9 ms·

Why Pessimism Sounds Smart

158 points by feross 5y ago

brimble 5y ago
Because it's usually right? See also: cynicism. Reads article Oh, this is about a very specific kind of pessimism in which a statement like "new economically-valuable technologies will emerge" is purely the domain of optimism.
- friedman23 5y ago
  How is it usually right? Pessimism and cynicism are cheap ways to appear smart to dumb people.
  - brimble 5y ago
    "You're not going to win the lotto jackpot". [EDIT] OK, one example was a bit flippant and easy to dismiss, but: "No, this isn't going to bring us meaningfully closer to economically-viable fusion power" "No, this isn't the War to End All Wars" "No, you're not going to keep your New Years fitness resolution" "No, your company's not going to succeed" "This miracle chemical's probably gonna turn out to be bad for our health. I look forward to finding out how fucked I am because of it in 40 years when someone gets around to doing anything about the alarming study someone will likely do in 10 years only to be ignored. If I make it that long. But at least we can make things fire-resistant 6% cheaper than before!" Et c.
    - kevinh 5y ago
      You're going to wake up tomorrow. You're going to be able to breathe a minute from now. Your whole life isn't going to fall apart. etc. There are unlimited hypotheticals you can make where an optimistic or pessimistic take is far more likely.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I can right now look at every single applicant to YC, predict they will fail, and be right the overwhelming majority of the time. I can look at every amateur scientist who has found "a problem" with mainstream science, predict that they are a crank, and be right the overwhelming majority of the time. I can look at every "breakthrough in battery technology," predict that it won't be on the market in 20 years, and be right the overwhelming majority of the time. Nevertheless, there are YC applicants that found successful companies. Amateur scientists have contributed to scientific breakthroughs. Battery breakthroughs have made it from lab-to-market in much less than 20 years.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    That seems like a pessimistic, cynical take on life...
  - dudeman13 5y ago
    Depending on the subject, people's natural state is optimism even if they think they are being realistic. [1] and [2] have a bunch of interesting references on this matter Appearing smart to dumb people isn't hard, so it doesn't count as a negative about pessimism :) I won't make a judgement about it being usually right, but being pessimistic can be a tool to counteract the standard optimistic stance if you know people are usually optimistic (aka their expectations overshoot reality) on the subject [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    A lot of pessimism is of the "this shitty thing that no one capable of fixing has any incentive to fix will continue to be shitty" variety. That is usually right, even if it is more pessimistic than "I'm going to fix this shitty thing even if it kills me". This basic pessimism is still less pessimistic than "nothing is shitty anywhere I can't hear you nananana!"
jrimbault 5y ago
You can be optimist about your goals but pessimist about your means. There's probably any number of quotes from military strategists about that kind of thing.
- brimble 5y ago
  TFA gets where it going by defining "pessimism" in a way that makes TFA's conclusions correct. It doesn't seem to be concerned with nuance. You can do the same thing in reverse with "optimism" by pinning that term to an extreme version of it, which is obviously going to be wrong most of the time, while making "pessimism" the milder outlook that happens to align better to reality. Straw-manning, basically.
  - jrimbault 5y ago
    I think it's a rhetoric device close the antimetabole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimetabole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimetabole
- l33t2328 5y ago
  This seems to be a convoluted way of saying “hope for the best plan for the worst.”
  - jrimbault 5y ago
    That's probably one of the quotes I was thinking of but couldn't think of.
paulpauper 5y ago
But there is a often a good reason to be pessimistic, mainly that it's not like you get infinite attempts in life or at anything. Life is not like practicing basketball or an instrument, in which the cost of failure is zero. Failure can have irreversible consequences professionally and personally. You have to be cautious in knowing what sort of things can trigger an irreversible failure.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Failure to take risks can do that. I've always found pessimism about pessimism to be the strongest argument for optimism about optimism.
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    Haha that's a mental trick I sometimes use - imagining literally selling myself short, and asking how that could go tits up. Being a skilled pessimist I can think of a multitide of ways.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Exactly, as a society, we should be glad sacrificial optimists exist for the benefit their sacrifice randomly provides to society. But we also shouldn't scorn the pessimist for the simple fact that they understand how randomness works.
- hgomersall 5y ago
  The thing is, you're forced to play the game whether you want to or not. Failure or not has little to do with disposition.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  In mountain biking (to use a sport where often the cost of failure is high) you must quickly identify the oncoming obstacles e.g. a rock. The thing is not to focus on the rock or else you will end up running into it. Pessimism is a trap because, on the surface it seems very logical, but having a pessimistic mindset will insidiously influence your behavior towards negative outcomes.
sonabinu 5y ago
There’s a great reference to this concept in The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
swatcoder 5y ago
> The opposite view is that progress is a matter of luck. If the progress of the last few centuries was a random windfall, then pessimism is logical: our luck is bound to run out. How could we get that lucky again? If the next century is an average one, it will see little progress. But if progress is a primarily matter of agency, then whether it continues is up to us. Or perhaps: progress is subjective and transient and often comes with unknown costs, so we don’t need to make a big deal of it either way. The author seems really caught up in some private neurosis about how they relate to progress, but surely they’d have more resources to contribute to their vision of progress if they stepped back a little and stopped trying to relate themselves to some conflict between “optimists” and “pessimists”.
- brimble 5y ago
  Author's just hacking at a straw man and crowing about how much better they are at fencing than it is, best I can tell.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  See [1] for the site's statement of purpose. It seems entirely dedicated to overturning the perceived current technological pessimism (or even fatalism). TFA seems to be justifying the sites existence by arguing that technological optimism is responsible for much of the "progress" seen since 1800 or so. 1: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-new-philosophy-of-progress https://rootsofprogress.org/a-new-philosophy-of-progress
fullshark 5y ago
I agree with this fairly whole heartedly, but yet, whenever I get presented some optimistic future tech scenario involving X, pessimism doesn't just seem smart but is smart 99% of the time. That 1% of the time though...
- feoren 5y ago
