[r3trohack3r]

I thought this was going to be an article about optimism ("geeking out" as in getting excited about things). I acknowledge that I'm responding to the headline and not the meat of the article.

I've recently (past ~5 years) stopped viewing the world pessimistically. I don't believe it's because I'm blindly optimistic, but because I didn't have the perspective to understand our ancestor's problems and how good of a life I had. It's pretty cool that I didn't die in 6th grade when I put that knife through my hand, that my knee doesn't lock anymore after having my meniscus removed, and pretty cool my wife survived to adulthood with unbelievably poor vision and asthma. It's pretty cool that a large portion of living is automated now by the systems around us, from food to cleaning, and that those systems are affordable enough that they're common place in most households. We've freed our societies up to focus on arts and science which has created a flywheel that keeps paying us greater and greater returns that we keep investing into arts and science.

Humans have done some cool things to conquer our basic nature and environment, and we continue to do cool things. Compared to other species we are absolutely killing it. Yes we suck compared to what we are going to be in the future, but that's the point!

Whenever I get a brief feeling of "this is bad," I remind myself that humans have conquered far worse than whatever "this" is and that we are likely to triumph over this thing too. Taking a second to appreciate what our species has accomplished, and "geeking out" about it, has helped improve my quality of life, thought I'd take a moment and share that with you.

[pathartl]

There are a few people in my circle that are overburdened by conspiracy theories to the point where they think that humans are corrupt and everyone is out to get them. It's exhausting to live like that. My goal is to be my 13 yr old self's hero. Do cool stuff, be in a good relationship, and fix things that bother me to the best of my ability.

[jahsome]

Hear hear! Our current and 13 year old selves sound like we could be a lot alike!

I'm really doing my best to make past/teenage me proud. I know about 5 years ago, I'd probably have kicked my own butt.

[908B64B197]

Remember how, just a few months ago, one could get banned from Social media for suggesting Covid-19 originated in a lab? "Fact Checkers" were hard at work silencing that content and attributing it to "conspiracy theorists".

Now the lab leak hypothesis is mainstream, with experts supporting investigating the labs in Wuhan and bringing in evidence that the disease indeed originated in a Chinese lab.

Sometimes, it seems the difference between facts and conspiracy is 6 months or another presidential administration, whichever comes first!

[mustacheemperor]

Viewing this sort of issue as equivalent in personal magnitude and meaning to Galileo’s heliocentrism dispute with the renaissance church is exactly the perspective I seek to avoid by framing my mindset like the earlier commenter, personally.

[khochesh_kushat]

Isn't the difference evidence? There were people jumping to all kinds of theories without evidence at the beginning, but acting like they knew for sure whatever their theory was. Some happened to be right, but that doesn't mean that the lesson to be learned is truth can best be found by jumping to conclusions without evidence.

If that was the lesson, then we should be jumping to exciting new conclusions without evidence like "actually, it's only changing now because US propaganda wants to harm China for their failure to align against Russia, and pinning COVID on them is a super convenient way to do that." Or whatever other exciting new theories you can come up, unbound from any evidence other than it sounds like something that could be plausible. Who knows maybe I will turn out right and I can rub it in everyone's faces later.

[skeaker]

I mean, it was an unfounded conspiracy theory before, wasn't it? When new evidence came about then it shifted into legitimacy. That's just how evidence works.

[TinkersW]

It was not unfounded for scientific reasons, but because some people decided it needed to be so.

[dnissley]

In this context I think you're pattern matching too deterministically on the term "conspiracy theory". I just read it as "random negative news headlines of the moment". Ironically this kind of poor pattern matching is what led to the situation you speak of, where anyone talking about the lab leak hypothesis got pattern matched as sinophobic / a conspiracy theorist.

[skyyler]

This is the stuff that is exhausting.

Why focus on it? What good does it bring to you?

[908B64B197]

"Why keep looking at the stars through these telescopes? We all know the Earth is at the center of the Universe, the Pope said so. What good does it bring to you?"

[skyyler]

I find it disingenuous to conflate “consuming news media” with “looking at the stars through telescopes”…

[hypertele-Xii]

It's reality.

[skyyler]

And in your day-to-day life, how does a deep understanding of the psyops being run against you and your countrymen do anything to help?

Knowledge is for action.

[hypertele-Xii]

Your rights are being eroded, your purchase power is being drained, society around you is slowly collapsing.

Change that happens slowly is insidious to notice, but it surely is impossible if you choose to actively ignore it... until it becomes unbearable, and then it's even costlier to act.

