Kevin Kelly on Optimism

 

Koitsu Tsuchiya

Kevin Kelly on Tim Ferriss podcast:

On Optimism:

what is the argument for why we should be optimistic?

Kevin Kelly: Generally, people see optimism as kind of a temperament, it’s a sunny view, and I think there is some of that, and I have a natural amount of it, but over time, I’ve actually become even more optimistic than my general tendency, deliberately. It’s kind of like a learned optimism, and I think the reason we should be as optimistic as we can is because it is how we make really good things, good, complicated things.

It’s hard enough. Well, I mean, it’s very hard to make good complicated things work because generally there’s more way things can fail than they can succeed, and it’s very unlikely that we’re going to make something really good that’s complicated, inadvertently. They’re hard to do. So we have to see it and believe that it can be done, and that is where the optimism comes in, is envisioning something and then believing that you could make it real. Because, when we look back on history, and that’s where a lot of my optimism comes, we realize that most of the things that we have now have been made by people who are optimistic. Reviewing that it was possible to make them, and believe that they were going to make them, and could imagine them.

So, I think of it as a work of imagination where you kind of imagine a good scenario, which is harder to do than imagining a scenario where it fails or collapses. It is much easier to imagine how things break than it is to see how they work, and that’s why entrepreneurs and all the others are rightly lauded because they’re going against that grain. It is hard to imagine how we could have this thing that seems like it is improbable, and most things that work are improbable. That’s the definition from the Santa Fe complexity theory, is that things breaking down is the probable. Complicated things working are improbable by definition.

And, so you’re against the improbable. And that work of imagining the improbable and having the improbable succeed, and believing it can, is optimism, which means that the optimists are the ones who shape our future. So I’d like to give a little story of a car, and you need to have brakes on the car to steer the car but the engine is actually the more important element, and so there are people and there are organizations, and there are methods that are going to be doing the braking, and I think they’re essential. I want brakes in the car, but I just feel that the brake can overwhelm and cause stagnation, and that we also wanted to remember to focus on making the engine even stronger, and so I emphasized the engine.

(I love your distinction between passive optimism and active.)

what's "progress"? 

It means that, overall, on average, this is a better place to live than at any time in the past, and this is the kind of Obama test. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that, but it’s like if you were to be born randomly in any time period, it could be male, female, poor, rich, you’re totally at random, on some average thing. What time do you want to live in? What time period? And there’s no way you want to be anything before, at least, 50 years ago, and maybe not even within 50 years.

I think there’s a movement called Degrowth, the degrowth movement.

Tim Ferriss: I’m not familiar.

Kevin Kelly: So these are people who basically see the troubles of the world, in particular the climate one, coming from our addiction to growth. That growth, this is kind of the consumer, capitalistic kind of idea that grow, grow, grow, grow, and they’re saying, it’s finite. We can’t continue to grow, and we have to degrowth, stop growing, and there’s a little bit of a confusion in English because there’s two meanings of the word growth. There’s growth to add more pounds, to add more and more stuff, to get bigger, wider, heavier, to have more things, to sell more refrigerators, to sell more bottles of wine, but there’s another meaning of the word growth, which is probably closer to what you’re interested in. Personal growth, developing, maturing — 

Tim Ferriss: Or knowledge growth.

Kevin Kelly: Knowledge growth.

Tim Ferriss: I guess, in a sense, it’s the same as the first, but it’s — 

Kevin Kelly: No, it’s increasing its complexity. It’s taking the same number of atoms and having a more complex arrangement. It’s going from a jellyfish to a chimpanzee or something, and so that complex, adaptive system, where you have increasing levels of complexity and more exotropy in it, that is a different kind of growth.

...So what type of growth is an increase in complexity? So you have an economy where instead of trying to sell more bottles of wine, you try to sell the same number of wines, but better wine.