Radical Optimism Quotes

A word about my personal philosophy. It is anchored in optimism. It must be, for optimism brings with it hope, a future with a purpose, and therefore, a will to fight for a better world. Without this optimism, there is no reason to carry on. If we think of the struggle as aclimb up a mountain, then we must visualize a mountain with no top. We see a top, but when we finall yreach it, the overcast rises and we find ourselves merely on a bluff. The mountain continues on up. Now we see the "real" top ahead of us, and strive for it, only to find we've reached another bluff, the top still above us. And so it goes on, interminably. Knowing that the mountain has no top, that it is a perpetual quest from plateau to plateau, the question arises, "Why the struggle, the conflict, the heartbreak, the danger, the sacrifice. Why the constant climb?" Our answer is the same as that which a real mountain climber gives when he is asked why he does what he does. "Because it's there." Because life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys of a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of a illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the known. Paradocically, they give up the dream of what may lie ahead on the heighs of tomorrow for a perpetual nightmare - an endless succession of days fearing the loss of a tenuous security.

In fact, certain foods and lifestyle practices can unlock immense self-regenerative energetic resources within your cells, optimizing DNA expression and making them more important in affecting your health than any other single factor.

But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What i'm trying to cultivate is not blind optimism or inane positivity but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. "What makes this hope radical," Lear writes, "is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is." Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as "imaginative excellence." Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence. And I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future.

The controlled-experiment people felt that public LSD orgies would lead to disaster for their own research. There was little optimism about what might happen when the Angels—worshiping violence, rape and swastikas—found themselves in a crowd of intellectual hipsters, Marxist radicals and pacifist peace marchers. It was a nervous thing to consider even if everybody could be expected to keep a straight head … but of course that was out of the question. With everyone drunk, stoned and loaded, there was nobody capable of taking objective notes, no guides to soothe the flip-outs, no rational spectator to put out fires or hid the butcher knives … no control at all.

It remains a mystery why these three young men, veterans of the same training and the same crash, differed so radically in their perceptions of their plight. Maybe the difference was biological; some men may be wired for optimism, others for doubt. As a toddler, Louie had leapt from a train

Embrace Reality and Deal with It 1.1 Be a hyperrealist. a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life. 1.2 Truth—or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality—is the essential foundation for any good outcome. 1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent. a. Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. b. Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. c. Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships. 1.4 Look to nature to learn how reality works. a. Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are. b. To be “good,” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded. c. Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything. d. Evolve or die. 1.5 Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward. a. The individual’s incentives must be aligned with the group’s goals. b. Reality is optimizing for the whole—not for you. c. Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable. d. Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing—and decide what you want to be. e. What you will be will depend on the perspective you have. 1.6 Understand nature’s practical lessons. a. Maximize your evolution. b. Remember “no pain, no gain.” c. It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one’s limits, which is painful. 1.7 Pain + Reflection = Progress. a. Go to the pain rather than avoid it. b. Embrace tough love. 1.8 Weigh second- and third-order consequences. 1.9 Own your outcomes. 1.10 Look at the machine from the higher level. a. Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know that you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes. b. By comparing your outcomes with your goals, you can determine how to modify

choose to use Kanban as a method to drive change in your organization, you are subscribing to the view that it is better to optimize what already exists, because that is easier and faster and will meet with less resistance than running a managed, engineered, named-change initiative. Introducing a radical change is harder than incrementally improving an existing one.

Complexity catastrophes help explain why bureaucracy seems to grow with the tenacity of weeds. Many companies go through bureaucracy-clearing exercises only to find it has sprung back a few years later. No one ever sits down to deliberately design a bureaucratic muddle. Instead, bureaucracy springs up as people just try to optimize their local patch of the network: finance is just trying to ensure that the numbers add up, legal wants to keep us out of jail, and marketing is trying to promote the brand. The problem isn't dumb people or evil intentions. Rather, network growth creates interdependencies, interdependencies create conflicting constraints, and conflicting constraints create slow decision making and, ultimately, bureaucratic gridlock.