  It's like a lottery ticket. If someone comes to me and excitedly says "I bought a lottery ticket! This is going to change my life!" I'd call that naive optimism, and I'm going to be pretty pessimistic about their chances. Nevertheless, I recognize that people win the lottery every week. When I see an article about the next cancer cure, it's that single lottery ticket: nope, not gonna work. I'll believe it when I see it, etc. That does not, however, mean I am pessimistic that we will ever cure (many/most) cancer. But I might not bother to read the numbers off every ticket that pops up in popular science feeds.
aidenn0 5y ago
There's an old saying that goes roughly: When an old engineer tells you something is possible, they are definitely right. When an old engineer tells you something is impossible, they are only probably right.
- jasoncrawford 5y ago
  Arthur C. Clarke's First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Thanks. I think Clark overstates things a bit (unless you take a very extreme form of what "impossible" means), so I prefer my version. It also seems possible that engineers are more likely to hedge their bets by calling things "unworkable" or "impractical" because what actually is and isn't possible in theory is more of the realm of the researcher than the practitioner.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      A lot of the impossibilites are relative to the current state of the art. "X is impossible with current metalurgy". "Y is impossible with current best integer factorization algorithms". Absolute impossibilities do exist too, but you basically need to prove that that particular thing goes against laws of physics/maths.
  - pazimzadeh 5y ago
    An example of this: Andy Grove in 1992: "The idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is "a pipe dream driven by greed."
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
tablespoon 5y ago
That whole site has a weird vibe, like it's trying evangelize a literal theology centered on faith in technological "progress." > Originally a Twitter thread. That explains why it seems so half-baked.
- formerkrogemp 5y ago
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  That whole site has a weird vibe ... That's because it is.
TimPC 5y ago
You can expect very long term growth by expecting sequences of very short growth. It's even reasonable to reassess what those sequences are at every point in the sequence. We don't get long-term growth by believing a plan for 2010 in 1960 and committing to it. If we did, I'd have some nice moon land in a colony to sell you. (This is a critique of the idea that very long-term growth comes from believing science fiction expressed in the article.)
a_c 5y ago
This is Sturgeon's law in disguise. Everything(most) is shit. Saying that is obvious and useless.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Optimism is fun and pleasant and thus people are drawn to it. It is therefore the tool of charlatans. Pessimists develop from repeatedly watching people be wooed by charlatans. It's a useful personality trait that balances out the wolves in sheep clothing.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    That doesn't explain the rampant, popular pessimism on social media platforms like twitter and reddit.
  - a_c 5y ago
    People are drawn to strong emotions, positive or negative. It could be anger, fear, joy, cuteness, anything that evokes our lizard brain. It is orthogonal to making the world a better place IMO
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      I have this feeling it's a bit of the random chance that our evolution grants us. Some folks get a dice roll that makes them just a tiny bit more afraid of the dark. Some less. Sometimes there's abundant food beyond the dark. Sometimes there's a bear. People aren't that simple though. Some people realize there might be a bear, and encourage other people to explore the dark looking for the food. Some other people might go, 'hey wait sometimes there are bears in the dark'. If you want to call the warning pessimism, well, that's your right, I guess. But it sure seems useful to me.
  - McLaren_Ferrari 5y ago
    > It is therefore the tool of charlatans Charlatans? I don't think there are any charlatans around. Maybe the bad guys you are referring to are the evil shortsellers working together with the Shortseller's Enrichment Commission? /s
bena 5y ago
It's easy to be pessimistic because doomsayers are always right on a long enough timeline. Let's take twitter as a hot button example. Twitter will eventually fail. As does everything. When it does, everyone is going to revisit their hot takes and point to them as them being uniquely prescient. The focus Ashton Kutcher had on being the first user with a million followers, all the GamerGate stuff, Donald Trump, wilw, SJWs, fail whales, Elon Musk, NFTs, etc. Whatever their point that they decided was the beginning of the end, they'll crow about. They'll crow about how they were right. Twitter did fail. And they'll think that made them right. That their decisions are smart and good because, by golly, they called it. They'll neglect to see why twitter hypothetically failed. And it's likely that the reason they believe twitter failed is not the reason it did fail. Sure, we could trace a thread from the end to their nexus, but we can do that with anything. Everything contributes to everything else, but it's a matter of degrees. If twitter replaces all of its infrastructure with warm, buttered toast, it will fail. And we can trace the mindset behind that decision to any other decision we want. "Well of course twitter did that, they also did X" But that's not to say we shouldn't listen to the cynic. It is the cynic who will warn us of the pitfalls. It is the cynic who tells us that warm, buttered toast cannot host services. The problem is learning which cynic to listen to and when. You don't want to beat the cynic, just his timeline.
McLaren_Ferrari 5y ago
> "How can this optimism be justified? Not on the basis of specific future technologies—which, again, are unproven—but on the basis of philosophical premises about the nature of humans and of progress." The premise is "optimists make money" but if there is no clear understanding of where the next technological breakthrough will come from, then it seems like the author is suggesting just going long on the S&P500? The Wilshire 3000? That's hardly anything revolutionary and won't make you anymore money than your peers around who'd also employ the same tactic, not because they had a philosophical enlightment but because their wealth manager at whatever bank produced for them the most classic 60-40 equities-bonds portfolio. We all like an optimist article about optimism but can we focus on the making money part? Maybe using leverage on the S&P500 when there are signals of a breakthrough? But again, if you can't predict the company or even the industry it would come from then how do you know to be on the cusp? It reads like something like: BS-ing yourself into believing your own hype and go on a binge of irrational exhuberance based on philosophy and past breaktrhoughs which happened when everything seemed static and decaying...so they will happen again at some point in some sector of the economy.
Gravyness 5y ago
> If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic. I consider myself optimist but I don't trust any unknown. If I have experience with something, I will soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and to the proven. I guess it's a matter of defining the known and the proven though: for me nothing is absolute because there are too many variables to most nontrivial situations, way more than a person can hold in their minds, save, recollect, and even verify, that affects an outcome in ways you don't even imagine. Life is not a tic-tac-toe match: way more things are connected than we can put in a human brain, or even multiple human brains. So even navigating unexplored territory a thousand times may not transform it into explored territory and you will only realize it when you optimistically expect things to go according to your plan. You are not consciously 'trusting the unknown': if you have experience and hope it is correct but soon reality will slap your face and tell you where you messed up. So I disagree: you can be optimistic and not believe in the unknown. Just accept you're not a smart ass, that you don't know what will happen in the future but whatever happens you will do your best to understand and deal with it. That is optimism. Everything's gonna be alright. Also the "economic growth" transforms the "known and the proven" into the "unknown and the unproven".
