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Comment by eecc | Hacker News Reader

Quote : “In this work the team induced depression in rats either chemically or by inducing what's called "learned helplessness." (The latter involves training the rats to recognize that they have no control over negative consequences in their environment.)”

Oh shit... that’s quite disturbing

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The genesis of the learned optimism movement was Dr. Seligman locking dogs in a cage and giving them electric shocks until they gave up trying to avoid them. This is somewhat glossed over in his books...

Yeah, they basically torture rats to test antidepressants. It's really upsetting.

Apparently it's funny to most hn'ers. I'm guessing they aren't clear on what it takes to teach helplessness.

Let's not assume that about most HNers.

Learned Helplessness is a really curious subject. I think the current capitalist system in western countries relies heavily on this mechanism - "I must work for many hours, otherwise I will become unemployed, so I am bound to this life" is a thought that kills many people's dreams, and relies on a false belief. In fact, you CAN survive without working full-time, trying to work for yourself on novel things, and it's probably a more fulfilling and engaging life, versus willingly giving all your time to your employer.

I was first introduced to the concept by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMPzDiraNnA

Apparently they made the rats work on maintaining legacy software.

While getting paid?

No, they sent them to get their Ph.D.

They train the doctoral rats to induce depression in other rats for research purposes, thus completing the cycle.

With the addendum that it's Class 1 biomedical device software and no one has any real clue about how it works.

That sounds kind of fun, if perhaps lethally risky for whatever poor soul is relying on the device.

If there weren't the results of mistakes leading to death or illness, I'd think black-box re-engineering a device like that would be one of the more interesting projects to take on.

Many a true word spoken in jest. Damn.

Good thing this study wasn't around during Y2K - the rats would have killed themselves.

and then updating the documentation and test plans

Now that is funny!

More than a few dogs show this behaviour.

The original studies on learned helplessness used dogs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness#Early_key...

They made them watch the news!

Unless the rats turn to stoicism. Then the joke’s on the researchers.

This is exactly what I thought. Could it be that their results are confounded by a mix of rats for which the induced state of helplessness results in depression and some other rats for which this resulted in enlightenment of sorts.

is their enlightenment related to cheese ?

I'm sure the researchers control for this. Most likely they block the rats' access to HN at the firewall, thus preventing them from ever hearing about stoicism in the first place.

Learned helplessness would manifest differently than stoicism. In LH you don't take clearly good (for external observer) opportunities because you believe it will all end badly anyway.

How can the stoic be so much more knowledgeable about whether the opportunity will work out or not?

The stoic may have imperfect assesment of the opportunity's true value, but in LH the assesment is way more off - it's basically always zero for all opportunities.

> Research has found that a human's reaction to feeling a lack of control differs both between individuals and between situations. i.e. learned helplessness sometimes remains specific to one situation but at other times generalizes across situations.[6][8][9]

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