Martin Seligman

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 25 Feb 2023 07:37
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    • Media Lab Perspectives | Agency and Progress: Efficacy, Optimism, and Imagination with Martin Seligman — MIT Media Lab
      • Agency & Progress: Efficacy, Optimism & imagination
      • "positive psychology"
      • "What is agency?"
        • He's been working on it for 50 years
        • Mental State...immediate cause of action
        • "I can make a positive difference in the world"
        • three components
          • Efficacy (goal acheivability in the present)
          • Optimism (same for the future)
          • Imagination (wide range of goals)
        • they do lab experiments...
        • Obviously some problematic reification going on, but that's hardly my real problem with this...
        • History of agency, hhunter gatherers, agriculture, bronze age, Illiad...
        • "Early Christianity iss enormously agentic" ... he's done NLP on the bible to detect agency... comes along later (kings/prophets/new testament)
        • Auguetus reverses this trend...
        • Very whiggish...in the Pinker mold...he rails against "the english department" which seems to be code for marxists?
        • "fewer soldiers dying on battlefield per capita for the last 70 years"...hm, why that timeframe
      • The plasricity of agency
        • learned helplessness
        • "Positive Psychology is the generalization of optimism"
        • "Helplessness is the default" (not learned, its the default response to bad events)
        • Something bullying about all this...it turns me off.
        • Underground Man mode...
        • Freud and Schopenhauer were all about misery and ill-being...
        • PERMA
      • Belief in agency is the engine of progress, without it we stagnate.
      • Efficacy, Optimism
      • Post-Covid Age of Agency
        • "all manner of things shall be well"
      • "Taoism is extremely passive" – true enough.
      • Some forms of Buddhism are more agentic than others
      • I asked a question
        • What are the political implications of agency? Many people feel very unempowered, is p by society, is political organizing a way to build agency?
        • What I really mean is – this is way too individualized.
        • "Important not to be a victim or victimologist" – wonder what he's day about BLM?