Pessimism is a barrier to progress

For someone whose user name is “zero gravitas”, you sure seem wise :-)

That's realism, not pessimism.

Optimists and pessimists are both unrealistic, for different reasons.

Optimism is unrealistic because it wants everyone on the happy clappy hype train, and people who aren't on will be resented. Collectively it's quite tribal, even culty.

Pessimism is unrealistic because it misses opportunities that have a realistic chance of success.

But they're only two broad kinds of unrealism out of many others. For example:

   Working obsessively on a project that interests you without doing any market testing. 
   Using the latest tech stack just because everyone else is using it.
   Believing that customers will definitely sign up if you add that one feature they want.

It's lack of realism that kills you, not two specific subtypes of it.

My own personal experience is that every single time I try to be positive about changing anything for the better in any way, the vast majority of humans I voice any "optimism" to are hell-bent on beating that "naïvety" out of me. The problem I see is that humanity as a whole has much of what we need to build a Utopia for all, but almost nobody actually wants a better world for anyone let alone for everyone. All the technology in the world does only harm if the only thing people want to do with it is "weaponize" it in the service of greed and power-lust. There's nothing "amazing" or "transformative" about repeating the same old mistakes humanity's been guilty of since pretty much the dawn of "civilization".

Perhaps instead of actively trying to find excuses to dissuade "optimists" from even trying, society might be better off trying to teach that supporting good ideas that benefit everyone is a good thing, not bad…

(Verbatim re-posting a past comment[+] of mine that seemed to have resonated with HN folks.)

Hans Rosling[1] used to call himself a "very serious possibilist":

People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.

           • • •

In his book 'Factfulness' (definitely read it), he talks about "bad and better":

Think of the world as a premature baby in an incubator. The baby’s health status is extremely bad and her breathing, heart rate, and other important signs are tracked constantly so that changes for better or worse can quickly be seen. After a week, she is getting a lot better. On all the main measures, she is improving, but she still has to stay in the incubator because her health is still critical.

Does it make sense to say that the infant’s situation is improving? Yes. Absolutely. Does it make sense to say it is bad? Yes, absolutely. Does saying “things are improving” imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It’s both. It’s both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rosling

[+] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550178

> Not so driven pessimists might tell that it is a waste of time, because Earth is Doomed

or kill himself because Earth is Doomed and effectively be part of the solution.

The reason why people do things it's mostly irrelevant, it's what they do that counts.