Optimism = agency
creative action comes from positive thinking
Doomerism is in the air.
Maybe it’s just the circles I’m in. Or maybe it’s my personal biases (we tend to naturally exaggerate things we dislike). But it sincerely seems to me that people (especially young, educated, urban types - like yours truly) have become more pessimistic about how the world is going to end up. If AI doesn’t destroy humanity or take away all our jobs or fill social media with toxicity, then climate change is going to render the world uninhabitable.
But I think the doomers are wrong - not necessarily in their predictions (many of them are intelligent people who are deeply thoughtful about the world), but in posture. More than anything, their vibes are off. Optimism is an important, agency-growing virtue.
Optimism moves you forward
The future is uncertain, and sometimes scary. But we resolve these uncertainties - and these fears - by working at them, not by running from them. And in order to work at them in a meaningful (constructive, horizon-broadening, positive-sum) way, it helps to believe that the future can be better than the present.
As often happens, Tyler Cowen puts it best:
Working optimistically is inherently joyful. You can bring a sense of curiosity and playfulness to the work. It means you’re open to a broad range of future possibilities, and have the emotional room to think through them clearly. In contrast, working pessimistically means you’re fearful and anxious. You’re locked into a specific causal chain of future events, as you feel like there isn’t the time or room to consider others. The possibility space is narrower.
In order for things to become better, you have to meaningfully believe that they can be better! To be high-agency is to feel a sense of control over your life and believe that you can do what’s needed to get to where you want to be. Optimism is the fuel that powers you through challenging, confusing times. Agency is rate-limited by optimism.
Pessimism is emotionally lazy. Taken to the extreme, pessimism has a nihilistic quality. If we’re all screwed, why bother doing anything? Pessimistic people are miserable to be around, too. They lower the collective energy and morale, and make it harder for anything to get done.
The life of a pessimist is easy but dreary. The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed. In the face of a hostile, cynical world, it takes effort to show that positivity has merit.
- Steph Ango, Optimism
I’m not making a claim about the predictive value of an optimistic mindset, I’m making a claim about the functional value of it. Obviously bad things can happen - how are we going to deal with that possibility? Nervously tiptoeing - or worse, forcibly slowing things down - and waiting for sufficient information (spoiler alert: it’ll never be sufficient) is a recipe for disaster.
It’s a common failure mode of brainy, cerebral people to feel like they need to have sufficient information about something before taking action on it. I tend to be guilty of this in many areas of my life. But it’s really a form of indulging one’s neuroticism and anxiety. Learning comes from action.
Again, Tyler Cowen:
COWEN: Why can’t one just build things and be resiliently optimistic in a pragmatic, cautionary sense, and take comfort in the fact that you would rather have the problems of the world today than, say, the problems of the world in the year 1000? It’s not absolute optimism where you attach to the mood qua mood, but you simply want to do things and draw a positive energy from that, and it’s self-reinforcing. Why isn’t that a better view than what you’re calling pessimism?
- From the Conversations With Tyler episode with John Gray
Relatedly, I find P(doom) to be an intellectually bankrupt idea. Any AI doomsday scenario that someone can conceive of is by definition conjecture. Every step of the chain of causality between today and doomsday consists of a situation that hasn’t happened before. How can you assign probabilities to events that have no empirical history?! P(doom) is pseudo-scientism. It’s a naive, almost grift-y, attempt to quantify what is really a qualitative issue. It tries to put into numbers what is really a matter of vibes.
(Key part at 48:48.)
Engage with reality
There is a prominent voice of pessimism that says something like “society is bad, we should retreat from it”. It encompasses what Venkatesh Rao calls Waldenponding, but is more than that:
The crude caricature is "smash your smart phone and go live in a log cabin to reclaim your attention and your life from being hacked by evil social media platforms."
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, Against Waldenponding
The voice takes many forms. It may say “misinformation on social media is tearing society apart”, or that “I need to protect my children from the mindviruses of critical race theory and sex positivity”, or that “the economic system is exploitative, we need to be self-sufficient”. (Yes it tends to be quite melodramatic.)
There’s no doubt that these are important concerns to think about and talk through. But something about this attitude of retreat feels wrong to me. It’s lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent, escapist. We are all part of a broader ecosystem of billions of people with complex values and competing incentives. Contribute to it! Solve these problems constructively instead. Contribute to the information flow of the world, though it may be hard to manage your attention in the process.
Waldenponding is... A kind of selfish free-riding/tragedy of the commons: not learning to handle your share of the increased attention-management load required to keep the Global Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC) running effectively…
When you are plugged into the GSCITC, you are part of a great computational fluidization of human cognition. You're just one instance in a liquid cloud of human intelligence, your thoughts entangled with those of others in a giant ongoing computation. It's a kind of computational civic duty, like voting. Sometimes it is fun, other times it is not, but it always important.
The urge to be self-sufficient betrays a lack of understanding of how the world works. It is exactly through our specialization and exchange that we prosper. To be able to just do one or two things but consume many different types of things, means that each of those things is available for cheaper and better than otherwise. Homesteaders, though well-meaning, are in my opinion delusional and misguided.
You are not truly self-sufficient — you are a node in your network, a living timestamp in your civilization, an agent of duty in your society, and most importantly, you live by exchanging with others.
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, Self-Sufficiency is Poverty
We live at the frontier - of technology, information, societal transformation. Yes, the world is changing rapidly - deal with this in a meaningful way! I sincerely think that the seeming difficulty of this tends to be more of a creativity issue than anything else. The frontier can indeed be a joyful place to be - if you reframe your circumstances, embrace the excitement of charting the unknown, and form bonds with like-minded people in the process. I bet you’d feel better from rising up to the challenge instead of running away from it.
There’s no virtue in running away from reality.
Things are pretty great right now
Every generation has their moral panics. From the computer to photography, from jazz to teddy bears, from cars to bicycles; human beings have an annoying tendency to be overly precious about their current circumstances and resistant to innovation.
Everyone thinks they’re Cassandra, but instead they’re Debbie Downer or Nervous Nelly.
In fact, we enjoy far more abundance today than ever before. At least in some ways, things are getting better.
I strongly believe we have an imperative to keep the train of economic growth chugging, given its importance in improving the human condition. Dealing with the economic system has its difficulties, and many people are in poor circumstances with little room to maneuver. Yet on the margins, I bet many people could be better about thinking a bit more about their role in the world.
The future can be glorious, if we work towards it being so.
Courage = agency
As you can probably tell by now, my aversion to doomerism is less intellectual and more emotional/moral. When things seem scary, what does it say about us when we spread panic instead of working constructively?
The story of humanity is the story of courage. We should take on future challenges with the hope that a better life awaits us beyond them.
Be a builder.
Thanks to my friend Shreeda for reading a draft of this!
Brilliant essay. Thank you for writing it. Makes me hopeful again.