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.
> And many people are conservative in particular at the individual level for very good reasons, because they cannot afford to play high risk games.
I became wealthy (I don't consider myself rich, but just doin' okay) when I realized that I was so poor that I had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. I don't think the attitude of pessimism or optimism has anything to do with success... You have to be somewhat good at being optimistic about the right things and pessimistic about the right things... all at the right time. You have to see opportunity, navigate risk and most importantly... actually go for it. The go for it part is super hard because there is great uncertainty on the journey.
Rich and wealthy have slightly different meanings. One common usage is the level of money. Chris Rock had a joke that "[Professional Athlete] is rich. The guy who signs his checks [and thus owns the team] is wealthy." Sorry to ruin the joke with additional text, but I'm erroring on the side of clarity.
The other main usage would be that "rich" describes how you can spend your money on possessions. "Wealthy" describes the degree to which your assets are generating income. So someone who makes a large sum of money a year might be rich (they own a Lamborghini and a house, and take fancy vacations) or wealthy (they have all that money in stocks and can retire tomorrow.) With this usage, wealthy people are often also rich.
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
> 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).
I don’t understand this ‘wealthy people can take the risk’ meme.
It applies to fine artists, but startups often have some sort of funding.
If you have funding, your personal risk is mitigated quite a bit. I don’t see why you would have to be independently wealthy to do a startup.
If you do a side project or consulting work, you can generally get started in your free time and migrate to it full time when it is already profitable. Still don’t see how this is an unacceptable level of risk.
If you don’t have the ability to code or raise money, then you wouldn’t be even in the discussion about Silicon Valley optimism. So …
I’m not sure. We’re on a hedonistic treadmill. Yesterday’s inventions are todays problems.
It’s easy to look at polluting transportation, addictive social media or unhealthy processed foods and extrapolate that the future will be worse.
But I believe someone in the 19th century would see a F-150; near real time, global news; and tasty, semi-nutritious food that’s shelf stable for years as amazing!
> The possibility of sustained progress is a consequence of the view of humans as “universal explainers” (cf. David Deutsch), and of progress as driven fundamentally by human choice and effort—that is, by human agency.
> 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.
So it's[1] not about predicting trends based on present conditions. In fact almost the opposite. An optimist would predict that hard unsolved problems will be solved in the future, because that has been the trend.
That's if you define optimism to be belief in sustained human progress, and redefine pessimism as realism (reality is a mixed bag)
If you go with someone else's definition, pessimism could be belief in ubiquitous, sustained human failure, while optimism is recognizing that failure may come, but won't indefinitely or all the time (reality is a mixed bag)
> The possibility of sustained progress is a consequence of the view
of humans as "universal explainers" (cf. David Deutsch), and of
progress as driven fundamentally by human choice and effort - that
is, by human agency.
As a humanist, I too am very optimistic about the ultimate triumph of
human agency. What gives me cause for pessimism is the emergence of
technologies that act against it.
Biology, intelligence and evolution, on a long enough timeline tend
toward unbridled possibility. We can overcome anything. I reject
Malthusian doom-saying.
The greatest challenge may not be energy or food, but how we overcome
our own technologies that cultivate dependency, weakness, and
ignorance. How do we avoid abandoning intelligence amplification in
favour of artificial intelligence, reality in favour of a "virtual
metaverse"?
I think the subtle danger in late modernity is the creation of
technologies that optimise for pessimism, thrive on discord, reward
laziness, and learn from our worst vices in order to amplify them and
offer us more.
It's a fuzzy term that mostly works out to some sort of often collaborative social environment. Not much different than HN or IRC in many ways, just with a different way of interacting.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
You have to be aware of the rock. focusing on the rock is the problem. You start knowing where the rocks are, and then you move on to the planning the better outcome.
Being unable to move on to
the better outcome is the pessimism trap.
I’ve run across people that work so hard to be optimistic, that they clearly are denying the possibility of a problem - they are no longer aware of the rock.
Like mountain biking and ignoring (to the point of forgetting/not believing!) there are rocks, it causes some very concerning behaviors.
One of them literally kept steering for the rocks because she kept forgetting they existed.
Further, in mountain biking and other similar sports, you have to make your body move as if your action will succeed; nothing will undermine your effectiveness more than your lizard-brain's self-defense movements.
Good decision makers can recognize “one way doors” and adjust their risk tolerance accordingly.
But I think it is important to also realize that what is risky to one person, might not be risky to another. Either because they are at the end of one of the spectrums:
1. They have nothing to lose
2. They have so much, that losing doesn’t hurt them very much
Everyone in the middle of that spectrum has something to lose and will experience varying levels of painfulness if they fail.
It is easy to just call them pessimists, but they might just have a different perspective from where they are in life.
But that goes both directions. Pessimists should also realize that optimists see things differently from where they are, and not try to bring them down to their reality.
