I recently read an article on the internet (where I get roughly 1/3 of my obviously accurate information from) about irrational optimism and how it may be hard wired into humans brains. Actually I never read the article. I looked at the cover link on the article and I immediately wrote it off [not because of the link itself so much as it's location on the sympatico/msn news page (which I have learned after repeated attempts at finding evidence to the contrary, that any "news" link that is associated with it has the nasty little side effect of causing me to feel less intelligent after reading said "news")].
This got me thinking about the idea of trying to test for the existence of hard-wiring (I despise the phrase but find myself at an impasse as how to describe something I despise without referring to it). I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that their study group had a proper representation of pessimists who agreed to have a study done on their brains.
Sure they can show a significant amount of evidence "a" in test groups 12 through 85 but how can they separate that from it being a nearly necessary survival mechanism? I can posit that breathing is hard-wired into the human brain and do all the tests I can imagine at proving (or disproving) it but there is nothing I can do to push that assertion past breathing being just overwhelmingly needed (I blame the scientific method).
I thought I might have more to say on the subject but I really don't. I'll just leave with a phrase that I may or may not be quoting (I'm too lazy to look it up).
"If you're not getting the right answer, you're asking the wrong question"
