6 ms·

I suspect optimism is learned to some extent. Past experiences and outcomes shape your optimism, because it skews your bias. People who had good things happen

I suspect optimism is learned to some extent. Past experiences and outcomes shape your optimism, because it skews your bias. People who had good things happen and got lucky get more optimistic as that's their experience. If true, it might be that good genetics and environment gives you exceptional longevity, and also increases your chances of good outcomes at every step of your life which in turn make you an optimist. Off course, I'd love to believe it's your mindset that affects outcomes, as it would give you control over your destiny, but it's precisely because that truth is so tempting that I'm extra skeptical of it.

monarchwadia 1y ago
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dleary 1y ago
This sounds like it should be true, but from life experience, I don't really think it is. It would be rational for things to work that way, but personalities and emotions are not very rational. There are some people who seem like they have everything in life going for them, and they're still pessimists, their narrative of the world is petty and ugly, or cruel. Conversely, there are other people who have suffered tragedies that I might consider literally unbearable (i.e. suicide-worthy), and they are still optimists. I think these are more fundamental personality traits. You can see it in siblings that grow up in essentially identical conditions, but one has a "sunny disposition" and another is anxious and worried.
- rcxdude 11mo ago
  Aye, I think this matches. I'm generally quite an optimistic and trusting person, and it's bitten me in the backside in a big way recently, but I don't think that's changed my outlook much. (Though, I think this is modulated by a lot of experience working in R+D where I feel like you need a healthy mix of optimism and pessimism/skepticism. Enough optimism to believe that you will figure it out in the end but enough pessimism that you don't see victory where it isn't or make promises you can't keep)
fellowniusmonk 1y ago
I shouldn't be here, the first 20 years of my life were essentially every bad thing, defective body, I had my first birthday party at 30, dead parents, stolen and exploited childhood, moving all the time, constant mortality threat, surgery induced aphantasia, waking surgeries scenarios that spiral some adults into ptsd. Long term thwarted desires because I couldn't get health insurance without being a wage slave pre ACA. Co-founded my own succesful company the moment I could get ACA. I have a brain and as my wife once told me in a moment of frustration. "You're just happy to be here" and that is true. I didn't ask to be born and I've generally not enjoyed it, I'm only here because random luck geographically and temporarily allowed me to just squeak by surviving childhood and adolescents, I am a few years away from a cardiological surgery I could easily die in. But, it's all so damn funny isn't it, what an odd thing to be alive, a little cluster of atoms arranged human wise. I hope I die not having achieved what I want to achieve, I hope, like sharks, I never keep moving. Humans generate meaning, we are the known, empirically observed generators of the mosy complex meaning in existence and we still don't know and haven't created most stuff, it's early days yet. In the meantime, we're part of the entropic cycle, and we emit meaning the way stars emit photons. People will say we aren't special, but we are, special and rare and should be preserved, dolphins, et all should be too, but let it be observed that it will be humans and not dolphins that deflect asteroids for the foreseeable future. Many times when things got bad I thought I'd kill myself, I woke up from so many surgeries I started getting disappointed when I'd wake up, but I was too damn curious about what happens next, I can always end it tomorrow, nbd, I look forward to the perma nap, I'm an accident that shouldn't exist and I can exert casual leverage on the world with mere speech. Who knows what the future holds, let's give dolphins thumbs, let's give silicon rockets to explore the universe, let's engineer long life so we can start worrying about solving entropy instead of whether or not a single spinning rocks "mid air collision" or 5 degree increase in temperature will cause total societal collapse and put an end to our weird little epicenter of meaning generation. Maybe we solve entropy, maybe we figure out how to change the topology of spacetime, maybe we don't, it's too early to tell. Optimism is just the headspace to try again, it's not emotional ignorance, it's not positivity, it's the curiosity to keep trying new experiments, and the humility to not be intellectually certain of despair.
- amatecha 1y ago
pksebben 1y ago
