I think it's useful to be optimistic when it comes to visions of the future and how a business can accomplish it. Electric cars for everyone? Sure, give it a try. All that can be lost is a little money, and maybe you make a huge fortune and change the world. Isolated government programs can be a similar story -- e.g. NASA, which is unlikely to lose anything but a small amount of money but can be really inspiring or create some great things.
However, when it comes to government policy, the downside can be utter disaster. It pays to be a little skeptical that the "help the poor" bill (or whatever other utopian title) will actually deliver as advertised. Or skeptical that a war will be a simple in-and-out proposition.
Or some things just have little upside. We see this all the time in engineering. Someone wants to use a fad technology or model of some kind, or wants to reimplement something to be a little faster, or whatever. There's huge project risk that it could derail other projects and destabilize the entire product -- which is fine if you're going to change the world with it, but not fine for a 10% speedup on some specific workload.
Moral of story: optimism and "can do" attitude is good when the upside is huge and the downside is contained (like in a startup). Not exactly a profound revelation.
I think it's useful to be optimistic when it comes to visions of the future and how a business can accomplish it. Electric cars for everyone? Sure, give it a try. All that can be lost is a little money, and maybe you make a huge fortune and change the world. Isolated government programs can be a similar story -- e.g. NASA, which is unlikely to lose anything but a small amount of money but can be really inspiring or create some great things.
However, when it comes to government policy, the downside can be utter disaster. It pays to be a little skeptical that the "help the poor" bill (or whatever other utopian title) will actually deliver as advertised. Or skeptical that a war will be a simple in-and-out proposition.
Or some things just have little upside. We see this all the time in engineering. Someone wants to use a fad technology or model of some kind, or wants to reimplement something to be a little faster, or whatever. There's huge project risk that it could derail other projects and destabilize the entire product -- which is fine if you're going to change the world with it, but not fine for a 10% speedup on some specific workload.
Moral of story: optimism and "can do" attitude is good when the upside is huge and the downside is contained (like in a startup). Not exactly a profound revelation.