Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life

One day a coworker said to me, "Luke! You're, like, the happiest person I know! How come you're so happy all the time?"

It was probably a rhetorical question, but I had a very long answer to give. See, I was unhappy for most of my life,¹ and even considered suicide a few times. Then I spent two years studying the science of happiness. Now, happiness is my natural state. I can't remember the last time I felt unhappy for longer than 20 minutes.

That kind of change won't happen for everyone, or even most people (beware of other-optimizing), but it's worth a shot! 

We all want to be happy, and happiness is useful for other things, too.² For example, happiness improves physical health,³ improves creativity,⁴ and even enables you to make better decisions.⁵ (It's harder to be rational when you're unhappy.⁶) So, as part of a series on how to win at life with science and rationality, let's review the science of happiness.

The correlates of happiness

Earlier, I noted that there is an abundance of research on factors that correlate with subjective well-being (individuals' own assessments of their happiness and life satisfaction).

Factors that don't correlate much with happiness include: age,⁷ gender,⁸ parenthood,⁹ intelligence,¹⁰ physical attractiveness,¹¹ and money¹² (as long as you're above the poverty line). Factors that correlate moderately with happiness include: health,¹³ social activity,¹⁴ and religiosity.¹⁵ Factors that correlate strongly with happiness include: genetics,¹⁶ love and relationship satisfaction,¹⁷ and work satisfaction.¹⁸

But correlation is not enough. We want to know what causes happiness. And that is a trickier thing to measure. But we do know a few things.

Happiness, personality, and skills

Genes account for about 50% of the variance in happiness.¹⁹ Even lottery winners and newly-made quadriplegics do not see as much of a change in happiness as you would expect.²⁰ Presumably, genes shape your happiness by shaping your personality, which is known to be quite heritable.²¹

So which personality traits tend to correlate most with happiness? Extroversion is among the best predictors of happiness,²² as are conscientiousness, agreeableness, self-esteem, and optimism.²³

What if you don't have those traits? The first thing to say is that you might be capable of them without knowing it. Introversion, for example, can be exacerbated by a lack of social skills. If you decide to learn and practice social skills, you might find that you are more extroverted than you thought! (That's what happened to me.) The same goes for conscientiousness, agreeableness, self-esteem, and optimism - these are only partly linked to personality. They are to some extent learnable skills, and learning these skills (or even "acting as if") can increase happiness.²⁴

The second thing to say is that lacking some of these traits does not, of course, doom you to unhappiness.

Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life

Some have suggested that the Less Wrong community could improve readers' instrumental rationality more effectively if it first caught up with the scientific literature on productivity and self-help, and then enabled readers to deliberately practice self-help skills and apply what they've learned in real life.

I think that's a good idea. My contribution today is a quick overview of scientific self-help: what professionals call "the psychology of adjustment." First I'll review the state of the industry and the scientific literature, and then I'll briefly summarize the scientific data available on three topics in self-help: study methods, productivity, and happiness.

The industry and the literature

As you probably know, much of the self-help industry is a sham, ripe for parody. Most self-help books are written to sell, not to help. Pop psychology may be more myth than fact. As Christopher Buckley (1999) writes, "The more people read [self-help books], the more they think they need them... [it's] more like an addiction than an alliance."

Where can you turn for reliable, empirically-based self-help advice? A few leading therapeutic psychologists (e.g., Albert Ellis, Arnold Lazarus, Martin Seligman) have written self-help books based on decades of research, but even these works tend to give recommendations that are still debated, because they aren't yet part of settled science.

Lifelong self-help researcher Clayton Tucker-Ladd wrote and updated Psychological Self-Help (pdf) over several decades. It's a summary of what scientists do and don't know about self-help methods (as of about 2003), but it's also more than 2,000 pages long, and much of it surveys scientific opinion rather than experimental results, because on many subjects there aren't any experimental results yet. The book is associated with an internet community of people sharing what does and doesn't work for them.

More immediately useful is Richard Wiseman's 59 Seconds. Wiseman is an experimental psychologist and paranormal investigator who gathered together what little self-help research is part of settled science, and put it into a short, fun, and useful Malcolm Gladwell-ish book. The next best popular-level general self-help book is perhaps Martin Seligman's What You Can Change and What You Can't.

Followup to:  Thou Art Physics, Timeless Control, Hand vs. Fingers, Explaining vs. Explaining Away

I know (or could readily rediscover) how to build a binary adder from logic gates.  If I can figure out how to make individual logic gates from Legos or ant trails or rolling ping-pong balls, then I can add two 32-bit unsigned integers using Legos or ant trails or ping-pong balls.

