Created: March 08, 2020
Modified: March 08, 2020
Modified: March 08, 2020
learned helplessness
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Happens all the time, at small scales and large scales.
- Large scale:
- When I was young, it was possible to imagine becoming a confident extrovert. It was possible to imagine running a company, or doing groundbreaking AI research, or at least changing some part of an online or intellectual conversation in a big way.
- It's not clear that any of those imaginings were impossible, or even are impossible now. (I believe they aren't). And yet, we eventually learn models of ourselves and plan relative to those models. So if empirically I haven't done a thing, it's hard to plan for it to happen. Eventually it just turns out that I 'learn' about myself that I can't do that thing, and so I don't try.
- The learning is even partially true: standards get higher as an adult so if I haven't been practicing I probably don't have the skills. And if I don't believe that I can get the skills I really won't try hard enough and any effort will be unsuccessful. But these are all second-order effects; they don't justify the first-order conclusion.
- When I was young, it was possible to imagine becoming a confident extrovert. It was possible to imagine running a company, or doing groundbreaking AI research, or at least changing some part of an online or intellectual conversation in a big way.