Pessimism and Doom

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

According to recent research, an absence of optimism plays a large role in keeping people trapped in poverty:

This hopelessness manifests itself in many ways. One is a sort of pathological conservatism, where people forgo even feasible things with potentially large benefits for fear of losing the little they already possess.

The parallels with scientific computing practically jump off the page, don't they?