From this story from the UK:
Survey results published by YouGov on 15 February found that only being an author or a librarian was more attractive than a life working in higher education. [So, that's Rank # 3 out of 31 professions.]
A little later in the same story:
According to the Cabinet Office’s career “happiness index”, published last year, “higher education teaching professionals” are the 61st most contented section of the UK workforce of 274 professional areas assessed.
Richard Van Noorden in Nature: Computer model predicts academic success [of biomedical researchers].
The mantra 'publish or perish' is drilled into every early-career scientist — and for good reason, a computer model suggests. The most important predictor of success for a young biomedical scientist is the number of first-author papers published in journals with high impact factors early in a researcher's career, according to the formula.
The model, created by computer scientist Lucas Carey, at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and his collaborators, also found that, even correcting for publication records, working at a highly ranked university — and being male — are predictors of academic success.
Tim Harford: The Four Lessons of Happynomics
Kirk Doran and George Borjas in Vox: Which peers matter? The relative impacts of collaborators, colleagues, and competitors.
Research so far has been inconclusive about the effect of losing and gaining productive peers on one’s own output. This column defines peers in three distinct ways and checks which types of peers matter, focusing on mathematicians shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Losing intellectual competitors results in an increase in one’s output, whereas losing collaborators reduces it. Competition for resources and positive spillovers from high-quality peers are simultaneously at force, explaining the divergent findings in the peer effects literature.
Nicholas Thompson in The New Yorker on Tesla CEO Elon Musk's the decision to open up all his patents.
SMBC on the true significance of commencement speakers.
And, finally, a priceless gem from PhD Comics on whether professors would pass the Turing test. See also: the Professor Turing Test -- Actual Responses from Real Professors.
Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone in Vox: What Good Are Children?.
Study after study has shown that those who live with children are less satisfied with their lives than those who do not. Is there something wrong with these empirical analyses? Or is it that happiness measures are unreliable? This column argues that the results are correct but that comparisons of the wellbeing of parents and non-parents are of no help at all for people trying to decide whether to have children.
That intriguing conclusion, according to the authors, is primarily because "non-parents are not failed parents, nor are parents failed non-parents." The happiness (or lack thereof) one group cannot be compared directly with that of the other.
From here:
Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.
Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. [...] During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.
[... long snip ...]
In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.
None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”
Gretchen Vogel in Science Insider: Germany's High Court Preserves Restrictions on GM crops.
David Sosa in Opinionator: The Spoils of Happiness: "Happiness isn’t just up to you. It also requires the cooperation of the world beyond you. "
Thomas Benton in The Chronicle of Higher Education: On Gratitude in Academe
Richard Larivier in WSJ: Saving Public Universities, Starting With My Own .
Anisha on her walks at IISc:
I have just taken a long walk in the IISc campus. The rain has left a pleasant chill in the air. The fireflies have come flitting out. The tree opposite MCBL is creaking ominously to the passing bystander. The moon is calmly watching the grey clouds saunter across the sky. It has been almost a year here and I have had many walks.
The quick ‘I have to get to lab before cell recovery is over’ walks (Very annoying. No time for contemplating on the deeper meaning of science or on any deeper meanings).
The post-General Biology class philosophical banter walks (When one is overpowered by the exalted sensation of being in science nirvana and concludes that anyone who isn’t doing science should dig a pit and bury himself).
The ‘Oh-my-god, the campus looks so Photoshop-ed walks’ (A common phenomenon in the month of March when someone seems to have cranked up the colour saturation dial of the surroundings).
A study by researchers at the University of Warwick and Cardiff University has found that money only makes people happier if it improves their social rank. The researchers found that simply being highly paid wasn't enough – to be happy, people must perceive themselves as being more highly paid than their friends and work colleagues.
More here.
Two links.
Jessica Hamzelou in New Scientist on the dark side of happiness.
Jonah Lehrer in NYTimes on the bright side of depression.
