Pessimism is a barrier to progress
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Like, Bill Gates accepts climate change is happening, that we should do something to avert the problems, and thinks that we can do that as a species. He thinks that renewables and EVs etc. will all help, but aren't enough and we should look for newer solutions. He has invested in multiple different solutions, presumably because he thinks some will be needed but not all will work.
So he's a pessimist, pessimist, optimist, optimist, pessimist, optimist, optimist/pessimist. And that's one person on one idea.
I agree with some of his opinions and methods, but disagree with others. I don't mind him investing in nuclear things, I just wish he'd tone down his 'pessimism' about renewables when pitching them because overall I think that is unhelpful, untrue and unnecessary.
He gets many of his downer talking points from Vaclav Smil, who is a grumpy pessimist about both the science and politics of climate change and I think personifies the "Pessimism sounds smart. Optimism sounds dumb" idea.
But does that mean "pessimism" is bad in the abstract? I don't think so.
Exactly. The author is stapling all the good qualities onto optimism and all the bad ones onto pessimism so that he can declare one good and the other bad.
I'm optimistic we can have a more meaningful conversation about optimism and pessimism if we forget this article.
Hard to take Gates seriously on climate change. Imagine everyone was living like this.
But this basic argument from hypocrisy is applied to a lot of people, and it's a weak case.
If someone is using an appreciable fraction of their fortune to decarbonize the grid, and otherwise make industrial civilization sustainable, they can fly private jets as much as they like. Ultimately, carbon in the atmosphere is a simple game of addition. If Gates Brand nuclear plants take 100GW of coal and natural gas offline, I don't care if the man lives on an airplane with a whole second fleet for in-flight refueling, because it doesn't matter.
The reason the hypocrisy argument sucks is that, by definition, you can only apply it to rich people who see a problem with climate change and are doing something about it.
The many wealthy private-jet owners who are invested in fuel extraction don't even get mentioned. They get wealthy when carbon emissions get worse, and then spend their wealth jetting around.
Can you link me to the page which tracks Mohamed bin Sultan's jet travel? No? I believe I've made my point.
Mohamed bin Sultan did not claim that polar bears might be dead by 2020 and that Florida will be under water by 2030, hence he can't be a hypocrite.
Yes, hypocrisy can only be be applied to someone who claims something, argues for a certain something. The fact that everyone does not beleive in apocalyptic global warming destroying mankind by 2020 still means that the people who do can be hypocrites.
But then the real question is why hypocrisy is so bad. All of us are hypocrites in different ways, on different things. Why is being a hypocrite on climate change worse than being wilfully ignorant?
Do as you preach, and others will follow. Flying your private jet to a conference, and tell Johnny Average that he shouldn't use his car to drive to his workplace is a shitty thing to do.
And he's far from being the only one doing that.
Living on MV does not contribute to the climate problem, so his actions are not hypocritical.
If he was looking for a 100-year property investment, perhaps he should have chosen a different part of New England (elevation > X meters), the Pacific Northwest, or the Great Lakes region.
If he's looking for a nice, private, place to live for the next 30 years, MV has a lot going for it. He won't live there for 30 years of course, and maybe "leaving it to the kids" isn't high on his priority list, and maybe he even has a lingering hope that mitigation efforts will happen and succeed. He didn't get famous by being a pessimist (ObOnTopic).
And, sure is a good thing he didn't move to Florida or the desert West, where he'd be both more endangered and more contributive to the danger.
I really can't imagine any plausible explanation for how any person arrives at the "Obama says climate change is a problem, but buys house near beach, must be hypocrite and bad person" narrative, unless of course you started at the end and worked backwards.
(edit) ... which, I see from other comments, seems to be the case. You believe Obama is lying about climate change and that buying a house on MV is proof? OK. Amazing.
But then the upper middle class twats couldn't go on vacation to Bali and we can't have that no sirree!
