Having fun with statistics: but there is some question about causation vs. correlation....

  Post-legalization [of marijuana], incomes in legalizing states grew by about 3%, home prices went up by 6%, and populations rose by about 2%. 

-as culled from this Marginal Revolution post

The good life....................

 

In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.

-Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz

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dogmatically.....................

 

History and the study of cultures do not teach or prove that values or cultures are relative.  All to the contrary, that is a philosophical premise that we now bring to our study of them.  This premise is unproven and dogmatically asserted for what are largely political reasons.

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Getting into...........................

 

................the nitty-gritty of trust:

It’s not a good idea to warily eye everyone like they’re potential contestants on “Who Wants to Betray Me Next?” Studies show expecting others to be selfish can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: “those who expect people to act selfishly, actually experience uncooperative behaviour from others more often.”

Meanwhile, displaying trust in others from the get-go can create the opposite type of self-fulfilling prophecy: people want to prove your trust in them to be justified. Research shows seemingly irrational displays of trust often prove quite rational because it leads others to trust you and not want to let you down.

Creationism...........................

 Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction.  People don't see the world with their eyes, they see it with their entire life.

     Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person "constructionism."  Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don't passively take in reality.  Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality.  That's not to say there is not an objective reality out there.  It's to say that we have only subjective access to it.

-David Brooks, How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Connections.......................

 People who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives.

The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.

-as culled from here

I'm sure this will end well...............

.............. California Department of Health is building a "Decision Intelligence Unit."

Back story here.  Why do I think that "we will secure grants" was the driving factor of the story.

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Who needed research to know this.......?

 Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. 

-as cut-and-pasted from here

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a raggedy coherence (sort of like this blog?).....

      Now most of us are information-age workers, doers and planners both.   No men stand over us with stopwatches.  We are our own efficiency experts, relentlessly driving ourselves to do more, ever faster.  This relentless quest for productivity drives the nascent but rapidly burgeoning field of "interruption science," which involves the study of the pivot point of multitasking. For multitasking is essentially the juggling of interruptions, the moment when we choose to or are driven to switch from one task to another.  And so to dissect and map these moments of broken time is to shed light on how we live today.  That emerges, in the jargon of leading interruption scientist Gloria Mark, is a portrait of "work fragmentation."  We spend a great deal of our days trying to piece our thoughts and our projects back together, and the result is often an accumulation of broken pieces with a raggedy coherence all its own.  After studying workers at two West Coast high-tech firms for more than one thousand hours over the course of a year, Mark sifted the data—and was appalled.  The fragmentation of work life, she says, was "far worse that I could ever have imagined."

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

Like it's not 100%....................?

 Cutting calories by 25% can slow the rate of aging in humans and lead to a significant reduction in mortality risk, according to a new study from Columbia University.

-as lifted from here

Studies show.................

 Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.

-as culled from here

About those meetings.................

 Accenture's team also discovered that something that nearly every meeting does is a waste of time: introductions.  The data show that everyone except for the person speaking is neurologically frustrated during these recitations.  Instead of an introduction, Accenture now puts names on paper tents in front of attendees. Using name tents also avoids "introduction creep" in which one person offers an in-depth description of his or her job, career and personal goals, sporting activities, children, and dog.  People are able to meet each other during frequent breaks without formal introduction.

-Paul J. Zak, Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness

Ah, science.........................

However frustrating this debate may be for all participants – and I imagine it can be very frustrating at times – to me it is an excellent example of the dynamic process of the scientific method. Claims are advanced, they are robustly criticised, and additional evidence is brought forward to refute the critiques. Bit by bit, the field advances in its understanding.

-as extracted from here

thanks

300%......................................?

 . . . ultimately, all of us are at least 300% more effective if we focus on doing one task at a time.  Multiple, independent studies show this to be true.  Still don't believe me?  Just search online "multitasking is a myth" and read to your heart's content.  One study even tested a group of people that considered themselves "good" at multitasking.  The reality was that test subjects were about as effective at accomplishing simple tasks as members of the control group who were high on marijuana. 

-Mark Dolfini, The Time-Wealthy Investor 2.0

I especially don't trust them.............

 You get all kinds of happiness advice on the internet from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t trust them.

Actually, don’t trust me either. Trust neuroscientists. They study that gray blob in your head all day and have learned a lot about what truly will make you happy.

-Eric Barker, from another one of his really good blog posts. 

A weighty subject......................

 Next time you’re “hungry”, ask yourself: “Would I eat broccoli?” If not, you’re probably not really hungry. This will make you a leaner person. No, I didn’t say happier. I said, “leaner.”

-Eric Barker, from this post

On listening...........................

      It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted.  Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there.  By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.

     Psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and to openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings.  In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to the calm and logical place where they can be good Getting to Yes problem solvers.

-Chris Voss, Never Split The Difference:  Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

True this...............................

 If there is one thing we learned from social science over the last century is that we may produce unintended consequences, even the opposite effect of what we desire, if we react simplistically to situations and don’t consider human psychology.

-Steven Novella, as cut-and-pasted from here

It might even help...........

 

Ah, science............................

............................Trouble brewing for nascent field of "behavioral economics"?

When the two biggest scientists in your field are accused of "systemic misrepresentation", you know you've got a serious problem. . . .

Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated.

The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. . . .

 This is because almost every lab-based study omits one key variable, which I'll call "situational fit". In a sense that's the point of the scientific process: to control for every variable except for the one you're interested in—to find effects that generalize across contexts. However, humans are not billiard balls or hydrogen atoms. We're remarkably complex and will react to the same stimuli in quite different ways depending on the circumstances. This is one of the fundamental flaws of lab based behavioral science research. It puts humans in bizarre contexts and assumes that their behavior in an unnatural setting will generalize to complex, natural settings. This happens to (almost) never be the case. Just because people are affected one way in a lab at UC Berkeley doesn't mean they'll be impacted the same way when sitting at home on the couch or while chatting with friends at the bar.

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