There is light at the end of the tunnel. Three questions:
Question 1: Why do we dramatize bad decision making?
When all the odds are stacked against you, and you are left with only the tiniest chance of success, why is it so romantic to fight against the odds? Shouldn’t that just be called poor decision making? (Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love playing (and hoping) for statistically anomalous success. I just don’t know why.)
Question 2: Where is the line between hope and self-deception?
At what point does hoping become irrational? You can hope for a hole-in-one to win the game. It’s crazy, but it is possible. Should you hope for waking from your slumber a foot taller than when you went to bed? I doubt it.
Question 3: Shouldn’t “hope” have been weeded out due to natural selection?
A computer that just deals with statistics and self-preservation is not going to “hope”. Is this just an odd artifact of brain evolution? Do animals hope? Can they? Should we expect to have increasingly wild, irrational hope in the future?