Edit: the point that I'm driving at (if it wasn't clear) is that we seem to all want upward mobility to be a thing, but boy do we hate those that actually experience it. That seems almost like it's own kind of pessimism to me.
But for the record I don't give a shit just don't preach environmentalism. Hypocrisy is just one of those things that crawls up my butt.
It is still logically consistent to play the game as everyone else, but still advocate for changes to rules that affect everyone. For example, flying in private jets while also supporting laws/regulations/taxes that would make that amount of pollution per person per unit time unaffordable.
For example, I want fossil fuels to be drastically costlier to force everyone to use smaller vehicles and live in denser communities enabling public transit.
But I do not want other individuals to have to do that while I do not. I am willing to make the sacrifices if everyone will, but if everyone is not going to, then I have a hard time seeing why I should.
Solutions or failures happen in other contexts. Gates does some real work in those.
The whole "I must recycle all my plastic bags or the planet will die" mentality is, to me, a weird form of delusion of grandeur. Seeing past that can be both freeing and depressing :)
They have always pushed "blaming the consumer for trash", and disparaged "producer responsibility" and "plastic recycling" (except in blaming the consumer for not recycling, but that's just a variant of blaming them for trash).
It's weird to now see people pointing to the same organisations that opposed these things, and claiming they campaigned for them.
In countries/states with functional governments that aren't owned by fossil fuels, plastic recycling has happened as just one of a suite of measures and has always been successful. Every academic study of it has agreed it's the best thing for the economy and planet.
In others states, the ones that are in thrall to big oil, it didn't really happen, and then the people who don't want it to happen appear to have recently started claiming "hah, we (i.e. the big evil oil corps) wanted you to recycle, so now you shouldn't do it, that'll teach us".
This is the kind of reverse psychology that works really well on toddlers.
you’re sorely missing what my point could be if you think it’s nihilism / hah fine to be wasteful, another spin on the individualist solution making I attacked in my comment
> Despite this, three former top officials, who have never spoken publicly before, said the industry promoted recycling as a way to beat back a growing tide of antipathy toward plastic.
And in doing so they get to repeat their "plastic recycling doesn't work" rhetoric.
As soon as you force the producers to pay for disposal and let them figure out how best to do it, recycling suddenly, magically becomes the cheapest option.
https://www.wastedive.com/news/2021-state-extended-producer-...
> Recycling, the former officials told NPR and Frontline, became a way to preempt the bans and sell more plastic
> "The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire, we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products," Thomas says.
I'm sure there is some kind of name for this.
Trying to shame people into using less never solves this problem. It just means there is more available for the shameless. The solution as are either to regulate the commons, or find a better way to meet our needs.
How does it happen that everyone, on average, recycles or uses less energy?
In general, by making non recycling or energy use more expensive. This can come from regulation, taxes, social pressure. Technical innovation can also sidestep whole issues by using less energy/materials and/or producing more. Maybe there are a few other paths.
Those things actually make a difference. Focus on them.
Thought Experiment:
Say, Bill Gates (and other VIPs) is respected enough that he can convert 5 Skeptics out a 100 Climate Deniers. So, In order for the successful climate actions Bill Gates has to change the minds of say 10,000 leaders in various positions across the world. That means he effectively has to meet 200,000 people across the globe.
If Climate Change is important, and you want quick action, do you want Bill Gates (and others) to
a) jet around the globe and try to convince 200,000 people in 5 years
or
b) Bicycle around the globe and try to convince 200,000 people in 50 years
Only a moron would suggest (b). I expect TikTokers and Redditors to pick option (b) as they are easily swayed by "Hurr Durr, Bill Gates Jets" arguments.
He can jet around the world in economy class without much difference, just a bit of sacrifice.
I'll start believing Bill Gates believes in climate change when he starts behaving as if he does.
Since then I still don't know which of his initiatives have shown a high probability of success.
Who can you say this is not true about?
Even some of his climate stuff annoys me.
