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
Worked example: Interpreting potential energy curves of diatomic molecules | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we began to think about potential energy as a function of internuclear distance for diatomic molecules. What do I mean by diatomic molecules? Well, we looked at molecular hydrogen, which is just H₂, which is just two hydrogens covalen…
Millennials Are Ruining The Economy.
Once the guys, it’s Graham here. So if you just read the title and decided to immediately click on my video, well, welcome to a brand new article by CNBC discussing a theory in which stingy Millennials, just like myself, are to blame for the sluggish econ…
10 Things I'm Not Buying in 2021 (Tips for Saving Money)
[Music] Hey guys, welcome back to the channel! In this video, I’m going to be talking about 10 things I’m specifically not buying in 2021 in an attempt to save a little bit more money. Now, I actually really do enjoy watching the videos that other financ…
Multiple points of influence due to separation of powers and checks and balances | Khan Academy
In several videos, we have touched on the idea of separation of powers between three branches of government in the United States. You have the legislative branch that writes laws and decides on the budget for the government. You have the executive branch …
Quadratic systems: a line and a parabola | Equations | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy
We’re told the parabola given by ( y = 3x^2 - 6x + 1 ) and the line given by ( y - x + 1 = 0 ) are graphed. So you can see the parabola here in red and we can see the line here in blue. The first thing they ask us is, one intersection point is clearly id…
Ratios and measurement
We’re told to complete the ratio table to convert the units of measure from hours to weeks or weeks to hours. So we hear, we see here they’ve told us already that there’s 168 hours for every one week. One way to think about it is the ratio of hours for ev…