suffer the consequences. This is the reason why it’s a bad idea to get blasted out of your mind on euphoric drugs and then drive through traffic at high speed. Yet that ’s a damn good metaphor for the way your species is approaching its entire future existence! Tens of thousands of ICBM’s with fusion warheads on hair- trigger alert? Well, they haven’t gone off yet, and maybe they never will. Let’s build more! Thousands of pools full of irradiated nuclear fuel rods? Well, they won’t melt down into belching pits of radioactive hell unless the grid power to the water pumps goes out for an hour or two, so why worry? Worst case, we die and the big party starts!
It’s apparently true that being functionally insane is good for human health in the short term. That doesn’t constitute a plan, though.
And say, I might even take issue with the common usage of the human concepts of optimism versus pessimism. Those are attitudes - they don’t correspond to future world-states. It is possible to believe that a delightful future is coming and be pessimistic about it or believe that your world is in a helluva pickle and yet be optimistic that it can be steered to be better. Basing one’s decisions on science and reality doesn’t make one an optimist or a pessimi st: rather, it provides an anchor to physical reality , which is in turn the most pragmatic way of achieving what would generally be regarded as optimistic outcomes.
The Bottom Line: It feels better to believe happy things uncritically. Uncritical belief in happy things eventually causes unhappy things.
Confirmation Bias
“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true”
- Frances Bacon
“ There are two ways that a human can feel confident. One is knowledge, the other is ignorance ”
- Charles Darwin
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