[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.