But, it's highly likely that if you ranked the whole human race on how much they'd done to reduce climate change, he may well be at the top.
So if it's about "doing his share" then he's probably doing okay.
But regardless, I don't want people to stop flying, I want them to stop releasing fossil C02 in the air because it's inefficient. Inefficiencies on an individual scale don't matter, inefficiencies on a civilization wide scale add up quickly.
I don't see how flying, or doing any other rich person thing, reduces his credibility. Unless you believe dealing with climate change is going to make us all poorer, which it isn't.
If you're really all about hating rich people, then there's lots of "climate justice" projects aiming to help poor people and carbon taxes that replace regressive taxes would be a good thing to champion.
And I don't buy that you can do your share by talking one way and doing the exact opposite privately. It's like being an animal rights advocate who (openly) tortures animals in their free time. Simply doesn't work that way, even if you save more animals than you torture.
Where is the line on how much pollution one is allowed to expel? 500sq ft per person apartment? 100sq ft? Prius or RAV4? Commercial flight to visit family, once per year or twice? How many kids?
I don’t have a problem with the dairy and egg products I use because I personally know the people that I get them from. I won’t purchase anything containing dairy and eggs. If someone prepares food for me containing them I may eat it to be polite but I wouldn’t eat meat. I also don’t have an issue with the honey I get from my friends hives. However, many of my activist friends and other people see all of these things as hypocrisy that perpetuate animal abuse. I still protest and we get along fine. Because to your point, there’s room for nuance.
He's not just talking about doing things, he's putting people to work doing things. To focus on his individual emissions is a premature optimization
A very important part of solving problems is choosing the right problems. It doesn't help to be optimistic about something that's not going to work.
Thinking a priori that it’s not going to work, here we have the true definition of a pessimist.
Past tense is hindsight. Optimism/pessimism is a future tense attitude.
In general, for any action, there is already some means of judging whether it's a good one. Not a perfect means, but you can get some idea. And after trying things a bit, the evidence gets better. It's utterly vital to use negative information obtained in this exploration. Otherwise, you can go off into an institutional failure mode where resources are poured down a black hole just because that's what's been done before.
If someone insists that something would work even when the evidence is clear that's borderline stupid. But let's look at pessimism and optimism in relation to something unknown. An optimist would continue trying even if they fail multiple times, they continue trying until they either succeed or find enough evidence that it won't work. While a pessimist won't even try once, or give up pretty early.
Optimism is believing that good electric cars exist and can be a lot of fun. Pessimism is saying that they'll never work and are terrible because our grid will collapse if too many people buy them.
Optimism is also believing that both problems are remarkably solvable.
I don't see any of your example indicating a pessimism.
Pessimism != < the most optimistic
I think that pessimism and optimism are human traits, and have more to do with our own fallible irrational view of the world, which can easily be changed depending on the current cultural perception of our future. It's so easy to bias.
When it comes to predictions, it should revolve around the scientific method. Statistics derived from data, and that probability which itself does not know the concept of optimism or pessimism, is what should be a guide for further research or decisions.
The problem is that we ourselves also decide what to investigate to begin with. Thus our tools will only ever be as good as we are ourselves. Willingness to learn, change opinions, let go of ego and prejudice, the path forward really starts with giving everyone, children and adults, time to learn. But we are in such a society where our values are often placed differently and we are in such a rush.
So I think it really starts with, how do we cultivate a good environment now? And not whether the future is pessimistic or optimistic.
That's a really interesting way to slice and dice it. When I read your first few sentences that's not how I interpreted it at all.
I got fact, fact, optimist. Optimist, fact. Fact, optimist, optimist.
But I'm not convinced that's a better way to go about it. What is likely needed is each of those chunks to be taken into context and when I look it at that, it's really "here is a problem and a solution to move things forward." To me that's optimistic. If it were pessimistic, I'd expect it to be "here is a problem and there's nothing we can do about it."