On a related note, Louis Menand has a great article on Can Psychiatry Be A Science. Here's a section on the criticism (from within the profession of psychiatry itself) that a lot of conditions, which arise as a natural expected response to nasty events, are being labelled using scary terms and 'treated':
Greenberg is repeating a common criticism of contemporary psychiatry, which is that the profession is creating ever more expansive criteria for mental illness that end up labelling as sick people who are just different -— a phenomenon that has consequences for the insurance system, the justice system, the administration of social welfare, and the cost of health care.
Jerome Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University, has been calling out the D.S.M. on this issue for a number of years. In “The Loss of Sadness” (2007), Wakefield and Allan Horwitz, a sociologist at Rutgers, argue that the increase in the number of people who are given a diagnosis of depression suggests that what has changed is not the number of people who are clinically depressed but the definition of depression, which has been defined in a way that includes normal sadness. In the case of a patient who exhibits the required number of symptoms, the D.S.M. specifies only one exception to a diagnosis of depression: bereavement. But, Wakefield and Horwitz point out, there are many other life problems for which intense sadness is a natural response—being laid off, for example. There is nothing in the D.S.M. to prevent a physician from labelling someone who is living through one of these problems mentally disordered.
... and, naturally, you think about 'difficult' people and 'socially enabled psychopaths'! A couple of links:
Are you the person whom everyone finds difficult?: A self-assessment quiz at Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project.
On socially enabled psychopaths: The Godfather Paradox by the neuroscientist Dr. E.S. Krishnamoorthy (VHS Hospital, Chennai). And yes, the article has a quiz that you can take; scroll down to the bottom.
In the competitive world of business, [...] the most effective leader is often perceived as the one who “delivers” whatever the means he employs. It is in this environment that the socially enabled psychopath with his unique perceptions of reality, willingness to shift societal norms and expectations to suit his agenda, and most importantly “willingness to reason with his fellow men” using a range of strategies from charming persuasion to latent threat, comes into his own. His “killer instinct”, lack of empathy and inability to experience and empathise excessively with the pathos of his fellow men consequent to his actions, serve him well here. His actions may hurt his fellow men, or be distasteful; but in the rough and tumble modern world we inhabit, the ability to achieve tangible and productive goals profitable to his organisation and to him, without twinges of conscience or feelings of regret, is often advantageous. The modern-day CEO is, therefore, in many cases, a socially enabled psychopath [...]
* * *
This is not entirely unrelated, but do read this story in Inside Higher Ed about a most unusual attempt to deny tenure to a faculty member because of lack of collegiality'. The decision is yet to be taken.
Featured link: Drake Bennett in Boston Globe: Happiness -- A Buyer's Guide: Money can improve your life, but not in the ways you think. Here's the money quote [pardon me for the unintended pun]: “Just because money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t mean money cannot buy happiness. People just might be using it wrong.” The quote is from Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia.
See also: Jonah Lehrer's comments on this article.
Eric Wargo: The New Genetics:
The metaphor Champagne uses is a library. A library contains many books, but they don't do anything by themselves; in order to have an impact, to instruct and inspire, they have to be actually taken down from the shelves and read. The genome is the same way: Whatever information it contains, it has no effect on anything unless and until it gets transcribed (by messenger RNA) and translated into protein. "DNA, in order to be read, must be accessible; it must be unwrapped from the very condensed form in which it is stored in cells," she explained.
Janet Stemwedel in Adventures in Ethics and Science: A [favorable] ruling [a harassment case] but no remedy: what to do when a university grievance process has failed you. Lots of useful suggestions in the comments section. What's interesting for me is the variety of laws and institutions in the US that one could turn to for help.
Ethan Zuckerman at My Heart's In Accra: Cute Cate Theory of Digital Activism [and its perennial battle to overcome censorship].
Joshua Hortshome in Scientific American: Does Language Shape What We Think? A new study looks at what happens when a language doesn't have words for numbers.
Psyblog has a post on psychology of money, a round-up of recent research on money and X, where X = shopping, gambling, sex, happiness, ... Here's the abstract of what this post describes as "saddest study of all" by Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, Miranda R. Goode:
Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance. [link; the text and commentary may require subscription]
Thanks to The Situationist for the pointer.
