The Knowing Smile of Self-Delusion

Have you ever had occasion to deal with someone who predicts tragedy for 5 things, is wrong about 4 of them, but then flashes you the 'knowing smile of self-delusion' when the 5th item goes wrong? As if to say, "gather round children, and basque in my omniscient negativity". To me, this elicits a kind of sadness, aside from the impetus to wipe said smile off of said person's face, because it reveals one of the greatest pitfalls of the human mind - confirmation bias: the tendency to identify and interpret information in a way that confirms one's beliefs. Of course, there are pros and cons to be had in just about everything, so I am not really saddened by confirmation bias per se. It is the bias towards the negative that makes me sad. If someone predicts a stellar outcome for 5 things, disregards the 4 that were, indeed, tragic, and then rejoices in the 1 item that went well, I might very well like this person ;-) The flip side, on the other hand, represents someone with a poisonous mind, that might (might) be able to see his or her way clear to greater self-awareness and more objective thinking (or, at the very least, subjective thinking in the positive), but, all too often, I feel that once a person has engaged in this mindset for a long enough period of time, the negativity becomes part of their persona - how they see themselves in the world - and any argument to the contrary is quickly ingested into the mind and broken down into ideas that feed current thinking - e.g. a sunny day becomes a potentially skin cancer causing day. In terms of strategies for dealing with this kind of person, I have become familiar with two: (1) 'fire and forget', wherein you employ the Socratic method to help them see that it is just as easy to predict a positive outcome as a negative one, and hope that in that realization they can see their own culpability in selecting the latter, with no expectation that they will see this; and (2) 'forget', wherein you simply 'raise shields' and turn off the 'universal translator', something that might save you some heartache, at the risk of narrowing down the field. Of course, there is the 3rd option that pertains to an escalation of wiping smiles off of faces, but, at the risk of committing the sin I have just written against, this would likely end up in tragedy :-/