Someone who had no idea how I'd just done the trick, might accuse me of having created "artificial addition" rather than "real addition".

But once you see the essence, the structure that is addition, then you will automatically see addition whenever you see that structure.  Legos, ant trails, or ping-pong balls.

Even if the system is - gasp!- deterministic, you will see a system that, lo and behold, deterministically adds numbers.  Even if someone - gasp! - designed the system, you will see that it was designed to add numbers.  Even if the system was - gasp!- caused, you will see that it was caused to add numbers.

Let's say that John is standing in front of an orphanage which is on fire, but not quite an inferno yet; trying to decide whether to run in and grab a baby or two.  Let us suppose two slightly different versions of John - slightly different initial conditions.  They both agonize.  They both are torn between fear and duty.  Both are tempted to run, and know how guilty they would feel, for the rest of their lives, if they ran.  Both feel the call to save the children.  And finally, in the end, John-1 runs away, and John-2 runs in and grabs a toddler, getting out moments before the flames consume the entranceway.

This, it seems to me, is the very essence of moral responsibility - in the one case, for a cowardly choice; in the other case, for a heroic one.  And I don't see what difference it makes, if John's decision was physically deterministic given his initial conditions, or if John's decision was preplanned by some alien creator that built him out of carbon atoms, or even if - worst of all - there exists some set of understandable psychological factors that were the very substance of John and caused his decision.

Followup to:  Uncritical Supercriticality

Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover than when cults receive a major shock—a prophecy fails to come true, a moral flaw of the founder is revealed—they often come back stronger than before, with increased belief and fanaticism.  The Jehovah's Witnesses placed Armageddon in 1975, based on Biblical calculations; 1975 has come and passed.  The Unarian cult, still going strong today, survived the nonappearance of an intergalactic spacefleet on September 27, 1975.  (The Wikipedia article on Unarianism mentions a failed prophecy in 2001, but makes no mention of the earlier failure in 1975, interestingly enough.)

Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence?

At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest.  People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft.  If people have the right to play video games - and it's hard to imagine a more fundamental right - then the market is going to respond by supplying the most engaging video games that can be sold, to the point that exceptionally engaged consumers are removed from the gene pool.

How does a consumer product become so involving that, after 57 hours of using the product, the consumer would rather use the product for one more hour than eat or sleep?  (I suppose one could argue that the consumer makes a rational decision that they'd rather play Starcraft for the next hour than live out the rest of their lives, but let's just not go there.  Please.)

In recent posts, I have predicted that, if not otherwise prevented from doing so, some people will behave stupidly and suffer the consequences:  "If people have a right to be stupid, the market will respond by supplying all the stupidity that can be sold."  People misinterpret this as indicating that I take a policy stance in favor of regulation.  It indicates no such thing.  It is meant purely as guess about empirical consequences - a testable prediction on a question of simple fact.

Perhaps I would be less misinterpreted if I also told "the other side of the story" - inveighed at length about the reasons why bureaucrats are not perfect rationalists guarding our net best interests.  But ideally, I shouldn't have to go to such lengths.  Ideally, I could make a prediction about a strictly factual question without this being interpreted as a policy stance, or as a stance on logically distinct factual questions.

Greg Burch said:

"I think people should have a right to be stupid and, if they have that right, the market's going to respond by supplying as much stupidity as can be sold."

Followup to: Causality: The Fabric of Real Things

Previous meditation:

"You say that a universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects. Well, that's a very Western viewpoint - that it's all about mechanistic, deterministic stuff. I agree that anything else is outside the realm of science, but it can still be real, you know. My cousin is psychic - if you draw a card from his deck of cards, he can tell you the name of your card before he looks at it. There's no mechanism for it - it's not a causal thing that scientists could study - he just does it. Same thing when I commune on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that my partner truly loves me. I agree that purely spiritual phenomena are outside the realm of causal processes that can be studied by experiments, but I don't agree that they can't be real."

Reply:

Fundamentally, a causal model is a way of factorizing our uncertainty about the universe.  One way of viewing a causal model is as a structure of deterministic functions plus uncorrelated sources of background uncertainty.

Let's use the Obesity-Exercise-Internet model (reminder: which is totally made up) as an example again:

We can also view this as a set of deterministic functions F_i, plus uncorrelated background sources of uncertainty U_i:

This says is that the value x₃ - how much someone exercises - is a function of how obese they are (x₁), how much time they spend on the Internet (x₂), plus some other background factors U₃ which don't correlate to anything else in the diagram, all of which collectively determine, when combined by the mechanism F₃, how much time someone spends exercising.