csours 5y ago
I think even the peak oil people said something like "Unless things change, we're going to run out of oil" But more to the point, I have a colleague who regularly speaks in future-past tense, speaking like some goals have already been accomplished. I complain about it sometimes, but I also think it is useful. I know that sometimes I will get into a problem finding spiral - listing all the things that can go wrong and need to be taken care of before I start a task. I know this is not useful, but it is something my brain does. I think the wisdom here is realizing that these parts of the brain or people in an organization need to take turns and be very careful about assuming a terminal condition of a system. There are both very real problems to be solved and very real value available. I'm not sure you can do both at the same time; it may be something our brain rewrites in a more pleasing form after the fact.
- altcognito 5y ago
  In the context of this text, it is a fine example, but they were definitely talking about "easily obtained high quality oil", not shale oil, which as the article suggests, was thought to be largely unobtainable at reasonable cost. So, people who love cheap oil seized upon this as proof that doomsaying such as this and Malthusian theory was just wrong. Obviously, even not withstanding shale oil or even abiotic production of oil, we will eventually outstrip our ability to pump oil if we just continue to grow our usage of it ad infinitum.
drewcoo 5y ago
Pessimism, in the article, is used to mean predicting a future state, given present trends. Optimism, in the article, is used to mean disbelieving that predicted future. Given the author framed them this way, of course "pessimism" sounds smarter. "Optimism" is counterfactual. The meanings of common terms have been mutated to be able to make this point. It's effectively circular reasoning via redefinition.
- lazide 5y ago
  Which if someone is that definition of ‘optimistic’ despite repeated problems is the definition of delusional.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    Except that while, say, predicting new advances in agriculture would sound delusional to Malthus in the late 1700s, thus avoiding the massive famines he predicted in the Western world, that's exactly what happened. He would have been right had nothing changed. But things do. The same thing with Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" in the 1960s. He didn't predict that in many Western nations (and even China) that the number of children would soon go the other way -- below the number needed for replacement, leading to a smaller, older population. Which causes problems of its own of course. but based on history one that is unlikely to be insolvable. So ultimately it's the pessimists that are delusional because they don't see that pessimism has rarely been right.
    - popcube 5y ago
      same prediction used to against global warming, they trust just waiting for new technology... but so many people fighting for preventing these crisis happening, and rich can say this is not true/new technology will work and get their money
    - lazide 5y ago
      It is important to recognize that sounding delusional and BEING delusional are vastly different things. The fundamental nature of someone having delusions is they believe things which are not true, and when faced when evidence of what is actually true, they refuse to believe it. Like a rock not physically being where that rock is, or that 2+2=5, or their favorite politician loves them. Fundamentally, any evaluation of a prediction has to be projecting the current world views onto something fundamentally unpredictable, the future. Any high variance future prediction will sound delusional. Since high variance also means high spread among possible futures, of which only one is actually possible, that also means high odds of a bad prediction. But someone making, evaluating, or the predictions themselves aren’t delusional yet, because there is no fact yet to compare them against.
blowski 5y ago
If you’re pessimistic, most of the time you’ll be right, for the short term at least. But it’s not really clever to predict the most likely outcome will come true. Clever is figuring out how to change that outcome.
- lward20 5y ago
  "I would rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right"
Barrin92 5y ago
>Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money. The entire piece is reiterating stereotypical VC twitter content but the most obvious point is that very few optimists make money. Most optimists will lose money. The reason that this doesn't matter in technology circles is because the overwhelming majority of tech folks hail from upper middle class households so the people who risk a lot can afford it and it's not that big of a deal if they crash. Even if you believe the premise of the article about the future of technology, which is itself kind of a bad Whig history but that aside for a second, most people in general have no good reason to think that they're the ones to be able to capitalize on it. Pessimism really isn't the right word here, Conservatism is more apt. And many people are conservative in particular at the individual level for very good reasons, because they cannot afford to play high risk games.
- woojoo666 5y ago
  I do think their point reflects well in social media though. You'll see somebody propose an idea in a comment or post, and seemingly everybody will try to take it down with some counterargument. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, all ideas need temperment, but I also think to a certain degree people are just doing it to sound smart. In fact often the better the idea, the more people try to take it down. Though this perhaps falls more under contrarianism than pessimism
- gumby 5y ago
  > very few optimists make money I think the point is: 1. only optimists make money 2. though most optimists lose it 3. pessimists manage loss, but in exchange forego gain I am dubious about broad statements (like the one I just made above) but perhaps it is broadly true.
- bsuvc 5y ago
  > but the most obvious point is that very few optimists make money. Most optimists will lose money. That sounds like something a pessimist would say ;)
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > The entire piece is reiterating stereotypical VC twitter content but the most obvious point is that very few optimists make money. Most optimists will lose money. That raises interesting question: how many of these condemnations of "pessimism" are by salesmen (like VCs) who want their jobs to be easier (or their lackeys)? It's easier to sell to an optimist than a pessimist, because an optimist literally buys your pitch. For instance, the VCs don't want "pessimists" criticizing "web3" and undermining their pitch, they want optimists to pour their money and effort into it (and their pockets).
rhacker 5y ago
This is describing conservative and radical, not pessimism and optimism.
InexSquirrel 5y ago