These are spectra, and neither extreme is "correct" and rooted in objective reality. Pessimism/optimism can be decoupled from other axes like ignorance/knowledge, acceptance/denial, awareness/delusion, etc. Assuming "climate change is happening" as fact, someone might exhibit climate change denial for any number of reasons. These are just illustrative sketches, not an effort to build some taxonomy of beliefs:
Ignorance: someone may be unable to comprehend the complicated climate system concepts, statistical concepts, nor noisy data.
Cynical pessimism: someone may believe it is happening and unavoidable, but they want to minimize their own inconvenience or discomfort prior to the end game.
Blind optimism: someone may just harbor a profound faith that things will work out in the end; to them, the people trying to address climate change seem like toxic pessimists who harbor delusions of grandeur!
Apart from that I think the article is mostly wrong. To make progress you need agency and self-confidence. The effects of Optimism and Pessimism are very context-dependent.
Just one example: A very driven and confident pessimist might be much more motivated to find a solution for Climate Change, because he knows for sure otherwise Earth is Doomed.
While a very driven and confident optimist in Politics might reduce Carbon Tax, because he knows for sure that Technology Companies will find solutions for Climate Change and they'll find it faster if they have more money.
> A very driven and confident pessimist might be much more motivated to find a solution for Climate Change, because he knows for sure otherwise Earth is Doomed.
Not so driven pessimists might tell that it is a waste of time, because Earth is Doomed.
or kill himself because Earth is Doomed and effectively be part of the solution.
The reason why people do things it's mostly irrelevant, it's what they do that counts.
Funny, I'd say it's quite the opposite, you aren't allowed to say anything negative or you'd be labeled as a "downer".
Everything nowadays is "amazing" and "transformative".
It's pure speculation, but it feels much more plausible than a society wide bias towards one or the other.
Perhaps instead of actively trying to find excuses to dissuade "optimists" from even trying, society might be better off trying to teach that supporting good ideas that benefit everyone is a good thing, not bad…
Care to expand about what this Utopia would look like and how it would work? Where does the resources come from to bring everyone to a first world standard of living?
An optimist who insists on driving ahead without understanding the challenge he's taking on will almost always end up being a big problem for everyone.
> The problem I see is that humanity as a whole has much of what we need to build a Utopia for all...
> Perhaps instead of actively trying to find excuses to dissuade "optimists" from even trying, society might be better off trying to teach that supporting good ideas that benefit everyone is a good thing, not bad…
Lenin was an optimist who thought he and his comrades could build a "Utopia for all."
> ...but almost nobody actually wants a better world for anyone let alone for everyone....
> Perhaps instead of actively trying to find excuses to dissuade "optimists" from even trying, society might be better off trying to teach that supporting good ideas that benefit everyone is a good thing, not bad…
Come on. Pretty much everyone wants a better world for everyone, they just want different ones, and that's a difficult problem.
Which has been my actual observation - has anyone here had corroborating or counterfactual experiences?
Offense is optimists, they run to good shooting positions in case the ball comes there. Most of their running is in vain, yet they have to do it every time. They get praise if they make a goal, and if the opponent scores, it doesn't make a difference to them personally or affect their career.
Defense is pessimists, they try to prevent the opponent from scoring. They for example have to sometimes commit a tactical fault in order to prevent the opponent from getting to a dangerous position where they could score a goal. They have to guard opponent offense players, even if the ball never comes near. They are criticized if the opponent makes a goal and they don't get credit for their team's offense scoring goals.
So, one thinks a good thing might happen and tries to seize the opportunity. The other one thinks a bad thing might happen and tries to make sure it is prevented. Both are estimating an uncertain future and a lot of their work goes to waste - but only in hindsight.
Both are needed for a team to win the championships.
