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Comment by lotyrin | Hacker News Reader

Certainly, an unbiased symmetrical appraisal should be the goal? If the premise is that the effects upon your past success are equally likely to be general or specific regardless of their sign, and any asymmetry between your appraisal of the specificity between positive and negative effects indicates bias, isn't either bias problematic?

All the worst initiatives that have crashed and burned around me in my career, smoldering craters, were built and planned by people who thought they were generally competent and that things would generally be fine, we can bet big on this one. All their past failures, ruins crumbled under the pressure of unmanaged complexity or debris scattered by some unforeseen risk, were minor specifics, won't happen this time.

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I agree with you that accuracy should be the goal, but Seligman doesn't. I read most of the book, he thinks that delusional optimism is good, because it will make you happier and more productive.

He's used his research to teach optimism to soldiers so that they are more effective. But perhaps it is appropriate for soldiers in the middle of a war to not feel super optimistic?

>If the premise is that the effects upon your past success are equally likely to be general or specific regardless of their sign

I don't know if that's a true premise. It's an empirical question. There's no fundamental reason why the universe should be even-handed.

I read a good portion of Learned Optimism a while back. I think it's a dangerous book to read for certain types of depressive personalities. Ironically, there's a reading of the book that reinforces pessimism.

> Certainly, an unbiased symmetrical appraisal should be the goal?

I have not read Seligman's work, but I can see at least one way in which the asymmetry in response to positive vs. negative can be justified.

If someone is doing something positive, you want them to keep doing it--so you want it to be permanent. And you want them to internalize whatever it is that makes them do that thing, make it part of themselves--so you want it to be personal. And you want them to expand whatever that positive factor is to other domains--so you want it to be general.

If someone is doing something negative, you want them to stop doing it--so you want it to be temporary. And you want them to not make it part of themselves--so you want it to be impersonal. And you want them to keep it confined and not let it affect other domains--so you want it to be specific.

In other words, the "optimistic bias" is an asymmetric strategy to achieve an asymmetric goal--maintain positives, but change negatives.

I have not read the book so I can't comment on that but I have done a good deal of cognitive behavioural therapy. Mostly I was taught to consider the optimistic explanation and assess how realistic my negative thoughts were.

The main exercise we used was to write down my thoughts, feelings, physiology and actions in response to a situation. Then we did it again for a more positive imagining of how the same situation could have played out. It's useful to see how each aspect effects the others and identifying how things could be changed helps a lot when the same situation arises again.

For sure it wouldn't be helpful to be wildly over optimistic, it must be very stressful to intentionally delude yourself. But the error bars on most of these judgements are so wide I don't see anything wrong with erring on the optimistic side.

Of course another skill is learning to avoid unhelpful judgements altogether. But that's a different topic and I won't pretend I have much insight there.

It's an open question in philosophy (what isn't?), but isn't happiness our ultimate aim, or at least a very important component of the ultimate aim?

It's pretty easy to try to bias yourself toward happiness, but still have a daemon in the background making sure you're not diverging from reality too much. If you're very concerned about being biased, then you can probably trust yourself to be reasonable when being biased in this way.

For many of us, we're more inclined to be irrationally biased against ourselves than in favor of ourselves. The conscious, monitored, and controlled bias the OP describes can counteract our natural pessimistic inclinations.

I think the idea is to recognize which side of the coin you naturally or subconsciously tend to fall on, and to consciously apply an asymmetrical or biased force to correct for that.

The author naturally struggles with pessimism, so his presentation and experiences are framed around forcibly developing more optimistic thought patterns. For the people you describe, perhaps the inverse should be applied (the same article from that perspective would be an interesting read!).

I would say that it's probably generally better for you (and those around you) to err on the side of optimism.

I've read Learned Optimism, Seligman at no point makes the recommendation that overly optimistic people should be less optimistic. He doesn't seem too concerned with accuracy, he just says that optimism will make you happier and more productive, so you should pursue it.

He comes very close to explicitly stating that mild optimistic self-delusion is good, because it will make you happier.

He acknowledges depressive realism, that is, the finding that depressed people make more accurate judgments in certain situations, but doesn't really address it.

I think based on what the post was saying that an optimistic attitude doesn't necessarily equate to ignoring reality. To me, the post was more about opinion and self-esteem than facts about a project. It sounds like whatever things have crashed and burned around you in your career were led by people who superimposed their self-esteem onto fact-based decisions.

Problem is that it's very hard to get rid of your own bias.

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