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wedrifid comments on Local Ordinances of Fun - Less Wrong
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7 is the one I have the biggest problem with. The opposite of happiness is sadness, not boredom. Anyone who says otherwise fails at opposites, and should probably retake the first grade.
Yes, happiness and sadness are both sides of the same coin, as are love and hate, but they are sides that are as far away from each other as it is possible to be on that coin, and anything not on the coin isn't pertinent.
Opposites are not things with as few commonalities as possible. Black has more common with white than it does with ketchup, but that does not make black and ketchup opposites.
More relevantly, if you want to achieve happiness, achieving boredom constitutes failure, but achieving sadness constitutes an even greater failure. If advice that prioritizes avoidance of boredom with ample resources has anything going for it, it's that boredom is a more stable attractor than sadness.
This quote and its various derivatives constitute one of my pet peeves.
No. I am quite capable of telling my first grade teacher the verbal password "sadness" as the opposite to "happiness" but I have no particularly good reason to declare the two fundamentally opposite psychological states, nor any particularly good reason to believe that the conventional wisdom taught by my first grade teacher constitutes sound neurobiological insight.