Comment by mllev
I guess hope can be false now.
I guess hope can be false now.
If I let playing the lottery change how I interact with the world/prevent me from dealing with my situation, because I hope I will win, that 'hope' is a negative impact on my life.
If I encourage my friend who is down on their luck to buy lottery tickets so they can have hope, am I helping them, am I being kind?
> guess hope can be false now
"Hope is false if it is based on ignorance of the correct assessment of the probability that a desire is fulfilled or on ignorance with regard to the desirability of the object of desire. Hope is justified—realistic—when the hoping person knows and accepts experts’ judgement about the probability of hope fulfillment. However, I argued, what matters for evaluating a person’s hope is not only whether it is realistic, but also whether it is reasonable in light of the aim and goals for which the person strives in (the remainder of) his life
...a person’s hope that an (experimental) treatment may prolong his or her life or improve the quality of his or her life can only be called false when he or she thinks that the chances of personal benefits are greater than those estimated by experts. If he or she does accept their judgement, continuing to hope is realistic. Hope is moreover reasonable if it contributes to realizing what a person strives for in (the remainder of) his life" [1].
I agree that the probability of a desired outcome is valuable information. But to call being unaware of this information “false hope” is a blight on our language. Hope is hope. It’s quite proven that believing a certain outcome is likely increases the likelihood of that outcome.
> to call being unaware of this information “false hope” is a blight on our language
False hope is still a form of hope in the same way a red car is still a car.
And it’s useful to delineate it. Hope is rooted in expectation. When we watch a film about a fraudster, the dramatic irony arises from the audience knowing the rube is being played even while the rube is quite hopeful. We may conclude it’s better for the victim to live in false hope. But again, it’s useful to understand it’s a hope that’s false (and that someone is making that decision for them).
If false hope is still hope the way a red car is a car, then false also has no meaning in this context. Would a false car still be a car?
I agree people should be informed and manage their expectations. My issue is that it’s a terrible expression that gets misapplied constantly.
Hope is premised on the basis that nobody knows the future 100%.
Experts can give a mostly-frequentist analysis based on past medical cases.
The unknown part is whether those cases apply to yours.
And nobody knows.
All the so-called probability is meaningless. It matters not whether your chances of remission is "99%" or "1%". Those numbers are meaningless in a specific case under a specific situation.
I understand this is not the commonly understood notion of probability, but the common notion is simply wrong.
I'm not saying experts are wrong, I'm happy to assume that their analyses are quite correct when applied to a population. I'm just saying the common way of interpreting their statistics onto one specific case (the one you care about) is wrong, because you can't just plug the probability onto a single person/case and round it off to zero or one.
Sure, if by "now" you mean "at least since Geoffrey Chaucer's time":
> And thys vyce cometh of false hope that he thynketh he thall lyue longe, but that hope fayleth ful ofte.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Workes_of_Geffray_C... [2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=false+hope&yea...
Or, come to that, "at least since Cicero's time":
> ...cui legi cum vestra dignitas vehementer adversetur, istius spes falsa et insignis impudentia maxime suffragatur.
[3] https://anastrophe.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/perseus/citequery3.p...