[908B64B197]

Would you say ignorance is strength then?

[barrysteve]

Uhh. The facts are off the map for media companies and the government media.

Society alternates between 3 functions. Hiding away facts, milking good times and taking valuable resources off the map.

We're just the weird people who remember the old-school world, where the public knowing the facts was a point of order and the science would settle it all.

Conspiracies theories appear to sound the alarm on it all, but they have no unique, private facts to share with the public, just like everyone else.

[Loocid]

Do you also remember COVID is a hoax, the vaccine is killing people for population control, 5G causes COVID, ivermectin is the real cure etc? The sheer volume is what is exhausting.

[cachecrab]

Lab leak != lab origination. It could have escaped the lab, but that doesn't mean it was created there.

[si1entstill]

I feel like I am and always have been a "day-to-day" optimist, but I struggle to apply that to larger, societal problems.

Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire. Income disparity seems to be increasing locally and globally. The military industrial complex of the largest nation-states feels eternal, as if it is a fundamental part of neoliberal capitalism.

I can "half-full" almost everything day to day. Financial issues, medical issues, family problems... never easy, but doable. I can handle it, smile on my face, and tough it out. But when I'm left alone with my thoughts, its hard for me not to draw the conclusion that the world my children (or their children) grow up in will be worse-off, and they will live harder lives than we have.

[vlunkr]

The way that I stay optimistic is to think about how awareness of these issues is growing. As they say, knowing is half the battle.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...

More people are concerned about climate change now, and the younger generations are more concerned than ever. Hopefully that leads to people in general making better choices, and more importantly, electing people who aren't deep in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

[r3trohack3r]

We made it through a cold war. Previous generations had to live with the very real risk of a fast escalating total nuclear disaster. We still have nukes but I generally don't worry about a fast escalating "everyone launches everything they have and we are ill prepared to shoot them all out of the sky before they make contact" doomsday scenario. Not only did we make it through that, but we put humans on the moon during that window of time and humans made some pretty significant scientific advances with the backdrop of all that stress.

> Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire.

Humans are pretty resilient and have been pretty good at mitigating large scale problems. Yeah we are impacting our environment, but we aren't the only species that does this. Many species, left unchecked, go through natural boom+bust cycles where they blast past the carrying capacity of their ecosystem and then bust the next generation.

At no point do deer look around and go "hey, we are eating all the food, maybe we shouldn't do that?" - they just eat and reproduce and nature sorts it out. They aren't morally corrupt for causing a boom/bust cycle, they're just animals like us. However, when it comes to humans, we have blasted past our ecosystem's natural carrying capacity (we've been past it for a long time now). Not only do we look around and go "hey, this is a problem" - something that puts us in a league all our own - but we have repeatedly solved that problem. And now we get to tackle the next set of problems.

Simply being aware that we are responsible for climate change and the ending of the Holocene is a huge achievement for a species, let alone putting together plans to over come it.

That is pretty cool!

What's even cooler is that all of the growing pains we are going through are putting us on a trajectory to literally save all life on Earth. Folks like to kick around the can about how humans are destroying Earth's environment. That's true, and we need to work our butts off to keep everything balanced moving forward. There are very smart humans working very hard to keep our ecosystems from collapsing.

But, no matter what we do to save our ecosystems, we are over 75% through the window of time life can survive on this planet.

A world without humans is a world where Earth slowly moves out of the habitable zone and finds itself in a complete extinction event in ~500m years - with little to no hope of any life bouncing back.

Getting life off this planet is a noble cause. Doing that requires either:

* a biological pathway to interstellar travel beyond the micro-organism scale (maybe nature will produce this in 500m years? find that _exceptionally_ unlikely)

* a species to develop the technology to get itself off this rock and survive the extremely hostile environments in space

Humans are doing that latter, and I have no reason to believe any other species would do a better job than we have getting to "building rockets and settling planets." Not only is our species going to the stars, but we are going to bring life on Earth with us when we do.

That is pretty rad.

[fullsend]

Because we are in fact so disconnected from our military today, modern people have forgotten that human civilization itself has been a military industrial complex forever. Not much to do with capitalism in particular.

[si1entstill]

I think there is a crucial semantic disconnect here, that may be partially stemmed from how much heavy lifting the relatively new term "military industrial complex" is doing. I'm likely partially to blame.

I use the term to refer to the the status quo of the relationship between interest groups, legislative bodies, and the bureaucratic system. I don't think I've forgotten anything. Some degree of defense was, and still is, necessary. I'm not refuting that. But, I believe that current manifestations of this relationship has lead to a system that is largely driven by private interests that have little to do with the defense or security of the people.

