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amitpamin comments on Happiness interventions - Less Wrong
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I haven't read any of the site but recognised this theory immediately. It has purportedly been shown to rest on an abuse of mathematics: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36910/title/-Positivity-Ratio--Debunked/
Author of the site here. Totally agree.
The evolutionary psychology may or may not be correct. I think there's some kernels of truth to it. But the mathematical model is crazy insanity, and I'm somewhat ashamed that I needed someone to point it out to me, especially considering that a brief look at the studies done which measured and correlated positivity ratios found 'dividing lines' all over the place, from 2 to 6 (http://happierhuman.com/losada-ratio).
The mathematics-abuse aside, I don't think it's a completely ridiculous idea. It seems obviously true that somebody experiencing negative emotions in a ratio of 1000 against every positive emotion cannot be described as "flourishing", whereas someone experiencing the reverse is probably permanently high on what must be a supremely lucrative designer drug.
But to be as precise as even a single order of magnitude in your range of flourishing ratios implies a degree of experimental rigour that I've never, ever heard of in psychology apart from arguably in IQ testing.
There's also a causation/corellation issue which must be quite challenging to disentangle.
In their pursuit of precision and the trappings of scienticity they've perhaps done at least as much to damage their idea as to nurture it. Think there's a lesson in there.