> “Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy." - (supposedly) Isaac Newton

Never heard of this quote, but I could certainly use a large dose of tact as defined above! The quote seems to be due to an advertising executive though, Howard W. Newton, not Isaac Newton [1].

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/07/18/tact/

I don't really agree. The dictionary definition of cynical is "believing the worst of human nature and motives; having a sneering disbelief in e.g. selflessness of others".

That's certainly very extreme, but a tempered, measured belief in the negative aspects of human nature is necessary, I think.

You might say, "that's just realism", but I think they are just separate axes: some amount of cynicism (and idealism) is necessary in order to be realistic. Possibly different amounts in different contexts, depending on the other people involved.

Cynicism inherently has no negative connotations. People misrepresented it.

The definition of cynicism as per Google "an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest".

This statement has nothing inherently negative. It's science, backed by evolution. The whole economic system is based on incentive analysis, the concept of invisible hand. Software architects are taught the Principle of least privilege, why? Because of cynicism, not trusting motive of others. But for everyday life people can't handle it mentally coz they love to think everyone giving them without any expectations.

I know this sounds counterintuitive but this space is limited to write more. If you have clarifying question you can ask me.

I think the terminology objection here is mostly semantic and misses what the author is actually claiming.

No one experiences their own beliefs as “cynical” or “optimistic.” Everyone believes they are being realistic. A cynic does not think “I am distorting reality negatively.” He thinks “this is how things really are.” The labels cynic and optimist are almost always imposed by observers, not chosen by the believer. When someone calls himself a cynic, what he usually means is that others perceive his conclusions, which he believes are factual, as negative.

So the core claim is not that cynicism is a mood or an attitude to aspire to. The claim is that reality itself is often negative, and that people who arrive at pessimistic conclusions are sometimes closer to the truth than people who default to hopeful narratives. Calling that “realism” instead of “cynicism” does not change the substance of the argument.

There is also actual empirical work here, not just vibes. In psychology this shows up under what is sometimes called depressive realism. Multiple studies starting with Alloy and Abramson in the late 1970s found that mildly depressed subjects were more accurate than non depressed subjects at judging contingency, control, and likelihood in certain experimental settings. Non depressed subjects systematically overestimated their influence and future outcomes, while depressed subjects were closer to objective probabilities. Later work refined this and showed the effect is bounded and context dependent, but the core point survived: positive mental health is often associated with optimistic bias, not neutral accuracy.

More broadly, a large literature on optimism bias and self serving bias shows that psychologically healthy people tend to overestimate success, underestimate risk, and interpret ambiguous evidence in their favor. That bias is adaptive and motivating, but it is still a bias. People who lack it tend to have more internally consistent and stable world models, even if those models are less emotionally pleasant.

So saying “realism is neutral” is true in the abstract, but psychologically misleading. Humans do not converge on realism by default. They converge on motivated belief. When someone repeatedly reaches pessimistic conclusions across domains, it is at least plausible that they are sampling reality with fewer affective filters, not merely indulging in a negative personality trait.

That does not mean cynicism is virtuous, or that it should guide social behavior. Tact and parrhesia are social strategies. They are orthogonal to whether your internal model of the world is accurate. You can be accurate and tactful, accurate and abrasive, inaccurate and pleasant, or inaccurate and hostile. Mixing those axes together is what creates confusion here.

The real disagreement is not about tone or attitude. It is about whether optimistic distortions are a feature or a bug. Psychology suggests they are a feature for well being, but a bug for accuracy.

Yes, the terminology is off — skepticism.

> It cannot be “good” for a social structure by definition.

Is 'good for the social structure' the metric to use for defining good? Should we be serving the social structure to be 'good'?

cynicism can also be a label applied by those with toxic positivity to anything that is actually realism

> All societies are dysfunctional, great and small, because human beings are dysfunctional.

I don't agree with the 'because' part of this. It misses my point about why organizations are dysfunctional. Even if the organization was made up of perfectly rational, perfectly functional individuals, it would still be dysfunctional. The people running large corporations, are individually, very rational, and very functional. They are among the most capable humans at achieving their goals. Any explanation of organizational dysfunction has to also explain that data.

The dysfunction (which means actions not aligned with the shareholders) comes from the fact that 1. preferences cannot always be aggregated coherently and 2. that the people operating the corporation do not necessarily have incentives aligned with the shareholders. The first is a mathematical impossibility which cannot be fixed, and the second is a failure of mechanism design. That's the "open problem" I mentioned.