Optimism is not a personality flaw

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik - and the United States lost its collective mind. Newspapers ran headlines about Soviet nuclear weapons raining from orbit, and schools held duck-and-cover drills. Eisenhower's approval rating cratered and the smartest people in Washington agreed that America had fallen behind, for good, the free world was in terminal decline, and their enemies were about to launch space-faring Nukes.

Then, eleven years and 8 months later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. One small step, etc.

Folks in 1957 had at least some reason to be afraid, and the fear was grounded in something real: you could measure the gap in rocket technology down to the pound of thrust. But the people who responded to that fear by building things (the Apollo program, the engineers who decided the problem was solvable) landed on the moon. The people who responded by predicting doom were forgotten before the decade was out.

I can't think of a better summary of the argument I'm trying to make here...

In the last 15 years, a specific kind of intellectual posture has taken hold everywhere. I've started calling it "competitive pessimism" - which might not be perfect, but it's the best I've got.

Whoever can list the most reasons something won't work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. If you say "I think this could go well," you get ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in astrology.

Pessimism reads as intelligence now.

Optimism reads as naivety.

This has gotten so baked into educated Western culture that most people don't notice they're doing it. But it's toxic, all the same.

Where this came from

The instinct has some logic to it, I'll be fair about that.

The 21st century opened with the dot-com crash, which wiped $5 trillion off the NASDAQ between March 2000 and October 2002. Then September 11th, and the Afghanistan War, and then the Iraq War. Then the 2008 financial crisis, which destroyed 8.7 million American jobs in eighteen months. Then Obama! And then Trump. Then a pandemic that killed over a million people in the US alone. Climate reports from the IPCC kept landing, each one worse. If you paid attention to any of this, bracing for impact started to look like base common sense.

The internet of course poured a gasoline on all of it. In 2012, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman at Wharton went through about seven thousand New York Times articles and tracked which ones readers actually emailed to their friends. The anxious // angry pieces won. The hopeful writing just sort of...sat there. The platforms didn't need an academic paper to work this out. Doom = clicks. Doom = ad revenue. Doom got you a booking on Joe Rogan. Pessimists built media empires, and optimists built water treatment plants in sub-Saharan Africa and nobody wrote a magazine cover about them.

Pessimism is useful and I won't be glib about that. You want a pessimist reviewing the specs on the I-35W bridge before it goes up. You want a pessimist reading your bloodwork. Risk assessment is a discipline that saves lives every single day. What happened over the last two decades is that risk assessment slid from being a discipline into being a disposition; worry stopped being something you ~did and became something you ~were.

And that's where the trouble started.

What the doomers predicted

In 1894, the Times of London published a calculation: at current rates of growth, the city's streets would be buried under nine feet of horse manure by the 1940s. The math was technically on the money: fifty thousand horses working in London at the time, each producing 15 to 35 pounds of dung per day, with a population growing...the arithmetic pointed one way.

What nobody at the Times knew was that Karl Benz, tinkering in a shop in Mannheim, had already patented a gasoline-powered vehicle eight years earlier. The car scaled up, the manure problem disappeared and a completely different set of problems showed up in its place.

Thomas Malthus did the same thing a century earlier, in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. Population grows geometrically, food arithmetically, and therefore - famine is mathematically inevitable. He published this at the start of the Agricultural Revolution. Paul Ehrlich doubled down in 1968: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," he wrote on page one of The Population Bomb, "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."

Well, food production tripled instead.

Peak oil in 2005, same story; the doomsday logic was always internally consistent. The world just did not cooperate.

I know I'm cherry-picking here. Listing reversals is easy. Plenty of problems didn't get fixed. Plenty of hopeful people were dead wrong. But the doomers were also wrong, and the doomers didn't build anything while they were busy ~being wrong.

The optimists who failed at least generated attempts.

This is the asymmetry I keep snagging on.

Why it feels smart to be grim

In 1984, a psychologist at Berkeley named Philip Tetlock started cornering experts at conferences and asking them to make specific, testable predictions.

• Would the Soviet Union collapse within five years?
• Would inflation top 6%?

He accumulated tens of thousands of these forecasts from 284 political scientists, economists, and government advisors, and after twenty years he scored them all against reality. Most of the experts performed about as well as "dart-throwing chimpanzees" -- Tetlock's line, not mine. The very worst forecasters were the folks with One Grand Theory™️ who bent all incoming data to fit it.

Nobody puts the careful, uncertain forecasters on television.

"I see arguments on both sides and I'm not confident" doesn't fill a segment.

This is an ongoing complaint of mine.

And then there's the reputation factor. If you predict a catastrophe and you're wrong, nobody circles back to check - and your wrong call just dissolves. If you predict things will work out and they don't, that shit follows you around forever. The lopsidedness of the payoff alone is enough to push smart, careful people toward the darkest possible forecast even when the evidence is genuinely mixed.

Being wrong about doom costs you nothing.

Being wrong about hope costs you your career.

Hope as a decision

Cornel West split optimism and hope into two separate things...

• Optimism is a spectator sport, in his framing. You watch the data and decide whether the trend lines look good.
• Hope is a commitment to act as though improvement is possible, because without that commitment you guarantee it isn't. Nobody serious is claiming things will get better on their own. In fact, things can only get better if enough people act as though they might.

Every hospital that got built started with someone saying "we can treat those people." Every civil rights movement and every vaccine that reduced suffering began with someone who looked at a bad situation and decided to treat it as a problem to solve, and a problem that ~could be solved.

"What about the problems that didn't get solved? What about the optimists who were wrong?"

Well, what about them?

The optimists who were wrong still attempted something.

The pessimists who were right attempted nothing.

And the world runs on attempts, not on accurate // profound predictions of failure.

The permanent bracing costs

At the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman spent decades studying what he called "learned helplessness." He found that people who explain bad events as permanent and personal, baked into the fabric of reality, are more likely to become depressed and less likely to keep trying. I should know. That about accurately describes my emotional state for most of my 20's.

The cultural pessimism that passes for intelligence has the same structure - if your default explanation for every problem is "systems are broken and people are selfish, so nothing will ever be different," you've adopted a worldview that is indistinguishable from despair, and you might call it realism but it produces the same behavior as hopelessness.

When pessimism becomes the default in public conversation, it starts building the world it claims to be describing. People who believe nothing can be different don't vote, don't volunteer, don't start companies, don't run for office, don't build the thing that might have mattered.

Pessimism at scale is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rebecca Solnit put it well in Hope in the Dark: "Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is something you do."

The stubborn, irrational case

In 1903, Simon Newcomb - a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins and probably the most credentialed scientist in the country - wrote a widely-read essay arguing that powered heavier-than-air flight was a practical impossibility. And on December 17 of that same year, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew four times at Kitty Hawk. The longest flight lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. Newcomb never revised his position.

Pessimism is more accurate in the short term - almost always, I'll give it that. Things do go wrong in roughly the ways people predict they will. But optimism is more productive over decades. Optimism is the thing that generates attempts, and without attempts nothing changes.

Blind cheerfulness ignores evidence, crashes planes, builds the Humane AI Pin and bankrupts companies. Nobody wants that. But the choice to look at bad data and act anyway, because sitting still is the one move that guarantees the bad outcome, is a noble one.

The most dangerous idea I keep running into is that there is nothing to be done. It's the one idea that, if enough people hold it, comes true - and I refuse to treat that as a serious intellectual position. I refuse to let Quiet Quitting become the dominant intellectual model of our age.

I would rather be wrong about what we're capable of than right about why we shouldn't bother trying...