Your definitions of pessimism and optimism don’t even seem to correspond with the paper in question. It’s not talking about a life philosophy, it’s about how one perceives one’s chances at a positive outcome given random events.
Better still to think about the expected value of optimism vs. pessimism. It's good to have well calibrated likelihoods of success, but it's also good to remember just doing things which might succeed feels inherently good.
> Pessimism is closer to truth. But it promotes inaction.
Is there any evidence on this? (I must admit, I didn't read the paper, just the abstract.)
> Optimist by choice, Pessimist by experience
Optimism vs. pessimism in a particular situation doesn't appear to me as being a choice. Can you really choose to be an optimist or is it just ignoring/suppressing your pessimism?
I don't know if there's evidence, but I find the point interesting because the idea occurred to me independently when I read this in the paper:
> Unrealistically optimistic financial expectations [...] can lead to excessive business entries and subsequent failures, as optimists overestimate the financial returns from entrepreneurship (de Meza et al., 2019)
I thought: Do pessimists overestimate the financial returns from a regular job?
It seems in many ways to be about whether/what risks are worth taking.
The universe tends towards first chaos and then entropy. Working against these forces, to build security, comfort, and meaning, inherently work against the tide. Resistance is inherently difficult. Realists blend both pessimism and optimism: a pessimism born of recognizing the natural forces (such as most people will be overwhelmed by them), and an optimism that, with healthy choices, they can escape those forces during their lifetime.
The elephant in the room in this study is how the UK economy has performed over the study period.
From a quick read, they are essentially asking people to predict whether they'll be better/worse off next year, and then correlating that with whether they were right in the next year's financial data.
Their study period looks like it's the period immediately post-GFC (2009 to 2021). As I understand it, the economy has performed better for those in professional roles, who are likely to score well on the tests of cognitive ability, than it has for lower-skilled jobs. And of course in the middle of that period, there's the Brexit vote that was pretty uneven in terms of who thought the economy (and their circumstances) would go well or badly.
It's an interesting data set, but I don't think I'd be game to make the same "causative" conclusions that they do ("Our findings suggest that these supposed consequences of optimism bias, may be a side product of the true driver, low cognitive ability").
There could be a time period in which cognitively well performing people are rewarded much better than in the past, so all the predictions of highly cognitive people will seem pessimistic on average, compared to others.
So for example, let's say tech starts to boom, and everyone good with tech will all of sudden have much better financial performance, although everyone were making their predictions based on historical performance.
It matters because if specific hard-to-predict one-off events hadn’t happened (e.g the Brexit vote), the optimists might have come out looking much better.
Also I'd expect a pretty good correlation between IQ score and the ability to look at the general state of the economy (both UK and global) and think "well that's not good."
> We operationalize unrealistic optimism as the difference between a person’s financial expectation and the financial realization that follows, measured annually over a decade.
Sounds like they proved that smarter people are better at predicting their (financial) future, which is pretty much a tautology.
The abstract states that it's a puzzle why people are irrationally optimistic. The puzzle is that one would expect this to be corrected through selective pressure, either evolutionarily, or wrt evolved cultural normative expectations.
Let me suggest a rather Neitzschean answer: it's very useful in a society to have the default assumption of the populace be that their prospects are better than they actually are. That's headroom.
If you haven't read him,
Neitzsche suggests that the promise of Christian afterlife, was in effect an extreme form of this: an irrational optimism about the future, which (very usefully) made the actuality of moment to moment, day by day, awfulness bearable, on the premise that it was a transient state.
He also noted that it was useful to associate sacrifice and penury with righteousness, and described the instrumental benefit to the 1% in allowing the masses to take pleasure in the thought that those enjoying a comfortable life in this world, would meet an (per Pascal, infinitely more expensive) bill in the next.
“God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.” - Nietzsche
"this is a pretty nice cave y'all got here" - God
"the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable (for an educated person)" - Nietzsche (supposed that to be well educated meant ability to read Greek and Latin and have familiarity with ancient texts from several cultures giving variations of Christian origin myths.
"We have just got to decrease funding for Education" - somebody living in a cave that still believes in God.
Yeah I don’t understand that at all. I’m usually a pessimistic person and I consider that to be unrealistic. “Predicting” the future is a classic symptom of depression and anxiety. They wouldn’t be depressed if they were predicting good things.
