"Epistemic Learned Helplessness," is simply shorthand for, "We are all finite and have an incomplete understanding for everything, yet we must still pragmatically make our way in the world."
You don't have to instantly believe arguments. Sit back and gather data to assess the predictive power of the model.
Except the problem the author identifies is that in many fields, such as history, there's no way for the lay person to judge the predictive power of competing theories, short of expending outsized effort to become an expert themselves.
Since they cannot judge theories scientifically, and they cannot judge them based on how well they're presented, they can only fall back on social consensus and instinctive sense of weirdness. "Trust the academy", would seem to be the more accurate shorthand.
> Since they cannot judge theories scientifically, and they cannot judge them based on how well they're presented, they can only fall back on social consensus and instinctive sense of weirdness.
Why judge at all? Or rather, why develop certainty when you lack the capacity to judge accurately?
The answer is that certainty, even when it is unwarranted, is sometimes useful and necessary. Certainty can also lead to major oversights and failures so it is something we should use with caution and care. When assessing the appropriate level of certainty we need to address not only our own level of expertise, but also the utility (and risk) which adopting a particular certainty provides.
However, I find this article rather misguided in its conclusions:
> And so on for several more iterations, until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable. What finally broke me out wasn’t so much the lucidity of the consensus view so much as starting to sample different crackpots. Some were almost as bright and rhetorically gifted as Velikovsky, all presented insurmountable evidence for their theories, and all had mutually exclusive ideas. After all, Noah’s Flood couldn’t have been a cultural memory both of the fall of Atlantis and of a change in the Earth’s orbit, let alone of a lost Ice Age civilization or of megatsunamis from a meteor strike. So given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed practically proven, I am obviously just gullible in the field of ancient history. Given a total lack of independent intellectual steering power and no desire to spend thirty years building an independent knowledge base of Near Eastern history, I choose to just accept the ideas of the prestigious people with professorships in Archaeology, rather than those of the universally reviled crackpots who write books about Venus being a comet.
The author has discovered their lack of expertise in ancient history. Knowing that, it seems to me that adopting a high level of certainty about ancient history based on "mainstream" or "the academy", without a clear idea of the utility of adopting that certainty, is epistemically irresponsible or at least unnecessary.
Yeah, this doesn't really seem that groundbreaking to me. You just try your best and take new information in as it becomes available (assuming the information is trustworthy). Then again, I build software. Even when there are competing ways to do something, you just weigh the pros and cons (that you are aware of) of each solution across various dimensions to determine which is better (assuming you can weight the relative importance of each dimension - which itself isn't always easy to do). The more information you have, the easier it is to decide on a course of action.
I think for stuff like religion or philosophy, you really move away from the domain of "correct/incorrect" to more conditional arguments: philosophy Y makes sense if your values are X. One is only better than another if it more aligns with your values and experiences. Your values are going to be determined by the totality of your life experiences and genetics. You can dispute that holding a certain position isn't necessarily pragmatic within a given context, but you can't really say it is wrong, in my view. Of course there are lots of smart people on this site, so I'm curious to see what others may think of my views on philosophy.
You don't have to instantly believe arguments. Sit back and gather data to assess the predictive power of the model.