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
Consciousness: The Fundamental Reality
Consciousness. It’s our awareness, our understanding, our ignorance. Our daily consciousness leaves out more than it takes in, and due to this, it leaves out important things—things that would help relieve us if we knew them. If we had a higher awareness…
Misconceptions About Falling Objects
Now I want you to make a prediction: in my left hand I have a standard size basketball, and in my right hand a 5 kg medicine ball. If I drop them both at exactly the same time, which one will hit the ground first? Ah, this is a trick one, isn’t it? The h…
The Surprising Genius of Sewing Machines
Can you explain how a sewing machine works? I mean, think about it. We’ve all seen them. There’s that little needle that’s moving up and down really fast, leaving a trail of stitches behind them. But if you think about it for a second, how are they doing …
Formal definition of partial derivatives
So I’ve talked about the partial derivative and how you compute it, how you interpret it in terms of graphs. But what I’d like to do here is give its formal definition. So it’s the kind of thing, just to remind you, that applies to a function that has a m…
Jeff Bezos – March 1998, earliest long speech
Good evening and welcome to the annual A.B. Dick lecture on entrepreneurship at Lake Forest College. Lake Forest College, 32 miles north of Chicago, was established in 1857 as a private co-educational liberal arts college. Lake Forest College engages our …
Atomic Bonding Song
In my outer electron shell Lies an electron all by itself. I seek elation Through oxidation. I have always felt incomplete, One electron shy of eighteen. I’ve the highest Electron affinity. If we exchange this one electron, We’ll both achieve noble gas co…