Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–137 of 137 posts

Re: Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression

#131

Post by pizza »

racer-v wrote: post #130
lliamander wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, there is a personality trait, Neuroticism, which has to do with sensitivity to negative emotion, and also does correlate with depression, anxiety, etc. In other words, if you are higher in Neuroticism (i.e. more susceptible to negative emotions) then you are more likely to also develop clinical depression.

What is the state of personality theory constructs with respect to empirical validation (e.g. fMRI)?

As for fMRI, while it's not particularly under existential threat re:empiricism, it's not necessarily a silver bullet: http://blog.brainfacts.org/2016/07/are-fmri-data-analysis-me...

Personally, my opinion is that the ambiguity of people's self-perceptions of their persona allows there to be an asymmetry between the harm they might get receiving advice about their personality and the benefit they might get from heeding advice about personalities that they can at least envision themselves as being perceived by others as having, if that makes sense. It probably isn't particularly empirical, but I don't know if we will get to a science of personality within our lifetimes (but (maybe..?) it would be nice to be proved wrong).

Re: Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression

#132

Post by brad0 »

Personally I believe that depression is caused when you're not doing what you want (or you're not aware of what you want).

By not doing what you find rewarding your brain doesn't have enough dopamine running through your system.

It's still a concept in development so I'm open to any counter arguments.

Re: Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression

#133

Post by xelxebar »

roenxi wrote: post #115
xelxebar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue with that stance is that a lot of human suffering happens because others claim it is "out of their control" to do anything. Dividing things into the two buckets "in my control" and "out if my control" allows a lot of leeway for us to excuse selfish behavior. I think it's prudent to make it out business to get control over and fix things that are actively causing harm. Or as Raymond Chen might say, "Be…

From a super-simple perspective, a community that grows exponentially _will_ eventually have very few resources per head. If, as a starting point, someone believes the population is growing exponentially then they likely also believe it doesn't matter if they try to be selfish or not. There will be a lot of people with limited resources and that is probably going to reduce their quality of life. Now there are a lot o…

> So I'm pretty happy to excuse [selfishness] until I see arguments with more facts than 'I think' or implicit 'selfishness is bad it sounds unfriendly'.

This is a really good point.

To remove the moral overtones, I like to think of selfishness as local vs global optimization. The prisoner's dilemma is a great (abstract) example where "locally optimal" or "selfish" behaviour creates a situation where everyone is individually worse off than they need to be.

In the real world, this kind of situation is especially visible in urban planning and traffic control. Things like lane widening or adding a new road can famously worsen traffic congestion. Lane mergers is another. The "zipper merge" is known to produce shorter queues and fewer accidents, but individuals have motive to "cheat" and merge earlier in these cases, which ends up causing worse traffic for everyone.

Personally, I find this game theoretic view point of "selfishness" to generate more precise and relevant questions than the more morally-tinted stances. Maybe that kind of thing is up your alley.

Re: Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression

#134

Post by tehramz »

wolfgke wrote: post #119
sol_remmy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that kind of thinking, why are you even posting here? Why do you allow yourself any leisure time when people in the world are starving?

> With that kind of thinking, why are you even posting here? Why do you allow yourself any leisure time when people in the world are starving? Indeed. I tell people all the time that poor/starving people should stop having children so that poverty or having to starve "dies out". I post here so that this message gets a much larger audience.

Yeah, that’s gonna work. If I was poor and starving, sex might be one of the only escapes I had.

Re: Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression

#136

Post by wolfgke »

tehramz wrote: post #134
wolfgke wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With that kind of thinking, why are you even posting here? Why do you allow yourself any leisure time when people in the world are starving? Indeed. I tell people all the time that poor/starving people should stop having children so that poverty or having to starve "dies out". I post here so that this message gets a much larger audience.

Yeah, that’s gonna work. If I was poor and starving, sex might be one of the only escapes I had.

> If I was poor and starving, sex might be one of the only escapes I had.

The only way in which sex helps you escape from poverty or starving is prostitution.

Re: Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up with Depression

#137

Post by LordRatte »

wolfgke wrote: post #136
tehramz wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that’s gonna work. If I was poor and starving, sex might be one of the only escapes I had.

> If I was poor and starving, sex might be one of the only escapes I had. The only way in which sex helps you escape from poverty or starving is prostitution.

I would imagine that in most cases it offsets poverty and starvation rather than escape from it.
Post reply on HN