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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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Could normal optimists help by repackaging and marketing weird optimism to normal optimists/pessimists? Normal pessimists are important for maintaining safety, but do they help to bring a better future beyond helping to keep the wheels on the train long enough?
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No, I think Normal Optimism is actually bad. Not that literally being optimistic and mainstream is bad, but that Normal Optimist patterns make you get stuff wrong and make it harder for anyone to correct your mistakes.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @tmcal77
I spent a while thinking about this, and it is unclear to me that that is a big problem. Error signals don’t have to come from public discourse. It’s possible that the worst mistakes can’t even be explicitly pointed out by others at all.
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It’s important to deliberately decide what sources of information you consider valid for learning. And sometimes certain kinds of criticism don’t make the cut.
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