yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Rational Optimism Is the Way Out


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

In general, professions in which you get your feedback from other members of that profession tend to get corrupted. When you see a journalist writing articles to impress other journalists, or a restauranteur running a restaurant that's designed to impress other foodies and other restaurateurs, those end up not being practical and high quality. They may receive accolades and prizes within certain elite circles, but they're not reflecting reality.

Where someone is getting feedback from either Mother Nature, like a scientist or an experimentalist, or from free markets, where other people are voting with their money and their time, those are going to be much better predictors. The people who are operating in the real world and are getting paid for it tend to be optimists. The people who are operating in ivory towers are incented to be pessimists.

To be an entrepreneur, you need to be optimistic about the fact that you're creating something that other people are going to find value in. People who have a pessimistic philosophy tend to have a pessimistic psychology as well. If you're constantly thinking about all the ways in which the world is going to rack and ruin, then this has a day-to-day impact upon your outlook on the rest of society and on your family, on your friends, on everything. Because you think that this world is condemned, you're going to feel that weight upon your shoulders, and it's going to come through in the way in which you present yourself to the rest of the world.

We see a lot of this on social media right now. Entrepreneurs are typically too busy to spend a whole lot of time on social media. But you do get scientists, academic journalists who are depressed with life because they have a pessimistic view of reality, and that's got to have an impact upon their subjective experience of the world, unlike people who are creating, trying to bring something new into existence.

Unfortunately, the pessimism is self-fulfilling. Here, we take the stance that all evils are due to lack of knowledge. Rational optimism is the way out. The data supports it, history supports it, and we can always come up with good explanations through creativity to improve our lives and everybody else's lives. So stay optimistic.

More Articles

View All
The Riddle That Seems Impossible Even If You Know The Answer
There is a riddle that is so counterintuitive, it still seems wrong even if you know the answer. You’d think it’s an almost impossible number. I feel like you probably hit me with some truth bomb. I mean, if you’re trying to create controversy and you’…
Something Strange Happens When You Keep Squaring
Take the number 5 and square it, you get 25. Now take 25 and square it, you get 625. Square 625, and you get 390,625. Do you see the pattern? 5 squared ends in a 5, 25 squared ends in 25, and 625 squared ends in 625. So does this pattern continue? Well,…
How Old Is The Earth?
I’m in New Zealand’s beautiful Milford Sound, which is actually not a sound but a fjord. So one question you might ask is, what is a fjord? Well, the answer is it’s a giant channel carved out of the rock, and it was carved by glaciers—so ice moving down t…
Justification using second derivative: maximum point | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
We’re told that given that h prime of negative four is equal to zero, what is an appropriate calculus-based justification for the fact that h has a relative maximum at x is equal to negative four? So, right over here we actually have the graph of our fun…
Bill Belichick & Ray Dalio on Identifying and Addressing Mistakes: Part 2
So we do, uh, some of the things, we actually video everything that’s going on, and then you could look at the video and then reflect on it. One of the things I found is that, um, some people, when they look at their, uh, mistakes, react differently than …
Heat transfer | Thermodynamics | High school physics | Khan Academy
All right, so I don’t know about you, but I feel like talking about pizza. It’s pizza night over here. I am smelling pizza as it’s in the oven. It’s on my mind, and I know we’re supposed to be talking about heat and thermal equilibrium, but I think we can…