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People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

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Re: People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

#161

Post by bobokanta »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #79
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read "factfulness". It annoys me when people talk of the current world and time in negative tones when it is best we have ever had by many measurements. Not that we are having a terrible time, but it is cool to think negatively of the world it seems to me.

The reason for this had always seemed pretty clear to me. Numerous different political ideologies rely heavily on scare mongering, outrage and catastrophizing to motivate their base and inspire followers. Many of the most powerful people or groups around the world have an incredibly vested interest in getting as many people as possible to believe that some particular set of things is very, very wrong with the world,…

You make such a great point here. Social media has amplified and enabled these groups that relentlessly create outrage and spin everything to suit their worldview to get inside everyone's head. Following or reading the daily news is depressing enough, but social media just makes it worse by forcing me to endure a relentless stream of people reacting to it.

Re: People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

#162

Post by mistermann »

wozniacki wrote: post #115
achenatx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, Ive been very fortunate to have a positive brain chemistry. When bad things have happened, my brain pretty much doesn't worry on them. Eventually things work out (or something good eventually happens) and I get through the bad times. There is no way to explain or describe this positive brain chemistry in a way that anyone can believe. But since I was a kid, my parents have been worried that Im too happy…

Does it ever bother you when people find that youre "too happy" which people might take it to mean that no outcome to any given event, can really displease you? Have you read up on what such a "condition" - if it can be called that - is called medically? Do others share it as well?

One description of such a condition might be the notion of (or for your question, the state of) enlightenment.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-does-i...

Medicine and science, being subject to the limitations of a falsifiable-evidence style of thinking as well as technical limitations, are understandably way behind the curve in this sort of thing.

From the reading I've done, the underlying physiological explanation for "the enlightened state" seems to be downgraded activity in the Default Mode Network of the brain, and evidence suggests this can be achieved in a variety of ways.

Meditation - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4529365/

Prayer - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/00952990.2016.1...

Psychedelics - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5857492/

Stroke - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3688936/

Meditation, prayer, and psychedelics often seem to put the rationalist-oriented mind into a sort of defensive, hyper-skeptical mode, but that the same phenomenon can also be observed in stroke patients hopefully makes such minds more open to considering the idea.

Re: People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

#163

Post by chiefalchemist »

The last couple years I've become interested in gut bacteria, especially as it relates to health. Long to short, I'd like to offer this theory:

People who are optimistic have more friends. People with more friends have more robust and more diverse gut bacteria. That (i.e., gut bacteria) help the optimistic live longer.

Re: People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

#164

Post by 300bps »

silveroriole wrote: post #58
300bps wrote: post #16

About three years ago I read someone on here recommend the book, “Learned Optimism”. They said it was life changing. I read it, did the work, and it is life changing. People with a pessimistic outlook are much less happy than people with an optimistic outlook. The book teaches you how each type thinks (for example, optimists think everything good that happens to them is personal and permanent and every bad thing that…

Weren’t you troubled by the fact that he admits optimists are factually wrong compared to pessimists, blame others, don’t admit fault, and just seem like generally unpleasant people (insurance salesmen and the type of person who talks on planes, for example)? Yeah, okay, they are happier, live longer, are more successful, get elected... but at what cost to the world? I came away thinking we should train the optimists…

The book is not for everyone. By that I mean that there are people in the world that think everything they do will fail. That obsess on every interaction with friends and significant others trying to look for signs that they don’t like them anymore. People that are riddled with anxiety on a daily basis because they always expect bad things to happen. That catastrophize every minor negative thing that happens in their lives.

Those people will have their lives changed significantly for the better by following the program in the book.

I am not troubled that reading a book will give you Narcissist Personality Disorder or as you said turn you into an insurance salesman.

