If you see more examples, please pass them along.

A public service announcement: You’ll get 40% more done by keeping your plans secret! So if your writing up resolutions and goals, have at it; but consider tearing up the list and don’t show anybody!

I think this is just amazingly and delightful.  Giving Anonymously is a small nonprofit in Washington state that facilitates giving money to others anonymously.  They clear about $75 thousand dollars a month at this point.   This lets you avoid the social frictions of donations.  It avoids any suggestion that your dontation is a form of status seeking.  It avoids any suggestion that the donation is just another market transaction.

So what could you use this for?

1. Help a neighbor, coworker, friend, … in need
2. Help your club without revealing how rich you are
3. Say thanks to the person who did all that work for the recent event
4. Avoid the embarrassment of a public thank you when donating to the event
5. Use it create a hard to fake signal
6. Use it to demonstrate it to another, a potential donor
7. Give money to things one might not have expected.

I really like #2.   If you are trying to fund some club’s operations it is brilliant.  It is very likely your club’s community of members has some very very wealthy people in it.  But they have little desire for that fact to be known.  By offering all your members the opportunity to make anonymous donations you create a way for the rich members to help without insisting that they break cover.

For gifts of less then $500 they charge nothing, though you can give a bit to help them along.  That’s pretty amazing when you block out what their credit card charges, mailing costs, check processing fees, etc. are so say nothing of the labor.  Well actually, they are apparently entirely run by volunteer labor.  It must be strange working there!  Apparently they listen to every phoned in thank you message before forwarding them back to donors.  Listening to a few on their site makes it clear that would be emotional work!

To give money you’ll need:

1. a credit card or a bank account,
2. the snail mail address for your recipient, and then
3. either an email address or a phone number.

Try it!

Why choice makes people miserable:

1. regret over the choice not taken, and fear of that future regret,
2. the cost of managing a portfolio of options,
3. the benchmark for success is raised higher, i.e. expectations escalate
4. self blame, when the choices made later appear to have been the wrong ones

He reports a study they did: those who maximize a job choice did in fact capture significantly more income, but at a cost.  They are more : pessimistic, anxious, stressed, worried, tired, overwhelmed, depressed, regretful, and disappointed.  They are less: content, optimistic, elated, excited, and happy.

Adds something to my thinking about option spaces, but still I regret not having the option of seeing the copyrighted cartoons.

“study shows that health benefits follow from just 2 minutes of written  expression. Certainly these results do not mean that spending more time expressing  emotion is bad but they do show that the minimum dosage required may be lower than previously thought.” — Burton and King

What we really want to know: “Is 140 characters enough?”

See also: blogging happy?

Abstract. Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.

From: Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? : Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings

You should pay me to buy your wine, scrap off the prices and replace them with tasty robust high price labels.

Even if you can puzzle out exactly which ideas and techniques he suggests are well tested you still get difficult confusions between cause and effect. Happy people have larger social networks, but how can you tease out the causality?  In another example; it is will known that marginal increases in your wealth have a weak but positive correlation with happiness. That weak link suggests we ought to strive to earn more. Much less widely reported though is the trajectory of happy people tends toward higher wages and positions.  I think that a cheery affect tends to generate the wealth, not the other way around.

The studies did show some interesting effects. Your various traits (humor, punctuality, cleanliness, etc. etc.) do tend to be genetically inherited and they don’t tend to be strongly effected by circumstance. I particularly liked that they know that older siblings do often have higher IQs than younger ones. How much? One IQ point!

He has a few pages devoted to dismissing the Freudian idea that childhood trama creates an emotional blockage which latter blisters out in ugly behaviors. Those ideas have been extensively tested and they came up wanting.

The Freudian idea that emotions are like water, e.g. if you represses them up they will leak out elsewhere turns out to be extremely wrong. Repressing is fine, and effective. Bottling up doesn’t cause them to stew. No, stewing on them makes them fester. If you nurture a grudge you can turn it into a monster. Living with those is a bummer. If you nurture gratitude, satisfaction, forgiveness, confidence, optimism, etc. etc. you can fill your inner life with kittens.

Unsuprisingly the distribution of search generators is power-law distributed. This is a log-log chart. Each dot on the chart represents one AOL users. The vertical axis is how many searches they did; for example the highest dot, aka user 2263543, did 8695 searches. This is only the most active 20 thousand users in this data set, the least active of whom did 313 searches. The complete data set has 657 thousand users, 57 thousand of whom only did one search.

Actually I dropped the most prolific searcher, user #71845, who made over a quarter million searchs; and totally messes up my nice straight line.

Today is national mental health day. I think the most disturbing thing I’ve noticed as I browse this data is the number of people searching for information on how to commit sucide. There are effective treatments for depression.

One of those postings is about a syndrome I named stuff addiction. News on that front. It might be worse than I thought:

the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. … a drug like nicotine produces much craving but little pleasure.

A good advertisment induces craving. Golly, the distinction between use and signal value runs deep.

That’s from a Sunday supplement article on happiness research that appeared in the Times of London. That’s light and fun to read.

One teaser in the article is the mention of a 100 “interventions” for building happiness; and even that 40 of these have now undergone at least some clinical testing.

Not that these interventions would necessarily be fun in and of themselves. This frightening one is outlined:

A third technique involves writing a long letter to someone you’re grateful to but have never properly thanked, and visiting them to read it out in person.

Seligman and his graduate students weep tears of joy when they do this exercise, but most Brits would probably rather be miserable than do it.

Same in New England I suspect. Thank goodness! That one’s not particularly effective.

These get higher marks:

In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week. The other is about identifying your signature strengths and using one of them in a new and different way every day for a week.

Of course what’s the point of a Sunday supplement if your not selling something.

Seligman speculates that doing more exercises for longer would bring greater benefits. Hundreds of thousands of people have registered with his website www.reflectivehappiness.com — where, for $10 a month, they are given a happiness programme including instruction in a package of positive exercises.

Cheaper than cable!

Humor, like enthusiasm, is not self-moderating. A classroom of high school students can trivially be drawn into an escalating chain reaction. It’s ironic; teachers who labor to nurture wit find it necessary to quench even the slightest fission of humor because their charges are such ill-trained humorists.

Of course all emotions run the risk of running off into exaggerated forms. Stress, panic, depression, etc. etc. The wonder of humor is its ability to call them back down out of the stratosphere. It’s a high art of getting it just right. A skill we have all observed in talented people around us. Injecting just the right bit of wit into a situation, diffusing at least a portion of the escalating emotions.

If this talent had a name you could put on a job description! Awards could be granted: “Best pun used in an IRS audit.” High school councilors could advise students join the guild. An international society could be formed. States could grant and revoke licenses. Weighty text books and complimentary multi-media virtual world educational games could be sold at great cost to state school boards.