People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

You beat me to this by 5 minutes. It seems pretty obvious that the path of causation tends in this direction, rather than the other. And even if there is a signal going the other direction, extracting it from the noise caused by "people who have health and financial stability" seems impossible, unless the sample group were all of people who have lived to at least 85 without having these traits.

If you read the article, the study accounts for influencing factors.

It is possible to imagine a potential casual process that leads to earlier death. What if pessimism creates a constant presence of key stress hormones (Adrenaline, Cortisol and Norepinephrine) and these are already linked to higher likelihoods of heart disease, cancer, ...

There is a lot of data over many decades that supports the expectation that optimism (which ISTR has pretty clear a definition) creates all sorts of positive life event outcomes. (e.g. you're more likely to succeed in whatever endeavors you choose if you're optimistic, which in turn tends to create a safe and supportive environment.)

Some of the most positive people I’ve met have lived in the worst of circumstances. The mind decides what it wants about the situation. Optimism is a powerful tool, even if only the person using it can feel the difference.

I thought that too, but then read the second paragraph:

> That finding was independent of other factors thought to influence life's length — such as "socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors," the researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say.

You should read "factfulness". It annoys me when people talk of the current world and time in negative tones when it is best we have ever had by many measurements. Not that we are having a terrible time, but it is cool to think negatively of the world it seems to me.

With 8 billion people around something bad is always happening every second. For that reasen I uninstalled all news apps years ago.

I'm never bothered with 'breaking news' or anything. I pick a few moments a day to look at some news sites. And I always start with world news, and end with HN, keeps me positive :)

I briefly read some "good news" sites years ago, but stopped because they started to depress me as I looked deeper into the individual reports. Most of the stories I've read were of the pattern of, "an inspiring but meaningless TED talk", or "an individual doing something completely inconsequential, but positively-looking", or "an individual or a small group working hard on a project that's completely bogus, but of course it's going to save the world!" (see e.g. solar roadways, uBeam). Note the focus on individuals, and bogus or unimportant work used to generate good feelings.

Trust is a finite resource. When constantly abused like this, it's bound to get depleted, and optimism goes down the drain along with it. Personally, I'd like to see some good news reporting, but not like the above. I'd like to see stories about organizations over individuals - about government bureaucracies doing a competent job, about NGOs making an impact. About technology that incrementally progresses and yields results. About actual, not potential or imagined breakthroughs. Something that would stand up to the most basic fact checking, most brief critical skimming; something that would demonstrate that actual good things are being done, that some parts of the system work.

"Keeping informed is the duty of a citizen in a democracy"

Sorry, but I have no such duty. We are free to do or not do as we wish. News media has evolved to make us angry and stressed and to pit us against each other, while encouraging us to come back for more. It's gotten much worse over time. After years of fulfilling my "duty" and forever frustrated that the more I learn, the more obvious it becomes that our problems are intractable the problems because most people are only superficially informed enough to know that the other side is wrong and our side is right. I've sworn it off as it's just an unrelenting source of stress and madness from the left and the right.

> Keeping informed is the duty of a citizen in a democracy

Says who? Are we taking votes away from ill-informed people? I don't think so. And even the act of being informed would be a massive task in itself. Where do you start? What does being informed even mean? How much depth is enough? Just following local news in details would take the good part of one's day, so being informed on a much larger level is pretty much an impossible task with the amount of information readily available to us these days.

This is the primary reason I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal (while avoiding the opinion section). It focuses on business, usually describing facts without judgement. Also, lacking are the local tragedies and most politics. In general, curating my own content makes a difference in my mood/anxiety levels.

> As an engineer, it's tough to get past this mindset.

Seems that way considering how you're being downvoted. A shame.

As engineers, we should be more concerned with what actually works, not with what works inside our heads.

Most memorable advice I got from my engineering professor: “you can get pretty far on feelings”

Rational is also quite often faked under how you feel. Sadness makes you analytic, but also myopic so your conclusions are not that valid.

It's always good to balance things and aim for positivity (but not foolishness).

Personally I've found the one reliable metric I have with which to evaluate decisions is: happiness. Everything else is inherently externally derived and I might have good models of how they affect me, but I can neither control nor reliably predict them. For example, I have a good idea of how something will impact me financially, but only to a point. I also can't actually control that outcome. How something affects my happiness, though, that is something I have the most intimate ability to determine. As far as I know something makes me happy, I can't know anything else more. Therefore I try to focus most decisions around what makes me happy, with other metrics thrown in as applicable.

One can choose to be rational and logical, but to what end? How does that serve you, does it? If it doesn't serve you, perhaps consider abandoning rational thought and logic for as long as it might serve to do so. We are not static beings and can be simultaneously rational and irrational. That's our power: to choose how we react and adapt.

Lastly, one thing I've learned the power of as I've gotten older, is the power and benefit of holding beliefs you know to be false. I used to never understand how people could believe demonstrably false things, but I now understand that even something as absurd as that has useful applications. Use it wisely.

We like to think of rationality as objectively true, but it’s not. Rationality is based on axioms that “feel right” and even the idea of being rational “feels good”.