Dissatisfying take: It's both true and untrue. Your mindset absolutely has an influence on outcomes - how you come off to other people influences how they react to you and treat you. How you look at a problem influences whether you decide to engage with it, and how. This exists in a gradient space - some things are more readily influenced in this way, others are not, a few are (nearly) completely untouched. Existence, that is - the Universe, is a complex system. We know at least a few things about those: - they behave in unintuitive ways. Attempting to predict the behavior of a complex system has an inverse relationship with the granularity and specificity of the prediction. - the behavior of the whole is unrepresentable in the behavior of the constituent parts (you cannot drive an axle to work, unless it is part of a car) - they are very resilient against attempts at control, but more susceptible to influence - they can exhibit features like recursion, inertia, and attraction. Each of these has specific consequences for the behavior of the whole. The relationship between outlook and outcome is bidirectional - one influences the other and vice versa. This structure has a high chance to exhibit recursive reinforcement, which is why I think we're used to seeing very optimistic and very pessimistic outlooks, with not so many 'middle-of-the-road' types. It does provide a lever to push, however, if one has the fortitude to push through the failures on the way to that tipping point.
dahart 1y ago
I can’t speak for others, but this might be extra relevant to this forum — I experienced a shift and became more optimistic when I attempted a startup. Luck may play a part, and it might be a big part, I don’t want to downplay that possibility, since being in a position to do a startup requires some luck, being able to go to college and to write software for a living requires some luck, etc. But I had lucky things happen and still less optimism before running my own business. My personal feeling is that the reason has to do with the mindset that comes from a combination of taking more responsibility for all of my failures (including the business failures, including result of things other people do) and of deciding that I have control over my situation in a broad sense. For example, I could find myself unlucky at any given moment, when I get cheated and lose money, have an accident, someone gets mad at me, or business goes down because of something in the news. All of these things used to make me feel unlucky, but I started to think instead that unlucky things are the result of a situation I put myself into from earlier past decisions. Whatever bad situation comes my way, my life decisions lead me there, so it’s somehow my fault. I started assuming responsibility for all bad luck, and that makes me always ask the question what earlier choices lead me there, and how can I make better choices, even when the answer is thinking about how to avoid unlucky situations that really were out of my control. This might be one reason why successful founders and other optimists often attribute their success to hard work, but I should add that I do believe strongly that luck plays a very big part in success, and there are downsides to forgetting that or being unable to see it. I try not to take all responsibility for the good things that happen to me, even though that makes me inconsistent. That said, one way that I think luck can feed optimism is realizing that because success is lucky, it means I should try a lot of different things rather that work harder and try to fix bad situations. If nine out of ten startups fail, then try ten startups! So… yes my optimism is learned, and luck plays a part. My feeling is that deciding to take responsibility for my failures caused a mental shift towards greater optimism. Maybe that’s rationalization on my part, I can’t tell, but I do feel like it was more than luck.
fuzzfactor 1y ago
>People who had good things happen and got lucky get more optimistic Well there's the old story about the lonely mountain blacksmith from hillbilly times who was hard at work one day, when the beautiful widow from the next mountain over came in and wanted him to fix her broken iron. You know, the kind they had before electricity. So he dropped everything and got right to working on it, and was proud to make it better than new in only about 15 minutes. She was very thankful, gave him a big smile and then he asked her if it would be OK if he called on her real soon. The only thing is, he was a strong-hearted gentleman, but not very tall, less than 5 feet. And she was a statuesque beauty, just over 6 feet tall. But she was agreeable right away, and he said "How about a kiss good-bye right now?", she nodded and he jumped right up on top of his anvil, gave her a big hug and kiss and there was some excitement between them. Looking straight into her eyes he then tells her she doesn't have to leave so soon, and they can go out in back and pick some fresh flowers on a wonderful spring day, to take home with her. The hard work can wait for a little while. It is very romantic and they stroll around for a few minutes until they come to the spot where the roses are growing, then he asks her for another kiss. She was too bashful this time, and said that once was enough for their first meeting, but she was looking forward to having him visit. He said "I understand, but if there's not gonna be any more kissin', I think I'll put this anvil down."

