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What is your most essential pessimistic belief? Conversely, what is your most essential optimistic belief?
That is a sincere curiosity of mine, and also something that can reveal a lot about a person! ;)
As always, anything goes, except for highly divisive controversial stuff that might get this locked
Optimistically, I believe that humans are fundamentally good. Pessimistically, I believe that humans are fundamentally stupid.
That sounds more positive than negative to me. I'd take stupid over evil any day!
Thankfully the bad humans are often too stupid to do widespread harm.
Unfortunately we sometimes see both. Consider Russia invading Ukraine.
I think the fundamental stupidity would more workable if humans were to better acknowledge their own individual stupidity and limitations.
I often feel bothered that I'll spend hours into carefully researching candidates and their positions when I know that there will be someone who will instinctively vote for a candidate who makes a name crusading against trans people, drag queens, and abortions; and has a name that sounds less foreign than that other candidate's.
I know that literacy tests were historically used to disenfranchise poor, uneducated minorities, particularly Black Americans. But I think that there should be literacy and formal logic exams for everyone in order to become fully enfranchised citizens. It should be The Test which K-12 education culminates in. People who don't pass are then offered the option of free literacy and logic classes until they can pass.
Getting people to think, "maybe I'm wrong and should try to reason this more, maybe even try reasoning it from different POVs, even opposing ones" would probably solve a lot of problems in democracy.
Optimistically, I would love for there to be more things where you first had to prove a basic understanding to be allowed to use/have it. Children, the internet, guns, etc.
Pessimistically speaking, though, gating voting behind one feels like another instance of "agree with the state or we won't let you pass the test".
Where's your individual stupidity shown?
That's a good question. I try to delegate or defer to others on matters beyond me. The ability to recognize my own limitations, stupidities, etc. is a skill in of itself, and it requires the cooperation of others to provide the necessary feedback.
One obvious area I know very little about is the law. I think that most reasonable people recognize this, though some don't and to their own ruin. On issues of the law, I would consult with a lawyer or a friend who studied law.
A less obvious area is social skills. Recently I made the decision that I wanted to formally end a friendship with someone (which I wrote about in a separate post in the mental health thread), and I wanted to do it maturely and kindly. I wanted to be honest but not brutal. In the past, I've chosen non-confrontational strategies like distancing and ghosting.
This time, I wanted to end it face-to-face, but I had little experience being confrontational. So, I went to a friend who's a clinical psychologist. We discussed my thoughts, feelings, and intentions; he provided feedback and advice; and then we then took turns roleplaying the conversation I would have with the soon-to-be-former friend.
I think people—I myself am included—overestimate our emotional intelligence and social skills because we've spent our entire lives socializing. It feels so natural, like driving or bathing. What more is there to learn about talking? But there are many social skills we haven't extensively trained or acquired. Social skills are like fitness: just because we've spent our entire lives walking, jogging, or running a few miles here+there doesn't mean we can pull off a marathon at will. We often rush into an extraordinary social situation with an exaggerated sense of our capabilities. In the past, I've done this sort of rushing. But that time, I wanted to do it differently.
Optimistically I do believe that we are on track to a benevolent society which actually values everyone and that we will manage to solve seemingly unsolvable issues such as the climate crisis. Pessimistically I think there's a large chance for human narcissism and egotistical behavior to allow a world-ending self-sabotage via war over resources before this happens.
Can they be the same thing?
That nobody cares about me and I don't matter.
I don't mean nobody, obviously I have friends and family. This isn't a cry for help! But in the grand accounting of everything, those few people are not even a rounding error. Nobody cares about me, nothing I does matters. It's amazingly freeing from one perspective and astonishingly bleak from another. But if nobody matters and nobody cares then in another, equally valid, sense - everybody matters and everybody cares. Both things are true at the same time.
In the TV show Angel, there's a scene where the main character says, "If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do" and that has stuck with me for a long time, for exactly the reasons you've stated here.
I don't really have much to add other than that there's a bit on a TV show that echoes what you've said, and I found it pretty inspiring.
I love that you're bringing the 1990s spin-off from Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a reference :D
I guess it depends on the definition of truly requires? I think it's clear to me that we're not anywhere close to being able to transition away from fossil fuels. But I also don't think that's somehow an inherent truth, it's just the result of the tangled mess of current cost/availability, politics, and long term investments.
