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KnaveOfAllTrades comments on Open thread, August 4 - 10, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 04 August 2014 12:20PM

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Comment author: KnaveOfAllTrades 07 August 2014 12:41:42PM *  2 points [-]

Good chance you've seen both of these before, but:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness and http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html

I am also now bereft of a term for what I thought "learned helplessness" was. Analogous ideas come up in game theory, but there's no snappy self-contained way available to me for expressing it.

Damn, if only someone had created a thread for that, ho ho ho

Strategic incompetence?

I'm not sure if maybe Schelling uses a specific name (self-sabotage?) for that kind of thing?

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 07 August 2014 01:35:05PM 3 points [-]

Schelling does talk about strategic self-sabotage, but it captures a lot of deliberated behaviour that isn't implied in my fake definition.

Also interesting to note, I have read that Epistemic Learned Helplessness blog entry before, and my fake definition is sufficiently consistent with it that it doesn't stand out as obviously incorrect.

Comment author: satt 12 August 2014 12:25:53AM 0 points [-]

Also interesting to note, I have read that Epistemic Learned Helplessness blog entry before, and my fake definition is sufficiently consistent with it that it doesn't stand out as obviously incorrect.

Now picturing a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles labelled "epistemic learned helplessness", "what psychologists call 'learned helplessness'", and "what sixes_and_sevens calls 'learned helplessness'"!