How to Be Happy

At the time in my life when I stopped reading LessWrong I became remarkably happier within a week. I attribute this to two reasons: 1. LessWrong's focus on optimizing your life is so great that whenever I failed at something or didn't uphold something I said I would do I felt bad about it. 2. One thing that makes me happy (and I think most others would agree they're happiest when this occurs as well) is accomplishment. I like the feeling of working on a goal and having that lead to tangible results, whether that means something I've created or something like lifting more weight in the gym.

By actually making a change to how I act and seeing the results of that change in the world I developed a lot of confidence (I was formerly very shy and uncomfortable with myself despite having a lot of things going for me).

I want to come back to the first point briefly as well. At the time I was reading LW it often felt like I was being productive. I'd think to myself "oh I just need to read this article on motivation and acrasia (the LW term for procrastination), and I'll never fail to do what I planned to do again. This caused me to spend my time preparing to do things that I never ended up doing, and it also set me up to feel angry with myself when I inevitably failed.

One thing that helped me a lot was accepting that on top of everything we humans have going for us we're really just animals, and we get upset, or jealous, or sad, or angry, just like any other animal. So rather than try to eliminate these negative emotions from my life I came to accept them as normal and try to structure my life so that they occur as infrequently as possible. I've found a few ways of doing this that work for me, and I can post some of what's worked if anyone's interested. I still have bad days or bad moments, but when I do I accept it as normal and try to see what I can learn from it to lessen the impact next time, rather than trying to over-optimize the life of an unpredictable, fallible human making most of the important decisions in his life based on emotion (hint: that's all of us).

The allure of LW is that we're perfectly rational or that we can at least make ourselves that we through sheer force of will. For better or for worse (I think for better) that's not the case.

If by "null hypothesis", you mean artificial intelligence that exceeds human intelligence is impossible, that is a bold claim. Since human intelligence is nothing more than a successful evolutionary algorithm implemented in 3-dimensional cellular networks, it is inevitable that we'll be able to copy and improve the algorithm at some point in the future. Then we'll have artificial intelligence that exceeds human intelligence. Then what?

I think that's right, and it's probably even pretty compatible with what I suggest.

What I think is dangerous is adopting the underlying philosophy that your intuition is inherently wrong and in need of salvation from reason.

In this, as with every other area of human improvement, there's a balance to be struck between recognising your current state as "good enough" (even that has a derogatory ring to it) while not isolating you from the fact that there's almost always almost infinite room for improvement. And I think the cult of reason and LW in particular is bad at recognising and respecting a "good enough" state.

Or put another way, imagine if the most popular software engineering website was "YoureNotAsGoodAsJohnCarmack.com".

> 1. If you suffer from serious illness, depression, anxiety, paranoia, schizophrenia, or other serious problems, seek professional help first. Here's how.

Link is broken. :-(

Also nowhere in the list of happiness suggestions are volunteering and helping others to be found. Says to practice gratitude by appreciating all the good things you have, but never to actually help those less fortunate than you.

The message is happiness is easy, as long as you aren't living below the poverty line or dealing with major problems in your life. Well plenty of people are dealing with both and could really use your help. Helping others might fulfill the gratitude and 'meaningful job' portions of this vanity list too.

I think it's easier to see the relations once you substitute everything in. I combined the perception terms instead of cancelling since presumably they're different, but here you go:

  Happiness = Perception * (1 / Happiness) * Skill * Circumstance / Others' Actual Life
  Happiness^2 = Perception * Skill * Circumstance / Others' Actual Life
  Happiness = +-sqrt(Perception * Skill * Circumstance / Others' Actual Life)

I'm not certain about the negative root there; maybe that's depression? Otherwise, looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Square_root_0_25.svg, it seems reasonable; improving one of perception/skill/circumstance if it's near-zero will improve your happiness drastically, but it's a relatively slow-growing function so improving happiness after that has diminishing returns.

Also, as you mention we never defined the terms. I believe all of these are generally measured on self-administered surveys with "rate X" scales, and so are just percentages with no units.

Finally, the terms don't have any obvious correlations with the post, so I just stuck in the things that were mentioned that seemed relevant:

* Happiness - see eqn., you can't affect this directly

* Skill - conscientiousness, self-esteem, optimism, feelings of purpose and fulfillment

* Others' Actual Life - income and wealth

* Circumstance - genes (health?), extroversion, "flow"

* Perception - paying attention to your situation/actions/feelings and in particular adjusting your estimates of success/failure chance to match reality (humans deal very badly with probabilities) - includes "agreeableness" (understanding of others), "memory" (perceptions of self being happy), and "mindfulness" (perceptions of world)