Being in the tech sector (embedded electronics), I find most people are negative / pessimistic on wild new ideas, and generally positive on incremental improvements. I think that's because we get exposed to a lot of 'new tech' that rarely lives up to it's proclaimed expectations. A few decades of that and it's a bit hard to not be pessimistic (or even cynical) about every new announcement of world changing technology. I find that non-tech people, outside of a given area of expertise, tend to be the most positive on a _new thing_. Whether it's battery technologies, IoT, AI, whatever, there's a general hype-esque belief that the new technology is a _good thing_, but they can rarely articulate why or how it will be good. Then they ask engineers to start developing on it, with never telling anyone _why_ this is a good idea or what problem it's actually solving or how it's solving it in a good way. I had a conversation with a mechanical engineer in our lunch room, who upon seeing Github Co-pilot, proclaimed that it would replace all of the embedded engineers on his team. I suppose this is optimism (significant technological progress), but also reeks of ignorance on what engineers actually do. The embedded guys see it as a useful tool though to help them code better by being exposed to other means of achieving very specific tasks. So I'm negative on the idea of Github Co-pilot-esque services replacing engineers, even in the long run, but am positive on it (and other tools) evolving into something very helpful. So with that said, I think I agree with some of the comments in this thread. If you come from a financially secure position, and have a strong financial safety net, then it's OK and good to be wildly optimistic - go try that new thing that may very well fail, because you're not destroying your lively hood in the process. And beyond that, being optimistic or pessimistic about things in general has no real bearing on their outcomes, barring your own happiness - so just do what makes you feel OK at the end of the day.
indymike 5y ago
Pessimism's intelligence is not durable. Applied to a short time frame, it sounds intelligent. Over a longer period of time, pessimism loses it's IQ. It may be that constraints are much more concrete in the short term, but when you add the dimension of time, it is very difficult to identify concrete constraints, and many factors that were constraints, are removed over time. That said, being an optimist does not guarantee correctness or success.
renewiltord 5y ago
I reject the premise: pessimism doesn't sound smart. It's just the middle-brow position when you have sufficient information to make short-term predictions but lack the vision to identify potential paradigm shifts that can be put into play (sometimes by you). i.e. most pessimists are just hill-climbers stuck in some local trough. In any case, I liked Peter Thiel's model in Zero to One better: definite vs. indefinite thinking coupled with pessimist vs. optimist thinking.
root_axis 5y ago
This sentiment completely bulldozes over nuance. Not all predictions are created equally, a person that is today predicting a mass market for self driving cars is not the same as a person predicting a mass market for flying cars. It's not pessimism to dismiss the absurd. Of course, vision is necessary for progress, but only a tiny fraction of the so-called "optimists" actually "make money", most of them fail.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Technology is the study of means, as John Stuart Mill put it. (Mill contrasts this with science, the study of causes.) A technology is a verb, a process to obtain a result. We often see the manifestations (tools, mechanisms, products), but those merely support and guide the process. - Any intervention has both intended and unintended effects. - Effects may be manifest or latent, similar to Robert K. Merton's notion of manifest and latent functions. - Effects, whether manifest or latent, may be short-term or long-term. - The overall process may be readily communicated (learned, sold, advocated, adopted), or difficult. - Implementations and interactions may be simple or complex. Optimists deal with the intended, manifest, short-term, and readily grasped. Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and that grasped only with difficulty. It's far more often the pessimist who then is addressing the unknown and remote-to-comprehension rather than the optimist, contrary to Crawford & Patrick's (data-free) assertions. In discussing latent and manifest functions, Merton makes the observation that: Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences. Robert K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions", in Wesley Longhofer, Daniel Winchester (eds) Social Theory Re-Wired, Routledge (2016). https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-connections-to-classical-and-contemporary-perspectives/oclc/1062283702 https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-co... In multi-bet gambles, the Optimist is wagering on a possible benefit, whilst the Pessimist is wagering to minimise losses. As others have noted, the Optimist occasionally wins, at least in the short term, but often loses. Suvivorship bias / Texas sharpshooter fallacy leaves us looking at the lucky Optimists. We rarely see manifest signs of highly-appropriate pessimism. Crawford's other arguments lean heavily on rhetoric, shibboleths, fallacies, and incomplete assessments. Whilst Haber-Bosch lifted the near-time constraint of overextracting a renewable biological resource (bird guano), it did so by tapping into an even less renewable resource (natural gas --- see the case of one early "unlimited" discovery playing out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom), and has only further increased human populations running up against energy, fertiliser, and agricultural productivity crises. And the practice itself has resulted in second- and higher-order effects of excessive nitrogen in the form of blooms, dead zones within littoral regions, and more. Sinks soak only so much. Rock-oil kerosene is no more renewable than natural gas, and reserves which in the 1860s were reported to suffice for a thousand years, or a million, are proving to have a total lifespan measured on the order of a few centuries. Mining is an inherently nonsustainable resource so long as extraction rates exceed those of natural formation. Human agency and innovation can only at best attain physical and technological efficiency limits. The cannot create new pools of low entropy. They may in the short term be successful in tapping into previously unutilised ones.
ouid 5y ago
When optimists lose, everyone loses.
gcheong 5y ago
"Fears of Peak Oil and other resource shortages follow this pattern. Predictions of shortages are typically based on “proven reserves.” We are saved from shortage by the unproven and even the unknown reserves, and the new technologies that make them profitable to extract. Or, when certain resources really do run out, we are saved economically by new technologies that use different resources" So by this reasoning, it's really unfortunate that peak oil didn't occur when predicted because we probably would have been saved by something even cleaner and better if it had.
civilized 5y ago
Related: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work?s=r https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...
dredmorbius 5y ago
The fundamental error of this essay is that it attemtps to frame the approach toward challenges, opportunities, and risks as between competing biases: optimistic and pessimistic. That's profoundly untrue. The opposite of bias is not a countering bias, but accuracy and realism. In reality, both optimism and pessimism as persistant biases will lead you astray. The one discounts risks, the other discounts opportunities. Realism, an accurate and appropriate view of reality, acknowledging both opportunities and risks, and taking a measured path through both, is what wins in the long term. The view expressed is appealing, simple, and false.