I am suprised the author has such a low opinion of optimism. After internalising Roosevelt I have actively tried to temper cynical thought when interacting with others. It's easy to throw stones and find fault but its much more powerful to be in the driving seat of change (which innately requires optimism)
Hans Rosling[1] used to call himself a "very serious possibilist":
People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.
• • •
Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical.
Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world.
The irony is I learned about it from Bill Gates’s book list recommendations years ago.
You know what I noticed? It takes a lot of energy to be pessimistic and pissed off all the time.
So, instead, I'm trying to remain focused and motivated by the wrongs I would like to see made right. I'm picking problems which I think I can positively impact. And while I'm not optimistic about much of it, neither am I succumbing to a pessimistic view which leads to not taking action.
It's not binary.
Posted my initial thoughts above
Exactly, it's not binary. Some pessimism is healthy, "the ones that speak truth to power". However, complaining without offering solutions is pointless. Good on you for following up, and trying to be optimistic about some of your solutions.
Either not stressing all the time will make me do more, or at least I'll feel better. That's still a win for my mental health if nothing else. I'm still well aware of all the problems around me, and try to help where I can, but beyond that point I maintain some personal distance.
But I think 2014 was when it started to become apparent that the idealist global mixing and digital revolution it was tied to, something I had pinned my optimism on, might be going in a more evil direction.
Paul Graham wrote about this, that we need to understand our current period in the context of a much longer historical timeline http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html
2013 was the year I'd pinpoint where my optimism ended. I was in grad school studying filter bubbles and what we'd eventually start calling 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' and discovering Eli Pariser coined the concept and then used it to create a corporation using that to influence people into thinking certain ideas were important was a major black pill moment, as was Tristan Harris's Google memo.
A lot of the rot was in evidence before then, but that was the year when I couldn't pretend not to see it anymore.
I'd say age has a lot to do with it in that my renewed sense of optimism is very tied into being more comfortable in my own agency, and that comfort only came into being because I saw the generation behind me and that updated my brain. "Oh, I'm not the 7 year old in the room of adults anymore. I'm the adult now. Interesting."
There isn't nearly enough contention, questioning, satire (notice how SNL never really goes for that) etc..
Marc Benioff spends the entirety of his time virtue signalling about how he is saving LGBT refugees from this or that, while superficially that's nice, it's ultra narcissistic PR and self aggrandization to use those people as tools for corporate branding. Nobody calls him out.
On the contrary, I see a lot of dour young people, with kind of a 'lack of faith' in the general sense, which is really odd, and I suggest maybe a new concept in the west.
When I was very young we had the 'Cold War' with nukes starring right at us and we were full of ... gumption, positivity, pride, goodwill, hope etc..
Finally - I don't think positivity/pessimism matters that that much - you have to be a 'strong believer' in some capacity to innovate, the rest is head games.
I don't think this sort of cynicism about LGBT rights activism is helpful. If we want to make progress in this area, we need support from all sectors of society. That definitely includes people who aren't saints and who don't act from wholly disinterested and pure motives. Whatever his motives (and I can't read his mind – can you?), Marc Benioff did something substantial to support LGBT rights when many other CEOs did not.
There's no objective content to the accusation of "virtue signalling". It's a zero-effort means of objecting to whatever kind of activism someone doesn't like. Instead of making a substantive criticism of the activism itself, just jump to uncharitable conclusions about the person's inner motivations.
Hollow and performative support for an issues that services only to engender the supporter with social points.
Supporting Ukraine doesn't bring anyone brownie points because it's not so much a moral position.
Corporations 'supporting' BLM, especially with donations, which is a totally corrupt charity - this is a problem. Corporations even throwing up the word 'equity' is a bit of a start, but not really there. Corporations making money off of it (Nike) is evil. Corporations doing something thoughtful and material about it, now that's not 'virtue signalling'. If they want to humble-brag about it in some non aggrandising way, then that's fine but it should not be part of company branding.
