8 Comments
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Eurydice's avatar

This is such a great post, especially in acknowledging the limitations of unnecessarily hostile framings. The LessWrong links were also illuminating; lovely work

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tautologer's avatar

Damn, this is really good. I wish I had read it four months ago—it would have saved me a lot of heartache.

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Jack Hooper's avatar

> learned helplessness is often serving a function!

What function would you say it tends to serve, out of curiosity?

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Chris Lakin's avatar

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

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Jack Hooper's avatar

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?

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Chris Lakin's avatar

Good coaching

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Evan Hu's avatar

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.

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Brittney's avatar

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

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