Thread by @borrowed_ideas

1/ Thread: The Case for Optimism

I started my weekend with this deeply intriguing piece by Kevin Kelly.

I would like to leave my notes here because I know I want to remember and often remind myself many of the following quotes.

2/ "It is extremely difficult to create a desirable future without first envisioning it. To imagine is really the first step in creating anything."

3/ "Since we can not be certain of the future, optimism is only a belief -- a stance that could be incorrect."

"In the long run, optimists shape the future."

4/ "Civilization depends on an implicit degree of general optimism. It is a collaborative exercise."

"Civilization requires trust; trust requires optimism; civilization requires optimism."

5/ "The best civilizations create things that take generations to build and whose benefits reward not the builders but those who come after them."

"Optimism enables us to reach good and great things beyond the capability of a single generation."

6/ "Every question answered by science generates at least two new questions, two new territories of unknown things that we now know we don’t know. In this way our ignorance expands faster than our knowledge, which is healthy."

7/ "If newspapers and websites were only updated every 50 years, they might report: literacy is up, longevity increased, violence is down."

8/ "The solutions to most problems will create new problems. But if we can create 1% more solutions than problems, that 1% compounded over decades equals civilization.

However 1% of almost anything is invisible in the now, lost in the noise."

9/ "Optimism equips people a greater ability to deal with hardship, and less stress in their lives. Optimism can be learned, especially by children.

Optimism is not utopian. It’s protopian -- a slow march toward incremental betterment."

10/ "We should be optimistic not because our problems are smaller than we thought, but because our capacity to solve them is larger than we thought."

11/ "To excel in innovation, entrepreneurship, art, caring, hospitality, science and discovery, humans must try things that don’t work, embrace failures, encourage small talk and playfulness -- all inefficient. Efficiency is for robots."

12/ "YouTube and Youku (in China) in particular are underappreciated learning accelerants. It’s not just make-up tutorials...

Brain surgeons upload their latest techniques to YouTube which other brain surgeons watch, then innovate on, and share their videos within days."

13/ "When learning accelerates everything else does as well.

These reasons for optimism are so strong that I believe we have a moral duty to be as optimistic as we can. As individuals we’d be more resilient and satisfied being aligned with something bigger than ourselves."

End/ Link to the original piece:

(h/t @RishiGosalia for sharing)

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