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The inimitable Hans Rosling[1] used to call himself a "possibilist": People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't kn

The inimitable Hans Rosling[1] used to call himself a "possibilist": People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful. • • • In his book 'Factfulness' (definitely read it), he talks about "bad and better": Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical. Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling

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oblio 5y ago
This is a great quote. I'm probably going to be using that example in a lot of debates :-) Thank you!
- nefitty 5y ago
  To overextend the metaphor, I try to see all the little systems of the world as incubator babies. Some of them are worsening, we may lose some, some are near perfect health... We can celebrate the improvements while simultaneously mourning the losses. Sometimes you'll hear that a person is "complicated". Our emotional world can be layers of many tones, textures, timbres. I think that when we invite the emotional correlate of abstract visual art, it gives us an intellectual advantage. In terms of being able to mentally simulate multiple contrasting perspectives in parallel, it almost guarantees we'll land closer toward truthiness. The basic emotions are like representational art. Easier to digest, easier to understand, easier to handle... Cotton candy for your guts. Suffice to say, we're richly rewarded when we couple intellectual understanding with emotional resonance.
  - prox 5y ago
    What are your thoughts on engaging in social media (say this comment thread), it is so easy to forget there is (probably!) a living and breathing person on the other end. I made friends in gaming who have different worldviews and sometimes debates came up (say covid and vaccins) and the debates really changed attitudes and understanding. It has been such a difference than many debates here or on worse on reddit, or anywhere else.
    - nefitty 5y ago
      It seems like people that are highly engaged in online conversations do so because they, consciously or not, think their contributions will pull the universe toward some goal. That goal might be "truth", "freedom", "absurdity", etc. (Uncovering those goals sounds like a really fun project.) I think some of it also comes from status needs. Specifically, dominance. I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here. Ever since I started using the internet as a little kid I've felt the need to toss my thoughts into the cyber stream. I think all the word games I've played with other people online have truly made me a multitude. All that is opposed to real life interactions. In real life, people sometimes just sit next to each other and occasionally share thoughts. It's a lot more like chat rooms instead of like social media. In a chat room, the facets of an individual are more prominent, meaning, as the chat continues, you witness how a person reasons through their ideas and feelings. Maybe he's a climate skeptic but oh hey, you love my favorite band, what! The above multi-facetedness of irl and chat interaction is in contrast to this, what we're engaging in now. This comment I'm writing is an expression of a microscopic slice of time in my life and thoughts in my brain. But it's now reified. People can come back to it 10 years from now and play with it in their heads. I might be dead by then, or I might be a fascist or I might have become a Zen monk. The new eyes sipping my words have no clue, little context, of who I was an hour or a day ago, let alone a decade since. No wonder we stumble into toxicity on social media. Not only are we probably trying to prove or achieve something, but its asynchronous nature causes weird second-order effects. Millions of people can read a Facebook post written in a fit of rage and fear with a migraine ripping through the body of the author at 3 in the morning, but suddenly, that psychologically, philosophically, sociologically, cosmically absolutely insignificant moment could cause ripples throughout the entire world. We're built by evolution to play joyous semantic games with each other. With social media we're trying to do the same, except our innocent flourishes are all punctuated with grenades and nuclear bombs. Anyways, those are my thoughts on that. I'm very happy to hear that you found good people to share your esteem and friendship with. That's the dopest shit.