> You have to be cautious in knowing what sort of things can trigger an irreversible failure.
Sure, but that's a matter of judgement. Pessimists predict failure where success is possible and even likely. So one reasonable definition of a pessimist might be:
A pessimist is someone that is bad at predicting the future.
In my experience, what we call optimists are often just people with a superior ability to see what is possible, usually based on intelligence, experience, and knowledge. They usually are the first to recognize that the world has changed in some important way, creating an opportunity for improvement.
> In my experience, what we call optimists are often just people with a superior ability to see what is possible, usually based on intelligence, experience, and knowledge. They usually are the first to recognize that the world has changed in some important way, creating an opportunity for improvement.
Or maybe, just maybe. You don't see all the optimists who crashed and burned, and successful optimists being rare creatures given that they got past the great filter tend to get all the press and accolades as well as attention . So people look at them trying to dissect their life and pick their brain trying to find the one thing that make them go past the great filter whereas it's most likely just luck and survivorship bias.
Optimism shouldn't be ever taken into consideration as a predictor of success, that would leave lots of people bitter and desperate when they don't make it past the great filter.
Optimism and the good mood you have when you are in an optimist state is itself the reward, that's about it. The idea that everything is possible and all is up for grabs gives the brain lots of pleasure and that is a win to be enjoyed even if you fall victim of the great filter later on.
An example is people watching with wide eyes Reusable rocket launches imagining they'd live on Mars in 20 years, or those visiting cryonics centers imagining how they'll beat death or Level 5 cars autonomy.
Such goals are 100% guaranteed bullshit but the pleasure that people feel while imagining those things is real, it's very important for humans to gaslight ourselves into believing great things are possible, if you can do that for long enough then at some point death will arrive and the problem of finding meaning would take care of itself in a sense.
The leadership of a visionary such as Elon Musk in this field appears crystal clear.
The only doubt I have is that all the above should fall under the umbrella of religion/cults, not entrepreneurship.
Unfortunately there is lot of social stigma around religion , cults and tarots.
Optimists are mostly people like crypto hodl crowd or sales people who tries to convince you that everything will get better if you just buy their product or people who fall for MLM scams or those who buys lottery tickets etc. They will call you a pessimist if you disagree with them, and tells you to be more optimistic.
In my experience this kind of optimist is way more common than the "sees real world opportunities" kind. Most people are not optimists though, if you try to sell them an opportunity they will scrutinize it and most likely refuse the offer unless you are someone they trust even if they would benefit.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
This is a truly weird claim to have made at least 85 years after the idea entered the public sphere and at least 19 years after a phone that was intended to be carried by a person not a car was demoed by Motorola.
Did he also poopoo the idea of a public internet and wait until the 80s to do so?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Pessimists do not discriminate between charlatan and innovator. They just sit on the sidelines and crap on everything because a) it doesn't require any work, and b) ideas and attempts are imperfect, so it's easy to point out flaws in them and be correct.
> Pessimists do not discriminate between charlatan and innovator. They just sit on the sidelines and crap on everything because a) it doesn't require any work, and b) ideas and attempts are imperfect, so it's easy to point out flaws in them and be correct.
This is the complaint of a salesman (or a follower of one) who's upset his job isn't easy, and wishes everyone was an optimist who'd just buy what he's selling based on his pitch.
The difference between a charlatan and an innovator is an innovator delivers and a charlatan sells.
This is precisely the attitude I was talking about with my comment. It assumes that it's everyone else's job to provide you with solutions, because providing solutions is the part that requires actual work.
> This is precisely the attitude I was talking about with my comment. It assumes that it's everyone else's job to provide you with solutions, because providing solutions is the part that requires actual work.
No it doesn't. Skepticism (or "pessimism") does not mean you "assume... it's everyone else's job to provide you with solutions."
> ...because providing solutions is the part that requires actual work.
And what if the solution isn't a solution, or isn't actually good enough to elicit universal enthusiasm and praise? No one's entitled to criticism-free cheerleading.
You're strawmanning pretty hard here. Nobody mentioned anything about universal enthusiasm, praise, cheerleading, or anything similar. Looks like you've intentionally missed the point.
If we identify optimists and pessimists only by the most extreme variant of each we will have excluded virtually everyone and no longer possess a scale with which to measure them.
There's a difference between identifying things that you will need to overcome, mitigate, or work around in order to be successful (which is useful) and insisting that the existence of these things means the task is impossible or not worth trying (which is not useful).
Sure, but if you google the definition of the word we're all talking about, there's no mention of impossible. Just someone that, "see[s] the worst aspect of things or believe[s] that the worst will happen".
So basically, it's the person you might want around when you're building a bridge, or a jet, or a shuttle.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!"
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!"
> 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”.
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.
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.
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).
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), 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.
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.