I generally agree with you, but I would like to comment on the expression you used: "As a scientist, I can't really object to rationality on its own, but it may be worth considering non-rational, transcendent experience as a fundamental psychological need.".
I think you would agree that if evaluations such as life-meaningfulness are secondary-properties or qualia like you said then arranging it as a debate between rationality vs irrationality is out of the picture. It is customary to consider various forms of mysticisms as opposed to rationality but it doesn't have to be the case as long as we properly define what is entailed by such experience.
I suppose that the reason people might object to such idea is that they are implicitly committed to a form of positivism and they sense that if people can experience evaluations then the fact/value distinction is undermined. Therefore I think that while it is understandable what you mean when you use the term "rationality" as equated with positivism it would be good for the long term debate to separate those two, since I take it that people like us would like to have it both: science and a form of atheistic mysticism [0].
Ultimately the grand-father of rationality, Plato, was anything but a positivist.
[0] I use the term mysticism mostly because I lack any better term. Evaluative intuitionism is probably the most correct technical term but it has historical roots which I dislike because it was constructed around the single intuition of what is Good, and I believe that we need a wider range of evaluative terms to adequately describe our experiences.
Can one be a rationalist and still believe that, “the universe if fucking lit” and marvel at how wonderful it is? I believe being rational allows one to really experience the depth and breadth of the place we are in.
Bleak utilitarianism is why so many reject applying themselves to a deeper understanding of the world, willfully ignorant in a way to manufacture wonder via a lack of comprehension.
It starts early, with the sexist trope of Eve plucking an Apple from the tree of knowledge and getting us kicked out of the garden eden. Bullshit.
I agree with the OP, the trip is the point. Travel, see the universe.
> Can one be a rationalist and still believe that, “the universe if fucking lit” and marvel at how wonderful it is? I believe being rational allows one to really experience the depth and breadth of the place we are in.
Based on observations of the Rationalist community over the years, I would say that it is possible as a rationalist, but not as a Rationalist, in that they tend to believe our knowledge of reality is limited to that which is endorsed by science.
Mysticism with focus on a higher power (deity) has been tried and tested. Why re-invent the wheel? The existence of a higher power does not contradict the more rational modern science, and vice versa. They are both tools that we can use to enrich our lives.
I completely agree with you. The opposition between rationality and life-meaningfulness was just a bit a useful rhetoric to get my my point across. I don't see any fundamental contradiction between the two, either.
I feel like this comment hits at the general discussion of "Why should I learn something which I won't be the best at?" and it applies just as well to maths, science and arts: you should learn it since if you really enjoy it then you can contribute by maintaining a healthy community around it; and this can mean really working on the community or just being a person who can understand the value of discoveries of others. Having a good audience is the dream of every artist and I think this applies quite universally.
I agree, often I write first sentence in technical language to introduce the reader to the existing discussion and then say "In other words" to paraphrase the technical language into more familiar but less precise vocabulary.
I agree, but even in those cases, “in other words” is just throat-clearing. Like “simply put” or “that is to say”, these are noise words that only hurt the clarity of writing.
If two examples help, use two examples. There’s no need to call out that the second one is another example; people will get that.
At least that’s how I see it after a lifetime of trying to stamp out this kind of filler language in my own writing.
I agree with your description that this is a throat-clearing but I don't see why it hurts the clarity of writing. Dense texts packed with information can often benefit from such breaks. In general I find text which uses artefacts from spoken language more readable. There are limits to this of course but if we remove all redundancy we end up with dry text which sometimes is expected but I am unsure if it is the most readable or clear way to write.
One side note is that it might be culture dependent. English speaking countries and Poland, where I am from, expect and teach much different writing style than France or Germany.
If it's two examples, it's not the same thing presented again in other words. If you are presenting the same thing twice phrased differently, separating the two presentations is important, and "in other words" is a perfectly reasonable phrase to do that.
Without beating around the bush, what I’m trying to say is, in other words, unless I’m mistaken, it’s perhaps possible that maybe some writing just could be written in fewer words.
In my experience, that’s a mistake. I start off by framing things in the “why” for a high level conceptual understanding and slowly get into the weeds.
The executives and the sponsors care about business objectives and they are going to zone out as soon as you start getting into the weeds.
Well I wrote one of the negative comments and I think you give the article an apologetic interpretation (which is great). I can agree that if this is the point then it is a good advice, but how is it different from setting yourself SMART goals and the general wisdom from personal management in psychology or theory of action in philosophy? You seem to argue that learned helplessness is alike weakness of will and while they might be on continuum there is something different between those cases since under normal circumstances you don't fail to run away from pain. And while the way "out" might be similar if we we fail to understand the difference then we will fail to understand the mental state of people who are in genuine cases of learned helplessness such as many-year homeless people.
So, like, maybe a careful criticism is not that the article is wrong but it simplifies things to the point where on the one hand we are blinded to the most important things about learned helplessness and on the other hand besides the point that you bring up the article includes many rhetorical devices which obscure the main point.
