"Of course, optimism is wonderfully adaptive as long as optimists aren’t your
leaders or analysts, and don’t run your nuclear power plants, or plan
your economies, or make any decisions about anything which if it goes
wrong can go catastrophically wrong. Optimists are happier, they live
longer, they’re healthier, they “get up and go”, blah, blah, blah.
Optimism is good for optimists and hey, they’re generally more pleasant
to be around, too. There are time periods when they’re even right a lot
(say during the 50s). But basically, they’re blind.
One imagines
conversations between cows. “Hey, they feed us every day, we get free
health care, no real responsibility! The dog makes sure the wolves
don’t bother us. This is great! I do wonder what happened to Thelma
and Fred, when they took them away in that truck? But I’m sure it
wasn’t anything bad, and if it was they must have deserved it, and
anyway, that’d never happen to me, because I’m a good cow and this is
the best herd in the whole world!”
www.ianwelsh.net
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