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.
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).
Most people are aware of the placebo effect, but greatly underestimate how large it's power truly can be.
I have fibromyalgia. At one time I couldn't write, needed a cane to walk, had constant diarrhea, and worse. I had already tried dozens of treatments. I had grown skeptical.
Then I was given a treatment which made lots of sense. It was based off of a theory which I had my doubts about, but after learning more about it, I was 100% convinced this was it. After trying the treatment, I was immediately much better. I could run. I could shave my own beard without pain. I could play sports, I could eat all sorts of foods without problems. One day walking caused me pain, the next I could run without any problems. For two months I was in heaven.
Then all the pain came back. No matter how much I tried that treatment again, it didn't help. Worse, as I learned more about the treatment, I discovered I'd been scammed. Yet it still seemed to have worked a miracle, if only for two months. Why? The placebo effect. More than any other treatment I'd tried, I was convinced this one was going to work.
(fyi, now, three years later I'm doing great)
I wrote an article listing the evidence for 54 suggested strategies for increasing happiness.
http://happierhuman.com/how-to-be-happy/
In general, my writing is more enthusiastic than the evidence would call for, but alas I must excite my readers and get the pageviews. My interpretation is that although some of the studies (e.g. keeping a gratitude journal improves symptoms of depression) may be flawed, follow 10 of them at the same time, and you'll likely have included something that works. No smoking guns, of course.
Professor Zueblin is right when he says that thinking is the hardest work many people ever have to do, and they don't like to do any more of it than they can help. They look for a royal road through some short cut in the form of a clever scheme or stunt, which they call the obvious thing to do; but calling it doesn't make it so. They don't gather all the facts and then analyze them before deciding what really is the obvious thing.
From Obvious Adam, a business book published in 1916.
WRT S.M.A.R.T. goals, Nick Winter says in the motivation hacker:
When you do pick your goals, forget the advice about SMART goals. Use Piers Steel’s slightly improved CSI Approach. Your goals should be Challenging (if they’re not exciting, they won’t provide Value); Specific (abstract goals can leave you vulnerable to Impulsiveness, since it’s not clear what you need to do); Immediate (avoid long-Delayed goals in favor of ones you can start now and finish soon), and Approach-oriented. (As opposed to avoidance goals, where you try not to do something, you should instead reframe it positively as an attempt to do something—it just feels better.)
Nick Winter knows about habit formation
I agree with the challenging bit, but for a different reason. Quoting from Piers Steel, "We are motivational misers who constantly fine-tune our effort levels so that we strive just enough for success."
For low complexity goals, up to a point, there is a linear relationship between goal difficulty and goal performance, even when the reward is held constant. That is, more difficult goals require more motivation; provided that the goal is valuable, that motivation is provided.
The difficulty with choosing challenging goals is ensuring that you feel motivated, not excited. Excited is thinking of the benefits and feeling positive emotion in anticipation. Motivation is the energy necessary to actually complete all the crap in between, like doing your pushups. I use mental contrasting for this. It works better than nothing, but still leaves much to be desired.
Howdy.
This is what I intend to be the start of a sequence on economics. Almost two years ago while reading through Greg Mankiw’s macroeconomics textbook, I noticed the bizarre manner in which Mankiw’s analysis of banking simply presumed central banking, with free market banking entirely ignored. I looked around for an explanation of why the economics is done that way, and after realizing that there isn’t one, I decided to write a book about why economists support central banking and what banking regime the evidence actually supports.
Writing a book is slow and difficult, and I finally realized recently, even though my dad told me this from the beginning, that it would be much smarter to write out my thoughts in shorter articles and get immediate feedback on them, which is what I intend to do here.
I decided to try this on LessWrong because I really liked reading the sequences here and think there should be one on economics, and because the feedback I’ll get here is probably the best I could hope to get on the Internet anywhere.
I know there’s a community norm against discussing politics here, but this sequence is really supposed to be about the economics, not politics, although it is the curse of economics that it’s really hard to talk about what economics does and doesn’t say without inadvertently refuting half a dozen political ideologies in the process. For me my opinions about the desirability of central banking simply fell out of doing the economics, in much the same way that atheism ought to be a natural consequence of reaching a certain level of rationality. In any case, the sequence will mostly be about history, economics, and economists. Most of the articles individually won’t have anything to do with politics. And if my sequence is ignored because of its political connotations, or if the introduction of a bit of political discussion into LessWrong starts destroying the community here, I’ll go elsewhere.
