Is the Secret to Happiness Anticipation?

June 16th, 2012   by   Andrew

The Optimism Bias - a self-serving bias where a person believes they are at less risk than someone else of having to go through a bad experience.

Or, in other words, we all think we are above the average in almost everything… which could be a statistical problem.

Tali Sharot has done some research and found about 80% of us suffer from the optimism bias. And here’s a tricky thing – You can’t just eliminate or neutralize the optimism bias. Sharot thinks we can learn something from it, and learn something about ourselves too.

Some Notes:

Is the secret to happiness low expectations?

Well, not really. According to Sharot, people with higher expectations tend to feel better regardless of outcomes.

Is Anticipation the key to happiness?

If you think you want something, and if you think you’ll get it three days from now, those three days will be happier than if you get it immediately or wait a long time for it.

The Weekend Effect

People look forward to Friday, even though it is often a workday. But, with Friday comes the anticipation of the weekend. A lot of people like Friday over Sunday. Go figure.

Feelings Affect Subjective Reality, But Also Influence Objective Reality

Stress and anxiety have a direct effect on your health, for example. You change your physical world, your physical body, by what you think about and what you do.

We need to be able to imagine a different reality, and believe we can create that reality.

Otherwise we don’t change things. But at the same time, if we simply leap at things too much, probabilities will very likely catch up to us quickly.

 

This TED talk put a lot of things into perspective for me. Teen angst, for example, is much more understandable now. If a person is upset about something, but feels there is no way to change it at all, then this can create a horrible, all-consuming trap of emotions.

I think this has something to say about religion and religious belief too. Faith, as in belief in magical beings with supernatural influence, isn’t so aesthetically pleasing anymore. The word “faith” itself can cause an almost allergic reaction in people. However, faith as in the motivation to be optimistic, and to be persistent in pursuing what you want, or the belief that what you want is worth pursuing with all your effort, could have some advantages in this game of life.

This means we have to be all the more responsible for our personal motivations, I think, and to that end, more responsible for our personal gods. (Faith gives power to act rather than faith gives justification for getting your way. And with any power comes responsibility, according to Uncle Ben from Spiderman…)

What do you think?

Do you see some advantages to the optimism bias?

Do you see some dangers?

Do you enjoy (or suffer from) the optimism bias?

 

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Sunday TED: Hans Rosling on Religions and Babies

May 27th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

The world is having less babies?

Hans Rosling is fascinated by statistics and information. He has studied trends in the birth rates of countries around the world. He has put together a kind of story of the last 50 years that suggests we can have a healthy, robust world without buying into the belief that we need bigger and bigger families.

The love of statistics is a form of emerging aesthetics. Rosling uses a program that animates statistical trends. Rosling also sees statistics as a way to wade through the “river of myths” in which we live.

So, what does he have to say about Religions and Babies?

Women are having fewer and fewer babies. Why?

You don’t have to get rich to have fewer children. It looks like you need some social stability (less war) and some education.

Some Key Points:

High mortality rates = fast population growth

Stable lifestyles with less overall poverty = slower population growth

Births decrease when:

1. Children survive
2. Many children are not needed for labour
3. Women get education and join the labour force
4. Family planning is accessible

The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion, but it may not grow much higher after that.

“The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child.”

Religion has very little to do with the number of children in a family. We may believe religions are a cause, but something else is clearly going on as well. Economics and education say more than belief.

 

Earlier in this series I brought up the Myth of Growth. We often think of good economics or finances as growth in terms of percentages. We often assume that growth in families should just be expected. And yet all across the world, we are responding to a more stable, educated, and global lifestyle by having smaller families.

What do you think?

What do we desire more? – growth or balance?

- – -

Hans Rosling is a medical doctor, disease researcher, statistician and took part in the television documentary The Joy of Stats. Here is his wikipedia page, and here is another one of his TED talks (kind of similar to the one above, but more about life expectancies).

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Posted in art, Beyond Belief, education, myth, psychology, Science, story | 2 Comments »


Sunday TED – Turning the World Inside Out with Art

May 20th, 2012   by   Andrew

I picked today’s TED talk because of this one image.  In Israel, a group set up a photobooth. People walking by were invited to get their photo taken. The printed photos inspired a mass demonstration (well, a group demonstration), with people waving signs of themselves in the air.

What were they demonstrating?

Well, themselves.

Not political leaders or party colours. Not religious zealotry, in particular. The demonstration was an attempt to make themselves their message.

The artist JR wants to turn the world inside out. He is fascinated with faces and large, gripping installations. In a sense, he is making individuals into art, and getting individuals to take part in how they are seen by the world. Individuals become part of the recognized environment.

I think people demonstrating for themselves rather than for their leaders or their political ideologies might be a good start.

JR had a TED Prize wish: a worldwide photo project to show the world its true face. To see what has come of his wish, check out the Inside Out Project.

What do you think?

Is the world changing?

- – -

Aside: apparently JR messed up a little in the geography of one of his stories. See if you can spot it.

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Sunday TED – Frans De Waal Gets a Morality Lesson from Chimps

April 22nd, 2012   by   Andrew

Why do we reconcile after a fight?