158 points by feross 5y ago

Because it's usually right? See also: cynicism. Reads article Oh, this is about a very specific kind of pessimism in which a statement like "new economically-valuable technologies will emerge" is purely the domain of optimism.

friedman23 5y ago
How is it usually right? Pessimism and cynicism are cheap ways to appear smart to dumb people.
- brimble 5y ago
  "You're not going to win the lotto jackpot". [EDIT] OK, one example was a bit flippant and easy to dismiss, but: "No, this isn't going to bring us meaningfully closer to economically-viable fusion power" "No, this isn't the War to End All Wars" "No, you're not going to keep your New Years fitness resolution" "No, your company's not going to succeed" "This miracle chemical's probably gonna turn out to be bad for our health. I look forward to finding out how fucked I am because of it in 40 years when someone gets around to doing anything about the alarming study someone will likely do in 10 years only to be ignored. If I make it that long. But at least we can make things fire-resistant 6% cheaper than before!" Et c.
  - kevinh 5y ago
    You're going to wake up tomorrow. You're going to be able to breathe a minute from now. Your whole life isn't going to fall apart. etc. There are unlimited hypotheticals you can make where an optimistic or pessimistic take is far more likely.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I can right now look at every single applicant to YC, predict they will fail, and be right the overwhelming majority of the time. I can look at every amateur scientist who has found "a problem" with mainstream science, predict that they are a crank, and be right the overwhelming majority of the time. I can look at every "breakthrough in battery technology," predict that it won't be on the market in 20 years, and be right the overwhelming majority of the time. Nevertheless, there are YC applicants that found successful companies. Amateur scientists have contributed to scientific breakthroughs. Battery breakthroughs have made it from lab-to-market in much less than 20 years.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  That seems like a pessimistic, cynical take on life...
- dudeman13 5y ago
  Depending on the subject, people's natural state is optimism even if they think they are being realistic. [1] and [2] have a bunch of interesting references on this matter Appearing smart to dumb people isn't hard, so it doesn't count as a negative about pessimism :) I won't make a judgement about it being usually right, but being pessimistic can be a tool to counteract the standard optimistic stance if you know people are usually optimistic (aka their expectations overshoot reality) on the subject [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias
- jessaustin 5y ago
  A lot of pessimism is of the "this shitty thing that no one capable of fixing has any incentive to fix will continue to be shitty" variety. That is usually right, even if it is more pessimistic than "I'm going to fix this shitty thing even if it kills me". This basic pessimism is still less pessimistic than "nothing is shitty anywhere I can't hear you nananana!"

jrimbault 5y ago

You can be optimist about your goals but pessimist about your means. There's probably any number of quotes from military strategists about that kind of thing.

brimble 5y ago
TFA gets where it going by defining "pessimism" in a way that makes TFA's conclusions correct. It doesn't seem to be concerned with nuance. You can do the same thing in reverse with "optimism" by pinning that term to an extreme version of it, which is obviously going to be wrong most of the time, while making "pessimism" the milder outlook that happens to align better to reality. Straw-manning, basically.
- jrimbault 5y ago
  I think it's a rhetoric device close the antimetabole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimetabole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimetabole
l33t2328 5y ago
This seems to be a convoluted way of saying “hope for the best plan for the worst.”
- jrimbault 5y ago
  That's probably one of the quotes I was thinking of but couldn't think of.

paulpauper 5y ago

But there is a often a good reason to be pessimistic, mainly that it's not like you get infinite attempts in life or at anything. Life is not like practicing basketball or an instrument, in which the cost of failure is zero. Failure can have irreversible consequences professionally and personally. You have to be cautious in knowing what sort of things can trigger an irreversible failure.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Failure to take risks can do that. I've always found pessimism about pessimism to be the strongest argument for optimism about optimism.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  Haha that's a mental trick I sometimes use - imagining literally selling myself short, and asking how that could go tits up. Being a skilled pessimist I can think of a multitide of ways.
fartcannon 5y ago
Exactly, as a society, we should be glad sacrificial optimists exist for the benefit their sacrifice randomly provides to society. But we also shouldn't scorn the pessimist for the simple fact that they understand how randomness works.
hgomersall 5y ago
The thing is, you're forced to play the game whether you want to or not. Failure or not has little to do with disposition.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
In mountain biking (to use a sport where often the cost of failure is high) you must quickly identify the oncoming obstacles e.g. a rock. The thing is not to focus on the rock or else you will end up running into it. Pessimism is a trap because, on the surface it seems very logical, but having a pessimistic mindset will insidiously influence your behavior towards negative outcomes.

sonabinu 5y ago

There’s a great reference to this concept in The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

swatcoder 5y ago

> The opposite view is that progress is a matter of luck. If the progress of the last few centuries was a random windfall, then pessimism is logical: our luck is bound to run out. How could we get that lucky again? If the next century is an average one, it will see little progress. But if progress is a primarily matter of agency, then whether it continues is up to us. Or perhaps: progress is subjective and transient and often comes with unknown costs, so we don’t need to make a big deal of it either way. The author seems really caught up in some private neurosis about how they relate to progress, but surely they’d have more resources to contribute to their vision of progress if they stepped back a little and stopped trying to relate themselves to some conflict between “optimists” and “pessimists”.

brimble 5y ago
Author's just hacking at a straw man and crowing about how much better they are at fencing than it is, best I can tell.
aidenn0 5y ago
See [1] for the site's statement of purpose. It seems entirely dedicated to overturning the perceived current technological pessimism (or even fatalism). TFA seems to be justifying the sites existence by arguing that technological optimism is responsible for much of the "progress" seen since 1800 or so. 1: https://rootsofprogress.org/a-new-philosophy-of-progress https://rootsofprogress.org/a-new-philosophy-of-progress

fullshark 5y ago

I agree with this fairly whole heartedly, but yet, whenever I get presented some optimistic future tech scenario involving X, pessimism doesn't just seem smart but is smart 99% of the time. That 1% of the time though...

