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Revision as of 22:19, 21 March 2026
Learned helplessness on The Basics Guide
On X
2010
Attempt @1tweet #foo summary: 'Massively parallel learned helplessness intervention via saturation Asabiyyah-boarding'
2012
Obviously unworkable ideas 1, Learned Helplessness 0.
Congratulations to everyone at SpaceX.
2017
It's easy to miss a bigger point: folks shaking off our national learned helplessness. Folks who can overwhelm D.C. won't need fear as much. https://t.co/cBWHpgzcz6
@Martyrmade Interesting point. But this is a warning shot across the bow of a new ship. A peaceful demonstration of less peaceful power.
Can we drown out @united's safety script w passenger participation? Ex: "In the unlikely event of a waterboarding" #UnitedAirlinesHorrorShow
.@united There has to be a hack against mere learned helplessness. If we can't avoid @united, driving their cost is necessary to complete the market.
2019
Iām numbed. I think Iām done talking about whatever the current mass shooting is. I want to say to all of us who still have children, parents, spouses, hold them close. Iām so sorry for all who are about to lose them during September. Which hasnāt happened yet. But it will.
Can we stop pretending that we care as a nation? Because clearly we donāt. There can be 10 of these in a month and we donāt do a thing. We donāt try things. We donāt experiment. We sit here like low agency idiots suffering from learned helplessness.
I suggested that Iām numbed by our learned helplessness around an increasingly lethal US mass shooting problem *without* mentioning gun control. Suddenly Iām an irrational jerk who doesnāt care about auto accidents, water, pools, etc and let everyone down?
Immediately lecturing folks feeling specific loss of life in a single community (and who are not yet even talking 2nd amendment rights) on general swimming pool safety, or how disappointed you are in the logic of the posters is bad optics & an excellent way to lose your argument.
Word to the wise: wait for someone (like me) to actually make a bad argument. I might! But a mass shooting of say N dead in one school community with a note from a deliberate killer with a known mental health history is a bigger deal for society than N diffuse auto fatalities.
BTW I donāt mean to pick on the specific post. There are many such tweets and DMs making the same points with not much variation. But it has become almost an automated reflex despite there being some validity in the arguments.
Letās talk about the next major US school shooting with more than 3 dead. Those folks are currently alive. They are just having a day today like anyone else. They donāt need our thoughts & prayers yet. We could take action to save those lives. We know it is going to happen.
Nu?
@RealJimbabwe Donāt forget malaria. Or suicide. Or snakes.
@RichyDispatch I donāt like mondays.
@CarrisJake Hereās my plan: That we begin talking ahead of time and not retroactively. Move to the next one. Like it is āGroundhog dayā. Letās set a schedule of anticipation and see if it changes anything. Why are we exhibiting learned helplessness? Makes no sense.
@CarrisJake Gun control is feared by many of my fellow Americans. Ok. So...I want the strong 2A crowd to take the lead. What real plan do we have that we can fund and implement to get these deaths toward numbers that arenāt an embarrassment?
@Lann5000 @CarrisJake Okay. Do we raise taxes and do mental health checks? What is it we do to avoid restrictions on firearm ownership to get good results?
@IbnChristo So, this is a negative externality of freedom and we are on the efficient frontier?
@Beefalo37 I just took it. My solution is to shift the burden onto future shootings so that we can find out why we refuse to cry over milk that is as yet unspilled. As it were.
@Thinkofwhy So this is too far down the list and we should not over focus?
@JamesDeanAnder1 So, focus on the media distortion?
@JamesDeanAnder1 @RealSaavedra So prioritize things that are more deadly?
@HamfistHarold @CarrisJake I donāt hate armed guards. Fill me in. How does this part of the conversation go when you bring it up? Iām not a veteran of this stalemate. More of a casual observer. Thanks.
@CrisVerdonik I want to understand what a conversation looks like that isnāt held in the aftermath of a shooting. I always see this done after a shooting with bodies that are still warm and grieving parents everywhere. I want to understand the issue. Why do we deadlock? Itās sad & surprising.
@CoffeeBear5 Sure.
@MiTenYo This is a highly conserved quasi response. Not without some merit. But also oddly reflexive as well.
@BadHombreMarcoB That makes some sense. It is a possible approach. Does that inhibit shooters or just limit their damage in your opinion? Has it been studied?
@BadHombreMarcoB Iām just ignorant of the theory here.
@Neubian Agreed.
2020
Listen carefully: you donāt have to elect Biden or Trump.
The world has woken up via being suddenly shut in doors by crazy incompetent people largely born in the 1940s and 1950s without a coherent explanation. Or plan.
Lives lost. Nurses sacrificed. Jobs & businesses destroyed.
Pick someone who never met Jeffrey Epstein. Pick someone who can code or with a masters degree or better in STEM.
