Question
Optimism: What is there to be optimistic about right now?
Answer
By their very nature, positive things are more obscure/hidden than negative things. So there is a natural human bias towards pessimism/doom-and-gloom.
The last 2 decades are interesting precisely because a diffuse sort of optimism has taken hold despite the lack of any concrete reason. To a certain extent there has even been an over-compensation. A cultural version of irrational exuberance.
Big positive gains in society emerge not as solutions to known problems, but via opening up of unanticipated new opportunity domains. So "alternative energy" is a "known problem" with a sort of known solution space, ranging from the heaven of cold fusion (or maybe even mining the energy of the Dirac vacuum) to hybrid cars.
But if you add up all those concrete things (everything from nanotechnology to efficient cities etc.), the balance is still in favor of doom-and-gloom in my opinion.
You need positive unknown-unknowns to make the future positive.
While these cannot be predicted by definition, you can talk about behaviors that make them more likely to happen. Just as Nicholas Nassim Taleb (who popularized the (negative) black swan concept) was able to make his fortune off unknown unknowns by simply betting against mainstream Wall Street, there are similar things you can do culturally to make positive unknown unknowns more likely. The more people are engaging in those behaviors, the more optimistic I get.
One of those behaviors is "paying attention to attention." We've never had so many smart people thinking about "attention" at the same time and thinking about ways to understand, appreciate, direct and manage it. Explorations range from the mystical (more accessible and modern models of mindfulness for example) to highly scientific and technical (fMRI, Web companies measuring attention at eyeball-tracking tenths-of-second level...).
This can only do good. It is the intellectual equivalent of sedentary people getting more active, lifting weights etc. with no clear idea of the benefits, but you know that it is going to be a positive even if you can't predict exactly how a fitter population will be a better population.
This "attention to attention" phenomenon is what has the potential to rebalance the gloom vs. optimism equation.
There is still not enough of it going on for me to be optimistic, but there's enough that the balance swinging in the right direction is a real possibility.
The last 2 decades are interesting precisely because a diffuse sort of optimism has taken hold despite the lack of any concrete reason. To a certain extent there has even been an over-compensation. A cultural version of irrational exuberance.
Big positive gains in society emerge not as solutions to known problems, but via opening up of unanticipated new opportunity domains. So "alternative energy" is a "known problem" with a sort of known solution space, ranging from the heaven of cold fusion (or maybe even mining the energy of the Dirac vacuum) to hybrid cars.
But if you add up all those concrete things (everything from nanotechnology to efficient cities etc.), the balance is still in favor of doom-and-gloom in my opinion.
You need positive unknown-unknowns to make the future positive.
While these cannot be predicted by definition, you can talk about behaviors that make them more likely to happen. Just as Nicholas Nassim Taleb (who popularized the (negative) black swan concept) was able to make his fortune off unknown unknowns by simply betting against mainstream Wall Street, there are similar things you can do culturally to make positive unknown unknowns more likely. The more people are engaging in those behaviors, the more optimistic I get.
One of those behaviors is "paying attention to attention." We've never had so many smart people thinking about "attention" at the same time and thinking about ways to understand, appreciate, direct and manage it. Explorations range from the mystical (more accessible and modern models of mindfulness for example) to highly scientific and technical (fMRI, Web companies measuring attention at eyeball-tracking tenths-of-second level...).
This can only do good. It is the intellectual equivalent of sedentary people getting more active, lifting weights etc. with no clear idea of the benefits, but you know that it is going to be a positive even if you can't predict exactly how a fitter population will be a better population.
This "attention to attention" phenomenon is what has the potential to rebalance the gloom vs. optimism equation.
There is still not enough of it going on for me to be optimistic, but there's enough that the balance swinging in the right direction is a real possibility.