Jayson_Virissimo comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong

20 Post author: ciphergoth 18 July 2012 05:24PM

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Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 19 July 2012 09:39:43AM *  5 points [-]

Idealism, in the sense of "believing that the world is good deep down/people will do the best they can/etc", can be broken by enough bad stuff happening. A sense of humour is a lot harder to break.

Arguably, if it was "broken" this way it would be a mistake (specifically, of generalizing from too small a sample size). I have a job where I am constantly confronted with suffering and death, but at the end of the day, I can still laugh just like everyone else, because I know my experience is a biased sample and that there is still lots of good going on in the world.