I find it somewhat ironic that the people who are most staunchly advocating the superiority of rationality in their replies to my post are displaying the greate

I find it somewhat ironic that the people who are most staunchly advocating the superiority of rationality in their replies to my post are displaying the greatest cognitive bias by advancing a position that no one has offered any empirical evidence for. And just to clarify, I wasn't even arguing that optimism is better than rationality. I am only calling into question the assumption that it is necessarily worse. In other words, the article (in my opinion) assumed that R > O always. I wanted to challenge this assumption that argue that R <?> O. I am not arguing, as some people seem to suppose, that O > R always. > Maybe depressive realism is better for getting things done - if, you know, you can get the 'realism' without the 'major mental disorder' part. Maybe, but that is pure speculation that has no support. Seligman's book offers a fair amount of evidence that optimists out-perform pessimists (the latter is not the same as being depressed, though they are correlated) in many areas of life. > And why didn't you consider manic-depressive disorder? If being optimistic is so great, surely being manic is even greater... Again, pure speculation. "More of a good thing is always better" is not a principle you can reasonably assume.