Is it rational to believe the parallel postulate? In unchanging laws of physics? In using logic with creatures who tend not to share your axioms?

It comes down to a feeling. From a rational point of view, if rationality were always helpful it would be highly selected for, yet it is not.

>Biases are irrational, by definition.

Not all biases are irrational...in fact most biases are in rational predispositions based on knowledge and/or first hand experience. Basically its an attempt to apply logic/rationality to unknown situations.

Bias is always framed as a negative word/trait, and it certainly can be (like racial prejudice), but bias should also be looked at as an evolutionary tool humans can use to apply past learned experiences to similar situations in the future.

Just as an example, motorcycle riders may have a bias against certain types of vehicles because of their training/experience, and they apply this bias when making decisions that impact their safety on the road, even though the specific vehicle/situation may not pose a danger. In an evolutionary context, maybe you saw a fury 4 legged animal kill one of the members of your tribe, so you apply a bias against all 4 legged fury animals. Now you don't know if all fury 4 legged animals are dangerous, or pose a threat, but at the same time its no irrational to apply the bias because in potentially life/death situations it may be better safe than sorry. Obviously its good to keep and open mind, maybe you can train such an animal and it may even turn out to be your best friend, but nothing wrong with approaching the situation with your bias either.

To understand "rationality is not always to our benefit" from an engineering perspective it can be helpful to bear in mind the ideas of evolutionary psychology - the evolutionary pressures on brain design are towards getting your genes into the next generation, not towards being perfectly rational. For example as to who gets the girl or the leadership role the guy who says I'm the greatest and believes it has an advantage over the guy who thinks he's mediocre even if in reality both are equally mediocre. So rationality works well for engineering things, less so for dealing with humans.

Sounds like "Cognitive Dissonance for Fun and Profit."

Weren’t you troubled by the fact that he admits optimists are factually wrong compared to pessimists, blame others, don’t admit fault, and just seem like generally unpleasant people (insurance salesmen and the type of person who talks on planes, for example)? Yeah, okay, they are happier, live longer, are more successful, get elected... but at what cost to the world? I came away thinking we should train the optimists to listen to pessimists more, not the opposite...

this book really didn't seem very helpful for me. as another commenter described, the book seems to very heavily imply that being a pollyanna-ish person is a superior state of being -- AKA, ignorance is bliss.

sure, i believe that. but it doesn't help those of us who can't look away from the real world.

i get that my critique of the book sounds like a strawman, but i genuinely can't escape the interpretation of the argument that i proposed here on the basis of what the book says alone.

there is no way I'm making it to 85

or a simple mixup of causation. It may easily be the case that healthier people also happen to be more optimistic, from the article (I haven't looked at the study myself), this appears to be purely correlational.

Probably easier to find women still alive at that age. (Here in the U.S. at least, women tend to outlive men by ~5 years)

"Data are from 2 cohorts, women from the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) and men from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study (NAS)"

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/37/18357.short

Every day you can get up out of bed, enjoy a cup of coffee, and go outside and see the trees and smell the air, it's a great freakin' day.

I’d love to see a different question answered: is there an inverse correlation to be drawn between optimism and stress levels. From my experience significant stress can be just as debilitating as physical ailments and I find that optimists seem to handle stressful situations with more apparent ease than others.

> I predict that telling people to be optimistic will not be effective.

I think that it's amusing how the scientific response (which I shared) to this finding in favour of optimism is pessimism.

My dad survived flying 30 missions over Germany when his group had 80% casualties. He had accepted that he wouldn't survive.

He was always an optimist. I'd ask him why, and he'd say he survived the war when so many of his buddies didn't, and was going to enjoy every day of it. (He lived to 93.)

Your doctor optimism is more important!

"The placebo effect works and you can catch it from your doctor" (October 22, 2019 )

"If there's one thing you do want to catch from a trip to your doctor, it's her optimism."

"The new study both demonstrates that the placebo effect is transmitted from doctor to patient, and shows how it might work. Researchers randomly assigned undergraduate students to play the role of a patient or a doctor. The "patients" were given a controlled heat stimulus to the forearm, after receiving one of two types of cream from the "doctor.""

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/10/21/npr-the-placebo-eff...

(January 2020) Journal of Psychosomatic Research:

"The influence of personality traits on the placebo/nocebo response: A systematic review"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002239991... ( Open )

"Highlights

• Results on the influence of personality traits on placebo responses are heterogeneous.

• More studies are available on the influence of personality traits on the placebo response than on the nocebo response.

• Optimism seems to be positively associated with placebo responses.

• Anxiety might lead to increased nocebo responses.

"

Or because, you know, it's a valid question for science to research.

But please, do tell us your favorite pet projects they should be studying instead.

After all who cares for factors of longevity, when they could be studying new revolutionary shoe laces, or some new mobile phone bound tech...

It is completely valid to study. There are plenty of "every knows that" bits of wisdom that are wrong. Or the degree of the effect is unknown. Or the mechanism of effect is unknown.

