Weird Optimist is absurdist whimsy. It seems kind of a missing affect these days, but I remember it from, say, Flaming Lips-era indie pop, or early BoingBoing. “Whee! So random and bizarre! I love it! The squares are missing out!”
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Normal Optimist things: most mainstream media, Disney, corporate PR, technocracy, performing personal excellence (like fitness or mental/emotional health), explicitly calling for “positivity”, etc.
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Neo-Nazis are Weird Pessimists but Hitler’s Nazis were Normal Optimist/Pessimist hybrids.
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Triumphalist aesthetics are Normal Optimist. If it’s in primary colors and has the Imperial Eagle on it? Normal Optimist.
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Normal Pessimism is pretty rare in discourse but very common in real life. Anybody who is busy working hard to survive and has little patience for nonsense is Normal Pessimist.
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Though it's not always practiced by people in conditions of danger or scarcity, I think some of the ethos of engineering and physical/mathematical sciences is Normal Pessimist. Intense conscientiousness. (There's also a Weird Optimist madcap creativity aspect to those fields.)
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Weird Pessimism judges people for being disingenuous or unreflective. Normal Pessimism judges people for being incompetent.
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Another way of looking at this: Weird Pessimism criticizes things. Normal Optimism tries to make itself impossible to criticize. Normal Pessimism has bigger problems to worry about than criticism. Weird Optimism is too engaged/happy to worry about being criticized.
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Yet another way of looking at it: There are social gradients that push towards stupidity. Normal Optimism has a sense of those gradients, and enthusiastically goes with the flow. Weird Pessimism has a sense of those gradients and hates them (but is still kind of trapped in them.)
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Normal Pessimism is locked out of those gradients by necessity; it “can’t afford to be stupid.” And Weird Optimism ignores or is unaware of those gradients.
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My own cards on table: I was raised by Normal Pessimist parents (self-made immigrants) and respect Normal Pessimism but don’t always like it; I’m a Weird Optimist by nature, but I’ve flirted with Normal Optimism on and off; most of my friends are Weird Pessimists.
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I think the best hope for the future is probably the Weird Pessimist/Weird Optimist/Normal Pessimist alliance.
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Normal Optimism is Winnerism. Support whoever is winning, believe whatever gives you relative social power. Follow and amplify incentive gradients. Of course it’s healthy to want to win — and a fair critique of Weird Pessimists that they have an unhealthy resentment of success.
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But throwing all resources into a zero-sum conflict destroys the possibility of any future for humans.
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There’s a Normal Optimist thing that’s *just* being supportive and encouraging, without trying to take resources or status away from anybody else, and I think it’s mostly good, just unlikely to be very influential.
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End of conversation
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