I'm curious to query the HN crowd: How do we mesh this learned helplessness on subjects for which there are no definitive studies for? (eg. is the purpose of a human life to produce more humans? How does one formally prove that, and how does one prove those proofs are valid, and the organizations that prove the proofs are valid are also valid?)
I feel like people who study subjective topics like the value of human life (philosophers) have already internalized "learned helplessness". It's empirical-oriented people like us who have a harder time grappling with the idea of not knowing everything
Translation: People who have spent so much time playing with highly abstracted and greatly simplified models, they've lost their grasp on how messy and complicated the real world can be.
More than that, we're used to dealing with maps when the territory may be inherently unmappable. It may not just be hard to produce an accurate map for the entire territory, it may be impossible.
I think that being empirically-minded requires, in part, accepting that not everything is known. Science differentiated itself from the rest of philosophy when it put aside big but unanswerable questions in favor of smaller questions that could be addressed empirically.
You can't do that, because any proof relating to how humans should live would have to start from axioms like "suffering is bad" or "other people are probably real rather than imaginary" or "suffering is bad, and other people are real, and it's bad when I suffer, and it's also bad when other people suffer", and you're not going to get everyone to agree on those.
The best you can do is to make arguments like "if you accept all the axioms I mentioned above, you should also accept this conclusion".
The online version is just to avoid believing things. We don't have independent knowledge of most of what gets reported on the Internet and we're not here to accomplish anything much, so we don't have to commit to any beliefs.
(This is the opposite of the "instant expert syndrome" to which many people seem susceptible, where they are certain they know which side to take about whatever was recently in the news.)
In real life, you probably do have commitments and decisions to make.
It seems to me that these issues would fall into the author's category of things you need not take seriously: in the first case, don't look for proofs of a proposition that is not well-defined enough to be amenable to either proof or refutation, and in the second, don't expect to reach the end of a line of inquiry that you can see will never end.
Check our his follow up essay raising the specter that tradition in general might be much more likely to be a useful authority than we give credit for.
