Everything's Coming Up Optimists

Happy New Year, everyone!

Instapundit pointed me to a great set of 160 essays on optimism over at The World Question Center.

So far, I particularly like the essay entitled Evidence, by Clay Shirky.

It is only in the last hundred years that evidence has even begun spreading from the hard sciences into other parts of human life. Previous platitudes about the unpredictability or universal plasticity of human behavior are giving way to areas of inquiry with names like Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Behavioral Economics. (That we need a label like Behavioral Economics says as much about economics as Evidence-based Medicine does about medicine.)

So far, a great read, and I'm only half way through...