On Hope

There are two components to hope, namely, pro-hope cognitive bias and positive reinforcement.

While one could claim that positive bias would only develop alongside positive reinforcement during the developmental stages thus making it a subset of having positive experiences, I think it bears knowing that there is bias, conditional or otherwise.

Hence when we speak of hope and that "people should have hope", I could not agree more, provided we understand that we mean that everyone should have the opportunity to have lots of positive experiences and reinforcement. Sadly, one cannot help but notice that this post facto wish is of no help where people already are in a position of not having hope - advising them otherwise boils down to being a condescending remark that they should have had a more auspicious life thus far.

On a related note, lets not let hope go rampant. We know that a pessimistic outlook is more in line with reality than an optimistic one, so it stands to reason that we should want our economists, risk analysts, engineers, design specialists and policy makers to be on the pessimistic side so their reasoning includes not only the very real and mild possibility of success, but also the inevitable occurrences of disaster.