The optimist's response to "What could possibly go wrong?" is a swing for the fences. The pessimist's response is a checklist. It's seeking to avoid the worst outcomes and allowing success to come in due time. It's braking early and accelerating from the apex as opposed going full speed and breaking things fast.
This seems like a fallacy of false dilemmas. The optimist can swing harder because, thanks to professional pessimism, the bat won't crack halfway through the swing, the stands don't collapse before the ball reaches them, the ball doesn't explode on contact, and the rules for what constitutes a home run don't have to be constantly reinvented by each player individually.
Yes, we agree that the optimist's imagination limits the list of things that could possibly go wrong to the absurd. And as you suggest perhaps an optimist's optimism derives from a concept of professionalism born the love child of dunning-kruger. Or perhaps the horns are grown on a strawman dividing the world into naught but optimists and pessimists according to the law of the excluded muddle.
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The optimist's response to "What could possibly go wrong?" is a swing for the fences. The pessimist's response is a checklist. It's seeking to avoid the worst outcomes and allowing success to come in due time. It's braking early and accelerating from the apex as opposed going full speed and breaking things fast.
This seems like a fallacy of false dilemmas. The optimist can swing harder because, thanks to professional pessimism, the bat won't crack halfway through the swing, the stands don't collapse before the ball reaches them, the ball doesn't explode on contact, and the rules for what constitutes a home run don't have to be constantly reinvented by each player individually.
Yes, we agree that the optimist's imagination limits the list of things that could possibly go wrong to the absurd. And as you suggest perhaps an optimist's optimism derives from a concept of professionalism born the love child of dunning-kruger. Or perhaps the horns are grown on a strawman dividing the world into naught but optimists and pessimists according to the law of the excluded muddle.