> Benioff led an effort of business leaders fighting back against [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act], leading to a revised version of the bill being signed into law that prohibited businesses from denying services to someone based on sexual orientation or gender identity
The accusation of virtue signaling is a convenient rhetorical move. It makes it possible to rail against things that no-one likes (hypocrisy and insincerity) rather than against the changes that activists are attempting to bring about – which many people may support.
In reality it doesn't much matter whether someone is an activist out of selfish motives or altruistic ones. That's between them and their conscience. What matters is what they're an activist for, and whether it's a good thing or not.
But perhaps you can clarify this point. Do you really object only to Marc Benioff's (supposed) underlying motives in opposing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Or is it not that you support the Act, and therefore oppose activism against it?
I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back— his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all.
-- Chesterton
Yes, there's a price to pay for optimism, but the alternative is much more costlier - I think this is the premise of this article.
> Reality is way more nuanced than single perspectives.
That's a truism, I believe.
My work is always colored with thoughts like “What happens when the user does this…” or “The last time I tried that, my toenails fell off,” etc.
People call that “pessimism,” and I’m often attacked as a “negative naysayer.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. I have a long, long record of Getting Things Done.
I ship; regularly and consistently. I do that, by anticipating problems, and architecting designs that are high Quality, secure, localizable, accessible, well-documented, performant, flexible, robust, long-lasting, maintainable, and complete (in a pretty short, predictable, timeframe).
I’m also a good problem-solver. Roadblocks don’t tend to last long, when I roll up my sleeves.
If you want pie-in-the-sky, shoot-for-the-moon dreams, I may not be the correct person to talk to; mostly because I’m admittedly fairly well-grounded, and less likely to come up with these ideas.
But if you’d like to actually make your dream into a reality, then someone like me is a good bet.
I think in order to found a startup one needs to be an optimist. The risks are high, chances of success are low, it's a lot of work and a ton of stress.
But in order for that startup to achieve anything, it needs realists (optimists call them pessimists, or can't tell the difference) to figure out what might go wrong and and keep it all on track.
Optimists and pessimists are both unrealistic, for different reasons.
Optimism is unrealistic because it wants everyone on the happy clappy hype train, and people who aren't on will be resented. Collectively it's quite tribal, even culty.
Pessimism is unrealistic because it misses opportunities that have a realistic chance of success.
But they're only two broad kinds of unrealism out of many others. For example:
Working obsessively on a project that interests you without doing any market testing.
Using the latest tech stack just because everyone else is using it.
Believing that customers will definitely sign up if you add that one feature they want.
Wait, what? Who thinks that way? This part is even highlighted in the article. Even blind optimism is seen as something that gives results. Sure it fails 99% of the time and a pessimist would think he will be part of the 99% but throwing things at the wall to see what sticks is a valid strategy for progress.
I can't be the only pessimist who thinks that most successful people are just lucky idiots who went along with their foolishly risky idea and somehow managed to make it work. Isn't that the most common coping strategy for the average Joe? I can't be a black sheep, right? Optimists get all the chicks, and pessimists are bitter about it.
> people mistake optimism for “blind optimism” — the blinkered faith that things will always get better. Problems will fix themselves. If we just hope things turn out well, they will. [...] If we sit back and do nothing, we will not make progress. That’s not the kind of optimism that I’m talking about
> Pessimism blocks solutions. If we always believe that the worst will happen, then what’s the point in starting? If any action will fail, we should stick with the status quo. Follow the pessimists if you want the world to stagnate or regress.
You've had enough of people equating passivity with optimism so you decide to equate it to pessimism instead. BIG THINK.
And it made me do a double-take, because the positivity of it was so unexpected, almost shocking. And indeed it wasn't made recently, rather it was from 1956.
Working in a start-up I'm surrounded by others who are overwhelmingly optimistic (which is such a powerful bulwark against the brutal struggle, especially in the early days).
I try my best to be as positive as I can, but on reflection I'm probably a slight optimist, or neutral in my overall outlook.