Well, why would animals reconcile after a fight?

Frans de Waal has spent a lot of time with apes. He was fascinated with how some of the animals he studied were obsessed with power. Or, why the researchers that studied animals were obsessed with how animals were obsessed with power. The more he studied the animals (and the researchers), the more the story changed.

de Waal collects some fun footage of chimps and elephants displaying cooperative behaviour and synchronization. There is also some evidence of underlying motivations behind the animal behaviour.

de Waal suggests there are two ‘pillars’ of morality that can be studied more with respect to animals:

Reciprocity – fairness

Empathy – compassion

He also puts in a fun little dig at academics and philosophers that scoffed at his studies, unable to play with the idea that animals could have anything to tell us about such things.

I thought this was a neat example of how people, even in the academic and scientific community, deal with new information that challenges their perceptions of things.

What do you think? Should we pay more attention to the moral lessons and new information other animals can teach us?

- – -

There is a series of videos from a youtuber named Evid3nc3, that I want to include in my Sunday videos. However, I felt like keeping things a little more light and fun right now. Thanks again to the Wise Fool for letting me know about Evid3nc3 – definitely a video series worth thinking about.

 

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Posted in Behaviour, Belief, Beyond Belief, education, Philosophy, psychology, Religion, Science, story | 6 Comments »


Faith and Food – Sunday TED with Jamie Oliver

April 1st, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

Shannon (my wife) has been on a food fixation for a little while. The more she learns, the more fascinating and frightening things appear.

We’ve been watching documentaries and movies like Hungry for Change, Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc.

Since my fixation has to do with religious issues, I found myself wondering if the problem presented in each of the films was one of faith.

You see, generally speaking, western religions have put a high value on faith, being trust in things unseen. With more and more of the world’s population concentrating into cities, more and more of what sustains our culture and our diet becomes unseen.

In the case of food, we don’t see what is going into the producing, processing and transporting of our daily meals. But the level of trust is incredibly high.

One of the films talks of the process of refining and the problem of addiction it can produce. Sugarcane as a plant is somewhat mild in its effect on us. However, refined white sugar (sucrose) appeals to a biological desire within us to increase our glucose. Similar things are happening in the processing of corn (fructose), tobacco (nicotine) and wheat (refined white flour).

Faith in this refined age seems to have changed into something like blind addiction to the things we most desire but don’t understand.

It does little good to blame governments or make a devil out of corporations. They were built out of human motivations to serve some need and to change how we live. And we should probably be open and frank about the amount of work that goes into feeding billions of people. After all, over half of us now live in cities, effectively not contributing but simply consuming food.

Faith, being trust in things unseen, can very easily slip into trust in the easiest thing, or trust in things I don’t understand.

I picked and old TED talk for today from Jamie Oliver. In particular, his language caught my attention. He found many young school kids couldn’t identify vegetables and didn’t know what they were digesting. He found that people were eating unhealthy diets, but it was mostly because they didn’t know anything different. They trusted the system and lifestyle around them. He believes we have to look differently at food. But his belief is going to take effort and education (and a lot less sugar).

Maybe faith needs to change too. Maybe faith cannot serve as an easy and all consuming answer. Instead, we have to build relationships and services that have earned our trust. It’s time we started testing ourselves too, and seeing what we are made of.

What do you think?

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Sunday TED – The Goal of Story: to Make me Care

March 25th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

Filmmaker Andrew Stanton from Pixar shares some ideas on the roles and promises of story.

Some points:

Storytelling is joke-telling, knowing your punchline, promising the pay-off will be worth the set-up, and sharing something meaningful between storyteller and audience.

There isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story.

The most important role of story is to “Make me care.” 

The storyteller needs to hide the fact that he or she is making the audience work for what they want.

When it comes to our own personality we need to learn to recognize it, and own it (be responsible for it).

Storytelling has guidelines, not rules.

We all live conditionally. We are all willing to live by the rules as long as some things are met. But if those things aren’t met, all bets are off.

The best stories invoke wonder. Can you invoke wonder?

The main point for me is at about 2:30 when Stanton says the role of story is to “Make me care.”

This is significant, I think, for the future of things like culture and religion, and how we manage our collective motivations. Stories play on things like what we value, how we value, and what lines we draw when it comes to feeling things like empathy.

Religious stories can no longer appeal to things like authority. The arguments just don’t make sense anymore, really. But at the same time, stories need not depend on truth or reality either. Stories can be entirely fictional, unreal, and wholly inspiring. What matters is what the story makes us care about.

Religious and cultural boundaries are drawn with fuzzy lines usually based on groups that share a story. Instead of holding to a particular story as complete and true, people are instead sharing and listening to other people’s stories (slowly, but it is a start). And we are finding things in other people’s stories and lives we feel compelled to care about.

What do you think?

- – -

Here is an interview with Jonathan Adler about our narrative identities.

If our identities are just stories… what does that mean for our lives, our memories, our mental health? Our sense of well-being is based on the tone of our internal narratives rather than the stories themselves.
~ Jonathan Adler

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Posted in art, Beyond Belief, empathy, ethics, psychology, Religion, story | 4 Comments »


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