I actually read in the last few days that there are parts of the US where electrical companies are halting renewable energy projects because they are falling behind on making the grid ready for them. So as far as I see it a mostly renewable grid is inevitable and we will probably see an entirely renewable grid some time in the unknowable future.
It’s the things outside of the grid that worry me.
We obviously need to fix transportation more than anything, but it’s amazing how much resistance there is on that front. We could make slight improvements by improving the cars that go on our roads but it seems everyone is in an arms race to drive the biggest and least fuel-efficient vehicles and the major automakers generally don’t seem to be interested in making an EV that is mass-market affordable.
It would help if electric vehicles were cheaper than gas, but on the other hand, cars and trucks being more expensive in general encourages people to consider alternatives.
(It's similar reasoning to a carbon tax.)
I'm mostly there with you. Although we might be able to ween ourselves off oil for direct fuel in the residential/transport sectors, I don't see us replacing all plastics and other petroleum derivatives anytime soon. Machine oil is just fantastic stuff. Let alone in manufacturing and other heavy industry...combustion is too useful.
I am however somewhat skeptical we'll be able to do so quick enough to avoid some truely cataclysmic climate change.
My optimistic flip of that will be that even if the world around us crumbles, most people will be OK, even if modern luxury dies a swift death.
The honest answer is we subsidize the hell out of it. This is an easy policy fix that no one has had the cohones to do.
We subsidize wind and solar but not nearly to the level of fossil fuels.
Optimistically I think the universe is habitable for life and there are most definitely other life forms out there. Pessimistically, the distances between stars is so great, that the reason we've never seen aliens is simply that no one can get that far in the universe.
I expect to always suffer.
I expect to make it through it.
Pessimistically I believe that individual human nature is fundamentally at odds with reaching our full potential as a global community.
I honestly can't think of any optimistic beliefs that reach anywhere near the same scale. Best I got is I believe the combination of VR and generative AI may give birth to something akin to holodecks that I could experience within my lifetime.
You seem like you've already read Meditations on Moloch. If not, it's a good lamentation of how everyone hates the current state of the world yet everyone also perpetuates it because the nature of the 'game' makes coordination difficult, if not impossible.
My most optimistic belief is that we, as a species, can transcend all of this. The fighting, the hatred, even the planet itself. We can spread to the stars, become a cosmic neighborhood, maybe even find life on other worlds before we put it there ourselves.
My most pessimistic belief is that it's not going to even start in my lifetime, nor is there more than a fifty-fifty chance (and likely, it's much lower) that the good elements of us will get the ball rolling before the bad elements of us wipe us all out.
I most warmly recommend The Expanse book-series by James S.A. Corey.
It's hard sci-fi, but that's not the most interesting thing to me. Rather, what keeps me so hooked is the realistic portrayal of people at the point where we have started colonizing the solar system.
It shares both your optimism and your pessimism, then adds shenanigans to it. :D
I'll make sure to give that a look, beltaloada! ^_-
Since you (and @thorondir) have clearly already read the books (and/or watched the show), you might enjoy this too. There are new Expanse graphic novels coming out soon. They released the first issue to their Kickstarter backers a few days ago, and it was great. A friend of mine backed it and shared the PDF with me. :P
I'm not surprised at, but definitely delighted by, this particular tidbit:
I'll check it out, thanks!
$1,405,859 / 12,196 backers = $115 per backer too, which is also impressive but isn't surprising. My buddy managed to snag one of the $225 limited edition hardcover box sets. And while I was unfortunately too late to back it, I likely would have gotten one of the hardcover sets too (though probably just the $125 regular ones). :(
The series is simply that good, yes. xD
Had I known of it, I'd also have gone for one of the box sets. :|
But such is life.
Pessimistic view - we cannot fix this gestures broadly.
Climate change, money in politics, ingrained hatred/bigotry, etc. Everything from existential threat levels to basic things like lack of empathy and bad drivers. There's just too much and we as individuals can't do shit about it.
Optimistic view? I think I keep going back to Kurzgesagt's Optimistic Nihilism - the idea that nothing matters, and that's okay.
Pessimistically: I don’t think we’ll make it off this planet. Even without taking into consideration climate change or AI safety, I think over a long enough timeline the risk of full-scale nuclear war is a certainty. And I think that such a timeline is likely a good deal shorter than us establishing a self-sufficient colony off planet.
