I don’t know. In “Epistemic Learned Helplessness” you pointed out that both right and wrong positions have many convincing arguments, so becoming more open to arguments is just as likely to make someone wrong as right.
I definitely agree with you here—I didn’t talk about it as much in this post, but in the psychedelics post I linked, I wrote:
People are not actually very good at reasoning. If you metaphorically heat up their brain to a temperature that dissolves all their preconceptions and forces them to basically reroll all of their beliefs, then a few of them that were previously correct are going to come out wrong. F&CH’s theory that they are merely letting evidence propagate more fluidly through the system runs up against the problem where, most of the time, if you have to use evidence unguided by any common sense, you probably get a lot of things wrong.
The best defense of therapy in this model is that you’re concentrating on the beliefs that are currently most dysfunctional, so by regression to the mean you should expect them to get better!
Maybe, but I don’t think that we developed our tendency to lock in emotional beliefs as a kind of self-protective adaptation. I think that all animals with brains lock in emotional learning by default because brains lock in practically all learning by default. The weird and new thing humans do is to also learn concepts that are complex, provisional, dynamic and fast-changing. But this new capability is built on the old hardware that was intended to make sure we stayed away from scary animals.
Most things we encounter are not as ambiguous, complex and resistant to empirical falsification as the examples in the Epistemic Learned Helplessness essay. The areas where both right and wrong positions have convincing arguments usually involve distant, abstract things.
I don’t know. In “Epistemic Learned Helplessness” you pointed out that both right and wrong positions have many convincing arguments, so becoming more open to arguments is just as likely to make someone wrong as right.
I definitely agree with you here—I didn’t talk about it as much in this post, but in the psychedelics post I linked, I wrote:
The best defense of therapy in this model is that you’re concentrating on the beliefs that are currently most dysfunctional, so by regression to the mean you should expect them to get better!
Maybe, but I don’t think that we developed our tendency to lock in emotional beliefs as a kind of self-protective adaptation. I think that all animals with brains lock in emotional learning by default because brains lock in practically all learning by default. The weird and new thing humans do is to also learn concepts that are complex, provisional, dynamic and fast-changing. But this new capability is built on the old hardware that was intended to make sure we stayed away from scary animals.
Most things we encounter are not as ambiguous, complex and resistant to empirical falsification as the examples in the Epistemic Learned Helplessness essay. The areas where both right and wrong positions have convincing arguments usually involve distant, abstract things.