Optimism, in the article, is used to mean disbelieving that predicted future.
Given the author framed them this way, of course "pessimism" sounds smarter. "Optimism" is counterfactual.
The meanings of common terms have been mutated to be able to make this point. It's effectively circular reasoning via redefinition.
It’s easy to look at polluting transportation, addictive social media or unhealthy processed foods and extrapolate that the future will be worse.
But I believe someone in the 19th century would see a F-150; near real time, global news; and tasty, semi-nutritious food that’s shelf stable for years as amazing!
> The possibility of sustained progress is a consequence of the view of humans as “universal explainers” (cf. David Deutsch), and of progress as driven fundamentally by human choice and effort—that is, by human agency.
> The opposite view is that progress is a matter of luck. If the progress of the last few centuries was a random windfall, then pessimism is logical: our luck is bound to run out.
So it's[1] not about predicting trends based on present conditions. In fact almost the opposite. An optimist would predict that hard unsolved problems will be solved in the future, because that has been the trend.
[1] by "it" I meant to say "pessimism" here
As a humanist, I too am very optimistic about the ultimate triumph of human agency. What gives me cause for pessimism is the emergence of technologies that act against it.
Biology, intelligence and evolution, on a long enough timeline tend toward unbridled possibility. We can overcome anything. I reject Malthusian doom-saying.
The greatest challenge may not be energy or food, but how we overcome our own technologies that cultivate dependency, weakness, and ignorance. How do we avoid abandoning intelligence amplification in favour of artificial intelligence, reality in favour of a "virtual metaverse"?
I think the subtle danger in late modernity is the creation of technologies that optimise for pessimism, thrive on discord, reward laziness, and learn from our worst vices in order to amplify them and offer us more.
It's a fuzzy term that mostly works out to some sort of often collaborative social environment. Not much different than HN or IRC in many ways, just with a different way of interacting.
If you go with someone else's definition, pessimism could be belief in ubiquitous, sustained human failure, while optimism is recognizing that failure may come, but won't indefinitely or all the time (reality is a mixed bag)
The fundamental nature of someone having delusions is they believe things which are not true, and when faced when evidence of what is actually true, they refuse to believe it.
Like a rock not physically being where that rock is, or that 2+2=5, or their favorite politician loves them.
Fundamentally, any evaluation of a prediction has to be projecting the current world views onto something fundamentally unpredictable, the future.
Any high variance future prediction will sound delusional. Since high variance also means high spread among possible futures, of which only one is actually possible, that also means high odds of a bad prediction.
But someone making, evaluating, or the predictions themselves aren’t delusional yet, because there is no fact yet to compare them against.