[fauxpause_]

Is the military industrial complex really that big? I’m under the impression that it’s honestly pretty weak and fragile.

[PeterisP]

Yep, the current Russian war in Ukraine exposed the fact that the western 'military complex' isn't that industrial anymore, as (for example) the total annual production of artillery shells is less than what we'd shoot in a single average day of WW2.

There's still a lot of money spent, but it's spent less on actual industrial capacity but rather mostly on various high-tech R&D things - probably because then you can convert a larger portion of the order to profits instead of hardware.

[fauxpause_]

Yes that was what I meant. Lots of RD. probably an army of contractors.

But industry? I really don’t think so. Still curious if others have evidence otherwise

[si1entstill]

I'd say that, colloquially at least (and maybe in a literary sense as well), the "military industrial complex" broadly covers the flow of money from a government and its military to the defense industry at large. (terms again can be a bit strange here, but the "defense-industry" describes an area of economic activity not "the refinement of raw materials into products").

[onemoresoop]

> Humans have done some cool things to conquer our basic nature and environment, and we continue to do cool things. Compared to other species we are absolutely killing it. Yes we suck compared to what we are going to be in the future, but that's the point!

At the same time it's important not to forget humans have done some messed up things to the environment that are not easy to clean up or undo. And they still do, all with a paltry goal to make a short term profit. This is what drives my optimism away, though I am not a pessimistic person by nature.

[r3trohack3r]

I have a longer response on another sibling.

But I’d say:

1) Most humans mean well and these are side effects of solutions to other problems - we can find and hold up examples of people acting poorly but to extrapolate that out I don’t think is fair. Energy abundance has done unbelievably important things for civil rights, quality of life, and the prospect of life being able to outlive Earth.

2) It’s important to remember life on earth is ~75% behind us. We’ve only got another 500m years until there is a complete extinction event with little hope of coming back. If you take humans out of the picture, you don’t save nature, you doom it to complete extinction.

Humans are awesome, all flaws considered. We are the only golden ticket our planet has printed to get life off this rock.

[s5300]

> We’ve only got another 500m years until there is a complete extinction event with little hope of coming back.

Are you speaking of a gamma ray burst expected to affect the ozone layer severely enough?

[r3trohack3r]

No, the carbon cycle being disrupted.

From your question I assume you’re on the Timeline of the Far Future Wikipedia page, which references this. It’s the next few boxes below the gamma ray burst.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

[e_i_pi_2]

This is somewhat true but also somewhat not - we have a lower chance of childhood mortality, but only in some countries. We have a general higher standard of living, but income inequality is worse than it's ever been. We have less people dying in wars, but when we do have them more people die than ever would have in the past. I'd recommend "The better angels of our nature" as a book for more on this - it covers human history of this well and shows the tradeoffs we've been making at the same time. The average person today has more creature comforts than a king a hundred years ago, but at the same time almost no one today has as much vacation time as a medieval peasant did

[zokier]

> Whenever I get a brief feeling of "this is bad," I remind myself that humans have conquered far worse than whatever "this" is

It's a nice sentiment, but I see no reason to think it is true. While I'd agree that in many ways life is nicer and easier, the problems that we do have now are even more complex and difficult than ever.

[mewpmewp2]

Sure, there are huge challenges facing us as a civilization, but we are not alone in terms of solving those. Individually people on average I believe are better off now compared to any time previous in history.

Of course some people have terrible lives still, some people die at birth, but we are living in a truly astonishing era with endless possibilities in my view.

[Damogran6]

You're still above ground after a global, full-blown, pandemic. Which is nice.

The things that bring me the biggest anxiety all come from Twitter, and I find they don't much impact my day to day. While the internet shows me the absolute worst of mankind (in addition to the best), I find my IRL world isn't half bad.

[411111111111111]

> Whenever I get a brief feeling of "this is bad," I remind myself that humans have conquered far worse than whatever "this" is and that we are likely to triumph over this thing too.

I do something very similar, though slightly different.

Whenever I notice something bad i rejoice that I've probably lived through the best times our western society likely ever have

I at least experienced a reality which didn't have [the bad thing] as the norm.

Society is not gonna get more equal from now on, so Gen Beta (people that are currently being born) are gonna have a massively worse life then I've had.

[spoonfeeder006]

Have we had to handle anything as bad as global climate change which can possibly render much of the lower latitudes near inhospitable for humans?

