[4ntonius8lock]

When I read the tile and skimmed through the article, I thought: define pessimism.

I mean, I consider myself pessimistic, but what do THEY who designed the study consider pessimistic. I tend to find the fault in things, see how they are wrong, or in general anticipate some negativity that most people will overlook. It's literally what makes me good at my job.

So I clicked through to the study. Which mentioned it used the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R) to test for pessimism.

So I looked up the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R) and found what questions and answers they consider pessimistic.

These are questions a 'pessimist' is supposed to answer as being 'very true':

3. If something can go wrong for me, it will. (R)

7. I hardly ever expect things to go my way. (R)

Welp I can't say these are views of pessimists. More of someone depressed or someone who has been beaten down in life.

I admire what they are trying to do, but I'm not sure this study really is proving anything until there is a clear measure of someone's pessimism. And for that we need I think better testing for someone's natural inclinations toward belief and skepticism. I've always associated skepticism as highly correlated to pessimism (seeing why not) and a tendency to believe in something at first sight as highly correlated with 'positivism' (seeing why yes).

Objectively speaking, of the 7,000,000,000 people in the world, some percentage will have objectively way less things 'go their way' then for others. It's simply how distributions work. So for someone like that to answer question 7 affirmatively, they might not be pessimistic, just someone who has objectively had a shitty life. And for someone like that, well, less life expectancy should be expected. I know I've been lucky in life and would answer 7 and 3 as absolutely no despite myself considering myself a pessimist (and I've been called that enough to suspect others view me as such too)

[jsharf]

I feel like usually the pessimistic complaining posts like this in hackernews are much more negative. It feels like there's a lot of hesitancy in this one and it's much more accepting/positive because you're afraid of being pessimistic because of the article :P

(Mostly just being cheeky. It's not fair to judge people on the internet when you don't know them)

[4ntonius8lock]

I'm not afraid of being pessimistic.

I read the article title and wanted to see how accurate it was.

If it was accurate, it would cause me, like a rational creature, to question my tendencies. I have list of pros and cons for all my proclivities and try to use/taper my tendencies accordingly. It's not like I'd abandon my tendency toward pessimism all together, but adding something to the list of cons would put it's utility into greater question. I'm always questioning my beliefs and the utility of my tendencies, it's how I constantly improve and progress in life.

But I also question other peoples assertions. It's the natural thing to do for me. I think to question how they define pessimism is also quite logical when trying to objectively measure something.

I'm curious though, can you please tell me how I was complaining? I'm genuinely interesting in knowing why you perceive that.

[emayljames]

You are right. The pessimism definition has many many cracks to end up with a bias of results.

[rolltiide]

> More of someone depressed or someone who has been beaten down in life.

Who accurately recognizes that they are going to be killed before people that have a tendency to have things go their way.

Sounds like we should just rename the study then worry about how they define pessimism!