I have no doubt that we can create a really miraculous future. I am just increasingly pessimistic about our collective desire to do so.
So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
> Optimism is the precondition for doing good.
It is still possible to do good when things are bleak and there is no possible way out - just because doing good is the right thing[1]. Optimism helps a lot for morale, but is not a precondition.
1. e.g. the 2 people who were pictured comforting each other while trapped at the top of a burning wind turbine.
Optimism doesn't necessarily mean hope. It can mean belief in an afterlife. An end to a suffering. Or gratitude for having someone else in a terrible moment.
I think OP is correct. You can't have good without optimism. Your point, which is also correct, is you can do good without hope.
Pessimism that leads to a self fulfilling prophecy is irrational, but you still need a win. A win is fuel.
Choosing a belief that is less desirable than the most likely, is equally irrational, clearly pessimistic, and often self-fulfilling.
So the ideal belief system is irrational (optimistic) but only to a chosen and realistic extent.
Somewhere between Pollyanna and Eeyore, but more P than E. And as irrational psychologies go, moderate-P is by far the more successful of the two.
I agree with this, and I recognize it as the good intentions behind faith communities.
People are (statistically) terrible at creating optimism on a blank canvas. They need narratives and common points of understanding.
And then the other side of human nature gets to take its swing at the mass of optimistic people with a shared belief system. :)
That is an argument of the pessimists and enemies of the good.
Pessimism is clearly irrational: Look at the world we live in; look what humanity has achieved since the Enlightenment, and in the last century - freedom, peace, and prosperity have swept the world. Diseases are wiped out, we visit the moon and (robotically) other planets, the Internet, etc. etc. etc.
To be pessimistic about our ability to build a better world is bizarre.
Maybe I need to to separate the art from the artist?
Yes. We die but the consequences of our actions resonate indefinitely. Ideas make good idols and people do not. Better Родина-мать зовёт! (a statue in Stalingrad approximately "Motherland [ie Russia] calls") and Liberty, which are both definitely statues about ideas than the Lincoln Memorial for example, or even arguably the "Statue of Unity" which is named for Unity but in practice is explicitly a statue of a specific man - Sardar Patel.
I really don't think people understand how little difference there is between having $1 billion and $10 billion or even $100 billion. It makes no difference whatsoever to have that much money; they can't enjoy it.
As an example, consider the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. In theory, sheer bloodymindedness and mass effort could have yielded the majority of the initial effects for great suppression. But the application of modern technology (and I include incentive system design in this category) brings the cost down sufficiently for successful eradication.
Suppression of the disease is possible with old techniques: case maps, word of mouth reporting, logbooks. Now detection to containment is far faster because of digital technology. You can't just dump temephos on everything. You need to target application.
The transmission of data specifically is a problem that most people discount the difficulty of. As an example that more people will be able to relate to, there was a delay in the October 2025 jobs report and it was finally released without an unemployment rate. Many people didn't get why it was hard.
One viral tweet (mirrored by others) went:
> Can't we just...
> (rubs temples)
> Can't we just divide the number of unemployed workers by the work force population? Isn't that the unemployment rate?
But you don't know what those two numbers are. You need machinery to get it. The machinery has a lot of middle management. It cannot function without.
Society today is a complex thing. To get insight into it you need a lot of infrastructure. The fact that we all have electric power, that roads across the country are reliable, that bridges are all up, that planes fly and trains run, is a marvel. It's a marvel enabled by all the bits that people work on, all the boring bits: yes, even procurement software. And yes, corporate law and bureaucracy. All of these things make this possible.
I think a very common thing in online forums is to look at a flowering tree and say "Oh, look at the flowers. They are so beautiful. Instead of such ugly bark and wood why don't we make more flowers?". Building the society that has the muscle to do this is part of making things like this happen.
"South Korea is second from bottom on our list in terms of the proportion of people saying their country “is heading in the right direction”, with only 15% stating so. A similar sentiment is also felt about the economy. Pessimism is usually the standard for South Korea; however, their economic indicator score has been particularly low in recent times, with just 8% believing the economy is “good”."
https://www.ipsos.com/en-ch/what-worries-world-may-2025?utm_...
I'm the guy that every time someone calls it a good horse dewormer I reply: "And a good human dewormer too!"
Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
Emphasis on might.
Evidence suggests "a giant boat and some helicopters" is the more likely result.
Nobody wants to make sure the roof is shingled and doesn't leak but everybody leaves money for new stained glass windows or the organ that nobody knows how to play.
I’d prefer not to rely on them.
Many, many fewer than you assume.
Libertarians like to make lots of good-sounding promises to justify their favored radical policy, but it's bullshit and the promises don't pan out when tested [1]. By that point, the libertarian has gotten what he wanted and moved on.
[1] Or their policy was already tried and already failed, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46876387, leading to reforms to fix the problems that they're now mad about and want to undo.
Philanthropy is anti-democratic; the people don't choose what is important to support, the wealthy few do. You can see that in the relatively poor public goods in the US, which has much lower taxes relative to peers.
The Carter Center teams should be very proud of what they accomplished. It would’ve been nice to get it done before Jimmy passed though
Clever. I wonder if the same model can be reused for other diseases.
An example:
https://www.who.int/news/item/11-04-2014-south-sudan-introdu...
Any individual presenting with the disease who meets all the criteria for containment is now rewarded with 500 South Sudanese pounds (SSP). The informer is given 100 SSP.
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).
It's also crazy how much Mother Theresa's quote rings true, even in reverse ("If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.") When I initially read 3.5M cases, I thought "wow, that's a lot", and somehow the 445 animal cases in Cameroon felt (at first) more real and similarly "a lot".
No comment other than interesting how our human brains work and distort how numbers "feel".
Once my rational brain kicked in, realized that's over 5,000 years for the current number of animal cases to match the former number of human cases. The future is awesome.
If you eradicate GWD in your region but, eh, not in dogs, well people in your region keep getting GWD anyway. But if you eliminate it entirely you're just done. So that's a strong incentive to ensure the latter.
Most drastic options are probably available in the afflicted countries than would be acceptable in many places that haven't had GWD for a hundred years or more. If you tell the population of rural France that military and police are going to start shooting wild animals dead as a disease control measure there will be mass protests. But in South Sudan hey, at least you aren't proposing to shoot all the members of some minority ethnic group.
10 _known_ cases
> To fully eradicate the disease, cases in animals (infected by the same species of worm) must also be wiped out. In 2025, animal cases were detected in Chad (147 cases), Mali (17), Cameroon (445), Angola (70), Ethiopia (1), and South Sudan (3).