feoren 5y ago
It's like a lottery ticket. If someone comes to me and excitedly says "I bought a lottery ticket! This is going to change my life!" I'd call that naive optimism, and I'm going to be pretty pessimistic about their chances. Nevertheless, I recognize that people win the lottery every week. When I see an article about the next cancer cure, it's that single lottery ticket: nope, not gonna work. I'll believe it when I see it, etc. That does not, however, mean I am pessimistic that we will ever cure (many/most) cancer. But I might not bother to read the numbers off every ticket that pops up in popular science feeds.

aidenn0 5y ago

There's an old saying that goes roughly: When an old engineer tells you something is possible, they are definitely right. When an old engineer tells you something is impossible, they are only probably right.

jasoncrawford 5y ago
Arthur C. Clarke's First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Thanks. I think Clark overstates things a bit (unless you take a very extreme form of what "impossible" means), so I prefer my version. It also seems possible that engineers are more likely to hedge their bets by calling things "unworkable" or "impractical" because what actually is and isn't possible in theory is more of the realm of the researcher than the practitioner.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    A lot of the impossibilites are relative to the current state of the art. "X is impossible with current metalurgy". "Y is impossible with current best integer factorization algorithms". Absolute impossibilities do exist too, but you basically need to prove that that particular thing goes against laws of physics/maths.
- pazimzadeh 5y ago
  An example of this: Andy Grove in 1992: "The idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is "a pipe dream driven by greed."
  - michaelmrose 5y ago

tablespoon 5y ago

That whole site has a weird vibe, like it's trying evangelize a literal theology centered on faith in technological "progress." > Originally a Twitter thread. That explains why it seems so half-baked.

formerkrogemp 5y ago
dredmorbius 5y ago
That whole site has a weird vibe ... That's because it is.

TimPC 5y ago

You can expect very long term growth by expecting sequences of very short growth. It's even reasonable to reassess what those sequences are at every point in the sequence. We don't get long-term growth by believing a plan for 2010 in 1960 and committing to it. If we did, I'd have some nice moon land in a colony to sell you. (This is a critique of the idea that very long-term growth comes from believing science fiction expressed in the article.)

a_c 5y ago

This is Sturgeon's law in disguise. Everything(most) is shit. Saying that is obvious and useless.

fartcannon 5y ago
Optimism is fun and pleasant and thus people are drawn to it. It is therefore the tool of charlatans. Pessimists develop from repeatedly watching people be wooed by charlatans. It's a useful personality trait that balances out the wolves in sheep clothing.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  That doesn't explain the rampant, popular pessimism on social media platforms like twitter and reddit.
- a_c 5y ago
  People are drawn to strong emotions, positive or negative. It could be anger, fear, joy, cuteness, anything that evokes our lizard brain. It is orthogonal to making the world a better place IMO
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    I have this feeling it's a bit of the random chance that our evolution grants us. Some folks get a dice roll that makes them just a tiny bit more afraid of the dark. Some less. Sometimes there's abundant food beyond the dark. Sometimes there's a bear. People aren't that simple though. Some people realize there might be a bear, and encourage other people to explore the dark looking for the food. Some other people might go, 'hey wait sometimes there are bears in the dark'. If you want to call the warning pessimism, well, that's your right, I guess. But it sure seems useful to me.
- McLaren_Ferrari 5y ago
  > It is therefore the tool of charlatans Charlatans? I don't think there are any charlatans around. Maybe the bad guys you are referring to are the evil shortsellers working together with the Shortseller's Enrichment Commission? /s

bena 5y ago

It's easy to be pessimistic because doomsayers are always right on a long enough timeline. Let's take twitter as a hot button example. Twitter will eventually fail. As does everything. When it does, everyone is going to revisit their hot takes and point to them as them being uniquely prescient. The focus Ashton Kutcher had on being the first user with a million followers, all the GamerGate stuff, Donald Trump, wilw, SJWs, fail whales, Elon Musk, NFTs, etc. Whatever their point that they decided was the beginning of the end, they'll crow about. They'll crow about how they were right. Twitter did fail. And they'll think that made them right. That their decisions are smart and good because, by golly, they called it. They'll neglect to see why twitter hypothetically failed. And it's likely that the reason they believe twitter failed is not the reason it did fail. Sure, we could trace a thread from the end to their nexus, but we can do that with anything. Everything contributes to everything else, but it's a matter of degrees. If twitter replaces all of its infrastructure with warm, buttered toast, it will fail. And we can trace the mindset behind that decision to any other decision we want. "Well of course twitter did that, they also did X" But that's not to say we shouldn't listen to the cynic. It is the cynic who will warn us of the pitfalls. It is the cynic who tells us that warm, buttered toast cannot host services. The problem is learning which cynic to listen to and when. You don't want to beat the cynic, just his timeline.

McLaren_Ferrari 5y ago

> "How can this optimism be justified? Not on the basis of specific future technologies—which, again, are unproven—but on the basis of philosophical premises about the nature of humans and of progress." The premise is "optimists make money" but if there is no clear understanding of where the next technological breakthrough will come from, then it seems like the author is suggesting just going long on the S&P500? The Wilshire 3000? That's hardly anything revolutionary and won't make you anymore money than your peers around who'd also employ the same tactic, not because they had a philosophical enlightment but because their wealth manager at whatever bank produced for them the most classic 60-40 equities-bonds portfolio. We all like an optimist article about optimism but can we focus on the making money part? Maybe using leverage on the S&P500 when there are signals of a breakthrough? But again, if you can't predict the company or even the industry it would come from then how do you know to be on the cusp? It reads like something like: BS-ing yourself into believing your own hype and go on a binge of irrational exhuberance based on philosophy and past breaktrhoughs which happened when everything seemed static and decaying...so they will happen again at some point in some sector of the economy.

