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It's empirical-oriented people like us

Translation: People who have spent so much time playing with highly abstracted and greatly simplified models, they've lost their grasp on how messy and complicated the real world can be.

More than that, we're used to dealing with maps when the territory may be inherently unmappable. It may not just be hard to produce an accurate map for the entire territory, it may be impossible.

I think that being empirically-minded requires, in part, accepting that not everything is known. Science differentiated itself from the rest of philosophy when it put aside big but unanswerable questions in favor of smaller questions that could be addressed empirically.

>feel like people who study subjective topics like the value of human life (philosophers) have already internalized "learned helplessness".

This.