This study only draws samples only from the U.K. The U.K. went through quite a difficult time in the past decade. Could such macroeconomic factors influence the result of the study?
I wouldn't apply these conclusions on other countries.
I suddenly remembered Voltaire's Candide. That's basically a book about exposing and ridiculing optimists as buffoons. Well, not exactly, but that's the gist of it.
Besides a fun read, the book is more a critique of the philosophical notion of Optimism, i.e. the idea that we are living in the optimal "timeline". Even if this reality is shit, Optimism states it's still better than all others that could possibly be.
Readit News
* you exist today
* you have agency to affect tomorrow
Pessimism is closer to truth. But it promotes inaction.
Optimism might be wrong, but it tugs at your agency to affect the future. A future you affect is better catered to your needs than a future you don't.
Therefore, optimists who make marginal inroads to the future they desire end up more fulfilled than pessimists who accept a future they only tolerate.
For once my hn status is relevant.
> Optimist by choice, Pessimist by experience
Dead Comment
Both fix a strategy before looking at the question.
Another strategy would be to look at the question at hand and what we can predict with what uncertainty about relevant variables.
Is there any evidence on this? (I must admit, I didn't read the paper, just the abstract.)
> Optimist by choice, Pessimist by experience
Optimism vs. pessimism in a particular situation doesn't appear to me as being a choice. Can you really choose to be an optimist or is it just ignoring/suppressing your pessimism?
I don't know if there's evidence, but I find the point interesting because the idea occurred to me independently when I read this in the paper:
> Unrealistically optimistic financial expectations [...] can lead to excessive business entries and subsequent failures, as optimists overestimate the financial returns from entrepreneurship (de Meza et al., 2019)
I thought: Do pessimists overestimate the financial returns from a regular job?
It seems in many ways to be about whether/what risks are worth taking.
Pessimism maximizes the value of worst case scenario.
Optimism maximizes the value of the best case scenario.
From a quick read, they are essentially asking people to predict whether they'll be better/worse off next year, and then correlating that with whether they were right in the next year's financial data.
Their study period looks like it's the period immediately post-GFC (2009 to 2021). As I understand it, the economy has performed better for those in professional roles, who are likely to score well on the tests of cognitive ability, than it has for lower-skilled jobs. And of course in the middle of that period, there's the Brexit vote that was pretty uneven in terms of who thought the economy (and their circumstances) would go well or badly.
It's an interesting data set, but I don't think I'd be game to make the same "causative" conclusions that they do ("Our findings suggest that these supposed consequences of optimism bias, may be a side product of the true driver, low cognitive ability").
So for example, let's say tech starts to boom, and everyone good with tech will all of sudden have much better financial performance, although everyone were making their predictions based on historical performance.
Joking aside, this whole paper had me thinking about Candide... All is for the best!
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19942
Boy, was I wrong!
It was actually funny and entertaining to read, had a great story, too.
Sounds like they proved that smarter people are better at predicting their (financial) future, which is pretty much a tautology.
Let me suggest a rather Neitzschean answer: it's very useful in a society to have the default assumption of the populace be that their prospects are better than they actually are. That's headroom.
If you haven't read him,
Neitzsche suggests that the promise of Christian afterlife, was in effect an extreme form of this: an irrational optimism about the future, which (very usefully) made the actuality of moment to moment, day by day, awfulness bearable, on the premise that it was a transient state.
He also noted that it was useful to associate sacrifice and penury with righteousness, and described the instrumental benefit to the 1% in allowing the masses to take pleasure in the thought that those enjoying a comfortable life in this world, would meet an (per Pascal, infinitely more expensive) bill in the next.
IMO this is "hard to un-see."
It isnt hard to think of situations where this would be true.
"Nietzsche is dead." - God
"this is a pretty nice cave y'all got here" - God
"the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable (for an educated person)" - Nietzsche (supposed that to be well educated meant ability to read Greek and Latin and have familiarity with ancient texts from several cultures giving variations of Christian origin myths.
"We have just got to decrease funding for Education" - somebody living in a cave that still believes in God.
Deleted Comment
I wouldn't apply these conclusions on other countries.
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