My name is Benjamin Lyons. I’m a self-taught 20 year-old American currently serving as a volunteer soldier in the Israeli Defense Force, where I am a proud senior vice supply closet manager at an army-themed summer camp for the worst teenagers in the Middle East. Yes, I’m entirely self-taught in economics, so you’re free to be entirely skeptical of anything I have to say and you probably should be. However, the economics and history I’ll present in this sequence will be entirely orthodox mainstream stuff. I’ll differ from the mainstream in the conclusions I draw and don’t draw from the economics, not the economics itself. If there’s any exceptions I’ll highlight them.
Well, this might turn out to be a disaster but the whole point of doing this for me is to get a lot better at writing and to turn my thoughts and arguments into something that can become a book in a manner much faster than just trying to write a book.
I don’t know what kind of posting schedule I’ll be able to maintain. I’d like to do one per day but that may be impossible, especially in the army. Nevertheless that’s what I’ll shoot for.
I’m trying to become stronger quickly, so I definitely am looking for fierce criticism here. That sort of thing has never bothered me on a personal level, and I know I can count on the people at LessWrong to criticize what needs criticizing and to complement and encourage what deserves complements and encouragement.
It's funny.
I went to business school, studied some economics, even did well enough in a monetary policy competition to meet Bernanke.
And I can't once recall having a conversation like the one you've just initiated. Even if your arguments end up invalid... I'm interested to see what you have to say.
I've done this twice in my life. First, when I was in college, I took a semester to study abroad in china while continuing my old job for a SF startup remotely. I felt rich, yes. But it was a failure - first and foremost, I want to hang out with people whom I can communicate and enjoy my time with. I learned this lesson after trying this again, but this time, moving to India for 3 months. I am Indian, so I didn't expect the cultural barrier to be as much of a problem. It was.
To encourage yourself to do some massive, granular task:
Upon completion of each granule, give yourself a reward with some probability.
A reward is a small piece of food or a sip of a drink, etc.
Never eat or drink anything except as a reward for working on the task.
This really works extremely well for me; I have been doing this for about 2 months, at first only with anki reviews and more recently for several other things. The feeling is very similar to addictions like video games or entertaining websites; I often think "I should probably go do X, but let me instead do just one more anki card" and a half-hour later I realize I still haven't done X.
More things:
Make the rewards unlikely and small so that you stay constantly hungry. Bonus: caloric restriction.
Create a timed reminder, say half-hourly, to do just a few granules of the task. This encourages episodes of the "just one more" effect.
Put reinforcers within arm's reach, both temporally (make granules easy and quick, so that hunger feels like an urge to do the task rather than an urge to cheat the system) and spacially (so that you are constantly reminded of your hunger and tempted to do the task).
I repeat: this works extremely well for me and I strongly encourage other people to try it. More details here.
Here is a graph showing the number of Anki reviews I've done every month for the past year, as an example of the results this method can produce.
I have tried several variants of this process. As expected, the largest road-block has been part 3 - the self-control not to consume the reward despite lack of completion.
I will mention that on the few occasions I have gotten this to work, my excitement and enjoyment was much higher than average. The desire and excitement for food seemed to translate into the task at hand.
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Re: the linked site. Browsing the homepage raises so many red flags that it's borderline overwhelming.
Offering me a free 45-page report? - Awesome, what do I get if I pay you money?
16 Happiness Ideas That Really Work! - Um, good? Is this seriously BuzzFeed style clickbait?
Direct Brain Stimulation, a Trillion Dollar Invention? - Wow that's a lot of money, I'd better start reading right now!
And this overtly manipulative style continues for basically the entire first page of posts.
Admittedly everything that I've pointed out is entirely unrelated to the actual content - it may be well researched and worthy of a second chance. But there are so many blatant attempts to manipulate the reader to click click click that I find it extremely difficult to take seriously right from the start. The broken links in the OP don't help at all.
If only everyone else had the same aesthetics as you. It's probably possible to make money in the space without being blatantly manipulative, but that's much much harder. I'm glad I'm not working in the space anymore.