Epistemic Learned Helplessness (2013)

[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal]

A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. You could consider this a form of epistemic learned helplessness, where I know any attempt to evaluate the arguments is just going to be a bad idea so I don’t even try. People used to talk about how terrorists must be very poor and uneducated to fall for militant Islam, and then someone did a study and found that they were disproportionately well-off, college educated people (many were engineers).

Source: slatestarcodex.com