Is It Better to Be a Determinate or Indeterminate Optimist?
Determinate optimists not only know the future will be better, but believe they know how it will look. Indeterminate optimists know the future will be better, but don’t know how it will look (or how we’ll get there). (The distinction comes from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One).
Bereishit Rabbah teaches that we can’t know the day of our death or the day of our comfort—certain fundamentals are hidden from our view, by design.
To put it religiously, determinate optimists believe they know the date the Messiah will arrive, while indeterminate optimists believe the Messiah will arrive, but are reluctant to block off time for the great moment in their calendars. Don’t take your kids out of school to rebuild the Temple, teaches the Talmudic sage, Reish Lakish.
Determinate optimists—like the Communist Revolutionaries—were willing to let bloody means justify noble ends. Indeterminate optimists like Cold War liberal Isaiah Berlin or libertarian philosopher Friedrich Hayek tend to focus on things like negative liberty—things will get better but only if we don’t try to make them better.
For indefinite optimists, Progress is like Eurydice and we like Orpheus. We can’t see her face and bring her with us. The moment we look back and gain a glimpse of progress, we lose it—become beholden to a static model.
Determinate thinkers act with confidence; indeterminate ones like to hedge. Thiel writes that Calculus is the preferred model of the world for determinate thinkers, whereas for indeterminate ones it’s Stats.
Intuitively, we know the pros and cons of each—over-confidence in the case of determinate optimists who get it wrong, a lack of strategy, conviction, and focus on the part of those who take a portfolio approach to the future.
Perhaps it’s better to ask when determinate thinking serves us and when indeterminate thinking serves us? In what areas are we best off welcoming uncertainty and in what areas are we best off acting as if the world is predictable, rational, elegant?