You donāt have to keep picking the card the magician is forcing you to select as your card. Itās not YOUR card. Itās the magicianās card. Grab the magicians wrist.
You would be better off with a thoughtful and competent 45 year old electrician or self made businessperson as president. Almost no ordinary people have family business interests in China or Ukraine. Chose anyone without dementia. Pick someone who canāt remember the moon landing.
You donāt have to take these choices. *Nobody* smart wants these people except to defeat each other. You donāt really like Fox. Or CNN. Or the NYT. Except when they go after your enemies.
Okay. So go cold turkey. Call them all what they are: The UnWorkables.
If the enormous generation of you young folk canāt use this mismanagement of a pandemic by a bipartisan kleptocratic gerontocracy, then you arenāt thinking like young folk at all. Demand your debt free future and the removal of this preposterous class of ancient legacy predators.
That card says āBidenā. Take that card and a lighter and set it on fire. Then grab the deck and pick another card, rifle it to check for markings on the back, look to see if they all say Biden, and chose a different card at random. This was never a primary. There was no election.
Learned helplessness is UnAmerican. This is like China or Russia controlling our minds from a bad sci-fi thriller. But we are being controlled by our grandparents and parents instead. And they donāt care.
This is beyond insane and it has never been like this. Ever.
Rant over.
2021
I think thatās great. Where we differ is that I donāt think Earth, our Moon & Mars plus space stations connected by rockets give us much real diversity. Itās barely doable. But assume you could make it work. I would want to run 1000s of uncorrelated experiments as most will fail.
Letās be clear about this weird sounding issue.
@elonmusk is one of the only minds properly focused in public on the issue of the current danger to human consciousness from having all known intelligent life in the universe on a single terrestrial surface. His top idea: rockets.
But yes, he believes. In fun. In hope. In ending the epidemic of learned helplessness that has infected everyone else. So Iām a pretty die hard Elon supporter. Not because I agree w/ everything. But he gets **the** big issue right. We need to end the single correlated experiment.
And if we are stuck in this solar system with the physics we know there is only one good surface and two marginal ones.
Faster than light spacetime travel is bullshit. But going beyond Einstein is not.
Itās unbelievably hard, but everything Elon does is hard. Like hope.
But because Elon is so smart, I donāt discount the idea that he isnāt interested in finding out if post-Einsteinian physics for some reason. I just doesnāt add up to me, but maybe he knows something I donāt. But north of $100B w/ his knowledge of physics, he could change it all.
Now he may have a reason. But I have never heard him address this so it just makes no sense to me. No one is taking the need to go beyond Einstein seriously so we are pretty much trapped here in this solar system with the physics we know. That means three terrestrial surfaces.
So on the main issue we agree. The second issue is where we differ. A multi multi billionaire (12 digits!) as smart as Elon w a physics background could diversify & place a small 2nd bet on rendering General Relativity a mere effective theory by single handedly fixing physics.
I just want to know why no one asks this question. Lex could do it. Joe could do it. But he doesnāt seem to address it so I have no idea what is going on. Itās not some special insight of mine. Our best hope for his stated dream is new physics. And making physics rich is cheap.
And the two multi billionaires I believe have the best technical chops to do this are Jim Simons and Elon Musk. But no one wants to build institutions that can do this because our institutions havenāt worked well enough since the Apollo program. So, Iām hopeful he gets asked.
Now that doesnāt strike me as a small ask. Itās a big bill. But it is also our best hope. Imagine COVID was radioactive fallout from a serious nuclear exchange and compute half lives. Or imagine a climate disaster.
Elon shouldnāt have to do this. But government canāt anymore.
Imagine you wanted to pay 2m salary to all the top 50 theorists in the world for 10 years to get them all to move to a couple of centers to free them from careerist temptations so they could at last swing for the fences. The salaries would be about 0.005 of current net worth.
- OccupyMars is good, but #FreeThePhysicists isnāt even as popular as #FreeTheNipple or #FreeBeer
Take a look around you. Much as I love it, this place is likely going to blow.
Elon is right: time to diversify. And we need to have fun if we are going to be saving ourselves. š
There isnāt much left that works in this area. Iām still betting on Elon making sense. Itās one of our last really good hopes. And returning fun and mischief to public spirited scientific attempts to āpreserve the light of human consciousnessā is something Iām 100% behind.
Either way I want to encourage him. But I want to know why rockets over physics. Why not both? Why is a physics guy w a HUGE risk appetite not trying to do for Einstein & his speed limit what Einstein did for Newtonās Gravity? If you know the answer, Iād love to know it as well.
@finaltoe Physics is subject to survivor bias in a system of perverse incentives. We induce physicists to work within failed paradigms if they want to eat or house their families. Itās an insane thing to do. We shoot ourselves in the foot when we take away their independence.