I can't help feeling like some other team members see me as constantly dragging things down when I point out issues etc. I guess I can sometimes feel like a total pessimist when contrasted against individuals who are overwhelmingly optimistic, despite not in-fact having a tendency toward pessimism.
Maybe I'm a barrier to progress :)
It's a strange relativism that I only encounter in my work environment. In everyday life, I definitely don't feel pessimistic.
I wonder if, relatively speaking, the extreme blind optimist can make the more rational, reserved optimist seem negative by comparison. Gaining a good overall perspective is key I guess, although never easy.
I suspect that on a large scale these emotional states don't make much difference to anything (although of course they're very important on the level of individual people).
There are lots of bad ideas, so undue optimism needs pruning. There are also lots of good ideas we haven't tried yet -- that is the evidence of history. The big problem I see in life -- including my own life -- is attachment to positions when the data is not in accord with that attachment. In science, it's why you often have to wait for a new generation of scientists who can fully integrate newer results (data) into their thinking. In life, it's why people like me get stuck in the past: it's the lens we understand.
Nothing positive ever gets covered.
What you hear is: - the planet is getting worse - US centered News about how they banning something means the end of the world. - education is getting worse
And everything negative, because negativety gets you clicks, its an endless cycle because of algorithmic timelines.
While in reality education has massively improved and people are getting out of poverty faster.
A huge exception is the current news. Because of the Ukraine War, its obviously why is everyone is negative now, you hear about nuclear war risk, millions facing risk of famine because of wheat and food shortage, and many other things happening currently.
So I would say its understandable why everyone is so negative currently, but the negativity that existed before Covid is for sure, caused by News, which caused the divide in America which is unfortunately now spreading to other countries.
I don't know whether this is actually true in practice. Some people get along through sheer cussedness (which some might interpret as pessimism). I suppose the pessimist more often than not finds reality to be more rewarding than expected - i.e. if you expect the worst, anything even moderately better comes as a pleasant surprise. A similar view is "expect nothing from people, then you'll never be disappointed".
Regardless, reality is what it is. The optimist who leaps off a cliff flapping their arms like a bird, visualizing flight, will come to a splattering end. This is called realism, which should probably take precedence over either optimism or pessimism. Here we can answer the question "how do you know it won't work if you don't at least try?" with a one-liner: math and physics, thank you very much.
As far as fossil-fueled global warming over the next few centuries, I imagine human beings will survive it, but historic disruptions are steadily coming on, and the tipping point has come and gone - there's no going back to the relatively stable, very-gradually-cooling regime of the past few thousand years. We'll see a steadily warming planet for the next 100 years at the very least, there's just no way out of it. A rapid transition to renewable energy is being blocked by entrenched fossil fuel interests (and has been for the past 40 years), and the only countries ahead of the curve are the net fossil fuel importers (China in particular), but even they are nowhere near anything like a meaningful reduction in fossil emissions.
Result? Climate outcomes are heading towards the most extreme of the IPCC predictions. All the bubbling optimism in the world won't change that - it's already here.
Optimism is mutations - it generates new random ideas.
Pessimism is fitness function - it kills bad ideas.
You need both for progress.
I don't really understand the distinction author makes between pessimism and criticism. The best critics are pessimists.
Progress in terms of what agenda?
You have a lot of them, and many are conflicting ones with varying degrees of potential conciliation (dialogue is possible) and some fundamentally irreconciliable (dialogue broken in a culture war, cold civil war, cultic war, hyperwar [1]).
Instead this gets into a lot of words about kinds of optimism and redefining pessimism as criticism if it is used effectly
It led me to this tongue in cheek thought:
Pessimists definitely played important roles in the early US space program, but it was optimists who suited up and believed they could make it there and back.
Yes I can now take a photo with my phone but my job is less secure, my environment is more polluted, housing is more expensive, and my retirement is less attainable then it was 50 years ago. What happened in between then and now? Progress.
