In fact in my experience people who can push past this “epistemological learned helplessness” also tend to have significant problems with day to day living
In a manner of speaking, I boil this down to how often you spend in different levels of thinking. I’m gonna go ahead and share a back-and-forth chat I had with ChatGPT on this precise topic the other day:
https://chat.openai.com/share/03302643-5efc-41e0-a681-6d1699...
To me it boils down to an intersection of raw IQ and experience. If you’re generally “thinking fast” in Kahneman-language then that would be “type1” thinking that most people do most of the day.
Much beyond that and thinking becomes exponentially harder with every level of “simulation” your brain has to do with more complex, multi variable simulations walking up the abstraction stack.
The downside to that, however, is that if you don’t have accurate perceptions, or there are flaws in reasoning, then you come to conclusions that don’t fit because your perceptions are off. This is the other side of genius, which is typically some kind of very iconoclastic position on something political social or personal.
I think it fits with what the author said to conclude:
“ It seems to me that although these people are more likely to become terrorists or Velikovskians or homeopaths, they’re also the only people who can figure out if something basic and unquestionable is wrong, and make this possibility well-known enough that normal people start becoming willing to consider it.”
Most people however have neither the IQ nor the experience to actually have coherence for almost anything at the 4th or 5th order.
Usually only in one area of their life like work or a hobby do anyone actually have the attention and focus to get to that level of coherency - and worldwide that’s extremely rare as most people aren’t secure enough to have the time and resources to gain the experience needed.