@jetpen No one sane wants to have to lean on time dilation for the reason you state.
But I *formally* agree.
@AndrewS65627884 Sure: @elonmusk, you have an open invitation to talk whenever you want. In confidence if preferable. On a podcast if desired.
No reply needed. Keep doing you.
@agoonforhire Thank you for this!
2023
@jordanbpeterson I donāt know Doc. After the pull out from Afghanistan, Kamala being second to the presidency, and the president having a 1/20 chance of death in any year, I think we are just tired of living and mainstaing this beautiful planet.
Seligmanās āLearned Helplessnessā at global scale.
@hereforElon @jordanbpeterson Thatās what they do: Prebunk any one capable of forcing investigation.
@brucefenton @jordanbpeterson Are you kidding???
@brucefenton @jordanbpeterson You have got to be kidding.
@mdotgru @jordanbpeterson Sorry to lose you. This is happening at two levels: national & planet-wide.
At the national level Ukraine must defend itself from its aggressor.
But you have to use both lenses. Backing a massive thermonuclear power into a conventional corner in a 1/2 proxy war is totally new.
@mdotgru @jordanbpeterson The word has seen many wars. And eastern/Central Europe has had its borders redrawn many time. But this post-Thermonuclear scenario is entirely without meaningful precedent. And we are pretending it is merely another conventional war.
It is an interesting question as to who inspires us in physics. Here is a list of 20th century giants whose work inspired me that might work as protagonists with interesting stories that deserve to be considered along with the best known Einstein/Hawking/Oppenheimer/Etc.:
CN Yang (with Lee and Simons)
Paul Dirac
Ernst Stueckelberg
Madame Wu
David Bohm
Abdus Salam
Ken Wilson
Emmy Noether
Ettore Majorana
Carlo Rubio
Shin'ichirÅ Tomonaga
Lev Landau
Simon Van der Meer
Freeman Dyson
Julian Schwinger
Paul Ehrenfest
John VonNeumann
Feza Gursey
Wolfgang Pauli
Louis and Edward Witten
Hans Bethe
George Sudarshan
Vera Rubin
Gerard 't Hooft
Not all of those stories areā¦uhā¦simple.
Would be curious to hear names from others.
i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that.
let's get that movie made!
(i think the social network managed to do this for startup founders.)
But letās face facts: inspiration is not the issue. Fundamental Physics needs to be a good life. What is holding us back is:
A) Terrible Pay.
B) Worse Odds of Survival
C) Decoupling of Success at Physics from Success in Physics
D) The Matthew Effect.
E) Math and Physics Pricks
F) Tyranny of large programs over individuals.
G) Multi Decade Stagnation
H) Un Scientific And even Anti-scientific behavior.
I) The Matilde Effect
J) The Sudarshan Effect
K) Ethics Collapse
L) Needlessly long pedagogical sequence (e.g. intro physics -> Classical Mechanics -> Grad Classical Mechanics -> Symplectic Geometry) driven by history.
M) Socializing physics into a team sport in areas dominated by individuals and iconoclasts.
N) Tolerance for Program level failure (e.g. *obsessive* use of toy model physics to evade a reckoning).
O) Intolerance for individual error and failure by those in programs.
P) Failure to reward early contributions (e.g. *Abelian* Chern Simons QFT).
Q) Atrocious MSM journalism distorting the public understanding.
R) Relentless discussion of woo physics in public and 3-5 real topics (e.g. somebodies cat).
S) Learned Helplessness coming from over-learning Ken Wilson.
T) Inability to support motherhood of female physicists.
U) Inability to keep physics marriages easily together with jobs.
V) DEI loyalty oaths and loss of autonomy.
W) Flooding of markets with disposable labor and abuse apprenticeship as labor.
X) Kicking up on attribution.
Y) Overpaying for cherry topping.
Z) Fetishizing the quantum when innovation in classical field theory remains the heart of QFT.
But lastly, if outsiders want to fund and fix movies, you will find that going to the āLeading physicistsā wonāt work. Peer review canāt work when the leadership *is* the problem. You get more failure.
You need to hold meetings where you get disagreement. So choose the leaders and iconoclasts with great care. Patrick Collison isnāt terrible at this. B+. Best I have ever seen. Start there. Good luck. š
So you have my list. It is incomplete and idiosyncratic. Iād love to have your corrections and additions.
Soā¦.Where is yours? Thanks again.
@Perterra1 No. And it doesnāt include people for different reasons. Feynman is already known to the public. People have no idea who Robert Herman is. Etc.
@Perterra1 @patrickc Man is incredible. On so many levels.
@illogicalUSA It took zero. Not as artful as I could have been. But there are so many issues.
@DrBrianKeating Not true. At least Three. But to your point, this is just the list that inspired meā¦and I am not a physicist.