[Uupis]

Oh, somehow this kinda clicks for me.

Thank you!

Reminds me of:

> I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.

[melagonster]

I hope this will happen:) everyday, I read a post about AI on HN and then feel terrible... guess human still exists.

[HervalFreire]

There was a science experiment where they took pessimists and optimists and had them rate themselves from one to ten in terms of looks.

Then they had another external group of people rate them based off of the same 1 to 10 scale to get an unbiased baseline.

Turns out pessimists had a more accurate and realistic rating around how good they looked. While optimists had ratings that were wildly overblown. There are other experiments that measured other things related to these two groups of people.

It turns out optimists are, happier, have higher salaries and are much more successful in life while pessimists are more likely to be clinically depressed.

This experiment tells us a dark truth about human nature. We lie to ourselves to stay sane. We construct illusions to protect ourselves from fully experiencing the cruel reality of life.

Optimism is a special kind of blindness. It's blindness that blinds you from being aware you're blind.

So look deeply at yourself. Are you happy? Are you optimistic? If so then that is in itself a statistical statement about how delusional and intelligent you actually are. Can you handle the truth?

I wonder how this post will get voted? Down for being depressing and negative? Or up for being truthful?

[r3trohack3r]

> I wonder how this post will get voted? Down for being depressing and negative? Or up for being truthful?

Likely down for talking about votes.

And for assuming there is only one truth.

> We construct illusions to protect ourselves from fully experiencing the cruel reality of life.

Reality is cruel. Nature is cruel. Existence is cruel. And Humans have overcome a substantial amount of that cruelty and enjoy a quality of life our ancestors couldn't even dream of.

There are many other things to be optimistic about given where life on earth started and how it is going for humans. Our ancestors have come a long way in 4.5bn years, it would be special kind of blindness to write that progress off as a lie we tell ourselves to stay sane.

[HervalFreire]

Who knows? You could be right and I could be the one that is totally blind.

I propose an experiment to find out just which one of us is actually more delusional. To start off, how would you rate yourself in terms of looks from 1 to 10?

[mewpmewp2]

I disagree with a lot of what you are saying. Firstly I wouldn't label myself any way, neither pessimist or optimist.

But you can be amazed at what has happened throughout the whole history and what humans have built, and be optimistic and excited about the future, and that we can handle the problems thrown at us and be completely realistic at the same time.

And even if there was some way to accurately judge whether optimists or pessimists view the World more accurately, it doesn't mean you can't still view the world accurately and be an optimist at the same time.

It might just be that optimists on average are more likely to view things in a better light than they are, but it doesn't apply to every single optimist.

There is truth, but also even bad truth like a problem coming your way you can treat it as an exciting challenge or a nuisance.

[HervalFreire]

https://radiolab.org/episodes/91618-lying-to-ourselves

What I'm saying is not something I made up. It's actual science.

Listen to the podcast if you have the time. It's derived from actual multitudes of scientific research done on thousands of people. It's only 12 minutes and it's really good and it will change your perception of the importance of knowing the truth.

This is real. And the experiments cited in this podcast are only a fraction of the psychological experiments used to confirm this theory. It's not about a matter of your opinion, it's science.

But even if it's real it doesn't matter does it? Because it's all about your perception and your ability to delude yourself.

[mewpmewp2]

I was responding to your points. Is there any other specific point you want me to respond to?

Because the arguments are that you can overestimate your capabilities or be overconfident to perform better, which I agree with, but my point is that none of it is indicative that someone having generally a positive view of the world necessarily implies that they would have less grasp on reality.

I think the experiments are not evidence that one has to "delude" themselves to be positive or happy. Because the end of your post implied that there must be at least some level of delusion going on.

[HervalFreire]

>but my point is that none of it is indicative that someone having generally a positive view of the world necessarily implies that they would have less grasp on reality.

From the podcast:

    Joanna: The people who were the most realistic, that actually see the world exactly as it is, tend to be slightly more depressed than others.

    Robert: Time and time again, researchers have found that depressed people lie less.

    Ruben: They see all the pain in the world. How horrible people are with each other and they tell you everything about themselves. What their weaknesses are, what terrible things they've done to other people and the problem is they're right....

That one research study they used as an example is one out of multitudes used to formulate the conclusion I cited above.

In short:

   People who tend to be realistic tend to be depressed. People who lie to themselves tend to be happy. 

I mean it's obvious that this point contradicts your claim. Ask yourself, are you lying to yourself right now? Are you currently being optimistically delusional about what was actually stated in the podcast? Hard to say.