Nuclear weapons have this terrifying outcome matrix where a global zero initiative is clearly required for us to move forward as a species, but that the risk of nuclear primacy by a participant engaging in cheating is so great and equally terrifying that it can never be considered. So we continue to trot along until inevitably a non-rational person with a doomsday mentality manages to get hold of the button.
Optimistically: We are as a species capable of a great deal of good alongside the bad, and we will meaningfully enrich the universe with our presence until we no longer can. Something something, journey, destination.
Pessimistically, I believe that I can't trust anyone in any type of deal. They're always going to intentionally or unintentionally screw me over in some way.
Optimistically, I tend to trust people, anyway. Life is much more pleasant when you trust people, even when they end up screwing you over. And "screwing you over" is an exaggeration, anyway. They'll just take a little more than they should've or some little quibble like that. Nothing that's worth distrusting people as a whole.
That's why I try to surround myself with people with whom choosing to always cooperate will yield a net positive return over multiple 'game rounds'.
I observe that a significant component of public care of public spaces differentiating nice areas (like where I was in Amsterdam) versus less nice areas (like where I now am in Oakland, CA) is the ratio of cooperators vs. defectors. There are a lot of good folks in Oakland, but there are enough antisocial defectors that everyone feels it's not worthwhile to try to keep public spaces nice and clean, so litter abounds.
Man, The Prisoner's Dilemma does pop up everywhere, doesn't it. xD
Optimistically, I believe that the universe is a fundamentally special and beautiful place, even devoid of anyone to appreciate it. The massive complexity that we may never fully be able to comprehend, the uncaring scale of the void, the unceasing, seemingly endless ticking of time and burning of atoms and swirling of gas and twirling of planets and all kinds of random systems all working together without meaning to work at all.
Even if I had nothing else to be optimistic about, I think there's something intrinsically interesting about just being able to know about these things and experience them at all. It's one of the only things that always keeps me moving forward in life. Might as well use this time for what it's worth and see more of the universe while I'm 'in' it, whatever that actually means.
Pessimistically, I feel like this beautiful, complex, random universe is also exactly that: random. Uncaring, the universe continues to do whatever the universe wants. We can invent whatever cool frameworks we want to explain science, ethics, history, whatever, the universe is indifferent. It continues to function regardless of your opinion on it's functioning.
As a consequence of this, I think that life, and as an extension, intelligence, doesn't have any intrinsic properties that make it different from any other random system in the universe. It may look slightly more ordered than the average slice of space in the universe for a short period of time, but entropy gets everything eventually, and this complexity we call life is just a fleeting drop in the bucket for the universe. It's all just peanuts to space.
And as an even further consequence of this line of thinking, and after learning more and more details about human history the older I get, I'm starting to feel like humans are absolutely no exception. We are animals, driven by instincts that have randomly fallen into place after billions of years of random natural selection. I believe that most animals, humans being no exception, are primarily driven by greedy instincts to preserve themselves and maximize 'good' chemicals in the brain. I think that any of the human accomplishments throughout history can be explained this way. Even altruism can be explained as making yourself feel good. I think it's silly to suggest otherwise unless you can try to empirically prove it in some way (which I would be very interested in learning about if it does exist already)
Now, some people might use that fact to motivate themselves to do good, but I believe that by and large, it will always trend towards greed winning at the end of the day, because it will always be the strongest motivator. Even if other configurations of society would work better for everyone, there will always be a driven few who are constantly racing to fulfill their greedy instinct, while everyone else is just trying to live their lives peacefully. I believe this group will always win out and will lead to the downfall of the human race and possibly any reproducing life in the universe, eventually.
That is my most pessimistic belief. I sincerely hope I'm wrong. The few decades I've been on this earth haven't been giving me much hope, though.
I think this is true in a way but it's not as bad as what many think. Imagine you have a choice between your loved ones getting X dollars after you die, or they get nothing but you get a false memory implanted that you chose a happier option where they get 2X dollars after you die. Most people would agree that the first option is much better to take and even that it feels better in the moment to choose that. That option feels better when you see both options specifically because you care about its better results out in the world. If your feelings really were an end to themselves, you'd have no hesitation in picking the second option.
I don't feel like you can bring the concept of implanting false memories into a very grounded discussion and still consider it a fair argument, quite frankly. I also think that even if there's another argument you could make along more physically realistic lines, it would just be an edge case to the overall trend.
