learning traps
- There are a few related self-reinforcing traps that make learning hard, due to an inability to imagine things being different than they are, and the general challenge of moving towards a future one can't imagine.
- The Broccoli Error
- Parent: Hey, do you like broccoli?
- Kid: No, it tastes horrible!
- Parent: Would you want to like broccoli?
- Kid: No!
- Parent: Why not?
- Kid: Cos if I liked broccoli, then I would eat lots of broccoli, and broccoli tastes horrible!
- What it's like to do something wholeheartedly
- There's a particular flavor of The Broccoli Error that shows up in situations where there's some sort of activity or training system being evaluated by someone, and the nature of that system is that it requires a certain level of buy-in and wholehearted commitment, and that the system doesn't work without it.
- Someone may enter into the learning context skeptically, and then their skepticism will make the system not work, and then their skepticism will seem appropriate
- #todo add examples
- Compromise
- Relatedly to What it's like to do something wholeheartedly, there's a phenomenon that can show up in eg political contexts, where two parties will end up compromising on some policy, producing a policy that:
- neither party actually thinks will work
- may in fact not work—standing on the east beach of the lake vs the west beach of the lake is very different than trying to stand in the middle of the lake
- cows are black and they are white and they are sometimes both but they aren't grey (...except some rare breeds, but you get the point)
- so when it fails, neither party has actually been disproven
- The critical rationalists talk about this
- David Deutsch says stuff about it in Beginning of Infinity
- Karl Popper writes about some related topics in an article... I think this one about politics.
- "Don't Knock It Til You've Tried It"
- p90 of influencer, re Mimi Silbert & Delancey
- Depression also has a structure like this
- > These hyperpriors can reach the level of a mood disorder when they become resistant to feedback. They present a couple of different arguments for how this might happen. In one, a depressed person doesn’t feel any positive emotions, since there’s such a strong prior on everything being terrible that these never reach the level of plausibility. Since positive emotions are a useful tool for figuring out what makes you happy and urging you to do it, depressed people aren’t motivated to make themselves happy, and so never end up contradicting their bias towards believing they’re sad all the time. This fits really well with “behavioral activation”, a common psychotherapy where therapists tell depressed people to just go out and do happy things whether they want to or not, and which often helps the depression resolve.