We should finally note a more radical challenge to the concept of Platonic utility that arises from nascent work in the reinforcement learning field under the rubric of intrinsic motivation. One idea is that the "true" evolutionarily appropriate metric for behavior is the extremely sparse one of propagating ones genes. What we think of as a Platonic utility over immediate rewards such as food or water, would merely be a surrogate that helps overcome the otherwise insurmountable credit assignment path associated with procreation. In these terms, even the Platonic utility is the same sort of heuristic expedient as the Pavlovian controller itself, with evolutionary optimality molding approximate economic rationality to its own ends. It as a sober thought that understanding values may be less important as a way of unearthing the foundations of choice that we might have expected.

Getting married requires a radical and permanent reorientation of attentional habits. When a child is added to the pair, both parents have to readapt again to accommodate the needs of the infant: their sleep cycle must change, they will go out less often, the wife may give up her job, they may have to start saving for the child’s education. All this can be very hard work, and it can also be very frustrating. If a person is unwilling to adjust personal goals when starting a relationship, then a lot of what subsequently happens in that relationship

I am not interested in spirituality that cannot encompass my humanness. I find little comfort or guidance in traditional dogma or unqualified New Age optimism. Because beneath the small daily trials are harder paradoxes, things the mind cannot reconcile but the heart must hold if we are to live fully: profound tiredness and radical hope; shattered beliefs and relentless faith; the seemingly contradictory longings for personal freedom and a deep commitment to others, for solitude and intimacy, for the ability to simply be with the world and the need to change what we know is not right about how we are living.

One might argue here that endorsing Joe’s life-style over that of his fellow workers is reprehensibly “elitist.” After all, the guys in the saloon are having a good time, and who is to say that grubbing away in the backyard making rainbows is a better way to spend one’s time? By the tenets of cultural relativism the criticism would be justifiable, of course. But when one understands that enjoyment depends on increasing complexity, it is no longer possible to take such radical relativism seriously. The quality of experience of people who play with and transform the opportunities in their surroundings, as Joe did, is clearly more developed as well as more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to live within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot alter.

If Thomas represents an epistemology of faith, which transcends but also includes historical and scientific knowing, we might suggest that Paul represents at this point an epistemology of hope. In 1 Corinthians 15 he sketches his argument that there will be a future resurrection as part of God’s new creation, the redemption of the entire cosmos as in Romans 8. Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen. There is more to be said about this, but not here. All of which brings us to Peter. Epistemologies of faith and hope, both transcending and including historical and scientific knowing, point on to an epistemology of love—an idea I first met in Bernard Lonergan but that was hardly new with him. The story of John 21 sharpens it up. Peter, famously, has denied Jesus. He has chosen to live within the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them. But now, with Easter, Peter is called to live in a new and different world. Where Thomas is called to a new kind of faith and Paul to a radically renewed hope, Peter is called to a new kind of love.15 Here

An extreme optimism is a condition precedent of Democracy, and democratic scepticism itself is optimist. There is no despair on account of the loss of Truth. It is believed that a mechanical counting of votes must always lead to good results. Behind Democracy stands the optimistic dogma of the natural goodness and loving-kindness proper to human nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the spiritual father of Democracy and it was infected at its roots by his sentimental notions about humanity. It simply will not see that there is also a radical evil in human nature, and does not allow for the fact that the will of the people can follow iniquity, that the majority may be for error and untruth, leaving truth and rightness to a weak minority. There is no guarantee that the general will shall be turned towards the good, that it will seek freedom rather than the complete destruction of freedom. The Revolution in France was begun by the proclamation of the rights and liberty of man; under the Terror all liberty was completely done away with. When, in pure affirmation of itself, the unenlightened popular will refuses to submit itself to any superior being, and claims arbitrarily to direct the destinies of human societies, it easily enters on persecution of Truth, denial of the true, and quenching of all spiritual freedom.

This is the pattern of American foreign policy: from isolationism to interventionism, from withdrawal to crusading and back again. As a self-proclaimed morally and politically superior country, the United States could remain uncontaminated only by abstaining from involvement in a corrupt world or, if the world would not leave it alone, destroying the source of evil. In short, both the isolationist and crusading impulses sprang from the same moralism. These swings tended, moreover, to be accompanied by radical shifts of mood: from one of optimism, which sprang from the belief that America was going to reform the world, to one of disillusionment as the grandiose objectives the United States had set for itself proved beyond its capacity to reach. Feeling too good for this world, which clearly did not want to be reformed but preferred its old corrupt habits, the nation retreated into isolationism to perfect and protect its way of life. Having expected too much from the use of its power, the United States then also tended to feel guilty and ashamed about having used its power at all.