monarchwadia 1y ago

[dead]

dleary 1y ago

This sounds like it should be true, but from life experience, I don't really think it is. It would be rational for things to work that way, but personalities and emotions are not very rational. There are some people who seem like they have everything in life going for them, and they're still pessimists, their narrative of the world is petty and ugly, or cruel. Conversely, there are other people who have suffered tragedies that I might consider literally unbearable (i.e. suicide-worthy), and they are still optimists. I think these are more fundamental personality traits. You can see it in siblings that grow up in essentially identical conditions, but one has a "sunny disposition" and another is anxious and worried.

rcxdude 11mo ago
Aye, I think this matches. I'm generally quite an optimistic and trusting person, and it's bitten me in the backside in a big way recently, but I don't think that's changed my outlook much. (Though, I think this is modulated by a lot of experience working in R+D where I feel like you need a healthy mix of optimism and pessimism/skepticism. Enough optimism to believe that you will figure it out in the end but enough pessimism that you don't see victory where it isn't or make promises you can't keep)

fellowniusmonk 1y ago

I shouldn't be here, the first 20 years of my life were essentially every bad thing, defective body, I had my first birthday party at 30, dead parents, stolen and exploited childhood, moving all the time, constant mortality threat, surgery induced aphantasia, waking surgeries scenarios that spiral some adults into ptsd. Long term thwarted desires because I couldn't get health insurance without being a wage slave pre ACA. Co-founded my own succesful company the moment I could get ACA. I have a brain and as my wife once told me in a moment of frustration. "You're just happy to be here" and that is true. I didn't ask to be born and I've generally not enjoyed it, I'm only here because random luck geographically and temporarily allowed me to just squeak by surviving childhood and adolescents, I am a few years away from a cardiological surgery I could easily die in. But, it's all so damn funny isn't it, what an odd thing to be alive, a little cluster of atoms arranged human wise. I hope I die not having achieved what I want to achieve, I hope, like sharks, I never keep moving. Humans generate meaning, we are the known, empirically observed generators of the mosy complex meaning in existence and we still don't know and haven't created most stuff, it's early days yet. In the meantime, we're part of the entropic cycle, and we emit meaning the way stars emit photons. People will say we aren't special, but we are, special and rare and should be preserved, dolphins, et all should be too, but let it be observed that it will be humans and not dolphins that deflect asteroids for the foreseeable future. Many times when things got bad I thought I'd kill myself, I woke up from so many surgeries I started getting disappointed when I'd wake up, but I was too damn curious about what happens next, I can always end it tomorrow, nbd, I look forward to the perma nap, I'm an accident that shouldn't exist and I can exert casual leverage on the world with mere speech. Who knows what the future holds, let's give dolphins thumbs, let's give silicon rockets to explore the universe, let's engineer long life so we can start worrying about solving entropy instead of whether or not a single spinning rocks "mid air collision" or 5 degree increase in temperature will cause total societal collapse and put an end to our weird little epicenter of meaning generation. Maybe we solve entropy, maybe we figure out how to change the topology of spacetime, maybe we don't, it's too early to tell. Optimism is just the headspace to try again, it's not emotional ignorance, it's not positivity, it's the curiosity to keep trying new experiments, and the humility to not be intellectually certain of despair.

