In other words, I’m saying the status of women in (developed vs undeveloped) has more direct bearing on fertility than happiness.

Oji

Yes, both the fMRI-driven mappers and the rationality-demolishing experimenters somehow seem to be making jabs rather than deriving foundational insights.

Am yet to explore all the links you have referred to.

Also, am obviously overstating my case a bit for dramatic effect.

@Brian: curious that you preface your comments with “I am an engineer/amateur.” So am I actually. In fact none of the other commenters is a professional psychologist.

That said, I don’t feel the need for either apology or qualification. Psychology is one discipline where I have no hesitation in offering up my opinions, and riding roughshod over academic boundaries, based solely on my privileged access to the only experimental subject that matters to me: myself.

Now as to your actual point, I am not saying the drive towards happiness is an illegitimate one. Your choice to be a happy pig over a miserable human is a perfectly valid one. My only point is that lots of other people choose other options (including ‘miserable human’ which I would choose without a second thought). It is quite often the choice made by people who value some notion of ‘truth’ or ‘art’ more. The conflict has been playing out nicely in recent episodes of “House” where the idea that Van Gogh would have been happier, not insane, and in possession of 2 ears if he had chosen treatment and happiness. But then we wouldn’t have his art. His sanity and one ear were a price he was willing to pay, and the rest of us certainly gained as a result. The character of House has, in previous seasons, clearly chosen “truth” over “happiness” and the writers of the show have set up an interesting point in the character arc, where he is poised to change his mind.

Your genetics angle is actually one I agree with. Our selfish genes have no stake in our happiness unless it helps them replicate.

Reproduction levels certainly go down with education/income levels, as the aging of the West and Japan shows. I’d argue that the correlation with happiness probably goes the other way. It is well known that more money (and probably more education) does not translate into more happiness beyond a point, and that other factors matter more. The world happiness survey consistently puts poorer and more hedonistic countries at the top, while richer, better educated ones have middling ranks. Countries like Bangladesh and Nigeria often top the rankings, while countries like the US languish. Some of it is undoubtedly translation effects, patriotism and certain sorts of lack of self-awareness, but some of this is genuine.

And yes, there is more baby-making in these self-reported happy countries.

My own cynical explanation is that what is being measured is not “happiness” but a mixture of hedonistic live-in-the-moment myopia and illiteracy. Ask those Bangladeshis after a few riots, bombings and a couple of bad years of flooding.

I must disagree with you on your low opinion of “maximisation of happiness”. I think the research on the evolutionary roots of depression might well shed some light on this disagreement. It seems to be widely agreed that anxiousness has an evolutionary benefit to humans, but the general conclusion from this is that happiness is not good for the survival of the species and our “genes have no interest in our happiness”. So your conclusion that lots of behaviour, including anti-social, behaviour is normal and healthy is quite correct. That does not imply that it makes people happy. So as an engineer I need to know what our ‘objective function’ is -ie. what we are trying to maximise. Personally, I put my happiness and the happiness of people around me as more important than the survival of the species. If I must act in a way that reduces the survival chances of my set of genes, so be it. I don’t really care. (I always wondered since I read about eunuchs in my twenties if I would be happier if I was castrated – I never got up the courage to try it).

An interesting test (if a little politically incorrect) of this is to see if happier people replicate less. Statistics show that educated people tend to be happier and have less children, so there is some indication there that is a correlation there.

A lot of people don’t like some of the conclusions that you can draw from this, for instance that if ambition and desire make you unhappy then you just try to be happy with what you have and stop wishing for more (I’m not just referring to financial issues here – also creativity). When I am asked to choose between the being a ‘happy pig’ or an ‘unhappy human’ I’m afraid that I have to say ‘happy pig’. However, I’m stuck with being a human so I have to make the best of it.

So where am I missing the point?

Regards,

Brian Mulligan

If you haven’t read Phantoms in the Brain, look at http://lesswrong.com/lw/20/the_apologist_and_the_revolutionary/ for a discussion of anosognosia.

