Sumit Paul-Choudhury
speaker
54 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I mean, as an infant, you have to be a hyperoptimist because you have to kind of believe that you can achieve these things. So children are hyperoptimistic, and that kind of tends to gradually wane over the course of our, as we get older, for various reasons. I mean, there are sort of a number of reasons why that might happen. One of them is just the accumulation of negative experience.
Over time, it seems like we've become better understanding what negative experiences are telling us about the world. When we're very young, we tend to ignore them. We kind of pay a lot of attention to the positives, but we brush off the negatives.
And again, if you know any kids, you know that kids forget a bad thing pretty quickly, but they remember when they're successful and they remember how to build on that. Over time, we start to become better at absorbing negative information because as we become more independent, we're going to encounter more situations where we need to be good at handling them. That's one.
We build better models of the world. We understand how the world works better. And we kind of get different feedback from the adults around us. We don't get told, like, you know, you can do anything. Just put your mind to it. You start getting, you know, hopefully constructive criticism about what you're doing.
So eventually kind of, you know, those experiences gradually mount up and they essentially set your adult level of optimism. From there on, it fluctuates a bit with life experience. And, you know, depending on how well or badly things go for you, it does go up and down a bit. Trying to move the needle on optimism is not that easy. It's not a short-term thing.
I think that, and this is kind of moving away from the research really into what I concluded, I think that if you do various practices, you can probably improve the way that you look at the world, particularly if you're talking about more intellectual kind of problems rather than emotional, intuitive things.
I think you can, but I think it probably takes a lot of repetition over a lot of time, and the chances are if you haven't been doing it for a lot of your life already, you may not make that much difference.
I think it's even more polarized than that, actually. So what I eventually concluded was that the essence of optimism is openness to possibility. Because essentially, I kind of said that optimism comes into its own when you don't know what the future holds. I think the critical thing that an optimist does, and there are kind of various studies that back this up in different ways.
The critical thing that an optimist does, a strongly optimistic person does, is they remain open to the possibilities, to the idea that there are many possibilities that lie ahead of them. And optimists kind of tend to think about the positive ones. But I think just the very awareness that there are lots of possibilities makes you more inclined to go out and look for them and to seek them.
A pessimist, by contrast, I think it's not so much that you look at many things and look at them negatively as so much as you just don't see alternatives. I think, really speaking, in a practical sense, the opposite of optimism is fatalism. It's this idea that actually there is nothing you can do. You can only carry on down the track that you've been that you're on at the moment.
And that kind of is reflected in, so in psychology, for example, people who score highly on optimism tend to do well. It's an association rather than a causative thing. But people who are strongly optimistic tend to live longer, they tend to be healthier, they tend to be more successful. People are complicated, so there's no hard and fast rules here, but that tends to be the case.
People who score very low on optimism, people who score high on pessimism, that associates quite strongly with mental illness, in particular with depression. And depression is characterized, among other things, by an inability to see that there is any other way forward or to believe that you can do anything that would change your status or your situation. So I think that's the one thing, really.
I think optimism is about being able to appreciate that there are more possibilities ahead of you than you may necessarily be able to see.
Yeah, I mean, people do say that, and I don't have a lot of time for realism. I think it's a fig leaf for ignorance a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time, someone who says they're being a realist is simply saying, I don't want to engage with the possibilities. I'm going to stick to what I know and assume that carries on.
And what we know from history is that history doesn't really move in straight lines. If you look back at just the course of this past century so far, there have been a number of epochal events since the year 2000. Most of them were not kind of straight line continuations of where we were going or what we thought was going to happen.
If you were being a realist under those circumstances, I think you would have missed most of the surprises that we've had in the past 25 years.
I think it's more in the, it seems like it might be the case. I mean, the evidence, I mean, this is a contentious subject, right, is the degree to which the ad media diet, if you like, is making it hard for us to see any beyond that. I think there's a, I mean, personally, I think there is a degree of truth to that. It's hard to see how being exposed to negative information, bad news,
terrible news a lot of the time, often about things that are happening in places and at times where we really can't, at an individual level, do very much about them. It's hard to see how that doesn't take a psychological toll. It's very easy to think that that might have a negative effect. In terms of the causation, that is less well-researched, less well-attested.
It's not really clear how that feeds directly into our levels of optimism or otherwise.
Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of work done in the past kind of couple of decades by people like Steven Pinker or the Max Rosa who runs the Our World in Data website that kind of show us that, you know, on a numbers basis, you know, it's a good time to be alive. And I think that's a good message. And I, you know, and I, you know, I support it. I mean, if you look at
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