In reality we rarely have the problem of being naively contented with our lives, or with the world in general. On the contrary, we are remorselessly confronted by our own failings and by the radical imperfections of society. Rather than needing a stern dose of disenchantment, we’re more likely to require art-tools that can feed and sustain our beleaguered optimism.

Keynesianism in this purest, simplest form is not so much a school of economic thought as a spirit of radical optimism, unjustified by most of human history and extremely difficult to conjure up precisely when it is most needed: during the depths of a depression or amid the fevers of war. Yet such optimism is a vital and necessary element of everyday life. It is the spirit that propels us to go on living in the face of unavoidable suffering, that compels us to fall in love when our hearts have been broken, and that gives us the courage to bring children into the world, believing that even in times such as these we are surrounded by enough beauty to fill lifetime after lifetime.

We divide ourselves into ‘us’ and ‘them’ based on all sorts of random and insignificant traits… According to optimal distinctiveness theory, humans are drawn to social groups that simultaneously fulfill two conflicting needs - - a need for assimilation, or the desire for social connection, affiliation, inclusion, and belonging, and a need for differentiation, or the desire to be unique, special, and distinctive.

Products change constantly through the process of optimization, what I call tuning the engine. Less frequently, the strategy may have to change (called a pivot). However, the overarching vision rarely changes. Entrepreneurs are committed to seeing the startup through to that destination. Every setback is an opportunity for learning how to get where they want to go

(according to the rules of NPC, one must not refer to the right-wing disrupters as radicals, whether they are in Hobart Town Hall or outside Parliament House in Canberra under banners reading ‘Julia Gillard: Bob Brown’s Bitch’)

The causes of my uneasiness are these: 1. The lack of spiritual fruit in the lives of so many who claim to have faith. 2. The rarity of a radical change in the conduct and general outlook of persons professing their new faith in Christ as their personal Saviour. 3. The failure of our teachers to define or even describe the thing to which the word faith is supposed to refer. 4. The heartbreaking failure of multitudes of seekers, be they ever so earnest, to make anything out of the doctrine or to receive any satisfying experience through it. 5. The real danger that a doctrine that is parroted so widely and received so uncritically by so many is false as understood by them. 6. I have seen faith put forward as a substitute for obedience, an escape from reality, a refuge from the necessity of hard thinking, a hiding place for weak character. I have known people to miscall by the name of faith high animal spirits, natural optimism, emotional thrills and nervous tics. 7. Plain horse sense ought to tell us that anything that makes no change in the man who professes it makes no difference to God either, and it is an easily observable fact that for countless numbers of persons the change from no-faith to faith makes no actual difference in the life.

How can a radical scepticism about the state be squared with a religious dedication to the notion that market outcomes are, by definition, optimal?

Radical optimism is a wide screen view of the moment nay the inconceivable, as you please.

This book seeks to foster that progress by identifying a place of reconciliation between the two poles outlined in the exchange between Paul Mason (whose optimism we relish) and Nigel Pollitt (whose realism we value) within a society that has already changed radically. We

It’s important to point out that the results of the Italian experiment and Dr. Racker’s predictions also jibe with the rules of chemistry we’ve already learned. Chemistry tells us that uncontrolled oxygen-PUFA reactions invariably generate free radicals and oxidative stress. When these reactions occur inside our mitochondria, our mitochondria can’t produce energy normally and will start leaking free radicals. This process of leaking free radicals consumes antioxidants, too—which the body can resupply, but it can take a while. Meanwhile, mitochondrial energy output will not be optimal, and the cell will be exposed to damaging oxidative reactions, toxin formation, and the general mayhem previously discussed. All of this is sometimes called mitochondrial oxidative stress, and mitochondrial oxidative stress is known to promote a variety of diseases for which medical science currently has no effective cures.

