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Comment by froh | Hacker News Reader

the title is clickbait by the press department

the advertised article has the boring title

Looking on the (B)right Side of Life: Cognitive Ability and Miscalibrated Financial Expectations

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672231209400

this was very specifically measuring the development of the family household finances vs actual development, quoted below.

it escapes me how this leads to the generalization that optimism is a sign of stupidity (translation from academesian to plain English by me).

as a reality check, innovation is driven by optimism. this whole site here is thriving because of optimism. smart, intelligent optimism.

the original article has a much more nuance

  Financial expectations were measured via responses to the following question asked in all 12 Waves of USoc:

  “Looking ahead, how do you think you will be financially a year from now, will you be. . .  
  1. Better off  
  2. Worse off than you are now  
  3. or about the same?”

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The "clickbait" headline corresponds to the paper's abstract pretty well, especially its final sentence:

"It is a puzzle why humans tend toward unrealistic optimism, as it can lead to excessively risky behavior and a failure to take precautionary action. Using data from a large nationally representative U.K. sample (N=36,312), our claim is that optimism bias is partly a consequence of low cognition—as measured by a broad range of cognitive skills, including memory, verbal fluency, fluid reasoning and numerical reasoning. We operationalize unrealistic optimism as the difference between a person’s financial expectation and the financial realization that follows, measured annually over a decade. All else being equal, those highest on cognitive ability experience a 22% (53.2%) increase in the probability of realism (pessimism) and a 34.8% reduction in optimism compared with those lowest on cognitive ability. This suggests that the negative consequences of an excessively optimistic mindset may, in part, be a side product of the true driver, low cognitive ability."

> unrealistic optimism

> optimism bias

> excessively optimistic

So not optimism, optimism qualified on bad outcomes.

and further scoped on family finances...

really anything beyond that is an overgeneralization.

> as a reality check, innovation is driven by optimism.

Are you claiming that based on anything more than wishful thinking? I have a vague memory of seeing a study that found almost the opposite: that the key to innovation is having the relentless skepticism to cull bad ideas quickly.

> this whole site here is thriving because of optimism. smart, intelligent optimism.

This site was notoriously negative (e.g. the famous Dropbox post) in its most successful days, and my subjective impression is that it has declined at the same time as it's grown more optimistic.

Optimistic vs. skeptic is a false dichotomy

"Trust, but verify"

yeah you can be a conditional rational optimist, who are often skeptic as well

I do find the tech optimism reflected by this site quite empty and superficial. There's a lot of tech for tech's sake optimism here, and that's a very Western-privilege way to look at things. And yes, it does come across as stupid, if you consider tone deafness a declination of stupidity.

It also comes across as deranged value wise, a investment into juicero hyping up what any street vendor can do, as a tech investment while parts of the world starve.

The again tech, as long as platform and source are unlocked, remains the greatest equalizer in chances there ever was. Your father may sell apples from a cart and the son may sell carts in an apple, passing by all the monopoly walls and hopeless hamster wheel work of traditional caste-locked employment

> (e.g. the famous Dropbox post)

This is bullshit and typical HN negativity.

All the top Dropbox comments were positive, the top top is a technical point, with a suggested solution -

https://web.archive.org/web/20081202041954/https://news.ycom...

I think this comment was flagged because of the "BS" lingo.

however yes, I agree, "the famous dropbox post" was indeed received enthusiastically.

here without archive.org:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

The top comment on there is a negative one. The archive.org link is relevant because it has a different comment ordering at that point.

the vast majority of comments are positive, outright enthusiastic, no matter how you sort them.

And the top level one, as another commenter pointed out, is constructive critique.

Constructive critique is pretty much opposite to optimism, I would say.

I see, we have different understanding of the word optimism

to me it's positive outlook on things, the confidence things usually turn for the better where we work together to make it so.

that's neither blind optimism, "lala no problems here, this is fine meme".nor is it naive optimism "oh ya negligible issues in that corner no real issues Pu bear" but hard working realistic "this ain't be simple but we'll make it work"

I feel in good company with this general understanding, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism

and that's why I have beef with the downspin of the article, which overgeneralized a single funding in a narrow context to a broad rejection of hope, when you think about it.

That's one take. Another is that innovation is driven by money, e.g. seeing an increase in war economies (government spending) or by high income inequality (VC/PE spending.)

Overall, optimism is probably also higher in these situations than others. The question is if the people who are optimistic are also the ones being innovative, or if they're just "rallying the troops." If optimism was itself linked to ability to innovate, you'd expect to see innovation happen regardless of money flows, because those innovating would not have to be paid to do it.

But, I'm pretty sure the space programs of the 1950-1980s were innovative because a few optimistic directors got funding to pay rocket scientists to be innovative. In fact, it's quite possible no rocket would have left Earth if the scientists were optimists.

Isn't it rather about who is optimistic and who isn't? when you scratch a personal itch with some innovation, _you_ are the optimist. when pointy haired boss has that brilliant idea _he_'s the optimist and the engineers may very well be "that pig ain't gonna fly no matter how hard you throw it..." and the middle managers may prevent the two from talking for a loooong time.

anyhow, my key point was: the study I understand (if you don't know enough, you can easily be unrealistically optimistic) and the PR department twist on it I don't, and I disagree with, violently.

.oO( else I'd have to admit how stupid I am ;-) )

>But, I'm pretty sure the space programs of the 1950-1980s were innovative because a few optimistic directors got funding to pay rocket scientists to be innovative. In fact, it's quite possible no rocket would have left Earth if the scientists were optimists.

And not that the pessimists thought that if they didn't do it the enemy would be able to lob nuclear missiles at them with impunity?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

meaning what in our context here? what I said and what the study said don't connect to it yet. for me.

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