Even if there are some situations where our self-serving drive can result in genuine altruism, I would personally consider that to be an 'unintended' result of the overall direction of the natural selection, which is simply to keep you living long enough to get busy boinkin'. Some people who cooperate and help their friends will survive, but only if they don't get taken advantage of by the other person, and those who take advantage of other people also survive. It's a super fatalistic version of the prisoner's dilemma IMO.
I still try to remind myself that the whole point of sapience is supposed to be that we can think beyond that kind of simple-minded survival arithmetic and actually meaningfully try to cooperate on a larger scale, and we certainly do in many cases, but the part that distresses me is that it seems like those instincts are still always creeping in constantly from the margins unless we actively drive them back.
My most optimistic belief is that humanity is going to be very successful through AI. Natural selection and human intelligence have been extremely consequential processes on Earth. Powerful general artificial intelligence wouldn't just be a new force like these; it would be the first time that a process like those is able to directly understand and intelligently improve its own operation on all levels. If we make it just right and things goes well for us, then things will go extremely well for us. Published ML researchers in a 2022 poll gave an average estimate of 37 years until superhuman AI is made. If this pans out, then we live in the most important and consequential period of history.
My most pessimistic belief, besides that we might not make it, is if humanity made it big and achieved all the technology we want including immortality, that human psychology and society might not be able to fully adapt without lots of tradeoffs. It would be a massive improvement of course, but it's disappointing to imagine that even utopia could still have fundamental issues. Could the default nature of the human mind be to accumulate countless personal and societal grudges over time, such that all of us would become nonfunctional antisocial hermits within our first thousand years of life?
If that were the case, we'd surely come up with techniques and treatments for avoiding this, but I wonder if all the solutions might have significant tradeoffs. Imagine people rejuvenate themselves by archiving most of their memories every few decades or centuries so they can face the world with the attitude of an unburdened ambitious 20-year-old again. It's a much better option than death, but is this not just a softer ongoing death? Maybe instead we find ways to improve the human mind to make us less emotionally vulnerable. Will people look back on today and yearn for the days before most people they met were so emotionally guarded, even though they knew that couldn't last? Maybe there will be subcultures and clusters of people who let their shields down together, but it's a shame if on some level our true selves can never directly engage with the full community of humanity.
And that's only thinking about how we'd adapt to immortality itself. What about the people who upgrade their own minds to stand next to superintelligent AI? Would the nature of superintelligence lead to a kind of self-sufficiency that's at odds with our innate social desires? Will society split into baseline humans, humans that have upgraded themselves without limit into peerless hermit gods, and humans that have upgraded themselves only as far as is currently known to be compatible with a social life?
Maybe many people will play multiple of these roles simultaneously: imagine existing both as an upgraded mind with full memory of your life and the intellectual ability to solve any question, and as a human mind that's managed by the superself, kept somewhat firewalled from that raw power, and used by the superself as a social avatar and the source of goals. You could be your own guardian angel. Would this bifurcation of the mind be seen as merely a tacky roleplay or as necessary to pursue both of the goals of understanding the world and socializing? Would people doing this ultimately become their own alien society separate from each of the segments they were trying to bridge?
I believe that Everything Will Be Alright in the End.
The flipside is that things being alright isn't the same as things being good. I have quite a lot of pessimistic tendencies. But all the times in my life I have catastrophized and worried too much about things, the things just kind of worked out. It might have not been exactly in the way I wanted, things aren't perfect (at all), but life goes on.
What does 'essential optimism/pessimism' mean exactly? Does that mean beliefs that are strongly held but could be viewed in a optimistic or pessimistic light?
What pessimistic and optimistic beliefs are central to your identity and how you view the world?
My most pessimistic and optimistic beliefs deal with my own mortality.
Pessimistically, I often feel that living is just a form of procrastinating. We live as though we're the most important show in the universe, yet one day we will die, humanity will go extinct, the Earth will be swallowed by the Sun, and so on, until any mark we've left is rendered meaningless.
I yearn for a long, happy life, but even the richest life is just filler.
Optimistically, my most pessimistic belief relies on many assumptions that might turn out to be false. We don't definitively understand consciousness, time, or the ultimate fate of the universe. Maybe consciousness doesn't depend on its physical stratum, allowing us to transcend our wetware. Maybe time doesn't actually "pass", and I'm actually trapped for eternity in this moment, forever fretting for the right words. Maybe the universe is inherently cyclic, amplifying our most courageous acts to infinity.
Hell, maybe there's a Heaven after all.
Both wrapped into one:
The Universe is fundamentally cold and unfair. We can choose not to be.