Once again, I start with the mystery link, a blog with an interesting theme and a multiple personality disorder ...
Please don't have a nice day: WSJ's review of Eric Wilson's Against Happiness
What is the value proposition of the humanities?
On a similar note, did you know that there are quite a few arguments to support the proposition that graduate education is a public good?
Claudia Dreyfus has a fantastic interview of Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness:
Q. How does [your research] relate to understanding happiness?
A. Because if we can’t predict how we’d react in the future, we can’t set realistic goals for ourselves or figure out how to reach to them.
What we’ve been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy — or unhappy. If you can’t tell which futures are better than others, it’s hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
Q. Are you saying that people are happy with whatever cards are dealt to them?
A. As a species, we tend to be moderately happy with whatever we get. If you take a scale that goes from zero to 100, people, generally, report their happiness at about 75. We keep trying to get to 100. Sometimes, we get there. But we don’t stay long.
We certainly fear the things that would get us down to 20 or 10 — the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a serious challenge to our health. But when those things happen, most of us will return to our emotional baselines more quickly than we’d predict. Humans are wildly resilient.
Here's a crucial section:
Q. As the author of a best seller about happiness, do you have any advice on how people can achieve it?
A. I’m not Dr. Phil.
We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.
We know that it’s significantly more important than money and somewhat more important than health. That’s what the data shows. The interesting thing is that people will sacrifice social relationships to get other things that won’t make them as happy — money. That’s what I mean when I say people should do “wise shopping” for happiness.
Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t.
Bhutan takes a decisive step towards democracy, with its first elections tomorrow.
Gurcharan Das's latest column has a Godwin's law index of 0 (or 1, depending on how you count). The target? Raj Thackeray.
We all know Delhi is far ahead of the rest of the country on many counts (except its female to male ratio). How far ahead? Find out for yourself.
But "the catch is: you have to spend [the money] on someone else."
And here's a bonus:
Sharon Begley reports in Newsweek: Happiness: Enough Already.
Eric Wilson, author of Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, in the Chronicle: In Praise of Melancholy.
Olivia Judson has a great article on evolutionary origins of altruism: The Selfless Gene.
How does a propensity for self-sacrifice evolve? And what about the myriad lesser acts of daily kindness—helping a little old lady across the street, giving up a seat on the subway, returning a wallet that’s been lost? Are these impulses as primal as ferocity, lust, and greed? Or are they just a thin veneer over a savage nature?
Jonathan Haidt discusses his research on moral inspiration in a short article in Greater Good: Wired to be Inspired (pdf).
In their column, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang cite summarize the research on the link between physical exercise and brain health:
One form of training, however, has been shown to maintain and improve brain health — physical exercise. In humans, exercise improves what scientists call “executive function,” the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party.
Executive function starts to decline when people reach their 70s. But elderly people who have been athletic all their lives have much better executive function than sedentary people of the same age. This relationship might occur because people who are healthier tend to be more active, but that’s not the whole story. When inactive people get more exercise, even starting in their 70s, their executive function improves, as shown in a recent meta-analysis of 18 studies. ...
... [P]sychological well-being moves along a U-shaped curve as we age. ... Happiness among American men and women reaches its estimated minimum at approximately ages 49 and 45 respectively. Among European men and women, life satisfaction levels are at their minimum at ages 44 at 43 respectively.
That's from this NBER commentary on the work of David G. Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald (which I haven't read). Here are some of the plausible reasons for why happiness levels pick up after reaching the minimum:
... [F]irst, ... individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell the unfeasible aspirations of their youth. Second, ... cheerful people live systematically longer than those who are miserable, and that the U-shape somehow traces out, in part, a selection effect. Third, ... a kind of comparison process is occurring - for example, I may have seen school-friends die and as a result eventually come to value my blessings during my remaining years.
What about this finding (articulated in a Daniel Gilbert column)?
Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives, becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away. When the popular press invented a malady called "empty-nest syndrome," it failed to mention that its primary symptom is a marked increase in smiling.
