People will really be like "you believe in advancing mankind through optimism? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, advancing mankind through cynicism" and then not advance mankind through cynicism.
One thing I worry about for the pessimists in my life is the lack of a self-correcting mechanism. The incorrect optimist eventually runs face-first into reality and adjusts accordingly. The pessimist is, as the saying goes, bound to be right.
I think it's best to have a rational take, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, particularly where there could potentially be as many harms as benefits from a significant development. Optimism is healthy, but I am wary of it, just as I am wary of the pronouncements of doom mongers. There is a middle way. It doesn't profit us as a society to ignore the harms and concentrate on the benefits, nor indeed to ignore the benefits and concentrate on the harms. My vision of a civilized society would be of one that is able to examine both the benefits and the harms, rationally and intelligently (ie without the hype), and discourage the activities that cause significant harm. It would be self-regulating, reaping the benefits of advances in technology, say, while maintaining a system of moral tenets that discouraged thoughtless profiteering and selfish gain, by making it socially and economically unacceptable to practise them.
As you say, "It is a matter of judgment when to lean into one or the other, and no (know?) there’s no shortage of examples of the utility and cost of each."
"As Webster’s account suggests, there is a bigger institutional story to tell about how America came to make this 'high stakes bet.' I’ve already mentioned Schmidt’s importance; Webster emphasizes the role of CSET, a Dustin Moskowitz-funded institution within Georgetown that brought together rationalist/EA arguments on the crucial importance of AGI with analyses of semiconductor supply chains and China’s vulnerabilities. There is a great dissertation to be written about the history of how this all came together."
A lot of this resonates, especially the: "designers and engineers and data scientists who have perhaps gone too far, have become cynical to the point of interfering with their ability to be generative and collaborative and energetic in their daily work." As a recovering cynical I'm now able to see it all around me, especially from some of the most well-intentioned people I know.
It's an extremely charitable interpretation sometimes, but it strikes me as a useful mental model: some people try to maximize good, while others try to minimize pain. Each have their dark side: one ends up justifying their efforts and gains under the guise of consequentialism, while the other is paralyzed and completely ineffective.
I understand that striking a balance is healthy and necessary, but I wonder sometimes if trying to find a middle way effectively neuters the power that comes from leaning into either side. Maybe trying to find a consistent compass is silly and we would be better off applying a different mix at different levels, something like: highly skeptical but a little optimistic when it comes to world/societal matters, highly optimistic but a little skeptical when it comes to private life/hobbies/work endeavors (at least for most people whose job is fairly inconsequential like ours).
Oh yes, I worry it does!!! I think I’m a bit neutered in precisely this way; I am not a driver, nor do i reliably hone and sharpen others, although I think I’m a little stronger on that front than on the other. Extremely good point, and I’m not sure it’s avoidable really?
I have mixed feelings about this essay. I agree both that there are theoretical reasons why excessive optimism can nevertheless be productive and pro-social in certain circumstances and with, "If I’d counsel anything, it’s that one try not to calcify into either, and especially not as a means to achieving psychological safety or a sense of superiority"
But I'm also struck that this description is both immediately comprehensible and recognizable and (from the perspective of someone far from Silicon Valley) deeply weird, "My own experience in tech is not an uncommon one. I believed far too much in my first startup; I was far too cynical at my second; I bailed to Facebook after my third; and only in my fourth and fifth roles have I had what I think is a useful sense of how to manage myself philosophically and psychologically"
I fully believe that there are valuable psychological and philosophical lessons to learn from that experience but, it seems worth pointing out that it's also a fairly narrow experience in it's own way.
It's like the provincialism of New York City -- reflecting an experience which is capacious and also bounded.
Ultimately I do appreciate the attempt to explain and it feels in various ways like this description places emphasis in ways that feel odd to my ears.
Yeah I feel so-so about this bad boy. I think it's useful to have a sense for the (forgive me) structural reasons optimism is eternal in some cultures; the analogy that occurred to me when I wrote the note was from my small liberal arts college in the 90s. To suggest that a given piece of art wouldn't "problematize the way Americans think of beauty" or whatever would've been totally out of bounds, because the necessary energy artists conjure with their big visions is the same for quixotic or real efforts, for things that matter and things that don't. You can easily disrupt a creative person by making (often true) contextual observations, as you can a nascent political movement or even a startup.
