Martin Seligman
30 Oct 2021 - 08 Mar 2025
- 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, hunter gatherers, agriculture, bronze age, Illiad...
- "Early Christianity is 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 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'd say about BLM?