Chuck Bryan

Yeah, for sure.

But there is some sort of like, I guess, prophylactic influence of that, which is you might go make sure that your spare tire is doing OK.

And that kind of belies this.

I'm not sure if I'm using that word correctly, but that goes to show that the optimist.

bias can actually be harmful in some ways because it will prevent you from doing something like going to check your spare tire because of course you're not going to get a spare tire because that wouldn't happen to you.

Yeah, it's Emily and I talk a lot about it, like the Pollyanna thing that doesn't seem to serve people well, because then you're all of a sudden ignoring or maybe not ignoring, but at least not not putting as much weight into the things you do and the decisions you make day to day that like might have a bad outcome.

And all of a sudden you're caught unaware when that bad outcome happens, which is it's bad enough when you're just an individual.

But if you're a corporation or a

frigging government and you're caught unaware because you thought something was going to go too well or you didn't put the budget or the time into something that you should have because you just thought it was a no-brainer or something like that, that can be really destructive to a business or to a nation.

Yeah.

I feel like just believing that artificial intelligence will be great with no downsides that are worth considering is an excellent example of what you're just talking about.

Yeah, for sure.

So you might say, OK, well, then if 80 percent of people are optimistic, that kind of suggests that this is like maybe humanity's default setting and that pessimism is like maybe a malfunction even.

Right.

The thing about that is that it doesn't really make sense that it would be evolutionarily favorable for us to be optimistic because of this optimism bias that can get us into trouble.

But you can look at it a certain way and say, like, actually, it does make a lot of sense, because if we didn't have an optimistic bias, we might not go try new things.

We might not make it out of the cave and learn to make fire ourselves.

Or kind of put differently, if you have a problem that's life or death and you throw a bunch of people at it and all of them are kind of pre-tuned to expect their attempt at being successful to work.

The ones who die trying don't get to reproduce.

The ones that succeed do get to live to reproduce.