After reading this book, I became far more depressed (i.e. realistic) about the fragility of the mind. The human mind-pattern fractures and shards off in so many interesting ways – everything’s fine, except .

VSR has breathed a lot of life and hard science into Freud’s defense mechanisms as well.

Whatever else shakes out of this, one thing is for sure: the body image is so easy to play games with that OBE is not mysterious at all. Ditto mystical/religious ecstasy and the implication that something deeply meaningful is going on.

Can’t comment on whatever version of Buddhism this author builds off of, but in the Indian tradition for instance, an anchor concept used by both Vedantic and Buddhist philosophers is “Satchitananda” (a compound of sat-chit-ananda — truth-consciousness-pleasure). In that, ‘ananda’ comes closest to ‘happiness’ but isn’t quite that… it is something in between sensual pleasure and existential happiness.

Venkat

Positive psychology had me conflicted for a long time. Some of it I feel is feel-good Kumbaya nonsense. But OTOH, the “strengths” bit is genuinely a contribution. Vaillant’s work is revered by the PP people, but their work is not really in the spirit of his; it has much less skepticism.

I think the big difference is that I think PP is only a rebellion against the organization man era of management in that it elevates employee empowerment virtues above middle-manager empowerment, but it is a rebellion the way a teenager’s is: still defined by the original. It is not a reframing.

Beh. econ: I am being careful here: I like the original Kahnemann-Tversky raw data. But people are running amok with interpretations.

Finally, evolutionary psych… I used to be a big fan (esp. of some of the oldest stuff before the field had a name, Desmond Morris’ work). I am still a fan, but I find it primarily stimulating but not central, because so much of it is speculative reconstruction via unfalsifiable stories. I am more of a stories-over-empiricism guy than you (you said Gladwell was your evil twin), but I take evol. psych. stories with a grain of salt.

That said, the depression article is in the evol. psych mould, and I’d use that in my synthesis.

1. Positive psychology will take a hit: To say that happiness is an organizational man concept is, I think, naive and over simplistic. IMO, positive psychology is going to be the key driver in a paradigm shift in psychology because it breaks away from the deeply capitalistic roots of modern psychology (I can’t figure out a better way of putting this).

2. There will be a Neo-Neo-Freudianism: Maybe, I have no opinion.

3. Behavioral economics will suffer a serious backlash: Could not disagree more. Behavioral economics can and must cause a paradigm shift in economics. To invoke Kuhn though, paradigm shifts don’t come when there is sufficient criticism of the old model, it comes when a viable alternative arises. Currently, behavioral economics is largely concerned with gathering evidence of why the current system is broken and it’s easy to see why. Just the thought of reformulating the entirety of economics from a behavioral basis is so daunting it’s almost unthinkable. There needs to be an Einstein who is conversant in so many fields to such a deep level that he can tie together all the disparate strands into a systematic way of thinking.
4. There will be a diversity of legitimate definitions of “psychologically healthy”: I feel like we’ve done this already, with the cultural fragmentation of the 60′s, the rise of sexual politics & sexual identification, the self esteem & self actualization movement, the death of the organizational man as a dream & the flowering of new age thinking. Then the pendulum swung the other way with the increasing medicalization of mental disorders, the PC movement & parenting nazism. I feel like the next stage is a melding of the two, optimistically taking the best parts of each but cynically, combining the most self-indulgent.

5. Network Psychology will displace classical social psychology: Probably true but this field will go through the same pains that you’re bashing other fields about in your post.

6. fMRI-happy empiricists will finally figure out what the hell they are about: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf . I’m hesitant to even link to this poster because it’s engaging in the type of gotcha journalism which I think hurts more than helps a field. Like evolutionary psychology (ps: why no mention of this in your post?) fMRI is filled with 95% attention grabbing bullshit and 5% serious, considered scholarship that advances the field. This makes it harder for an outsider to filter through the noise and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.