Agency

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more

The kind of agency that comes from knowing how to win friends and get things done is important and should be learned. But without aligning it with wisdom—and without fellow travelers on the path toward less foolishness—greater foolishness often follows.

I have been enamored with Samo Burja’s notion of a live player for a while, which he contrasts to a dead player. From his Great Founder Theory:

A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of... See more