Hint: Iām looking for your list. Doctor.
@darreljlewis1 @Perterra1 Itās also *deliberately* incomplete.
@bluesneakerdog @Perterra1 @patrickc The clarity is double edged. But letās just say I trust Patrick more than anyone else when I disagree with him.
So you have my list. It is incomplete and idiosyncratic. Iād love to have your corrections and additions.
Soā¦.Where is yours? Thanks again.
@alexattack88 Ran out of letters. Devanagari next time.
@ziegler34 Damn you Matthew!
@KeithJensonn @MarkSeanPuls Already well known.
@ThePudyTat Aware. Bizarre.
@complex_maths If I put them on we wouldnāt have a general discussion. See Paul Ehrenfest.
@renegademormon @Perterra1 I laughed. Didnāt see it comingā¦
@Circusponi Funny
@raulsplay I made the name up: but the fact is that EVERYONE who matters will get it. And without explanation.
@MrJPL @witten271 The greatest of our time.
@nandor117 Forgot Rabi. Super inspiring story along with Schwinger.
2024
@martinmbauer So letās talk about the best new theories with new particle predictions.
What are your favorite top 5 theories formulated over say the last 25 years ranked by well motivated particle predictions just as you see it Martin? Then as the community sees them? Thx.
Iām not truly understanding even though I think I follow everything you wrote. I sense the word āagnosticā is doing a lot of heavy lifting in not giving me 5 modern theories.
One way of making sense of what you just posted is that there isnāt enough information in the Wilsonian EFT framing to want to worry about any particles/fields/dof that arenāt strictly needed to close the observed physics off within the current energy regime. Is that what you mean??
If soā¦yikes.
Nice to meet you.
I am not unaware of thisā¦but I am shocked by the *change* in the interpretation of EFT during the String Era.
40 years ago, the Standard Model was considered geometrically beautiful but mysterious. āSO(10)ā was an example of how to get a 3 factor reductive Lie group and a bizarre series of internal quantum numbers to become elegant. In short, the SM was an EFT, but not a random one. It was a coherent idea that pointed the way towards its own preferred completion/extension. Oddly, String phenomenology recognized this.
Then as the field spun off into mathematically informed medieval theology, the SM started to be seen as ugly. A random EFT without a preferred extrapolation towards its Planckian revelation. Seeing the SM as in anyway distinguished became seen as ānot getting Wilsonās pointā analogous to archaic views on strong reductionism.
This is such a disaster to think this is what Martin means. Itās the physics version of Seligmanās āLearned Helplessnessāātheory.
Longer discussion. But SUSY and GUTs both got associated with particular instantiations of general ideas by zealots.
The SU(5) and MSSM variants failed and then, oddly, the community moved to a dysfunctional interpretation. If no observed SU(5) proton decay then downgrade ALL GUTs. Similar for E-W scale super partners.
The community is just bizarrely intellectually dysfunctional now. Strings has an infinite leash and the other good ideas are ignored with this monstrous new EFT defeatism as the new sophistication. I still canāt believe this is our world.
That gives me some insight into your worldview. If I understand correctly, it hugs the shore of observed SM phenomenology to avoid tilting at windmills of geometry or chasing shadows of quantum gravity for the most part.
Right handed neutrinos, for example, are implicit within the old āSO(10)ā GUT, but you list them here as ānewā because they arenāt here to fill out a Weyl 16 for Spin(10). They just are being posited without much motivation beyond the dark sector. Wilsonian agnosticism as it were.
@martinmbauer Got it. Is this exciting to you? Are you hopeful here? High conviction?
@WeLivetoServe @martinmbauer No kidding.
2025
With respect to our institutions in the west, I canāt stop seeing the fundamental division as being into two basic groups:
A) HIGH TRUST: āSure, they arenāt perfect; I myself like to think independently. But they are better than any of the crazy alternatives.ā
B) LOW TRUST: āI donāt get how anyone still listens to legacy institutions. They are over.ā
āā
I bring this up because what I donāt see is C)
C) DECLINING TRUST: āI cannot believe that our previously high quality institutions are being looted and/or crumbling at this rate. They are decaying from a very high height, so they are still working in many areas but they are already pure poison in others. We canāt live modern prosperous secure lives without them. So why are we exhibiting universal learned helplessness with respect to getting rid of the rot? Why the all or nothing thinking? What is going on? Itās like someone attacked us by convincing us to hollow ourselves out so you could knock us over with a feather.ā
Iām in C). And I find it much more helpful to replace Left / Right with High Trust / Low Trust as our dominant political axis. High Trust roughly correlating with Blue and Low Trust roughly correlated with Red.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thx.š
@NicoleBehnam Every word Nicole.
@StephenLeeCarr āBitcoin Fixes This.ā
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