Devon

So would someone who says “Success is unlikely but it’s worth trying” be an optimist, under that definition?

(I guess when people are frustrated at others who are unnecessarily defeatist, saying “be an optimist” might just be a way to say “don’t be unnecessarily defeatist”)

Yeah that's roughly what I mean. A sort of "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" thing, where defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Takes something from a low-probability event to a zero- probability event. Optimism of this first category mitigates that failure mode.

Yeah this reminds me of another big category of misunderstanding I run into, with ppl who don’t automatically think in terms of EV - when I talk about something having a low probability of success, they assume I’m saying it is not worth doing.

What does EV stand for?

There is a weird thing happening here though, imo. People can't truly believe a proposition by choice while knowing it's not necessarily true. We can pretend it's true, like how we pretend fiction isn't fiction, but it involves pretending. This distinction gets lost a lot imo.

I think people are able to convince themselves of things that, in another mindset and context, they might be more critical of

Only temporarily though. Tonight, I plan to go home and play a video game where it's my job to save the universe and if you catch me in a moment when I'm fully immersed in that, it may be true that I "believe" it at that moment, but it's also true to say I don't truly believe it.

Perhaps you're more consistent across time than me then; I've had enough experiences of genuinely, truly *believing* I'll do something I then end up not doing that I now see beliefs more as a tool of the Darwinian mind than a fully accurate representation of a person's knowledge.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing here. Changing your beliefs about what behavior you might engage in due to new information over time is different from choosing to pretend something is true for some pragmatic purpose when you're aware it's not.

Agreed. But, I'd say the 2nd scenario you describe is quite uncommon; much more common is: "finding you truly believe something is true, which *conveniently* has some pragmatic purpose, but you certainly wouldn't consciously endorse that as your justification for believing it".

It's actually impossible imo; that's what I'm arguing. You can't get to truly believing something while knowing it's false. It's internally illogical because to truly believe something is true is by definition to truly believe it's not false. But it's constantly advocated.

I think our minds are less internally consistent & unified than that.

perfect. I’ve been trying to find a term for this - best I have so far is “effective optimism”