Gravyness 5y ago

> If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic. I consider myself optimist but I don't trust any unknown. If I have experience with something, I will soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and to the proven. I guess it's a matter of defining the known and the proven though: for me nothing is absolute because there are too many variables to most nontrivial situations, way more than a person can hold in their minds, save, recollect, and even verify, that affects an outcome in ways you don't even imagine. Life is not a tic-tac-toe match: way more things are connected than we can put in a human brain, or even multiple human brains. So even navigating unexplored territory a thousand times may not transform it into explored territory and you will only realize it when you optimistically expect things to go according to your plan. You are not consciously 'trusting the unknown': if you have experience and hope it is correct but soon reality will slap your face and tell you where you messed up. So I disagree: you can be optimistic and not believe in the unknown. Just accept you're not a smart ass, that you don't know what will happen in the future but whatever happens you will do your best to understand and deal with it. That is optimism. Everything's gonna be alright. Also the "economic growth" transforms the "known and the proven" into the "unknown and the unproven".

csours 5y ago

I think even the peak oil people said something like "Unless things change, we're going to run out of oil" But more to the point, I have a colleague who regularly speaks in future-past tense, speaking like some goals have already been accomplished. I complain about it sometimes, but I also think it is useful. I know that sometimes I will get into a problem finding spiral - listing all the things that can go wrong and need to be taken care of before I start a task. I know this is not useful, but it is something my brain does. I think the wisdom here is realizing that these parts of the brain or people in an organization need to take turns and be very careful about assuming a terminal condition of a system. There are both very real problems to be solved and very real value available. I'm not sure you can do both at the same time; it may be something our brain rewrites in a more pleasing form after the fact.

altcognito 5y ago
In the context of this text, it is a fine example, but they were definitely talking about "easily obtained high quality oil", not shale oil, which as the article suggests, was thought to be largely unobtainable at reasonable cost. So, people who love cheap oil seized upon this as proof that doomsaying such as this and Malthusian theory was just wrong. Obviously, even not withstanding shale oil or even abiotic production of oil, we will eventually outstrip our ability to pump oil if we just continue to grow our usage of it ad infinitum.

drewcoo 5y ago

Pessimism, in the article, is used to mean predicting a future state, given present trends. Optimism, in the article, is used to mean disbelieving that predicted future. Given the author framed them this way, of course "pessimism" sounds smarter. "Optimism" is counterfactual. The meanings of common terms have been mutated to be able to make this point. It's effectively circular reasoning via redefinition.

lazide 5y ago
Which if someone is that definition of ‘optimistic’ despite repeated problems is the definition of delusional.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  Except that while, say, predicting new advances in agriculture would sound delusional to Malthus in the late 1700s, thus avoiding the massive famines he predicted in the Western world, that's exactly what happened. He would have been right had nothing changed. But things do. The same thing with Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" in the 1960s. He didn't predict that in many Western nations (and even China) that the number of children would soon go the other way -- below the number needed for replacement, leading to a smaller, older population. Which causes problems of its own of course. but based on history one that is unlikely to be insolvable. So ultimately it's the pessimists that are delusional because they don't see that pessimism has rarely been right.
  - popcube 5y ago
    same prediction used to against global warming, they trust just waiting for new technology... but so many people fighting for preventing these crisis happening, and rich can say this is not true/new technology will work and get their money
  - lazide 5y ago
    It is important to recognize that sounding delusional and BEING delusional are vastly different things. The fundamental nature of someone having delusions is they believe things which are not true, and when faced when evidence of what is actually true, they refuse to believe it. Like a rock not physically being where that rock is, or that 2+2=5, or their favorite politician loves them. Fundamentally, any evaluation of a prediction has to be projecting the current world views onto something fundamentally unpredictable, the future. Any high variance future prediction will sound delusional. Since high variance also means high spread among possible futures, of which only one is actually possible, that also means high odds of a bad prediction. But someone making, evaluating, or the predictions themselves aren’t delusional yet, because there is no fact yet to compare them against.

blowski 5y ago

If you’re pessimistic, most of the time you’ll be right, for the short term at least. But it’s not really clever to predict the most likely outcome will come true. Clever is figuring out how to change that outcome.

lward20 5y ago
"I would rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right"

Barrin92 5y ago

>Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money. The entire piece is reiterating stereotypical VC twitter content but the most obvious point is that very few optimists make money. Most optimists will lose money. The reason that this doesn't matter in technology circles is because the overwhelming majority of tech folks hail from upper middle class households so the people who risk a lot can afford it and it's not that big of a deal if they crash. Even if you believe the premise of the article about the future of technology, which is itself kind of a bad Whig history but that aside for a second, most people in general have no good reason to think that they're the ones to be able to capitalize on it. Pessimism really isn't the right word here, Conservatism is more apt. And many people are conservative in particular at the individual level for very good reasons, because they cannot afford to play high risk games.

woojoo666 5y ago
I do think their point reflects well in social media though. You'll see somebody propose an idea in a comment or post, and seemingly everybody will try to take it down with some counterargument. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, all ideas need temperment, but I also think to a certain degree people are just doing it to sound smart. In fact often the better the idea, the more people try to take it down. Though this perhaps falls more under contrarianism than pessimism
gumby 5y ago
> very few optimists make money I think the point is: 1. only optimists make money 2. though most optimists lose it 3. pessimists manage loss, but in exchange forego gain I am dubious about broad statements (like the one I just made above) but perhaps it is broadly true.
bsuvc 5y ago
> but the most obvious point is that very few optimists make money. Most optimists will lose money. That sounds like something a pessimist would say ;)
tablespoon 5y ago
> The entire piece is reiterating stereotypical VC twitter content but the most obvious point is that very few optimists make money. Most optimists will lose money. That raises interesting question: how many of these condemnations of "pessimism" are by salesmen (like VCs) who want their jobs to be easier (or their lackeys)? It's easier to sell to an optimist than a pessimist, because an optimist literally buys your pitch. For instance, the VCs don't want "pessimists" criticizing "web3" and undermining their pitch, they want optimists to pour their money and effort into it (and their pockets).

rhacker 5y ago

This is describing conservative and radical, not pessimism and optimism.

