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Lumifer comments on Buying happiness - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (34)
On the one hand, I upvoted this because there is no reason for this post to be in the negatives.
On the other hand, I don't think I'm a fan of the advice DGW are giving out.
On the third tail, this is because I'm trying it on for myself and it fits just terribly.
On the fourth twitching tufted ear, I have no illusions about being typical, so "doesn't work for me" certainly does not imply "doesn't work for normals".
On the fifth tentacle, I continue to have doubts about this advice even for the normals.
So, follow the herd and don't comparison shop? I would love to be your retailer. Especially if you want to pay now and consume later.
I also suspect (without having read the paper, natch) the authors' methodology. Let me illustrate -- let's take the first point, "buy experiences". Alice and Bob live in pretty identical circumstances. Both have a car that's old, cranky, breaks down a lot, and tends to need expensive repairs. Both have some savings.
Alice goes YOLO!!! and goes on a Caribbean vacation. Returning from it, she continues to curse at her car and suffer from its slings and arrows. Bob uses his saving to buy a new(er) car.
In a bit, DGW show up. They ask Alice -- did spending your savings make you happy? She says yes, fuck yes, that was an awesome vacation, especially compared to how crappy the life now is. They ask Bob -- did spending your savings make you happy? Bob says well, kinda, not really, the new car is highly useful, but it's not like it is the high point of his life.
And so DGW happily go and tell the world to buy experiences.
Reminds me of the classic quote: "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."
But the invisible to DGW opportunity costs can be... problematic.
One should probably distinguish between buying things for what they can do and buying things just to have them.
I agree with your suspicions about material versus experiential purchases, for similar reasons. (It's a similar objection to the one I raised about their buying-for-self versus buying-for-others arguments.)
What you'd really need to do to assess this is give a few hundred people $1000, tell half of them to spend it on something material and half to spend it on something experiential, and then do experience-sampling on them all for the following 5 years or so to assess their happiness. Oh, and for the previous year or so too. It isn't hard to see why no one has done that particular piece of research.
I'm not so convinced they're wrong about "buy now, consume later" (though "plan now, buy later" seems like it might be better), or by "follow the herd" or "don't comparison-shop", at least if they're taken to mean "follow the herd more" and "comparison-shop less". (Yup, those might make things better for retailers too. But, y'know, the whole point of trade is that it isn't zero-sum.)
It's possible to debate the pros and cons of each suggestion, but I think that what rankles me is the overall theme of shortsightedness. Be a happy little sheep, live day by day without worries about far future, don't deviate from the herd, don't worry your pretty little head about trying to optimise things....
It could very well be that being more shortsighted really does make you happier. Or that lots of moves in the shortsighted direction lead to greater happiness although some don't (e.g., saving more may well be a win[1] if you look at the reasonably long term).
[1] I hope it is...
It seems like the methodology of many of the studies they cite systematically neglects long-term effects. That's probably at least partly because long-term effects are harder to measure -- and make the study more expensive to do and take longer before you get to publish it. It seems likely that there's a general short-term bias in this sort of research.
That advice goes back to at least Jesus.
However at this point I will have to ask "Make whom happier?" People are different (and in a high-dimensional space, too) so producing this kind of advice for an average human is both useless and misguided. I would believe it more if it came conditional on certain personality characteristics, for example.
By the way, who were the subjects of DGW questionnaires? The usual WEIRD people?
I bet (p=0.8) there's something along those lines predating Jesus in the Buddhist tradition.
Yes, different people will be made happy by different things. The studies DGW cite were mostly done by other people rather than by DGW. I share your suspicion that too many of the subjects were young healthy well-off well-educated Western psychology students or the like.
I wouldn't be surprised.
With a tiny bit of effort you can drag Ecclesiastes in here, too (not on the side of enjoy the here and now, but on the side of planning and effort are futile).
At least back to 23 BC.
Carpe diem is more a predecessor of Nike's Just Do It, rather than "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow".
That might be what it has become in present-day popular culture, but the line in the original poem did continue with "quam minimum credula postero".