This is such a great post, especially in acknowledging the limitations of unnecessarily hostile framings. The LessWrong links were also illuminating; lovely work
Awesome post. This is such a strange book, deep insights and good ideas encased in such a thick, opaque shell, that you either bounce off of it and become a vocal hater, or are so desperate to steelman and understand its ideas that you actually crack through to the diamond at the center, only to find that 1. precious few others are willing to do all that work, and 2. the diamond is far from practical, its mostly glittery, but if you can fashion it into a tool it is pretty damn solid.
Any issue can have any incentives, but the most common I’ve seen for learned helplessness are things like feeling undeserving of getting better, that getting better will lead to social retribution, or that it will fail and result in shame
It's something I've been trying to wrap my head around for a little while... any suggestions on how to figure out what's incentivizing a particular issue?
Learned helplessness serves the function of allowing a person to have some acceptance/peace of living in a bad situation that they are not ready to disrupt. Theres a comfort in feeling bad for yourself, mad at the world/others etc, because you believe you are trapped in a situation outside your control. Sometimes people adopt this because the risks of changing the bad situation are genuinely too high at the moment to accept it could be worth pursuing a change until later.
Loved this post, you got a new subscriber! I felt much of the same when I read the book the first time. I agreed with what I thought the book was trying to say, but I also felt like I had objections or at least I felt annoyed/triggered by the way it was saying it, and I had to do a lot of thinking in my own time to find what I liked and what I didn’t like. The second time I tried to read it I didn’t finish it because I was looking for more practical advice and I was still annoyed by the wording of the book and I didn’t want to put up with it. I really liked your analysis of what worked and what didn’t work in the book, and I think your improvements would help it reach a much wider audience and be more helpful for myself too!
loved this post as someone who read the courage to be disliked many years ago, thought it was super profound on an “intellectual” level and then was subsequently unable to integrate anything it said into my life
This is such a great post, especially in acknowledging the limitations of unnecessarily hostile framings. The LessWrong links were also illuminating; lovely work
Awesome post. This is such a strange book, deep insights and good ideas encased in such a thick, opaque shell, that you either bounce off of it and become a vocal hater, or are so desperate to steelman and understand its ideas that you actually crack through to the diamond at the center, only to find that 1. precious few others are willing to do all that work, and 2. the diamond is far from practical, its mostly glittery, but if you can fashion it into a tool it is pretty damn solid.
> learned helplessness is often serving a function!
What function would you say it tends to serve, out of curiosity?
Any issue can have any incentives, but the most common I’ve seen for learned helplessness are things like feeling undeserving of getting better, that getting better will lead to social retribution, or that it will fail and result in shame
It's something I've been trying to wrap my head around for a little while... any suggestions on how to figure out what's incentivizing a particular issue?
Learned helplessness serves the function of allowing a person to have some acceptance/peace of living in a bad situation that they are not ready to disrupt. Theres a comfort in feeling bad for yourself, mad at the world/others etc, because you believe you are trapped in a situation outside your control. Sometimes people adopt this because the risks of changing the bad situation are genuinely too high at the moment to accept it could be worth pursuing a change until later.
Loved this post, you got a new subscriber! I felt much of the same when I read the book the first time. I agreed with what I thought the book was trying to say, but I also felt like I had objections or at least I felt annoyed/triggered by the way it was saying it, and I had to do a lot of thinking in my own time to find what I liked and what I didn’t like. The second time I tried to read it I didn’t finish it because I was looking for more practical advice and I was still annoyed by the wording of the book and I didn’t want to put up with it. I really liked your analysis of what worked and what didn’t work in the book, and I think your improvements would help it reach a much wider audience and be more helpful for myself too!
love the care and thought put into this post — very curious to see where the 'personal growth skill tree' goes next
loved this post as someone who read the courage to be disliked many years ago, thought it was super profound on an “intellectual” level and then was subsequently unable to integrate anything it said into my life
Damn, this is really good. I wish I had read it four months ago—it would have saved me a lot of heartache.