Techno-optimism is the belief that technology will produce more good than bad. To defend techno-optimism, we must first establish what our values are, and then discover the facts that preserve those values. Modest techno-optimism acknowledges the problems in technology, but couples that to an optimism in human institutions and virtues.

In The Beginning of Infinity, physicist David Deutsch defines The Principle of Optimism: “All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.” From that principle, Deutsch writes, flow a few implications that help understand optimism:Optimism is “a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success”: If we’ve failed at something, it’s because we didn’t have the right knowledge in time. Optimism is a stance towards the future: Nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come. Optimism follows from the explicability of the physical world: If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being possible is not knowing how.In the long run, there are no insuperable evils: There can be no such thing as a disease for which there can’t be a cure, because bodies are physical things that follow the laws of physics. If you want, you can call it “realistic optimism” or “pragmatic optimism” or “realistic skeptical optimism” or whatever you want to call it in your head to make it feel less doe-eyed, but the actual definition of optimism captures those, so I’ll just call it optimism.

Harold Jarche looked at his most visited blog postings over the years, and concludes his blog conforms to Sturgeon’s Revelation that 90% of everything is crap. I recognise much of what Harold writes. I suspect this is also what feeds impostor syndrome. You see the very mixed bag of results from your own efforts, and how most of it is ‘crap’. The few ‘hits’ for which you get positive feedback are then either ‘luck’ or should be normal, not sparse. Others of course forget most if not all of your less stellar products and remember mostly the ones that stood out. Only you are in a position to compare what others respond to with your internal perspective.

Gramsci famously said "I am a pessimist because of intelligence but an optimist because of will."

But, Gates adds, the future might turn out okay. He has an idea.

If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s to be wary of optimism.

There’s a telling episode about a quarter of the way into Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson’s impassioned manifesto on the way digital tools should transform how we learn and work.

No one is going to be able to imagine a text online without annotations anymore.” They also foresaw a day when the site’s algorithmic evaluation of your Genius annotations — their “Genius IQ” — would be so widely accepted that it “could impact your grades in primary school and your ability to get a job in a certain field.” (“We’re going to have annotations on other sites, so every other site in the world like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are going be Genius-powered and they’re going to have our annotations on them. And then the Genius platform will take over the internet; everyone’s most important statistic that they have in life is their Genius IQ.”)

eem intent on building new institutions and traditions rather than maintaining old ones.

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treament.

An early optimism that the system might evade many of the unwanted constraints of society has been replaced today with a realization that the internet is all too susceptible to societal and human frailties, with limited avenues for accountability or redress.

I haven't actually tested this yet, but I feel like there's a good 60% chance it might work

Johnson’s book (lively and well sourced –  highly recommended) transcends the cliche of the individual innovator  and shows the ways in which innovation depends on a form of social  capital — the networks of people and ideas that innovators learn from  and build upon.

black Americans have been making rapid progress along most important dimensions of well-being since the turn of the millennium.

Community Let's start one together!

Immediately many people will object that this is too hard, too implausible, contradictory to human nature, politically impossible, uneconomical, and so on. Yeah yeah. Here we see the shift from cruel optimism to stupid pessimism, or call it fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism. It’s very easy to object to the utopian turn by invoking some poorly-defined but seemingly omnipresent reality principle. Well-off people do this all the time.

One way of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. It’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better. Here no doubt one has to avoid Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” which is perhaps thinking and saying that things will get better without doing the work of imagining how. In avoiding that, it may be best to recall the Romain Rolland quote so often attributed to Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Or maybe we should just give up entirely on optimism or pessimism—we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it. So by force of will or the sheer default of emergency we make ourselves have utopian thoughts and ideas.

I’ve heard it suggested often that the World Wide Web is an example of what Ivan Illich called “convivial tools” — although his book predates the Web by 15+ years, Illich speaks of “learning webs” in Deschooling Society. I grow less and less certain that the Web is quite “it."

cautiously optimistic

Isn’t the point of life to change and improve, rather than just accept things the way they are and naively believe the future will be better? In fact, mindfulness and the other techniques discussed help put us in better touch with reality so we can see things clearly and act from there. And thanks to neuroplasticity, science has shown that we are able to change.

Jonas