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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

"you must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

-Jim Stockdale, describing the Stockdale paradox.

For me to be remotely optimistic, I would need to see more people confronting those brutal facts. They are truly and properly brutal. Too brutal for the Kevin Kelly types.

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This is how I feel as well. I am a pessimist in the sense that without more progress on certain issues, I think life will get worse for future generations. This isn't ignoring the historical arc of progress, and I would argue that pessimists get an undeserved bad rap for pointing out problems when that is exactly how progress happens. Find problems and try to fix them.

Pessimists aren't just people who assume everything will collapse no matter what is done. I believe humanity is capable of overcoming the challenges set before us, but optimism often seems to be naive, or merely a way of ignoring problems in the short term so that we don't experience unpleasant emotions. If we work on solving problems rather than ignoring them, then I don't care if you are a pessimist or an optimist because we are on the same team regardless of disposition.

I read that article and some other things on sites as defining optimism as NOT avoiding problems. That one site in particular says the goal is to get more people thinking about the possibilities while specifically acknowledging there are problems. My way of thinking is optimism is about getting a deep understanding of the issues, why they exist, and how humanity has shown time and again we can innovate and come together to solve them. Human progress can accelerate if we come together to do so. It’s good debate, and i like that warp and others like them appears to be presenting that side of things. It’s an interesting paring with Kevin Kelly, hope to support it more.

I have no idea why you were downvoted, but I have upvoted.

"If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst." -- Thomas Hardy.

Unthinking optimism is magical thinking. I blame a steady diet of Disney productions in people's childhoods for this mindset.

With respect to climate change, there is a complete disconnect between the predictions of doom and the proposed solutions. Electric cars ain’t gonna do it. Massive disruption and reordering if the economic order and a real reduction in global well-being are the price to be paid if we’re really serious.

I just don’t see intellectual honesty among people who claim that climate change is an existential threat.

There will be a reduction in global well being no matter what.

The lesser of 2 evils is something we can choose. The greater is what we'll get if we don't make a choice.

I think they are honest - they really believe that their proposals are solutions - but also that they are hopelessly innumerate, and ignorant of the time and effort involved in scaling anything up to global scale.

For myself, existential is going way too far. It will transform civilization, yes. One way or another, that's coming. Extinguish every human? No. Not unless we get weeks-long global thermonuclear war - 3700 weeks on the top 10 existential threats chart, and still number 1.

It would take an absolutely apocalyptic event (or more likely, series of events) to make the human race go extinct but it wouldn't take much more than a prolonged, widespread power failure to push civil society to collapse.

Dies the Fire is a first of a series of novels about a global power failure due to an alteration in physics by an unknown cause. Most humans starve to death, but some in the right locations resort to farming by hand, hunting and fishing. Others set up feudal kingdoms.

Maybe the question is: an existential threat to what? Not to humans in general, but probably to human society as we know it.

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