Optimism is radical. It is the hard choice, the brave choice. And it is, it seems to me, most needed now, in the face of despair—just as a car is most useful when you have a distance to close. Otherwise it is a large, unmovable object parked in the garage. These days, the safest way for someone to appear intelligent is being skeptical by default. We seem sophisticated when we say “we don’t believe” and disingenuous when we say “we do.” History and fable have both proven that nothing is ever entirely lost. David can take Goliath. A beach in Normandy can turn the tide of war. Bravery can topple the powerful. These facts are often seen as exceptional, but they are not. Every day, we all become the balance of our choices—choices between love and fear, belief or despair. No hope is ever too small.

However, two features of BHB and acetoacetate metabolism provide an advantage for cells that glucose does not offer. The first advantage is that, compared to glucose, fewer free radicals are produced during the process of ATP production from the ketones. The second advantage is that ATP production from the ketones is more efficient—more ATP is produced from each ketone molecule than is produced from each glucose molecule.

Yet, there was always a dark side, a side of me I let loose. There was a beast in me that I refused to tame because of my radical aversion to being told what to do, of being controlled, and, even worse, of being judged.

An iteration-led approach can move financial KPI up and to the right, but it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll build game-changing products. On the chessboard, optimizing for capturing a few pieces doesn’t guarantee that you’ll win the game.

Studies indicate that when people have hope, they are better able to manage stress, cope with setbacks, think creatively and achieve their goals.

Optimism can be thought of as a cheery disposition to always look on the bright side of life, even despite the evidence. It is an attitude that can easily breed complacency and inaction. Hope, on the other hand, is a more active and radical ideal that recognizes the real possibility of failure, yet at the same time holds on to the prospect of success despite the odds, driven by a deep commitment to an outcome we value.

(...) Is not true optimism to consider the world a fundamentally negative event, with many happy exceptions? By contrast, does not true pessimism consist in viewing the world as fundamentally good, leaving the slightest accident to make us despair of that vision? An ideal universe at the mercy of the slightest reverse and doomed, in any case, to death? And does not true superstition consist in regarding evil as an exception which ought to disappear? We judge everything today in terms of a real and rational sequence of events. But we could equally fully and reasonably view those events as part of an irrational sequence – we simply have to reverse the perspective and take a maleficent transcendence rather than a providential force as our reference. We would be less despairing if we regarded every misfortune as justified by a transcendent order of evil. Such is the rule of a radical optimism. We must make evil the basic rule. Then, the fortunate occurrence becomes the exception. Then, it is joy we would be fated to meet with. At any rate, in relation to an impossible truth, the two hypotheses are equally (im)plausible. But the hypothesis of evil has the advantage of restoring to the world its illegal character. Moreover, it lends a new prestige to good and happiness, the prestige of a miraculous exception.

Of all the companies I know well, Apple did the best job of creating a great environment for people in a rock star phase. The company’s organizational design optimized for deep functional expertise. There were no “general managers.” There was no iPhone division. Instead, there were operating system engineers, camera experts, audiophiles, and glass gurus who came together around the iPhone. There were always people around who knew some functional aspect of the product more deeply than anyone else, and they were revered for it.

The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values. As Kraybill elaborates, they confront the following questions: “Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?” When a new technology rolls around, there’s typically an “alpha geek” (to use Kelly’s term) in any given Amish community that will ask the parish bishop permission to try it out. Usually the bishop will agree. The whole community will then observe this first adopter “intently,” trying to discern the ultimate impact of the technology on the things the community values most. If this impact is deemed more negative than helpful, the technology is prohibited. Otherwise it’s allowed, but usually with caveats on its use that optimize its positives and minimize its negatives.

We are not the masters of our fate. We think we control our lives—but we don’t. In an instant life can radically change— a car accident, a heart attack, a pink slip, a child’s raging fever. Frustrated researchers conquer one deadly virus, only to discover one even more lethal. The Psalmist pointed out our basic dilemma: “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away” (Ps. 90:10 NIV). Even if we live to a ripe old age, he said, we seldom know peace. No book is more realistic about the human situation than the Bible. It won’t let us get by with frothy platitudes or unsupported optimism. But it also gives us hope.

