Categories
Happiness

Smiling scientists

One of my nephews is working on his PhD in physics. So the following info may be useful to him besides just being interesting on its own.

Theory and research indicates that people with more positive emotions are better at attaining goals at work and in everyday life.

Does the expression of genuine positive emotions by scientists positively correlate with work-related accomplishments? Those accomplishments are the number of citations of their papers and the number of followers for their scholarly updates.

Using publicly available photographs of 440 scientists from a social networking site for researchers, multiple raters coded the smile intensities in the photos (full smile, partial smile, or no smile). The scientists with full smiles had the same quantity of publications but they had more citations per paper. The authors with full smiles attracted more followers to their updates compared to less positive emotionally expressive peers.

The results remained after controlling for age and sex. So no matter how serious you feel on the inside, if you want your work more widely distributed you should smile broadly in photos.

Categories
Happiness Health Ideas

Cautiously Optimistic

There’s lots of seemingly bad news every day.

But there’s always been bad news.

And now with more bandwidth available, I think we’re just taking taking in more info. Then combine that wit the human bias toward the negative that comes baked in to help with survival during our millennia spent in the wild as hunter gatherers.

The world’s population will begin trending downward sometime in the next decades.

Most people are unaware of the positive changes in our world. Read Hans Roling’s book “Factfulness” and you’ll see that even the folks who should know about positive trends don’t know about them. You’ll be surprised.

Educating women leads to women having less children.

Cities are more efficient than country living and so are effectively “greener.”

Most poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration rather than  redistribution or philanthropy.

Think about this rapid change. In 1949, 75% of Chinese women were illiterate. But today China has one of the lowest rates of female illiteracy in the world — as well as the highest percentage of self-made female billionaires.

There’re lots of positive things happening, but they’re generally overshadowed by the negative news we constantly get.

 

Categories
Ideas

Did humans self-domesticate?

Recent archaeological evidence suggests that humans became increasingly docile and less reactively aggressive around the time of becoming Homo sapiens, a process that started about 300,000 years ago.

There are certain changes that appear in human fossils that also appear in domesticated animals.

There’re four bone characteristics of domesticated animals. They tend to have smaller bodies than their wild ancestors. Their faces tend to be shorter. Differences between males and females are less. And they tend to have smaller brain cavities (and brains). Our brain size increased steadily over the last two million years, until about 30,000 years ago, when our brains started becoming smaller.

As language became sufficiently sophisticated, our ancestors’ increased communication ability led not only to a more peaceful species but also to new kinds of hierarchy. The physical force of an individual was no longer the prerequisite for ruling human groups. Once capital punishment came along, then anyone aspiring to control the group by force couldn’t get away with just being a killer. He had to be a politician, too.

The result of such selective pressure over generations means that maybe human beings are an animal species that’s been domesticated — like dogs, horses or chickens.

Categories
Happiness Ideas

Stop going to the circus

When is time to stop going to the circus?

If you started seeing reports about a large number of clowns molesting young children at  circuses, would you continue going to the circus? Probably not, especially if you have kids.

Why should the Catholic church get a pass (over and over) for priests who are child rapists? What about the continued cover ups and the slap-on-the-wrist punishments for the offenders ?

Revelations in the Catholic church’s decades-long child-rape and sex abuse scandals revealed “a repulsive institution — or at least one permeated by repulsive human beings who reward one another for repulsive acts, all the while deigning to lecture the world about its sin.” That was situation described by a Catholic as the straw that broke the camel’s back, compelling him to finally leave the church. 

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Uncategorized

2019 update of “so far”

When you’re used to a website, noticing changes on it can be tough.

So here’s a heads up. I’ve just updated the “so far” page for this blog. “So far” is where I’ve compiled some of the best ideas from more than 600 blog posts.

Categories
Happiness Ideas

Notes from not giving a f*ck

These are some book notes and takeaways from Dereck Sivers he came away with from Mark Manson’s book, “THE SUBLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK.”

The key to a good life is giving a fuck about less, and giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important. Learn how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively – how to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finely honed personal values.

Say “fuck it” to everything unimportant in life.

The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.

What most pampered people consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.

Suffering is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.

Happiness comes from solving problems. To be happy we need something to solve.

