What I find rather creepy about the doomsayers is the sense that they actually want the world’s economy and society to collapse. The 100% failure rate of Ehrlich’s predictions are met not with relief, but with disappointment. Like some weird fundamentalist sect whose predictions of the imminent second coming fail to materialise, they simply re-set the clock to another date in the no-too-distant future when the collapse will happen.

Meantime, another piece of good news for the rest of us. The UN reports that its millennium goal of “halving, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1.25 a day” was achieved five years early.

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/poverty.shtml

The majority of posts above prove "optimism bias" in human cognition. Pick any subject: Climate Change? Optimism. Crude Oil Supply? Optimism. Future Economic Growth? Optimism. Future technological advances in energy? Optimism, Flying cars? Optimism, you get the idea.

One problem, "optimism bias" is so deeply ingrained, so much a part of who humans are, that 99.9% of people are totally blind to its existence.

A fish is always the last to know what sort of water it swims in.

Unfortunately it's our delusional optimism, the obligatory hope that makes the world work, even when it's not working.

In a recent study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers found that “people who are very optimistic about the outcome of events tend to learn only from information that reinforces their rose-tinted view of the world. This is related to ‘faulty’ function of their frontal lobes.”

People’s predictions of the future are optimistic, thus a problem why human optimism is so pervasive, when reality continuously confronts us with information that challenges these biased beliefs.

Safe sex? Saving for retirement? What about learning from cautionary information that shows humans are altering climate, destroying oceans, and running out of easily exploitable oil? And that's just a partial list.

The researchers identified the optimist's brain suffers from "faulty" functioning in the frontal lobes.

If 95% of people are optimists, then the large majority of humans have "faulty" frontal lobes.

In order to emphasise the profound craziness, unbridled self-destructiveness, and astonishingly delusional nature of looking forward to enhanced oil & gas production or easier transpolar shipping in the Arctic forty years from now at a time when the Earth's biosphere is engulfed in an ecological crisis caused by human actions like those previously mentioned, well then go on believing we don’t have anything to worry about.

I am a realist and know the desire to make money is now the primary source of the planets predicaments.

People also need to realise you can solve problems, you can’t resolve predicaments.

Can’t wait to spend that $1.25 a day, great help that would be!

Your expertise cut'n'paste is failing you, Robert LePage.

>>Pericles, says... that doom and gloom are just around the corner etc. etc.<<

You missed out the first part.

Pericles actually said...

"It seems to be important for some people to be constantly reassured that life is dreadful, that doom and gloom are just around the corner etc. etc."

If you are going to quote me, please do me the courtesy of quoting accurately.

Thank you.

Geoff of Perth
Surely the test of whether a person is unduly optimistic or unduly pessimistic is how many of their expectations are realised. In Ehrlich’s case, that appears to be about 0%.

And yes, $1.25 a day is not great, but the key point is that absolute poverty rates are falling fast. If the Ehrlichs of the world were correct, the trend would be the other way.

Hello Geoff of Middle Peak Perth,

We are both on notice from Graham Young for abuse so I will go as hard as usual in anticipation of your response.

You suggest that you are a realist? That in itself evidences that this is the last thing you represent. You are as full of the Club of Rome and Agenda 21 nonsense as you always were.

The nice thing about your ideology is that that there is absolutely no requirement for cognitive effort. You continue to adopt the opinion of others and make no effort to form an opinion of your own.

Sooner or later you will be forced to recognize that you are so full of other people’s opinion that you will eventually disappear up your own conspiracy theory clacker.

The good news for us in the East is that the WA election result renders you a representative of a shrinking minority. God bless the sensible majority in WA

Spindoc, yes it is unfortunate that I am on the same hit list as you, makes me cringe actually.

By the way, I was fortunate to see the party I voted for last Saturday win the election, so you can take your false assumtion and blinkered bias and stick it up your own conspiracy theory clacker.

Oh and thanks for 'your' "God's blessing" fortunately for me I am not religious

Yours in anticipation of another irrelevant rant

Geoff