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Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr Helplessness is the default, what the brain learns is control, examples of "learned helplessness" are actually the brain "unlearning" control.

Honestly doesn't seem like a very meaningful distinction to me.

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My understanding is that "learned helplessness" is not "unlearned control" but "not-learned control". Someone who can't read isn't someone who forgot how to, but someone who never learned how to.

I think it's helpful because that means that everyone has to learn control. As opposed to just a few people who would need to learn it to fight their helplessness. So, maybe something that should be taught at school?

Reading is something you learn but many behaviors are done instinctively or intuitively.

Imagine every book you picked up were nonsense, but you were forced to "read" them, over and over every day. Over time, your brain might stop parsing the letters and words because it has learned that there is no semantic reason in them anymore, to the point that you might read a meaningful work and no longer be able to understand it.

That is learned helplessness.

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

The article says that there is no such thing as "learned helplessness". To match what the article says, I can turn your example into: when you don't know how to read, reading means nothing. One has to learn to read in order to make sense of the words.

You do not learn to ignore words by reading without knowing how to ("learned helplessness"), you learn to read words.

It's not about having to learn to read. The example the parent poster was making was you already know how to read, but one day find that every book you pick up is filled with nonsense rather than real words. Eventually to stop bothering to try to read anything. That's what they were describing as 'learned helplessness'.

The new paper seems to just re-word it as 'learned loss of control'. I don't see the huge difference. Just because the default state on most things is helplessness doesn't mean you cannot learn to fall back into helplessness again. But if the new wording helps with constructing treatment plans for mental health issues, sounds fine enough to me.

Yes, this is well stated. I understand why people write articles thqt lead with a provocative statement, but I think it's important for us all to read between those lines.

I could see it being useful in helping people in these situations.

Teaching someone to have control, as opposed to “unlearning” their helplessness (which presumably if default, can’t be done).

"unlearning" or even "never learned" I think the distinction is important when trying to fix that. Learning new skill is something different then trying to unlearn something. You probably need to use other methods.

Both the original research and the reversal are a typical case of a narrow scientific truth being misused to paint broad strokes.

As long as you can go back and forth between the too, both are relevant.

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