Errancer

Stanisław Lem is an example I suppose?

I generally agree with you, but I would like to comment on the expression you used: "As a scientist, I can't really object to rationality on its own, but it may be worth considering non-rational, transcendent experience as a fundamental psychological need.". I think you would agree that if evaluations such as life-meaningfulness are secondary-properties or qualia like you said then arranging it as a debate between rationality vs irrationality is out of the picture. It is customary to consider various forms of mysticisms as opposed to rationality but it doesn't have to be the case as long as we properly define what is entailed by such experience.

I suppose that the reason people might object to such idea is that they are implicitly committed to a form of positivism and they sense that if people can experience evaluations then the fact/value distinction is undermined. Therefore I think that while it is understandable what you mean when you use the term "rationality" as equated with positivism it would be good for the long term debate to separate those two, since I take it that people like us would like to have it both: science and a form of atheistic mysticism [0].

Ultimately the grand-father of rationality, Plato, was anything but a positivist.

[0] I use the term mysticism mostly because I lack any better term. Evaluative intuitionism is probably the most correct technical term but it has historical roots which I dislike because it was constructed around the single intuition of what is Good, and I believe that we need a wider range of evaluative terms to adequately describe our experiences.

I feel like this comment hits at the general discussion of "Why should I learn something which I won't be the best at?" and it applies just as well to maths, science and arts: you should learn it since if you really enjoy it then you can contribute by maintaining a healthy community around it; and this can mean really working on the community or just being a person who can understand the value of discoveries of others. Having a good audience is the dream of every artist and I think this applies quite universally.

I agree with your description that this is a throat-clearing but I don't see why it hurts the clarity of writing. Dense texts packed with information can often benefit from such breaks. In general I find text which uses artefacts from spoken language more readable. There are limits to this of course but if we remove all redundancy we end up with dry text which sometimes is expected but I am unsure if it is the most readable or clear way to write. One side note is that it might be culture dependent. English speaking countries and Poland, where I am from, expect and teach much different writing style than France or Germany.

I agree, often I write first sentence in technical language to introduce the reader to the existing discussion and then say "In other words" to paraphrase the technical language into more familiar but less precise vocabulary.

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.

Fair enough, this was a stupid oversight. Thanks for pointing this out!

I don't think I understand how your comment relate to what I wrote.

Well I wrote one of the negative comments and I think you give the article an apologetic interpretation (which is great). I can agree that if this is the point then it is a good advice, but how is it different from setting yourself SMART goals and the general wisdom from personal management in psychology or theory of action in philosophy? You seem to argue that learned helplessness is alike weakness of will and while they might be on continuum there is something different between those cases since under normal circumstances you don't fail to run away from pain. And while the way "out" might be similar if we we fail to understand the difference then we will fail to understand the mental state of people who are in genuine cases of learned helplessness such as many-year homeless people. So, like, maybe a careful criticism is not that the article is wrong but it simplifies things to the point where on the one hand we are blinded to the most important things about learned helplessness and on the other hand besides the point that you bring up the article includes many rhetorical devices which obscure the main point.

This one is funny since I deliberately checked how to write it correctly and I found the form 'ad nauseam' annnnd somehow left it in the incorrect form. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

huh, I thought this was a correct use. Thanks!

This article seems to relay on the idea that by default we can take no action and therefore we don't acquire helplessness as it is the default. But it doesn't seem to make sense? The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected. When one loses their agency then we are talking about learned helplessness. If we want to say "Oh, in fact those people did not learn helplessness since there is nothing like this to learn, it is more accurate to say that they find their circumstances so dire that all actions seem to them unreasonable effort as it won't allow them to change those circumstances." then I guess that true but it seems trivial. It is like saying that if you are so depressed that you don't eat then it is not depression but a default state since you need a reason to eat and you just fail to have that reason. Which is like, the point? We expect healthy people to take care of themselves and if they feel like there is no reason for them to do so then they are not back to some natural state which is fine. So I feel like there is no big discovery here. It is just terminological adjustment so that we can avoid possible misinterpretations plus some new fact from the neuroscience which doesn't change anything about our psychological understanding.

So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.