Tag Archives: happiness

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Oct ’11)

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Only a couple of articles for this month and one of them is a general feature about a subject rather than a recent discovery. But anyway:

  •  The feature in question is an article on how intelligent octopuses are from Orion Magazine. There are interesting anecdotes in there about how they can recognize and form relationships with humans, solve puzzles and engage in playful behavior with toys. My favorite part is how three-fifths of their neurons aren’t in their brain at all but in their arms, which allows the arms to act independently even when severed from the main body.
  • The other article is from The Economist and is about how happiness not only has a genetic component but that due to genetics, different races may have different levels of ingrained tendencies to be happy. The mechanism the  team in question fingered is a gene that encodes the serotonin-transporter protein. This gene comes in two variants, a long one and a short one, and the team found that those with the long versions were more likely to report themselves as being happy. Where things get really interesting is that different ethnic groups tend to more of one variant of the gene than the other. Black Americans for example tend to favor the long version of the gene while Asian Americans tend to mostly have the short version. ‘Lo and behold this blends in nicely with observations that newly rich Asia reports far lower levels of happiness than their GDP per person figures suggest. This also adds weight to earlier findings that societies composed of people with the short version of the genes lean towards collectivist political systems that emphasize social harmony and de-emphasize individual independence and freedom.
Games, Philosophy

What makes a game fun?

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As someone who has been a gamer since I first laid hands on the original IBM Personal Computer in primary school, the question of what actually makes a game “fun” is something that I often ponder. This recently popped on QT3 as a loosely related tangent in a discussion on whether or not gaming can be an addiction. One particular poster made an observation so insightful that I simply need to put it here:

What games actually do, imho, is give you sheer, unadulterated happiness.

How? The reason is simple. A psychologist called Mihaly Czikzhentmihalyi (sp?) discovered (I think in the 60s and 70s) through extensive questionnaires with statistically quite large samples, the secret of ordinary human happiness, and it’s laughably simple – basically, if you go through life setting measurable goals that are just outside your comfort zone to attain, and then attain those goals, and then move on to pick a new, slightly higher-level goal, etc., etc., etc., you will be happy.

It’s exactly this progression of increasing powers and ever-increasingly-difficult goals that games give you in a miniature, abstract form, and that make them so addictive – little jags of happiness as you set and attain mini-goals, constantly excelling yourself in skill, the attainment of lewt, the discovery of new stuff, etc., etc.

Of course, theoretically, we should all be getting that kind of happiness in real life, through our careers, family, etc., and most of us probably do, but sometimes life isn’t so forthcoming, things are difficult, and it’s nice to have a happiness-producing substitute.

In a response to a question from me, he posted a link to Wikipedia about the research he cited which is here. Pretty interesting stuff, no? I hope to expand on this later.

News & Politics, Philosophy

Economic growth is good

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This post is an expansion of comments that I’ve made in response to posts made in De Minimis. In a way, it seems odd that I would need to make this post at all. After all, everyone instinctively feels that becoming wealthier is a good thing, right? So what possible arguments might one advance to claim the opposite? There are many levels to the critique made in De Minimis, and in his defense, he appears to acknowledge that this is a train of thought that is still in the making. Still, as I understand it, the argument against economic growth falls largely into the following two groups:

  1. Economic growth is bad for the environment and depletes the Earth’s finite resources in an unsustainable manner.
  2. Striving for material wealth may not necessarily bring about the desired happiness and the stress and conflict this cause may actually turn out not to be worth the struggle.

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