My fiancee mocks me for my inclination to collect and archive horrible exemplars just because they are so unbelievably bad. She probably has a point about my bookmarks of awful woman’s dresses but at least in the case of science journalism it’s actually useful to notice the way in which it’s bad as that tells us something about the underlying cultural biases that give rise to it. Or that’s just bullshit to justify this new sequence of posts because I couldn’t resist sharing just how bad this sort of reporting is.

The article that motivated this new series was this doozy that amazingly tells us that, “moderate happiness may be preferable to full-fledged elation.” This might make some sense if the study was warning that elation often presaged a crash while moderate happiness was more sustainable but it’s nothing that reasonable. Rather the article ‘warns’ us that:

“The highest levels of income, education and political participation were reported not by the most satisfied individuals (10 on the 10-point scale),” the authors wrote, “but by moderately satisfied individuals (8 or 9 on the 10-point scale).”

The 10s earned significantly less money than the eights and nines. Their educational achievements and political engagement were also significantly lower than their moderately happy and happy-but-not-blissful counterparts.

We are further warned that the most happy people tend not to get the best grades in school. Now if I had confidence in these results (see below break) this would be an interesting result but the idea that this shows we should be less happy is so deeply confused it boggles the mind. In fact it’s such an absurd conclusion that I wouldn’t have believed the article was really saying it, much less that the actual researcher endorsed it, if they hadn’t hammered the point home.

The data indicate that happiness may need to be moderated for success in some areas of life, such as income, conscientiousness and career, Diener said.

….

All in all, Diener said, the evidence indicates that happiness is a worthy goal for those who lack it, but the endless pursuit of even more happiness for the already happy may be counterproductive.

Great so your telling me that I should give up on that whole being crazy fucking happy thing so I can be more anal retentive about cleaning my room and earn more money for my own benefit. This is so brainfucked I can’t comprehend it. These are probably the same people who object to living (voluntarily) in the matrix because it would make us all really poor (no physical goods). Sometimes I boggle that people like Dennet can deny the existence of experiences then I run across something like this that reminds me just how deep the physicallist fallacy runs in our society.

To add insult to injury the results of the underlying study are neither surprising nor compelling. Given that happiness scores were self-reported answers of 10 may really be tracking impulsivity, lack of ambition or inability to imagine a better life. But the results are probably mostly correct (possibly excepting the health related conclusions) because they are blindingly obvious. I mean does anyone think that the most ambitious, workaholic and driven people they know are the most happy?

I mean Tibetan Buddhist monk or business executive, relaxed (tenured) academic or corporate sell out, who would you bet on to be happier?

Of course rigorous studies that bear out our preconceptions can be usefull but I doubt this one really cuts it.