Nobody who’s actually happy stands in front of a mirror and tells himself that he’s happy.

If you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved. Negative emotions are a call to action and positive emotions are rewards for taking the proper action.

Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it’s bad. Emotions are merely signposts or suggestions. Make a habit of questioning them.

People over-identify with their emotions. Emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, sucks.

I was in love with the result, but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. The common cultural narratives would tell me that I gave up on my dream. The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.

The easier and more problem-free our lives become, the more we seem to feel entitled for them to get even better.

Technology has solved old economic problems and given us new psychological problems.

The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so because they’re obsessed with improvement, which stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. It’s anti-entitlement.

The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay. Accepting your mundane existence will free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.

If what we value is poorly chosen, then everything will be out of whack.

Good values are
1) reality-based
2) socially constructive
3) immediate and controllable.

Bad values are
1) superstitious
2) socially destructive
3) not immediate or controllable.

If you’re miserable in your current situation, it’s because you feel like some part of it is outside your control – it’s a problem you have no ability to solve, or a problem that was thrust upon you without your choosing.

William James conducted a little experiment. Spend one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he’d do everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood of failure. James would later refer to his little experiment as his “rebirth,” and would credit it with everything that he later accomplished in his life.

We are responsible for everything in our lives. We always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.

Change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else. It really is that simple. It’s just not easy.

An educated mind can entertain a thought without accepting it.

If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.

To build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly.

The only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or one person.

Travel shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function.

Categories
Health

Health test

Can you climb four flights of stairs at a fast pace in under a minute without stopping? If you can, you have good functional capacity. If not, it’s probably a sign you need more exercise.

This exercise data was crosschecked against heart attacks, strokes and deaths for 11 years or so after each study participant’s last clinic visit.

The findings were dramatic: The risk of experiencing these events was roughly 50 percent lower for those who lifted weights occasionally, compared with those who never did — even when they were not doing the recommended endurance exercise.

The people who lifted weights twice a week, for about an hour in total, had the greatest declines in risk.

“The good news,” says a co-author of the study, “is that we found substantial heart benefits associated with a very small amount of resistance exercise.” As an associational study, the results show only that people who occasionally lift weights happen to have healthier hearts — not that resistance training directly reduces heart-related health risks.

The data, though, does reveal associations between weight lifting and a lower body mass index, which might be connected to fewer heart problems.

The specifics of which exercises people were doing — lat pull-downs? dead lifts? squats? — or how many repetitions they did or at what level of resistance is unknown. But don’t wait.  It’s probably a good idea to lift some weights while the researchers figure out what the exact exercises were.

Categories
Happiness

Definitely a black swan

Black swans are unforeseen, unusually large occurrences that have catastrophic results. For example, a huge volcanic eruption is a black swan event.

Almost every unusually cold summer over the past 2500 years was preceded by a volcanic eruption.

A really bad year for humanity and probably one of the worst years to be alive was 536 AD.

In early 536 a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash that drifted across the Northern Hemisphere. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547.

The resulting fog in 536 plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night for 18 months. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Crops failed. People starved. Snow fell that summer in China.

Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck a Roman port in Egypt and spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire.

Volcanic ash followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640. Kinda puts things in perspective.

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Happiness Uncategorized

Lotteries

Facts about lotteries fromTyler Cowen:

The $29.8 billion Americans spent on the lottery in 1995 worked out to about $112 per capita. Today, per capita spending is up to $225 dollars a year. Part of that is the result of more states jumping on the lotto bandwagon.

If we subtract the 73 million people under age 18, and divide the remaining 250 million in half (since only 49 percent buy a lotto ticket in a given year), it works out to $600 a year in expenses for the average lotto player.

Some survey data show that a disproportionate share of regular lottery players fall into low-income brackets.

Massachusetts leads the nation with an astonishing $767 in annual per capita lotto spending. It’s followed by West Virginia ($594), Rhode Island ($513), Delaware ($421) and New York ($421).

Categories
Happiness

Thanksgiving and Happiness

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving.

Giving thanks for the small and large things in your life is important because happiness doesn’t lead to gratitude, gratitude leads to happiness.

It’s import to be grateful on a daily basis if you can rather than waiting until you’re happy before you’re grateful.