You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

itaibn0 comments on Happiness Logging: One Year In - Less Wrong Discussion

14 Post author: jkaufman 09 October 2014 07:24PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (23)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: itaibn0 10 October 2014 12:34:07AM 3 points [-]

Overall my experience with logging has made me put less trust in "how happy are you right now" surveys of happiness. Aside from the practical issues like logging unexpected night wake-time, I mostly don't feel like the numbers I'm recording are very meaningful. I would rather spend more time in situations I label higher than lower on average, so there is some signal there, but I don't actually have the introspection to accurately report to myself how I'm feeling.

I've also been suspicious of happiness surveys for a similar reason. One theory I have is that a large portion of the variation in happiness set-point is just that different people have different tendencies in answering "rate in 1-10"-type questions. It would be interesting to test how much does happiness set-point correlates with questions such as "rate this essay from 1 to 10". Another test for this theory that is far more like have actually been conducted already is to see how well happiness set-point correlates with neurological signals of happiness (the difficulty being here that the primary way to determine whether a neurological signal signals happiness is through self-report. Nonetheless, if the happiness set-point correlates with any neurological signal then it more likely that this signal plays a role in happiness than in inducing high number ratings).