This article seems to relay on the idea that by default we can take no action and therefore we don't acquire helplessness as it is the default. But it doesn't seem to make sense? The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected. When one loses their agency then we are talking about learned helplessness. If we want to say "Oh, in fact those people did not learn helplessness since there is nothing like this to learn, it is more accurate to say that they find their circumstances so dire that all actions seem to them unreasonable effort as it won't allow them to change those circumstances." then I guess that true but it seems trivial. It is like saying that if you are so depressed that you don't eat then it is not depression but a default state since you need a reason to eat and you just fail to have that reason. Which is like, the point? We expect healthy people to take care of themselves and if they feel like there is no reason for them to do so then they are not back to some natural state which is fine. So I feel like there is no big discovery here. It is just terminological adjustment so that we can avoid possible misinterpretations plus some new fact from the neuroscience which doesn't change anything about our psychological understanding.
So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.
> So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.
Wait, what?!
This post is summarizing and then (past the sponsor blurb) literally citing the paper on this. Not just any paper, but one by the same authors who first created the theory of "learned helplessness" - and one in which they conclude they initially got the mechanism backwards. See:
In your defense, the site layout is partly to blame. I almost didn't notice the citation at the bottom - the sponsor blurb made it seem the content ends there, and that citation, for a split second, looked to me like some templating/database bug. Also the major point - that this insight is not random, but an update by the original researchers - is buried in the last paragraph.
Yea, the point about the same people changing their opinions was quite interesting so I mostly pointed out the lack of citation since I though that the article might misrepresent the paper and I wanted to verify it. And now that I am reading it, I find it is nicely nuanced and really well written. I was wondering why exactly I was suspicious about the original article and now I see that my problem is the tone. The article starts with "Helplessness Is Not Learned" and claims that it has been "debunked" where the paper keeps the phrase "learned helplessness" as a well documented fact and adjusts the mechanism behind the phenomena, which is much more reasonable.
> The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected.
Agency about things we percieve we can control. There are vastly many more things which are out of our control, or require gargantuan effort to change, or would be extremely risky.
I always felt like Wittgenstein deeply hated philosophy and all his work was aimed at showing its meaninglessness. That is why I felt that despite the theoretical opposition between his early and late work they are continuous. The proofs has changed but the claim remained the same. But his hatred was sourced in the fact that he couldn't stop himself from engaging into it and found this desire deeply stupid and despicable so again and again he had to show himself that this is futile but as it is with philosophy every time you think you made a point a new angle revels itself and you need to adjust the argument ad nausea. So in this sense I find his preference for stupid movies understandable. The ability to just stop thinking about what you consider irresolvable, meaningless problems is a blessing and dumb pop fiction is a safe space with no traps that would cause you to think anew some problems.
Now, none of what I said is backed by any research really. I haven't read his biography and I might be projecting my own experience, but I feel like there are some experiences a prolonged engagement in philosophy causes and they are quite difficult to explain to people who have not went through them. Like, you can pick up St. Augustine or Kierkegaard and I feel that they want to scream their lungs out the exact same insight. Kierkegaard had similar relation to the theatre as far as I remember.
Anyway, there is no clear point to my comment. I guess I am interested what others are thinking.
I find Wittgenstein's work in PI to be actually pretty therapeutic. He's not really insistent on finding the solution to a philosophical problem. His method is more about dissolving seemingly intractable philosophical problems by patient analysis of the assumptions hidden in our use of language. Seen in that way, his philosophical work is less focused on capital T truth, and more on clarification. We know for a fact though that he did struggle with coming up with his method, that it caused him something like mental anguish for his perfectionist mindset; but I don't think that reveals something inherent about the nature of philosophy. Instead, I think that reveals how terribly knotted our ways of thinking can get when we engage in language games that are seemingly intractable for 1000s of years.
His biography is actually incredible. I would recommend it; he lived through incredible disaster, tragedy, and triumph. He was an odd man to say the least, but he was also a brilliant philosopher, arguably the 20th century's most important.
The deeper your questions go, the less likely you will find answers for them. If you insist to find an answer, can't continue living without finding it, you're going to have a quite miserable life.
The mind is an incredible tool, but if you point it against yourself it can give you the worst suffering possible.
> I always felt like Wittgenstein deeply hated philosophy and all his work was aimed at showing its meaninglessness
Well, Wittgenstein was an Engineer - he started (then) leaning towards Aeronautics, which brought him to Mathematics, which brought him to Foundational Formal Logic, which brought him to Bertrand Russell (after Gottlob Frege), which brought him to Philosophy.
It is kind of normal for foundationalists and engineers to be "discriminating" towards "solidity".
But is effort was positive towards obtaining "discriminating logical engines".
Wittgenstein's anti-intellectualism was quite well-known and he voiced his displeasure towards intellectualism during his time.
Really, this is the root of a lot of his philosophy. It was to prove intellectuals wrong. For some of us, he was right. Reading any philosophy book, we joke that it takes a philosopher 20-some odd pages to get to the punchline. Why? No idea. Philosophers love to hear themselves talk and love to meander.
If we have this branch, also 'ad nauseam'. But let's face it, we do not have all the time in the world to polish what we are composing here, so there will be errors.
This one is funny since I deliberately checked how to write it correctly and I found the form 'ad nauseam' annnnd somehow left it in the incorrect form. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This would be incompatible only if we require realistic interpretation of our taxonomies and theory of evolution can be true regardless of our (anti)realistic commitments.
The point as I understand is that interfaces in the OOP sense try to mimic what modules do. Therefore OCaml not having them is not a serious accusation since everything you try to accomplish with interfaces / design patters you can and should be able to do with modules. Here is the article explaining the concept: https://www.pathsensitive.com/2023/03/modules-matter-most-fo... but I have to note that I never worked in OCaml so this is just my theoretical understanding.