InexSquirrel 5y ago

Being in the tech sector (embedded electronics), I find most people are negative / pessimistic on wild new ideas, and generally positive on incremental improvements. I think that's because we get exposed to a lot of 'new tech' that rarely lives up to it's proclaimed expectations. A few decades of that and it's a bit hard to not be pessimistic (or even cynical) about every new announcement of world changing technology. I find that non-tech people, outside of a given area of expertise, tend to be the most positive on a _new thing_. Whether it's battery technologies, IoT, AI, whatever, there's a general hype-esque belief that the new technology is a _good thing_, but they can rarely articulate why or how it will be good. Then they ask engineers to start developing on it, with never telling anyone _why_ this is a good idea or what problem it's actually solving or how it's solving it in a good way. I had a conversation with a mechanical engineer in our lunch room, who upon seeing Github Co-pilot, proclaimed that it would replace all of the embedded engineers on his team. I suppose this is optimism (significant technological progress), but also reeks of ignorance on what engineers actually do. The embedded guys see it as a useful tool though to help them code better by being exposed to other means of achieving very specific tasks. So I'm negative on the idea of Github Co-pilot-esque services replacing engineers, even in the long run, but am positive on it (and other tools) evolving into something very helpful. So with that said, I think I agree with some of the comments in this thread. If you come from a financially secure position, and have a strong financial safety net, then it's OK and good to be wildly optimistic - go try that new thing that may very well fail, because you're not destroying your lively hood in the process. And beyond that, being optimistic or pessimistic about things in general has no real bearing on their outcomes, barring your own happiness - so just do what makes you feel OK at the end of the day.

indymike 5y ago

Pessimism's intelligence is not durable. Applied to a short time frame, it sounds intelligent. Over a longer period of time, pessimism loses it's IQ. It may be that constraints are much more concrete in the short term, but when you add the dimension of time, it is very difficult to identify concrete constraints, and many factors that were constraints, are removed over time. That said, being an optimist does not guarantee correctness or success.

renewiltord 5y ago

I reject the premise: pessimism doesn't sound smart. It's just the middle-brow position when you have sufficient information to make short-term predictions but lack the vision to identify potential paradigm shifts that can be put into play (sometimes by you). i.e. most pessimists are just hill-climbers stuck in some local trough. In any case, I liked Peter Thiel's model in Zero to One better: definite vs. indefinite thinking coupled with pessimist vs. optimist thinking.

root_axis 5y ago

This sentiment completely bulldozes over nuance. Not all predictions are created equally, a person that is today predicting a mass market for self driving cars is not the same as a person predicting a mass market for flying cars. It's not pessimism to dismiss the absurd. Of course, vision is necessary for progress, but only a tiny fraction of the so-called "optimists" actually "make money", most of them fail.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Technology is the study of means, as John Stuart Mill put it. (Mill contrasts this with science, the study of causes.) A technology is a verb, a process to obtain a result. We often see the manifestations (tools, mechanisms, products), but those merely support and guide the process. - Any intervention has both intended and unintended effects. - Effects may be manifest or latent, similar to Robert K. Merton's notion of manifest and latent functions. - Effects, whether manifest or latent, may be short-term or long-term. - The overall process may be readily communicated (learned, sold, advocated, adopted), or difficult. - Implementations and interactions may be simple or complex. Optimists deal with the intended, manifest, short-term, and readily grasped. Pessimists deal with the unintended, latent, long-term, and that grasped only with difficulty. It's far more often the pessimist who then is addressing the unknown and remote-to-comprehension rather than the optimist, contrary to Crawford & Patrick's (data-free) assertions. In discussing latent and manifest functions, Merton makes the observation that: Discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge .... It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences. Robert K. Merton, "Manifest and Latent Functions", in Wesley Longhofer, Daniel Winchester (eds) Social Theory Re-Wired, Routledge (2016). https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-connections-to-classical-and-contemporary-perspectives/oclc/1062283702 https://www.worldcat.org/title/social-theory-re-wired-new-co... In multi-bet gambles, the Optimist is wagering on a possible benefit, whilst the Pessimist is wagering to minimise losses. As others have noted, the Optimist occasionally wins, at least in the short term, but often loses. Suvivorship bias / Texas sharpshooter fallacy leaves us looking at the lucky Optimists. We rarely see manifest signs of highly-appropriate pessimism. Crawford's other arguments lean heavily on rhetoric, shibboleths, fallacies, and incomplete assessments. Whilst Haber-Bosch lifted the near-time constraint of overextracting a renewable biological resource (bird guano), it did so by tapping into an even less renewable resource (natural gas --- see the case of one early "unlimited" discovery playing out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom), and has only further increased human populations running up against energy, fertiliser, and agricultural productivity crises. And the practice itself has resulted in second- and higher-order effects of excessive nitrogen in the form of blooms, dead zones within littoral regions, and more. Sinks soak only so much. Rock-oil kerosene is no more renewable than natural gas, and reserves which in the 1860s were reported to suffice for a thousand years, or a million, are proving to have a total lifespan measured on the order of a few centuries. Mining is an inherently nonsustainable resource so long as extraction rates exceed those of natural formation. Human agency and innovation can only at best attain physical and technological efficiency limits. The cannot create new pools of low entropy. They may in the short term be successful in tapping into previously unutilised ones.

ouid 5y ago

When optimists lose, everyone loses.

gcheong 5y ago

"Fears of Peak Oil and other resource shortages follow this pattern. Predictions of shortages are typically based on “proven reserves.” We are saved from shortage by the unproven and even the unknown reserves, and the new technologies that make them profitable to extract. Or, when certain resources really do run out, we are saved economically by new technologies that use different resources" So by this reasoning, it's really unfortunate that peak oil didn't occur when predicted because we probably would have been saved by something even cleaner and better if it had.

civilized 5y ago

Related: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work?s=r https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...

dredmorbius 5y ago

The fundamental error of this essay is that it attemtps to frame the approach toward challenges, opportunities, and risks as between competing biases: optimistic and pessimistic. That's profoundly untrue. The opposite of bias is not a countering bias, but accuracy and realism. In reality, both optimism and pessimism as persistant biases will lead you astray. The one discounts risks, the other discounts opportunities. Realism, an accurate and appropriate view of reality, acknowledging both opportunities and risks, and taking a measured path through both, is what wins in the long term. The view expressed is appealing, simple, and false.