Created: June 07, 2021
Modified: June 08, 2021
Modified: June 08, 2021
optimism
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- As Josh Marshall said, at the beginning of the Trump presidency: "Optimism is not primarily a prediction but an ethic, a philosophy, a way of confronting the world."
- And in another post: "Optimism isn’t principally an analysis of present reality. It’s an ethic. It is not based on denial or rosy thinking. It is a moral posture toward the world we find ourselves in. If everything seems great, there’s no need for optimism. The river of good news just carries you along."
- I like this view because it frees you to be optimistic, without denying that a negative assessment of the world might be objectively accurate.
- We can put some weight behind this ethic with the ML/RL concept of exploration versus exploitation. It as actually irrational (and so also in some sense immoral, since rationality is moral) to make decisions entirely based on your current best estimate of the likely consequences. We know that we don't have full knowledge of the world, and so long-run rational behavior requires deliberate exploration. It's necessary to try new things, in the hope that they might lead to outcomes better than what we currently expect. Uncertainty implies a need for optimism.
- We can also see optimism through the lens of the feedback loop or dynamical system view of depression. Believing that nothing will get better starts a feedback loop where you don't try anything, and then nothing gets better, your belief is reinforced, etc. The only way to break the feedback loop is to act contrary to your beliefs. You have to act as if things can get better even if you don't really believe it.