amatecha 1y ago

pksebben 1y ago

Dissatisfying take: It's both true and untrue. Your mindset absolutely has an influence on outcomes - how you come off to other people influences how they react to you and treat you. How you look at a problem influences whether you decide to engage with it, and how. This exists in a gradient space - some things are more readily influenced in this way, others are not, a few are (nearly) completely untouched. Existence, that is - the Universe, is a complex system. We know at least a few things about those: - they behave in unintuitive ways. Attempting to predict the behavior of a complex system has an inverse relationship with the granularity and specificity of the prediction. - the behavior of the whole is unrepresentable in the behavior of the constituent parts (you cannot drive an axle to work, unless it is part of a car) - they are very resilient against attempts at control, but more susceptible to influence - they can exhibit features like recursion, inertia, and attraction. Each of these has specific consequences for the behavior of the whole. The relationship between outlook and outcome is bidirectional - one influences the other and vice versa. This structure has a high chance to exhibit recursive reinforcement, which is why I think we're used to seeing very optimistic and very pessimistic outlooks, with not so many 'middle-of-the-road' types. It does provide a lever to push, however, if one has the fortitude to push through the failures on the way to that tipping point.

dahart 1y ago

I can’t speak for others, but this might be extra relevant to this forum — I experienced a shift and became more optimistic when I attempted a startup. Luck may play a part, and it might be a big part, I don’t want to downplay that possibility, since being in a position to do a startup requires some luck, being able to go to college and to write software for a living requires some luck, etc. But I had lucky things happen and still less optimism before running my own business. My personal feeling is that the reason has to do with the mindset that comes from a combination of taking more responsibility for all of my failures (including the business failures, including result of things other people do) and of deciding that I have control over my situation in a broad sense. For example, I could find myself unlucky at any given moment, when I get cheated and lose money, have an accident, someone gets mad at me, or business goes down because of something in the news. All of these things used to make me feel unlucky, but I started to think instead that unlucky things are the result of a situation I put myself into from earlier past decisions. Whatever bad situation comes my way, my life decisions lead me there, so it’s somehow my fault. I started assuming responsibility for all bad luck, and that makes me always ask the question what earlier choices lead me there, and how can I make better choices, even when the answer is thinking about how to avoid unlucky situations that really were out of my control. This might be one reason why successful founders and other optimists often attribute their success to hard work, but I should add that I do believe strongly that luck plays a very big part in success, and there are downsides to forgetting that or being unable to see it. I try not to take all responsibility for the good things that happen to me, even though that makes me inconsistent. That said, one way that I think luck can feed optimism is realizing that because success is lucky, it means I should try a lot of different things rather that work harder and try to fix bad situations. If nine out of ten startups fail, then try ten startups! So… yes my optimism is learned, and luck plays a part. My feeling is that deciding to take responsibility for my failures caused a mental shift towards greater optimism. Maybe that’s rationalization on my part, I can’t tell, but I do feel like it was more than luck.

fuzzfactor 1y ago

>People who had good things happen and got lucky get more optimistic Well there's the old story about the lonely mountain blacksmith from hillbilly times who was hard at work one day, when the beautiful widow from the next mountain over came in and wanted him to fix her broken iron. You know, the kind they had before electricity. So he dropped everything and got right to working on it, and was proud to make it better than new in only about 15 minutes. She was very thankful, gave him a big smile and then he asked her if it would be OK if he called on her real soon. The only thing is, he was a strong-hearted gentleman, but not very tall, less than 5 feet. And she was a statuesque beauty, just over 6 feet tall. But she was agreeable right away, and he said "How about a kiss good-bye right now?", she nodded and he jumped right up on top of his anvil, gave her a big hug and kiss and there was some excitement between them. Looking straight into her eyes he then tells her she doesn't have to leave so soon, and they can go out in back and pick some fresh flowers on a wonderful spring day, to take home with her. The hard work can wait for a little while. It is very romantic and they stroll around for a few minutes until they come to the spot where the roses are growing, then he asks her for another kiss. She was too bashful this time, and said that once was enough for their first meeting, but she was looking forward to having him visit. He said "I understand, but if there's not gonna be any more kissin', I think I'll put this anvil down."