Blind optimism leads to blind progress. The purpose of pessimism isn't just to stop progress but to question its direction, and the metrics ("kpis" if you will) that define it.
>Pessimism sounds smart. Optimism sounds dumb. [...] There is an “optimism stigma” that is pervasive throughout society.
Does it? Is there? I am thinking you associate with and consume from the wrong circles.
To me this is not the case. I find full pessimism (nihilism?) disappointing, and often not thinking situations through. I have yet to find a situation where I had not been able to find some optimism (, and yes I had my share of horrors).
If I had a choice between a full pessimist and a full optimist, I would always take the optimist. I think the movie "What Dreams May Come" by Richard Matheson is fitting.
That is all about me. As for society (people I come in contact with), most, despite sometimes horrific situations (e.g. cancer, war, torture, starvation, near-death) they mostly have optimistic outlook from small to big pictures, their life situation, to getting that next meal. Even when they get into a pessimist thought, they abandon it.
I also do not think it is a binary choice, and realism is on this scale somewhere.
Define progress. Is it more/better technology? Is that progress something we want?
Because anyone who does can basically no longer innovate anything at all as there is probably a patent about some aspect of you innovation (which should never have been issued). Patents on the level of patenting trivial things like automatically shutting down unneeded resources.
In a caring about (such) patents is for innovation like endless pessimism for your live, okay maybe more like being depressed or having an anxiety disorder.
"Speaking truth to power" is not really working because power doesn't care. Organizing seldom leads anywhere because it's just interpreted as more of "speaking truth to power" through protest. More critique. If a power structure is bad and it doesn't listen to you yelling louder doesn't really work. Complaining doesn't work. There needs to be something positive. Something that creates an alternative. But somehow the right owns the idea of entrepreneurship and unions are out of fashion and have maybe stagnated as a concept so the left is stuck protesting.
/Rant
You realize that this is rhetorical scam to prevent the questioning of action and the suppression of dissent?
The left has plenty of good ideas on how to constructively corral the greed and stupidity of the right. And no unions are not out of fashion.
Revolutions of the past (or against autocrats) succeed because they presented a solution that people genuinely believed in and want. If degrowth is to convince anyone outside a small niche it needs to be reframed/restructured/remade into a vision that people want. Not a solution that people are guilt-tripped into while believing they have to give up every comfort while others can still keep doing what they do.
I think there are seeds of this vision scattered about here and there. But it needs to be turned into a robust ideology that can stand the scrutiny of social media 2022+.
And in this lies the problem that ideology is kind of dead. Or it needs to get some kind of rebirth. Social media eat modernist ideologies for breakfast and poops out a mess that people so far has only been able to build messy populism or very niche movements from.
So we might need a way to go past modernist ideology. Maybe we need to reinvent democracy. The closest idea I have found so far is the idea of the "Third Attractor" - Creating collectivist truth through some kind of well thought out method for structured discourse, negotiation and decision making. Making something that scales here seems to me like one of the defining issues of our time.
I'm probably still naive about what seeds are out there though because there is just sooo much. And I'm just a software engineer so what the hell do I know. But I don't see anyone else connecting the dots enough to create something that people in general can agree on so I suppose I can allow myself to speculate.
> Social media eat modernist ideologies
I agree, but I believe that is the intended effect.
Social media is a void that people scream into. Unless your organizing on social media has any direct action in the physical world, it is functioning as intended.
If it's progress towards having constant news pieces about a potential nuclear attack any day now then I'd say the pessimists were right and we should have sticked to less progress.
I'm more of a Star Trek person - I hope we all become great people, competent, professional, curious, and generous, and that we can create a post-scarcity society that's fair to everyone after taking on our problems in a rational way.
Is it possible we'll fail to prevent a major climate crisis? Yes. Is denying climate change, the effectiveness of vaccines, or the results of elections the thing we need to do right now, and does it help? Absolutely not.