Innovation accounting works in three steps: first, use a minimum viable product to establish real data on where the company is right now. Without a clear-eyed picture of your current status—no matter how far from the goal you may be—you cannot begin to track your progress. Second, startups must attempt to tune the engine from the baseline toward the ideal. This may take many attempts. After the startup has made all the micro changes and product optimizations it can to move its baseline toward the ideal, the company reaches a decision point. That is the third step: pivot or persevere. If the company is making good progress toward the ideal, that means it’s learning appropriately and using that learning effectively, in which case it makes sense to continue. If not, the management team eventually must conclude that its current product strategy is flawed and needs a serious change. When a company pivots, it starts the process all over again, reestablishing a new baseline and then tuning the engine from there. The sign of a successful pivot is that these engine-tuning activities are more productive after the pivot than before.

We had gotten really good at optimizing, tuning, and iterating, but in the process we had lost sight of the purpose of those activities: testing a clear hypothesis in the service of the company’s vision. Instead, we were chasing growth, revenue, and profits wherever we could find them.

As one of my mentors, the venture capital investor Shawn Carolan, put it, “Startups don’t starve; they drown.” There are always a zillion new ideas about how to make the product better floating around, but the hard truth is that most of those ideas make a difference only at the margins. They are mere optimizations. Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning.

The sandbox also promotes rapid iteration. When people have a chance to see a project through from end to end and the work is done in small batches and delivers a clear verdict quickly, they benefit from the power of feedback. Each time they fail to move the numbers, they have a real opportunity to act on their findings immediately. Thus, these teams tend to converge on optimal solutions rapidly even if they start out with really bad ideas.

Every successful product or feature began life in research and development (R&D), eventually became a part of the company’s strategy, was subject to optimization, and in time became old news.

The problem for startups and large companies alike is that employees often follow the products they develop as they move from phase to phase. A common practice is for the inventor of a new product or feature to manage the subsequent resources, team, or division that ultimately commercializes it. As a result, strong creative managers wind up getting stuck working on the growth and optimization of products rather than creating new ones.

the hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times.

Innovations are happening in conventional schooling. Some people will read the chapters to come and respond that their own children’s schools are incorporating evidence-based changes, making them more like Montessori schools—eliminating grades, combining ages, using a lot of group work, and so on. One could take the view that over the years, conventional schooling has gradually been discovering and incorporating many of the principles that Dr. Montessori discovered in the first half of the 20th century. However, although schooling is changing, those changes are often relatively superficial. A professor of education might develop a new reading or math program that is then adopted with great fanfare by a few school systems, but the curricular change is minute relative to the entire curriculum, and the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure of the school environment still underlie most of the child’s school day and year. “Adding new ‘techniques’ to the classroom does not lead to the developmental of a coherent philosophy. For example, adding the technique of having children work in ‘co-operative learning’ teams is quite different than a system in which collaboration is inherent in the structure” (Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001, p. 13). Although small changes are made reflecting newer research on how children learn, particularly in good neighborhood elementary schools, most of the time, in most U.S. schools, conventional structures predominate (Hiebert, 1999; McCaslin et al., 2006; NICHD, 2005; Stigler, Gallimore, & Hiebert, 2000), and observers rate most classes to be low in quality (Weiss, Pasley, Smith, Banilower, & Heck, 2003). Superficial insertions of research-supported methods do not penetrate the underlying models on which are schools are based. Deeper change, implementing more realistic models of the child and the school, is necessary to improve schooling. How can we know what those new models should be? As in medicine, where there have been increasing calls for using research results to inform patient treatments, education reform must more thoroughly and deeply implement what the evidence indicates will work best. This has been advocated repeatedly over the years, even by Thorndike. Certainly more and more researchers, educators, and policy makers are heeding the call to take an evidence-based stance on education. Yet the changes made thus far in response to these calls have not managed to address to the fundamental problems of the poor models. The time has come for rethinking education, making it evidence based from the ground up, beginning with the child and the conditions under which children thrive. Considered en masse, the evidence from psychological research suggests truly radical change is needed to provide children with a form of schooling that will optimize their social and cognitive development. A better form of schooling will change the Lockean model of the child and the factory structure on which our schools are built into something radically different and much better suited to how children actually learn.