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Error comments on Luck II: Expecting White Swans - Less Wrong
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It's interesting that you associate that with depression. I know someone who does this -- typically accompanied by a startling degree of resistance to solutions-to-obstacle -- and in the past I've mentally attributed it to motivated stopping. Sounds like I might be wrong. Do you know any literature on the subject?
Learned helplessness is relevant. I don't think the behaviour is specific enough to identify depressed people.
Consider that many people are not looking for advice when they complain. Complaining can be a script for small talk, a request for validation of them giving up something or a request for sympathy etc.
Good point, but not relevant in this case. The person in question has a known history of depression, I had just never connected A with B until Nancy mentioned it.
[Edit: Usage as depression-identifier not relevant. Learned helplessness might be right.]
Indeed, and my own internal explorations have indicated that "learned helplessness" is probably exactly what's going on. Watching myself and my cognition patterns when my depression kick in have shown me that the root problem is an early overgeneralization of "Strategy S(1) didn't work, S(2) didn't work, S(3) didn't work, S(4) didn't work, S(5) didn't work..." into "Strategy S(s) won't work for all s". The actual 'depression' is then just a perfectly reasonable resource-conserving strategy, given the (probably faulty) assumption that no identifiable strategy will offer a positive payoff.
In general, though, the problem with the "no one can help you but you" self-help rhetoric is that it pretty much throws under the bus everyone who has been trained to be their own worst enemy. If you want highly rational depressives to stop being depressive, I think the best strategy is NOT to tell them to go out there and take more risks - it's to put then in a controlled environment where they can be rewarded for exploring and taken care of when they run out of willpower, and then slowly train them to update out of their learned helplessness, build successful willpower-replenishing strategies, and restructure their social model to positive-sum instead of negative-sum.
I'm betting you'd have a better chance doing this with depressive people whose family/friends have a lot of resources, than you would doing this with depressive people who are surrounded by poverty and social malaise, but then resources are a direct measure of how much a capitalist society cares about a given member, so maybe that's as it should be.
This makes me think of the first two steps from Alcoholics Anonymous's twelve step program:
One of the few things that AA comes close to getting 'right' is providing people with a framework to bond together as a community and help each other. Of course, there isn't much evidence that AA works particularly well, but when there aren't very many "real" choices available, people take what they can get.
Sorry, no literature, just introspection, which means I should have been more careful about generalizing.
Tentatively, if a person makes a fast jump to "that's impossible" for things they don't want to do, but they are resourceful about doing things they do want to do, that's not depression. Maybe. If the only thing an alcoholic is resourceful about is getting alcohol, it might be reasonable to say they aren't depressed, or maybe depression/not depression isn't the right distinction.
I do think that inertia and misery are both attributed to depression, but they're somewhat independent.
nod that seems reasonable, but here's a second generalized counterexample:
When I'm depressed, I tend to behave as if I don't want to do anything. Then, when I'm not depressed, I tend to be VERY resourceful about doing things, which makes it look like those are the things I most want to do. It is then very easy to declare that I'm resourceful about doing the things I want, and just lazy about doing the things I don't (which is a particularly unhelpful criticism that I've dealt with all my life (but stating that it's unhelpful just leads to people pointing out that if enough people say something, it's probably true (but pointing out the inherent cognitive biases involved in that just leads to people pointing out that I'm being defensive and making excuses (but pointing out that that's a fully general counterargument just leads to people deciding to not talk to me at all anymore (but I need people for my physical and emotional health so I try to avoid that and just accept that I'm lazy instead of depressed (which makes the depression worse (which makes people decide to not talk to me at all anymore (which leads to another layer of learned helplessness))))))).
This is because it often works people who are not depressed, and people can't know with certainty when your behaviour is due to depression. How confident are you about knowing it yourself?
Depression works like a fully general counterargument too. It seems your frustration has more in common with theirs than expected.
Well, yes. And I usually solve that by ceding the point; I'm more willing to acknowledge that I'm just a worthless parasite than they are to acknowledge that I need help, so eventually we can all just agree and move on.
I'm pretty sure you understand those are not the only two options.
The funny thing about akrasia, from the inside, is that you often have plenty of "options" that you can't actually execute on.
By options I mean explanations for what's happening, not actions, unless you want to define thoughts as actions. Vast majority of people suggest solutions because they want to help, not because they want an excuse to call you a parasite. Implying they're evil assholes doesn't help your situation.
The implication is that I distrust them, not that they're actually evil assholes. The problem is that gut-level social instinct doesn't distinguish between "this person mistrusts me because his capacity for trust is damaged, and he knows that" and "this person mistrusts me because he thinks I'm an evil asshole". For example, my usual pattern of assumption is NOT that people in general are evil assholes; it's that I'm caught in a loop of behaviors that provokes them into questioning my veracity, I overreact to their questioning, and they become primed to act assholeish towards me, thus reinforcing the pattern. (And then you throw in people who simply are evil assholes, and who are attracted to weakness...)
Also, something kind of interesting just happened here: I presented two options; in one I acknowledge that the fault is entirely mine, and in the other people help me. You then interpreted this as "implying that they are evil assholes". This means that I can't even fold and admit defeat without it being interpreted as an aggressive act. What out is left for me, then?
There's a whole gradient between those two options. You're splitting which is understandable. "Fault" doesn't exist without other people, neither do parasites or defeat. How about "thanks for the suggestions, but I've tried them already and they don't help"?