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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

Life consists of only 2 realities.

* you exist today

* you have agency to affect tomorrow

Pessimism is closer to truth. But it promotes inaction.

Optimism might be wrong, but it tugs at your agency to affect the future. A future you affect is better catered to your needs than a future you don't.

Therefore, optimists who make marginal inroads to the future they desire end up more fulfilled than pessimists who accept a future they only tolerate.

For once my hn status is relevant.

> Optimist by choice, Pessimist by experience

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Your definitions of pessimism and optimism don’t even seem to correspond with the paper in question. It’s not talking about a life philosophy, it’s about how one perceives one’s chances at a positive outcome given random events.

Better still to think about the expected value of optimism vs. pessimism. It's good to have well calibrated likelihoods of success, but it's also good to remember just doing things which might succeed feels inherently good.

I would like to go further and state that just optimism by itself feels inherently good.

Even though pessimism can minimize impact of all kind of negative future live events, it won't make you any happier if you will always be as pessimistic as you are now.

Optimism vs. Pessimism - that's not the only choice.

Both fix a strategy before looking at the question.

Another strategy would be to look at the question at hand and what we can predict with what uncertainty about relevant variables.

> Pessimism is closer to truth. But it promotes inaction.

Is there any evidence on this? (I must admit, I didn't read the paper, just the abstract.)

> Optimist by choice, Pessimist by experience

Optimism vs. pessimism in a particular situation doesn't appear to me as being a choice. Can you really choose to be an optimist or is it just ignoring/suppressing your pessimism?

> But [pessimism] promotes inaction.

I don't know if there's evidence, but I find the point interesting because the idea occurred to me independently when I read this in the paper:

> Unrealistically optimistic financial expectations [...] can lead to excessive business entries and subsequent failures, as optimists overestimate the financial returns from entrepreneurship (de Meza et al., 2019)

I thought: Do pessimists overestimate the financial returns from a regular job?

It seems in many ways to be about whether/what risks are worth taking.

The universe tends towards first chaos and then entropy. Working against these forces, to build security, comfort, and meaning, inherently work against the tide. Resistance is inherently difficult. Realists blend both pessimism and optimism: a pessimism born of recognizing the natural forces (such as most people will be overwhelmed by them), and an optimism that, with healthy choices, they can escape those forces during their lifetime.

> The universe tends towards first chaos and then entropy. Working against these forces, to build security, comfort, and meaning, inherently work against the tide.

I am not sure I would agree. Try living in the snowy mountains without shelter and a fireplace. I'd bet optimism wouldn't help you a lot in that particular circumstance unless you'd have already secured the necessities for survival.

The shelter and the fireplace are themselves expressions of optimism that it is possible to live in the snowy mountains. Pessimism notes that the shelter and fireplace will naturally fall into disrepair; optimism drives you to maintain the shelter and fireplace so that you can continue to live there for as long as you like.

Let’s say I am a mighty evil lord who put you there against your will.

I think you’d need more pessimism to anticipate risks rather than optimism to believe that you can survive. The will to survive is somewhat hardwired anyway.

They are hedging strategies.

Pessimism maximizes the value of worst case scenario.

Optimism maximizes the value of the best case scenario.

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