Re: People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

#165

Post by wozniacki »

minblaster wrote: post #153
hadiz wrote: post #130

"Optimism Bias" improves our mental and physical well-being. Biases are irrational, by definition. Our mind is supposedly rational...and rationality is not always to our benefit. This kinda blew my mind when I was reading up some philosophy. My key takeaway was that rationality and logic is not always helpful to make decisions, esp. when it comes to complex systems such as people (i.e. relationships). As an engineer,…

We like to think of rationality as objectively true, but it’s not. Rationality is based on axioms that “feel right” and even the idea of being rational “feels good”. Is it rational to believe the parallel postulate? In unchanging laws of physics? In using logic with creatures who tend not to share your axioms? It comes down to a feeling. From a rational point of view, if rationality were always helpful it would be hi…

Is it rational to believe the likelihood of violent physical harm directed at you if you use a transit station in a sketchy neighborhood as opposed to one in a non-sketchy one?

Does it "feel right" to use the sketchy one, despite everything you know about sketchiness of neighborhoods and crime in general?

Re: People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

#166

Post by ChrisLomont »

abecedarius wrote: post #155
asdfman123 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that too, but then read the second paragraph: > That finding was independent of other factors thought to influence life's length — such as "socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors," the researchers from Boston University School of Medicine and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health say.

"Controlling for Confounders Is Harder than You Think" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

That paper is about assessing incremental validity, not every situation regarding confounders.

This paper is not about incremental validity. The above does not apply.

Re: People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

#167

Post by mistermann »

Cougher wrote: post #92
kristiandupont wrote: post #50

Yesterday, my wife stumbled upon a "20 pieces of good news" article and read it to me. Things like initiatives being taken to save the bees etc. At first I thought it was a bit silly but I realized that hearing all those good things did something wonderful: it made me feel quite optimistic on behalf of the world, which I can't say I have in a while (in spite of my own life going quite well). Keeping informed is the d…

"Keeping informed is the duty of a citizen in a democracy" Sorry, but I have no such duty. We are free to do or not do as we wish. News media has evolved to make us angry and stressed and to pit us against each other, while encouraging us to come back for more. It's gotten much worse over time. After years of fulfilling my "duty" and forever frustrated that the more I learn, the more obvious it becomes that our probl…

> Sorry, but I have no such duty. We are free to do or not do as we wish.

Well sure, depending how one thinks about it. From an individualist perspective/philosophy, you're correct. But this is only one of many ways of thinking about the matter. For example, would you advocate an individualist approach such as that for someone who is married with children? Could a similar argument be made for overall mankind?

I can agree that it is technically true that we are all individual mammals living on a rock hurtling through space, but I don't think it is also true to say that we are just that.

> After years of fulfilling my "duty" and forever frustrated that the more I learn, the more obvious it becomes that our problems are intractable because most people are only superficially informed enough to know that the other side is wrong and our side is right.

I can appreciate this perspective, you're certainly "not wrong", or at least not entirely. But consider this perspective:

"...the more obvious it becomes that our problems are intractable because most people are only superficially informed enough to know that the other side is wrong and our side is right." Indeed, it seems clearly true that our problems are intractable (not easily governed, managed, or directed; not easily relieved or cured) - but is it conclusively true that they are unsolvable?

How many different approaches have we taken thus far toward cracking this nut, really? From where I sit, the majority of activity at both the individual and political levels seem to consist of people criticizing the (perceived) actions and (perceived) beliefs of their out-group, and the overwhelming consensus seems to be something like "if those other people would just start acting according to my philosophy, all these problems would be solved."

It seems crystal clear to me that this style of thinking is obviously sub-optimal, but at the same time the vast majority of people seem passionately devoted to it. I wonder, might studying the problem from higher, more abstract perspectives such as this yield some new ideas, and how might this approach gain traction?

Re: People who tend to be optimistic are likelier to live to 85 or more: study

#170

Post by iudqnolq »

katzgrau wrote: post #148
watwut wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you assume that everything will turn out bad, you wont even try. If you assume all people around you are assholes, you wont even try good relationships. Plus, people like better optimistically looking people and reward them more then pessimistic people with equal merit. Moreover, outward apparent optimism create illusion of success even when there is not actual real success backing it. (The optimism does not even…

This is the root of it, and something most on HN won't accept. Optimistic people generally see and seek opportunity (either knowingly or unknowingly) more frequently than pessimists.

Won't accept? It seems startups are the same. "Rationally" a poor way to get rich, but if enough people miscaulate their odds (or enjoy it for nonmonetary reasons) we'll get a few big successes.
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