So I wanted to say why it might be that these things persist, and why they even have a basis for persisting beyond inertia and cargo-culting; but I don't feel great about where it all landed in some ways. I mean: the other way you could say all this is "lots of people are fools, being wrong is always bad, and people need to sober up." I'd mash like on a note that said that, too lol.
FWIW my own experience is also narrow-- I've spent my career working for small businesses without any outside investment. I've never worked for a company with more than 10 employees and, at three separate points, I've been the only employee working alongside the owners. Which is a very different form of being, "in the arena "
But, on a different note, as I was mulling it over last night the discussion of "optimism" made me think of Bruce Sterling's classic take on Stanislaw Lem which, if you haven't seen it, seems like very much your kind of thing.
Lem was surgically excised from the bosom of American SF back in 1976. Since then plenty of other writers have quit SFWA, but those flung out for the crime of being a commie rat-bastard have remained remarkably few. Lem, of course, has continued to garner widespread acclaim, much of it from hifalutin' mainstream critics who would not be caught dead in a bookstore's skiffy section. Recently a collection of Lem's critical essays, Macroworlds, has appeared in paperback. For those of us not privy to the squabble these essays caused in the '70s, it makes some eye-opening reading.
Lem compares himself to Crusoe, stating (accurately) that he had to erect his entire structure of "science fiction" essentially from scratch. He did have the ancient shipwrecked hulls of Wells and Stapledon at hand, but he raided them for tools years ago. (We owe the collected essays to the beachcombing of his Man Friday, Austrian critic Franz Rottensteiner.)
Highly, HIGHLY recommend reading "The Delusions of Crowds" - not to be confused with the classic "Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds", this is a kind of modern updated version, and it explores financial bubbles and episodes of religious apocalypticism in a remarkable clear-eyed way. "The 4 most dangerous words in the english language are: This Time It's Different"
People will really be like "you believe in advancing mankind through optimism? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, advancing mankind through cynicism" and then not advance mankind through cynicism.
Great essay.
One thing I worry about for the pessimists in my life is the lack of a self-correcting mechanism. The incorrect optimist eventually runs face-first into reality and adjusts accordingly. The pessimist is, as the saying goes, bound to be right.
My boss has noted this too, observing that in some respects a fella like myself conforms to the expected speculative performance of a rock lmfao!
I often remind myself that you don’t get a trophy at the end of your life for having always been right; it’s not that kind of game down here!!!
I think it's best to have a rational take, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, particularly where there could potentially be as many harms as benefits from a significant development. Optimism is healthy, but I am wary of it, just as I am wary of the pronouncements of doom mongers. There is a middle way. It doesn't profit us as a society to ignore the harms and concentrate on the benefits, nor indeed to ignore the benefits and concentrate on the harms. My vision of a civilized society would be of one that is able to examine both the benefits and the harms, rationally and intelligently (ie without the hype), and discourage the activities that cause significant harm. It would be self-regulating, reaping the benefits of advances in technology, say, while maintaining a system of moral tenets that discouraged thoughtless profiteering and selfish gain, by making it socially and economically unacceptable to practise them.
As you say, "It is a matter of judgment when to lean into one or the other, and no (know?) there’s no shortage of examples of the utility and cost of each."
Thanks. Keeping an open mind, always.
One other thought about optimism. It's a little crazy to think that the AI Hype Cycle had a significant impact on US foreign policy: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-twilight-of-tech-unilateralism
"As Webster’s account suggests, there is a bigger institutional story to tell about how America came to make this 'high stakes bet.' I’ve already mentioned Schmidt’s importance; Webster emphasizes the role of CSET, a Dustin Moskowitz-funded institution within Georgetown that brought together rationalist/EA arguments on the crucial importance of AGI with analyses of semiconductor supply chains and China’s vulnerabilities. There is a great dissertation to be written about the history of how this all came together."
Excellent piece.
Thank you!!!
A lot of this resonates, especially the: "designers and engineers and data scientists who have perhaps gone too far, have become cynical to the point of interfering with their ability to be generative and collaborative and energetic in their daily work." As a recovering cynical I'm now able to see it all around me, especially from some of the most well-intentioned people I know.
It's an extremely charitable interpretation sometimes, but it strikes me as a useful mental model: some people try to maximize good, while others try to minimize pain. Each have their dark side: one ends up justifying their efforts and gains under the guise of consequentialism, while the other is paralyzed and completely ineffective.
