[picometer]

Summary: 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]

He 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.

[joe_the_user]

Yes, 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.

[fooop]

I, for one, am glad that the rationality-bubble is popping.

[picometer]

A further thought that is too much for an edit… one of Alexander’s final conclusions is:

> I’m glad that some people never develop epistemic learned helplessness, or develop only a limited amount of it, or only in certain domains. It seems to me that […] 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.

I think there’s better framing here as well: he is glad that a few people direct their own bounded resources towards what I’d call high-risk epistemic investments.

I’m also thankful for this. As species, we seem to be pretty good at this epistemic risk/reward balancing act - so far, at least.