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”.
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”.