I understand that striking a balance is healthy and necessary, but I wonder sometimes if trying to find a middle way effectively neuters the power that comes from leaning into either side. Maybe trying to find a consistent compass is silly and we would be better off applying a different mix at different levels, something like: highly skeptical but a little optimistic when it comes to world/societal matters, highly optimistic but a little skeptical when it comes to private life/hobbies/work endeavors (at least for most people whose job is fairly inconsequential like ours).
Oh yes, I worry it does!!! I think I’m a bit neutered in precisely this way; I am not a driver, nor do i reliably hone and sharpen others, although I think I’m a little stronger on that front than on the other. Extremely good point, and I’m not sure it’s avoidable really?
Been a while dude!!!
I have mixed feelings about this essay. I agree both that there are theoretical reasons why excessive optimism can nevertheless be productive and pro-social in certain circumstances and with, "If I’d counsel anything, it’s that one try not to calcify into either, and especially not as a means to achieving psychological safety or a sense of superiority"
But I'm also struck that this description is both immediately comprehensible and recognizable and (from the perspective of someone far from Silicon Valley) deeply weird, "My own experience in tech is not an uncommon one. I believed far too much in my first startup; I was far too cynical at my second; I bailed to Facebook after my third; and only in my fourth and fifth roles have I had what I think is a useful sense of how to manage myself philosophically and psychologically"
I fully believe that there are valuable psychological and philosophical lessons to learn from that experience but, it seems worth pointing out that it's also a fairly narrow experience in it's own way.
It's like the provincialism of New York City -- reflecting an experience which is capacious and also bounded.
Ultimately I do appreciate the attempt to explain and it feels in various ways like this description places emphasis in ways that feel odd to my ears.
Yeah I feel so-so about this bad boy. I think it's useful to have a sense for the (forgive me) structural reasons optimism is eternal in some cultures; the analogy that occurred to me when I wrote the note was from my small liberal arts college in the 90s. To suggest that a given piece of art wouldn't "problematize the way Americans think of beauty" or whatever would've been totally out of bounds, because the necessary energy artists conjure with their big visions is the same for quixotic or real efforts, for things that matter and things that don't. You can easily disrupt a creative person by making (often true) contextual observations, as you can a nascent political movement or even a startup.
So I wanted to say why it might be that these things persist, and why they even have a basis for persisting beyond inertia and cargo-culting; but I don't feel great about where it all landed in some ways. I mean: the other way you could say all this is "lots of people are fools, being wrong is always bad, and people need to sober up." I'd mash like on a note that said that, too lol.
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
FWIW my own experience is also narrow-- I've spent my career working for small businesses without any outside investment. I've never worked for a company with more than 10 employees and, at three separate points, I've been the only employee working alongside the owners. Which is a very different form of being, "in the arena "
But, on a different note, as I was mulling it over last night the discussion of "optimism" made me think of Bruce Sterling's classic take on Stanislaw Lem which, if you haven't seen it, seems like very much your kind of thing.
https://germanponte.com/txt/catscan/sterling.html#ym2
_______________________________________
Lem was surgically excised from the bosom of American SF back in 1976. Since then plenty of other writers have quit SFWA, but those flung out for the crime of being a commie rat-bastard have remained remarkably few. Lem, of course, has continued to garner widespread acclaim, much of it from hifalutin' mainstream critics who would not be caught dead in a bookstore's skiffy section. Recently a collection of Lem's critical essays, Macroworlds, has appeared in paperback. For those of us not privy to the squabble these essays caused in the '70s, it makes some eye-opening reading.
Lem compares himself to Crusoe, stating (accurately) that he had to erect his entire structure of "science fiction" essentially from scratch. He did have the ancient shipwrecked hulls of Wells and Stapledon at hand, but he raided them for tools years ago. (We owe the collected essays to the beachcombing of his Man Friday, Austrian critic Franz Rottensteiner.)
....
Highly, HIGHLY recommend reading "The Delusions of Crowds" - not to be confused with the classic "Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds", this is a kind of modern updated version, and it explores financial bubbles and episodes of religious apocalypticism in a remarkable clear-eyed way. "The 4 most dangerous words in the english language are: This Time It's Different"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56240358-the-delusions-of-crowds