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
RECESSION ALERT: The 5 BEST Index Funds To Buy ASAP
What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here. So, I’ve noticed that people love to over complicate investing. Just buy into money puts expiring on May 12th over here, March in your portfolio. When the Fibonacci sequence falls below the 369-day moving average, you’ll…
Visualizing division with arrays
[Instructor] We have three different pictures here, and my question to get us warmed up is which of these could represent 20 divided by four? Pause this video and see if you can figure that out. All right, so let’s go through each of these. And, actuall…
Deep concealment: searching for hidden narcotics in cars | To Catch a Smuggler
WELLE: Can you pull all the way to the front, sir? MAN: Sure. WELLE: Thank you. Right there is good. And then everybody step out and, uh, just sit over by that table over there please. Thank you. If you can think of putting something in something, you’…
Worked example: using recursive formula for arithmetic sequence | High School Math | Khan Academy
We are told b of 1 is equal to negative 7, and b of n is equal to b of n minus 1 plus 12. They’re asking us to find the fourth term in the sequence. So, what we have up here, which you could use a function definition, it’s really defining the terms of a s…
Multiplying 1-digit numbers by multiples of 10, 100, and 1000 | Math | 4th grade | Khan Academy
Let’s multiply 4 times 80. So we can look at this a few ways. One way is to say 4 times we have the number 80. So we have the number 80 one time, two times, three times, four times. Four times we have the number eighty, and we could do this computation, …
TIL: Bees Could Help Save Elephants—By Scaring Them | Today I Learned
[Music] African bees are renowned to be very vicious, and, uh, elephants are terrified because they literally don’t want to have a bee of their trunk stinging them. Elephants tend to rest under very big trees, and if there is a natural beehive, the eleph…