just any paper, but one by the same authors who first created the theory of "learned helplessness" - and one in which they conclude they initially got the mechanism backwards. See:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4920136/

[Errancer]

Fair enough, this was a stupid oversight. Thanks for pointing this out!

[TeMPOraL]

In your defense, the site layout is partly to blame. I almost didn't notice the citation at the bottom - the sponsor blurb made it seem the content ends there, and that citation, for a split second, looked to me like some templating/database bug. Also the major point - that this insight is not random, but an update by the original researchers - is buried in the last paragraph.

[Errancer]

Yea, the point about the same people changing their opinions was quite interesting so I mostly pointed out the lack of citation since I though that the article might misrepresent the paper and I wanted to verify it. And now that I am reading it, I find it is nicely nuanced and really well written. I was wondering why exactly I was suspicious about the original article and now I see that my problem is the tone. The article starts with "Helplessness Is Not Learned" and claims that it has been "debunked" where the paper keeps the phrase "learned helplessness" as a well documented fact and adjusts the mechanism behind the phenomena, which is much more reasonable.

[Gare]

> The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected.

Agency about things we percieve we can control. There are vastly many more things which are out of our control, or require gargantuan effort to change, or would be extremely risky.

[Errancer]

I don't think I understand how your comment relate to what I wrote.

[PurpleRamen]

> The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected.

Why do you think that? By default, we know nothing and are lazy.