[mewpmewp2]

It may be that on average "realistic" people are more depressed, but it doesn't mean an individual "realistic" person can't be generally happy.

It's only an "average". You can have a set with average of -20, but it could be a range of -60 to 20, so you can have 20s in the set while on average the set is below 0.

> They see all the pain in the world. How horrible people are with each other and they tell you everything about themselves. What their weaknesses are, what terrible things they've done to other people and the problem is they're right

There's both negatives and positives in the World. You can accept the negatives and appreciate the positives. Humans have suffered throughout the whole duration they have existed as species. You don't have to be depressed because of that. You can appreciate all what humanity has built, and where we have reached in our quest to advance and innovate. We are discovering more and more every day. You can focus on your curiosity. I have no problem discussing those topics or noticing those issues.

> What their weaknesses are

You can accept your weaknesses and either work on them or consider them not worthy to be worked on and focus on your strengths instead. Some weaknesses are worth working on, others are not and you can just accept that they exist.

> what terrible things they've done to other people and the problem is they're right

Everyone makes mistakes. No point in staying around feeling guilty about it. Move on and do your best.

> I mean it's obvious that this point contradicts your claim. Ask yourself, are you lying to yourself right now? Are you currently being optimistically delusional about what was actually stated in the podcast? Hard to say.

It's not contradicting, it's just taking one seemingly unhealthy mindset, that seems to correlate with certain type of realism, but overall you can have an healthy mindset about realism where you accept the bad and appreciate the good.

The podcast is missing this healthy type of acceptance and appreciation of truth.

[mewpmewp2]

Okay, listening to the podcast. I understand your point much better now, that seems like a very interesting episode, thank you for that. Like if there are some unpleasant truths that if you don't believe to be true would make your life much easier.

But the questionnaire on the streets - to be fair, if I were to answer "no" there, it doesn't mean I would be lying to myself, I might only be lying to the interviewer, for obvious reasons.

[mewpmewp2]

I mean it's very interesting topic, but there's many things to take a part or consider here. Visualising success is a recommended activity for instance, but it doesn't necessarily mean lying to oneself, it's just preparing yourself, going through what is upcoming.

[rixed]

Let's see if there is anything of value in between those two extreme viewpoints...

Reality is cruel and often sad, and for our own sake our brain tricks us into believing it's all pink, making us optimistic, delusional and stupid.

On the other hand, contemplating all the time just how cruel and vain everything is left us depressed and unmotivated and eventually makes life useless and worthless.

Well, then maybe we could aim for the middle, aknowledge that our brain has a tendency to paint everything either pink or black, but that with some little effort it's not so hard to recognize these trends when they happen and navigate in between, and be realistically satisfied that we can actually achieve to do that and be happy without delusion?

[mnky9800n]

but it isn't a lie. everything you said here is biased by your perspective on reality. everything you read here is biased by your perspective. everything i understand you said is biased by my perspective. it is a wonder any of us at all are able to communicate with each other ideas using words and body language. it is quite possible that we are all non-overlapping cognitive bubbles traveling around interpreting input never actually connecting or understanding each other in any real way.

[HervalFreire]

Would it be different if I told you that what I wrote here is based on and confirmed by science?

When subject to the rigor of statistical confirmation then what I said is no longer a "perspective". It is a fundamental fact about reality as we know it.

[mnky9800n]

Science is an attempt to remove bias from perception but it's not perfect. I feel like we are on the same page but reading different books.

[HervalFreire]

Its nearly perfect if the sample size is big enough.

Barring that it's also the best we can do. There's no better alternative to science so you either believe in the science or you believe something significantly less accurate then science.

If you're not on board with science that has been thoroughly researched then it's akin to saying you're not on board with reality.

[mnky9800n]

I feel like I'm on board with science. I have a PhD in physics and a position at a researcher both in an industrial research lab and part-time at a university. I spend most days thinking about something related to science.

But I also think about how we as individuals perceive reality and is there an objective perception of that reality? Often times our perceptions bias even what we choose to observe scientifically. This can blind us or make us stick to things even when they are no longer useful. For example, Sabine Hossenfelders criticism of inventing new particles with the only evidence being various unexplained statistical uncertainties [1]. Science is quite useful because it's a way to try and average our perceptions of reality such that we get an explanation that we all more or less agree with. But, most of these explanations are wrong in some way depending on what initial and boundary conditions you pick. That is, it's all about the perspective you choose when approaching a problem as to whether you ever arrive at a meaningful solution or not.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/26/physic...