- kashyapc 5y ago
  The "bad and better" mental model works well in many scenarios. Particularly where people tend to become hyperbolic and think in only absolutes. Rosling used to work in Mozambique, the poorest country in the world at that time. In his first year there he was the only doctor for a population of 300,000 (!) people. He writes further: in my second year, a second doctor joined me. We covered a population that in Sweden would have been served by 100 doctors, and every morning on my way to work I said to myself, "Today I must do the work of 50 doctors."
- necovek 5y ago
  Having had a premature baby, please don't: progress is rarely "linear". I agree that does not make the example inapplicable, it just makes it insensitive. There are so many better examples to choose from that don't strike a personal nerve (at least, personal to this extent) with any of the audience. Or if your audience hasn't had this experience, it's a moot example that they can't really relate to.
  - oblio 5y ago
    There's two things to unpack here. First, the major one. Yes, it is an insensitive example so a better one should be one. Secondly, regarding your comment regarding progress, human progress is also not linear. It's not even constantly and universally pointing in the right direction (there are frequent regressions, some bigger than others), let alone advancing at a constant speed.
    - necovek 5y ago
      I said as much: it's not inapplicable, just insensitive. TL;DR: I am letting you know how this example made me feel. Take it any way you want. It's so much easier for me to process any realist take on something that may have concerned my own health or my parents' health (we've all had serious health conditions), but shouts of the crowd "hey, we are empathizing" when it comes to premature babies makes me gulp (and my kid is doing great: what about those whose isn't?). Why don't we use kids with serious, life threatening conditions as examples too? Because those examples are too emotionally taxing. It exactly feels like coming from someone who has not had a premature baby (or had a low risk one, as >80% of them are: babies coming out at 36 or even 33 weeks of gestation have a very low risk of any developmental issues and have high chances of survival, yet are still called "premature" — their parents are unlikely to have heard phrases like "it's so-and-so, you probably understand what this means" or "may become blind in a matter of days/hours", even though they've experienced a lot of psychological stress too). If the goal is to trigger an emotional response, I think this is the wrong one. If the goal is to trigger a rational response, then anybody with a first-hand experience is going to have a hard time. I am simply calling it out as I see it: find a better example, please.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
This reminds me of something one of my history professors said. He's never really disappointed in life because he sets his expectations extremely low. If something exceeds those expectations, he's happy. If they don't, well, he didn't expect much of it to begin with so nothing really changes. He said it kind of tongue-in-cheek but it still sticks with me over a decade later.
agumonkey 5y ago
Interesting term, so simple yet effective.
tiagomfcorreia 5y ago
Sir, I really liked this one. Gonna read the book for certain.
FrankyHollywood 5y ago
I like the incubator example. It is easy to jump to (extreme) conclusions, and not see what's really there. Reminds me of https://www.logicalfallacies.org/ https://www.logicalfallacies.org/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

