Once in a while Normal Pessimists pipe up to tell everyone how much they suck.
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HPMOR and the LessWrong Sequences were firmly Weird Optimist, which is why I think they’ve gotten so much flak in recent years. Robin Hanson, though, has always been Weird Pessimist, like most public intellectuals. And EA is a Normal Optimist movement.
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Crooked Timber and Harper’s are Weird Pessimist publications. Most academics in the humanities are Weird Pessimists.
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Anybody who hates “kitsch” or “platitudes” or “sanitized” content is a Weird Pessimist. The people who produce that content are Normal Optimists.
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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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Replying to @s_r_constantin
The small space company world is a super interesting blend of Normal Pessimist and Weird Optimist. Seriously attempting to do outlandish innovative stuff, but the reliability and operations demands require a strong Normal Pessimist engineering approach as well.
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That’s exactly what I’d expect.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
I suspect it's (almost) required. To venture into the realm of speculation... Stratolaunch is failing because of insufficient weird optimism, Vector Launch because of insufficient normal pessimism. SpaceX is running on remarkably little weird optimism.
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