Let me be concrete. Everyone knows that it is better to eat more fruits and vegetables and less processed food. Off the top of your head, how much must one eat to make a difference? Does it help people live longer, or just reduce sickness? Does it help by 1%, 5%, 20%?

If you just read the title of the report it is easy to be cynical and say, "duh, I knew that", but if you read the actual study it surely will give insights that you were not aware of.

> More of someone depressed or someone who has been beaten down in life.

Who accurately recognizes that they are going to be killed before people that have a tendency to have things go their way.

Sounds like we should just rename the study then worry about how they define pessimism!

I feel like usually the pessimistic complaining posts like this in hackernews are much more negative. It feels like there's a lot of hesitancy in this one and it's much more accepting/positive because you're afraid of being pessimistic because of the article :P

(Mostly just being cheeky. It's not fair to judge people on the internet when you don't know them)

You are right. The pessimism definition has many many cracks to end up with a bias of results.

Cohort studies cannot show causation, indeed, but that's not very relevant for what's being claimed.

And what they are saying with "finding was independent of other factors" is that they adjusted for demographics and health conditions.

Yes, there are countless factors that could impact the results, the adjustments are not perfect, but cohorts are useful clues and in the large scheme of things, if you are optimistic, this shows you have a higher likelihood to live longer.

Doesn't matter. You can be optimistic or pessimist in the same exact situation. E.g. when in dire economic situation. The pessimist is "right" sure.

But being right doesn't make you stronger.

If you give up hope, you lose all kinds of benefits of the hopeful - including fighting till the last minute, and perhaps reversing the situation.

Not to mention that whether you're right or wrong to be hopeful, some situations just reverse themselves, or something good happens out of nowhere, in which case the pessimist just got a more expended period of internal suffering for no good reason.

I know a lot of optimists who aren't realistic. But they're happy and tend to be successful.

It's a principle among the Hasidim, too. The followers of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov believe that we should feel commanded to be happy at all times:

https://breslov.org/1366/

I haven't read the article yet but I've heard stats like this before. Is it simply the effect of a positive emotional state? When my friend and I were talking about this I said:

'Be happy. Or else.'

Being optimistic and realistic will always be better than just being realistic. The two aren't at odds and having things to look forward to is what separates the miserable from the successful.

Thiel has a good chapter on dichotomizing optimism/pessimism as it relates to building the future in his Zero to One book. Someone else can probably quote it better, but it basically boils down adding a definite/indefinite qualifier also.

He posits:

- Definite pessimists have a concrete negative potential future in mind and often work to subjugate it

- Indefinite pessimists have a vague "the future looks negative" and don't act on concrete plans to improve it

- Definite optimists have a concrete positive potential future in mind and often work to make it a reality

- Indefinite optimists often have a vague "everything will be fine" mindset and rely on others to make that a reality

On a general sense, I'd wager that both optimists and negatives are a good idea to have at the collective level, as both are driven by similar but different motivations. I'd say it's the definite subsets of each group that are "realistic" and "useful" as it pertains to the future, rather than either larger group as a whole.

> accepting the world for what it is

That's impossible for anyone in the world.

A pessimist and an optimist will probably consider various interpretations as realistic, yet neither will see the world "as it is".

Even just the idea of the world as something that can be seen, thought of, considered, described etc. is squeezing it through a very human-shaped filter, and what you get out of the other end is always more about us than about the world.

Being realistic is not an alternative to optimism or pessimism though.

A pessimist cynic will say "that's just the way it is" for example.

Additionally pessimism and optimism are mainly about thinking about the future rather than objective state of now.

Perhaps it's stocism that's a more fitting alternative.

I'm gonna live forever, or die trying.

As someone else has mentioned in the thread, the book Learned Optimism is all about this. I have also found learning meditation from the book The Mind Illuminated to be helpful. You could also check out CBT, and/or the writings of Albert Ellis.

Fundamentally, you will need to learn to let go of your negative perspective. One thing that helped me with this is realizing that the facts of reality are one thing, and how I feel about them are another. These are entirely orthogonal, and rewiring yourself to react differently to things is very doable, especially if you realize that your negative reactions are not helpful.

The the.. do I sound like I stutter mf?

If you lie to yourself you'll know you're lying... Also that's a great way to keep yourself in a bad job or relationship when you could leave and get a better one.

And in this case, you could easily imagine the arrow of causation pointing in the other way. If you have the good fortune of being generally healthy, and make enough income to have access to good healthcare, it's likely that you will live to 85. But these same factors also make you a likely optimist.

And it's easy to condemn unfortunate people for their pessimism, because haven't they caused their own circumstances by "choosing" pessimism?

Optimism: the conceit of the fortunate.

>so the authors of the paper are aware of that.

The authors of every paper are aware of that. It's a thing that's being hammered on to them from early days at the university, and they are either studying for their PhDs or seasoned researchers when they create a paper.

It's mostly geek arrogance and facile dismissal from HN crowd to put this tired cliche mantra up.

When papers seem to ignore this, it's willingfully so (to get grants, pad their publications, etc with a nice result), not because they don't know this.