Blanket fatalism about the world is unhelpful to anyone who wants to improve it.

Added to korrents 7 Sept 2026 · How quotes work · Something wrong? Tell us

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• Rests on

  Knowing that poverty and child mortality have actually fallen is what makes people think the future can improve.

  Saying fatalism is unhelpful is only useful if it can be undone, and the evidence Ritchie offers for that is the survey: 17% of people who knew nothing about historical progress thought the world would improve, against 62% of those who did.

Shared subject first, then similar wording. They may agree or disagree.

• It is better to be an optimist who works hard than a pessimist who writes about why things will not work, because no amount of such essays moves society forward. SASam Altman4 Aug 2026
• Healthy-minded optimism is inadequate as a philosophy, because the evil it ignores is part of reality and may be the key to life's meaning WJWilliam Jamesc. 1902
• A world where altruists followed expected-value estimates would be one where nearly all of them helped distant strangers instead of the people around them, and that world would be worse. HKHolden Karnofsky18 Aug 2011
• Falling birth rates make a society less able to be hopeful, because nihilism creeps in when people have no stake in the future. DHDavid Heinemeier Hansson26 Aug 2026
• The stock of useful scientific knowledge is bounded rather than endless. JRJosé Luis Ricón20 Jun 2020

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