I’d like to nominate the cult of Positive Thinking.
Yes, it helps in certain circumstances, but there’s growing evidence that thinking positively about ‘high impact’ scenarios can be very dangerous. On a personal level, if you have a difficult cancer that responds to very few treatments and convince yourself and your children everything will be okay and don’t have contingency plans, you are, in all likelihood, in for a bad time, as are your children.
On a socio-economic level, if the CEO and gang of bank executives go on positive thinking seminars and ignore the scientifically-minded quants and other analysts, you get into a mindset that ignores the warning signs and pretends everything is ‘just fine’, the system works and your mathematical models are accurate, until we get a financial crash or similar disaster.
This seems to be a real problem in corporate America but friends in banking and tech comanies have told me it has become very much a problem here.
‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst’ doesn’t seem to register with these cunts.
Nominated by Cuntamus Prime



