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. The smartest people in Washington agreed America had fallen behind for good. Eleven years and eight months later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.
The people who responded to the fear by building things landed on the moon. The people who responded by predicting doom were forgotten before the decade was out.
Over the last 15 years, a specific intellectual posture has taken hold in educated Western culture. I’ve started calling it competitive pessimism. Whoever can list the most reasons something won’t work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. Optimism gets the tilted-head look, the one people reserve for a belief in astrology.
Philip Tetlock spent 20 years scoring the predictions of 284 political scientists, economists, and government advisors. Most performed about as well as dart-throwing chimpanzees. The very worst forecasters were the ones with one grand theory who bent all incoming data to fit it. Nobody puts the careful, uncertain forecasters on television.
In 1894, the Times of London calculated that the city’s streets would be buried under nine feet of horse manure by the 1940s. Carl Benz had already patented a gasoline-powered vehicle eight years earlier. Malthus said famine was inevitable at the start of the agricultural revolution. Paul Ehrlich said hundreds of millions would starve. Food production tripled instead.
Being wrong about doom costs you almost nothing. Being wrong about hope can cost you your entire career. That asymmetry is pushing smart, careful people toward the darkest forecast even when the evidence is mixed. I refuse to treat that as intelligence.
