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
Introduction to infinite limits | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we’ve looked at these graphs. This is y equal to one over x squared. This is y is equal to one over x. We explored what’s the limit as x approaches zero in either of those scenarios. In this left scenario, we saw as x becomes less an…
Screams of the Falling | Brain Games
We’ve got a surprise in store for our competitors. Our cognitive challenges were missing one critical element of survival situations: stress. What you’re going to do is you’re going to go up the stairs and just follow the path over to that plank. God, ok…
A Serious Warning To All Investors
What’s up guys, it’s Grahe here. So I had another video that was scheduled to post today, but given the rather abrupt and dramatic selloff throughout everything, including the official start of an S&P 500 bear market, I felt like it would be more appr…
Pick a Business Model With Leverage
One more question about leverage. Do you think a choice of business model or a choice of product can also bring a kind of leverage to it? For example, pursuing a business that has network effects, pursuing a business that has brand effects, or other choic…
How to Pee in Space | StarTalk
So we have to ask Mike, “Yes, have you ever peed in your pants in space?” “Yes, we didn’t call it the UCD; we called it the MAG.” “The MAG? The Maximum Absorbency Garment? It was a diaper?” “Diaper! Yes, we wore a diaper on launch and entry, and while …
Introduction to electron configurations | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we’ve introduced ourselves to the idea of an orbital. Electrons don’t just orbit a nucleus the way that a planet might orbit a star, but really, in order to describe where an electron is at any given point in time, we’re really thinki…