= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
John_Maxwell_IV comments on Happiness interventions - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (14)
This website was actually made by SF bay area community member Amit Amin. He writes about it here and here. From talking to him, my impression is that much happiness research is pretty low-quality due to the pressure to publish results and whatnot.
BTW, you might want to fix the links--you did them markdown-style, which works for comments but not posts. And maybe cut down on the amount of whitespace in your post some. (E.g. use bullet points?)
John has the correct impression - I actually switched careers nine months ago. I now work as a programmer at a startup.
My most popular post, which brings in 20,000 to 40,000 pageviews a month, was written five months into my career (http://happierhuman.com/benefits-of-gratitude/). Everything after was less popular. Why? Because as my understanding of statistics and methodology improved, my writing possessed fewer bold and enthusiastic claims, which non-LW folk love.
I hold a medium degree of confidence in my latest posts, e.g. my one about meditation. Everything else... well I'm willing to bet $10k that gratitude, for example, can improve the well-being of a large subset of folks. But it would not surprise me if future studies showed that gratitude journals are only 50% as effective as the current batch of research claims.
If you're looking for happiness advice, positive psychology has lots of great ideas. But most interventions are less likely to help and less effective than claimed.