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

A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 175 posts

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#71

Post by fragsworth »

tokenadult wrote: post #45

This kind of correlational study is awash in survivorship bias, and may not even apply to age cohorts born in a different society in a different era. Most likely, the study results neither show what is sufficient for a happy life for all nor what is necessary for a happy life for anyone. It would take an experimental study design with a study population more representative of the broad range of present-day people (no…

Agreed; this study seems to only find correlations between parenting and happiness/success in life.

What if some children grow up in certain ways regardless of how they're raised, and this is what causes them to have shitty relationships with their parents? Maybe some kids don't get good parenting simply because they became little shits? And then this carried on into their lives?

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#72

Post by jl6 »

singular wrote: post #15

Ack. Reliable or not, I'm sure it was meant as a feel-good piece, but for people like me the quote:- "Vaillant’s key takeaway, in his own words: “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points … to a straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’" Is actually very depressing. I am 5'5" so have this (if you've not encountered it you are unlikely to be aware)…

Sorry if this sounds harsh, I mean no harm, just asking you to consider...

There are plenty of women out there who would be happy to date you. You are the one filtering them out. Consider women over 40 and women with children. Those groups have huge problems finding men. Works both ways.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#73

Post by btilly »

insickness wrote: post #40
Amadou wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't have a link for you, but I've recently read that one of the problems that many parents who live in poverty have is that they simply do not know what is necessary to be a good parent. The specific example was with respect to talking to infants - that talking to children who do not yet have the power of speech makes an enormous difference in the development of verbal and cognitive ability. Rich infants h…

I'd like to see your data on this and whether the studies they did corrected for genetics. A lot of these studies like where parents talked to their kids more and the kids ended up being smarter ended up being proven false because there was no 'control' in these groups, children who were adopted, etc. Check out Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. This talk sums it up pretty well: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_c…

Overly enriched environments might or might not matter. But deprived environments in early childhood demonstrably hurts. A lot.

The cause is that in the first few years of life we lose unused connections between neurons. If a child does not have a primary care giver, then a lot of the connections lost are necessary for proper social and cognitive development, and the child is impaired for life in ways which are clear in the physical structure of the brain.

This has been known for decades, yet still periodically someone somewhere that still has orphanages rediscovers this basic fact. (The most recent example that I heard about involved children in Romania.)

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#74

Post by nitrogen »

fragsworth wrote: post #71
tokenadult wrote: post #45

This kind of correlational study is awash in survivorship bias, and may not even apply to age cohorts born in a different society in a different era. Most likely, the study results neither show what is sufficient for a happy life for all nor what is necessary for a happy life for anyone. It would take an experimental study design with a study population more representative of the broad range of present-day people (no…

Agreed; this study seems to only find correlations between parenting and happiness/success in life. What if some children grow up in certain ways regardless of how they're raised, and this is what causes them to have shitty relationships with their parents? Maybe some kids don't get good parenting simply because they became little shits? And then this carried on into their lives?

Unless you don't believe in a physicalistic universe, in which case there's not much point in science, a child's personality is formed entirely by its environment and genetics, both of which start with the parents.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#75

Post by nitrogen »

oblique63 wrote: post #67
zalzane wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's no cerebral solution to that problem short of going out there and making yourself look like an idiot until you don't looks like an idiot anymore.

Now, I find myself to be a pretty darn introverted mofo internally (I line up perfectly as a full-out INTP on the Myers-Briggs scale if that means anything to anybody), but I've found that socializing is just as useful of a skill as programming or playing a musical instrument. Sure, I find it to be significantly more tiring than either of those two activities, and I'm not nearly as proficient at it as I'd like to be,…

Imagine that learning social skills from scratch is like tuning a feedback loop. You need to have something in the loop to begin with in order to tune it. If you're a child, good news, you can just feed your imagination's random number generator into the loop and see what happens. If you're an adult though, you might find yourself with absolutely no starting data on which to iterate, and your internal RNG has been forcibly shut down by growing up.

It's like trying to run Newton's method with NaN as your starting value, or like you're trying to follow a linked list, but your ->next pointer infinitely redirects to itself.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#77

Post by ma2rten »

nostromo wrote: post #11
auctiontheory wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The research on mothering style may be highly predictive, but unless I'm missing something, it isn't actionable or "useful."

It's useful to parents.

What would interest me is what effect this has on parents. I would suspect that caring for a child has an equally good effect on the parents as it has on the child.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#78

Post by duaneb »

zalzane wrote: post #32

I hate it when these things pop up because they turn problems into self-fulling prophecies. I hate being around my mother. I've never had a relationship with a girl in my entire life. I drown my sorrows into a mug of beer every friday. I barely get by as is - and have to work my ass off harder than everyone around me to get anything done. And now I come across this article that says it's likely I'll make 6 figs less…

Why is that depressing? Odds are its not those six figures that make them happier.

Re: A 75-Year Harvard Study Finds What It Takes To Live A Happy Life

#79

Post by duaneb »

zalzane wrote: post #55
mercuryrising wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you happy?

Working, solving problems. Days where I can work on my side projects for the entire day without being interrupted are like a gift from god. I hate being around people because it comes down to either just sitting there and listening to other people converse, or trying to contribute to a conversation and making a fool of myself.

Much of socialization is making a fool of yourself---and other people spending time with you anyway. I socialize to get out of my head, and it sounds like you could use it too.
Post reply on HN