oblio 5y ago

This is a great quote. I'm probably going to be using that example in a lot of debates :-) Thank you!

nefitty 5y ago
To overextend the metaphor, I try to see all the little systems of the world as incubator babies. Some of them are worsening, we may lose some, some are near perfect health... We can celebrate the improvements while simultaneously mourning the losses. Sometimes you'll hear that a person is "complicated". Our emotional world can be layers of many tones, textures, timbres. I think that when we invite the emotional correlate of abstract visual art, it gives us an intellectual advantage. In terms of being able to mentally simulate multiple contrasting perspectives in parallel, it almost guarantees we'll land closer toward truthiness. The basic emotions are like representational art. Easier to digest, easier to understand, easier to handle... Cotton candy for your guts. Suffice to say, we're richly rewarded when we couple intellectual understanding with emotional resonance.
- prox 5y ago
  What are your thoughts on engaging in social media (say this comment thread), it is so easy to forget there is (probably!) a living and breathing person on the other end. I made friends in gaming who have different worldviews and sometimes debates came up (say covid and vaccins) and the debates really changed attitudes and understanding. It has been such a difference than many debates here or on worse on reddit, or anywhere else.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    It seems like people that are highly engaged in online conversations do so because they, consciously or not, think their contributions will pull the universe toward some goal. That goal might be "truth", "freedom", "absurdity", etc. (Uncovering those goals sounds like a really fun project.) I think some of it also comes from status needs. Specifically, dominance. I don't understand the lurker mindset whatsoever. It has to be how most people interact with the internet though, otherwise there would be 10's of thousands of comments on every post here. Ever since I started using the internet as a little kid I've felt the need to toss my thoughts into the cyber stream. I think all the word games I've played with other people online have truly made me a multitude. All that is opposed to real life interactions. In real life, people sometimes just sit next to each other and occasionally share thoughts. It's a lot more like chat rooms instead of like social media. In a chat room, the facets of an individual are more prominent, meaning, as the chat continues, you witness how a person reasons through their ideas and feelings. Maybe he's a climate skeptic but oh hey, you love my favorite band, what! The above multi-facetedness of irl and chat interaction is in contrast to this, what we're engaging in now. This comment I'm writing is an expression of a microscopic slice of time in my life and thoughts in my brain. But it's now reified. People can come back to it 10 years from now and play with it in their heads. I might be dead by then, or I might be a fascist or I might have become a Zen monk. The new eyes sipping my words have no clue, little context, of who I was an hour or a day ago, let alone a decade since. No wonder we stumble into toxicity on social media. Not only are we probably trying to prove or achieve something, but its asynchronous nature causes weird second-order effects. Millions of people can read a Facebook post written in a fit of rage and fear with a migraine ripping through the body of the author at 3 in the morning, but suddenly, that psychologically, philosophically, sociologically, cosmically absolutely insignificant moment could cause ripples throughout the entire world. We're built by evolution to play joyous semantic games with each other. With social media we're trying to do the same, except our innocent flourishes are all punctuated with grenades and nuclear bombs. Anyways, those are my thoughts on that. I'm very happy to hear that you found good people to share your esteem and friendship with. That's the dopest shit.
kashyapc 5y ago
The "bad and better" mental model works well in many scenarios. Particularly where people tend to become hyperbolic and think in only absolutes. Rosling used to work in Mozambique, the poorest country in the world at that time. In his first year there he was the only doctor for a population of 300,000 (!) people. He writes further: in my second year, a second doctor joined me. We covered a population that in Sweden would have been served by 100 doctors, and every morning on my way to work I said to myself, "Today I must do the work of 50 doctors."
necovek 5y ago
Having had a premature baby, please don't: progress is rarely "linear". I agree that does not make the example inapplicable, it just makes it insensitive. There are so many better examples to choose from that don't strike a personal nerve (at least, personal to this extent) with any of the audience. Or if your audience hasn't had this experience, it's a moot example that they can't really relate to.
- oblio 5y ago
  There's two things to unpack here. First, the major one. Yes, it is an insensitive example so a better one should be one. Secondly, regarding your comment regarding progress, human progress is also not linear. It's not even constantly and universally pointing in the right direction (there are frequent regressions, some bigger than others), let alone advancing at a constant speed.
  - necovek 5y ago
    I said as much: it's not inapplicable, just insensitive. TL;DR: I am letting you know how this example made me feel. Take it any way you want. It's so much easier for me to process any realist take on something that may have concerned my own health or my parents' health (we've all had serious health conditions), but shouts of the crowd "hey, we are empathizing" when it comes to premature babies makes me gulp (and my kid is doing great: what about those whose isn't?). Why don't we use kids with serious, life threatening conditions as examples too? Because those examples are too emotionally taxing. It exactly feels like coming from someone who has not had a premature baby (or had a low risk one, as >80% of them are: babies coming out at 36 or even 33 weeks of gestation have a very low risk of any developmental issues and have high chances of survival, yet are still called "premature" — their parents are unlikely to have heard phrases like "it's so-and-so, you probably understand what this means" or "may become blind in a matter of days/hours", even though they've experienced a lot of psychological stress too). If the goal is to trigger an emotional response, I think this is the wrong one. If the goal is to trigger a rational response, then anybody with a first-hand experience is going to have a hard time. I am simply calling it out as I see it: find a better example, please.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

This reminds me of something one of my history professors said. He's never really disappointed in life because he sets his expectations extremely low. If something exceeds those expectations, he's happy. If they don't, well, he didn't expect much of it to begin with so nothing really changes. He said it kind of tongue-in-cheek but it still sticks with me over a decade later.

agumonkey 5y ago

Interesting term, so simple yet effective.

tiagomfcorreia 5y ago

Sir, I really liked this one. Gonna read the book for certain.

FrankyHollywood 5y ago

I like the incubator example. It is easy to jump to (extreme) conclusions, and not see what's really there. Reminds me of https://www.logicalfallacies.org/ https://www.logicalfallacies.org/