The Good Life

Really nice job discussing the meaning of heritability! I, too, get frustrated when I see the media, laypeople, students and even other academics make errors in interpreting heritability coefficients. Your post is very important.

Sincerely,
Scott

"These figures [weights] are sometimes offered to the public as a guide to what might be most worthwhile to change in order to achieve greater happiness. However, the causes for change in an individual's happiness might diverge from what causes differences in happiness between individuals ... one person might gain an enormous boost in happiness from becoming religious, even if the amount of individual differences in due to religion in a population is modest ... The pie-chart way of thinking is seductive, because it is clear and simple, but ... [it can be] ... misguided."

This is a very important clarification when talking about the multitude of factors that contribute to happiness.

Very informative and thought-provoking article!

Chris, I am going to have all my students read this parsimonious explanation of heritability. Somewhere along the way, people in the positive psychology community (not just the media) started to accept the pie as an absolute fact. As if that wasn't enough, they used the pie to justify why people should seek their services- consulting, coaching, etc.

your blog continues to be a joy to read (and you know I don't dole out indiscriminate praise).

hope you had a great holiday

cheers,
Todd

I feel that in taking account from what this type of analysis of happiness stems from one needs to consider not comparing it to the analysis of mortality, but the modern state of analysis of sources of un-happiness.

If you're going to refute the methods of one, you're also refuting the methods of another.

Links between hereditary or environmental depression factors to people's current states of un-happiness are accepted as valid medical diagnosis tools. But still, the state of the opposite (happiness) has to fight for qualification under the same methods.

One could argue that this stems from unfair treatment of a topic that seems "hippie-esque" to academia and pharma, the state of people who are already happy. But I posit a different argument.

The definition of happiness lives inside the definition of a person who is happy and the attribution of obliviousness to said character, just as we would ascribe obliviousness of understanding depression to a depressed individual.

I posit that the measure of either be tied to the level of oblivion rather than happiness or unhappiness.

A state of balance and how well one manages it, instead of the polarities of happiness or unhappiness. Measured by how deeply the individual parses where his feelings are originating from, past or present, and what weight he assigns to the very act of emotional observation & parsing, and why.

Ultimately I feel the underlying factor in the most naturally happy people is the level of self-awareness and the inevitable devices they create to work with life's ups and downs. The devices themselves likely weighing in quality based on the quality and persistence of emotional observation in said individuals.

Absolut Super Comment, das wollte ich selbst auch schon Mal schreiben, wusste nur niemals wie ich dies niederschreiben konnte !

Da frage ich mich beim groben Uberfliegen ja schon, ob man selbst nicht irgendwie auf den Kopf gefallen war. Herzlichen Dank fur eure Erlauterungen