* “Postmodernism” in the humanities and humanistic social sciences arose out of the failure of the mid-century modernist idea that you could treat human beings and their behavior like classical-physics particles–categorizing them, modeling them, and predicting them, all according to stable rules. It turned out that people are more complicated than that, and also that the very terms of your categories and models (your language, your political institutions) shape the human beings you’re supposedly analyzing at a remove. Things are a lot less stable than modernists hoped. So all the theories that get lumped together as “postmodernism” are basically an attempt to say, “now what?”
Like many other sets of academic ideas or theories, they share powerful insights and also some pretty big problems, and like every other idea or theory, sometimes they are applied well and usefully, and sometimes they degenerate into self-parody. There is definitely nonsense among the humanities, and on the margin humanists could probably be a little more active in clearing it out. What the humanities aren’t, despite their critics, is **indifferent** to truth, as you suggest they are. Even if postmodernists do think that we need to think harder about what “truth” means and how we as imperfect human observers can ever access it, they aren’t callous about it.
In fact, that humility towards knowledge is an area where you and the “postmodernists” you’re criticizing might well have something to talk about! It’s no good when lazy humanists criticize social science as “the approach of saying nonsense using a bunch of technical-sounding jargon,” and it’s not any more constructive the other way around. We all have a lot to learn from each other!
* About the (death of the) author. It’s been a while since I was interested in these issues, but the point is a subtle one. Take films (which might make the idea sound more intuitive). We talk about a Stanley Kubrick film, even though we realize there are a host of other creators involved in in the production of a movie (screenwriters, actors, etc). If you say the “director” is dead, you’re not saying a film has no director. You’re basically saying that a “director” can’t serve the purpose of saying that there is only “one” guiding voice that defines the only way to determine something as the director-function or the myth of the “Director” in the 20th century, would imply. Again, it’s not to say that directors as individuals don’t play a role, its just that the particular cultural/ideological idea of the director has changed.
* The death of the author is more about understanding that authors are grounded in context like all “truth”. That’s the over-arching postmodern message—truth isn’t “out there” X-files or Plato style. The world is out there, though, so things aren’t as ungrounded as the anti-postmodernist caricature might have you believe. The problem is that “truth” is a human construction grounded in vague and intertwined natural language. One has to start by asking what the unit of truth-bearing is. It’s certainly not the sentence, because sentences like “It is raining” have no meaning outside of the context in which they’re used.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions…may be the most influential treatise ever written on how science does (or does not) proceed. It is notable for having spawned the trendy term “paradigm.” It also fomented the now trite idea that personalities and politics play a large role in science. The book’s most profound argument was less obvious: scientists can never truly understand the “real world” or even each other.
…He nonetheless traced his view of science to an epiphany he experienced in 1947, when he was working toward a doctorate in physics at Harvard. While reading Aristotle’s Physics, Kuhn had become astonished at how “wrong” it was. How could someone who wrote so brilliantly on so many topics be so misguided when it came to physics?
Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out his dormitory window (“I can still see the vines and the shade two thirds of the way down”), when suddenly Aristotle “made sense.” Kuhn realized that Aristotle invested basic concepts with different meanings than modern physicists did. Aristotle used the term “motion,” for example, to refer not just to change in position but to change in general—the reddening of the sun as well as its descent toward the horizon. Aristotle’s physics, understood on its own terms, was simply different from rather than inferior to Newtonian physics.
Kuhn left physics for philosophy, and he struggled for 15 years to transform his epiphany into the theory set forth in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The keystone of his model was the concept of a paradigm. Paradigm, pre-Kuhn, referred merely to an example that serves an educational purpose; amo, amas, amat, for instance, is a paradigm for teaching conjugations in Latin. Kuhn used the term to refer to a collection of procedures or ideas that instruct scientists, implicitly, what to believe and how to work. Most scientists never question the paradigm. They solve “puzzles,” problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn called this “mopping up,” or “normal science.” There are always anomalies, phenomena that that the paradigm cannot account for or that even contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored, but if they accumulate they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.
Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn held that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative act. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants (to borrow Newton’s phrase) and then bashes them over the head. He or she is often young or new to the field, that is, not fully indoctrinated. Most scientists yield to a new paradigm reluctantly. They often do not understand it, and they have no objective rules by which to judge it. Different paradigms have no common standard for comparison; they are “incommensurable,” to use Kuhn’s term. Proponents of different paradigms can argue forever without resolving their basic differences because they invest basic terms—motion, particle, space, time—with different meanings. The conversion of scientists is thus both a subjective and political process. It may involve sudden, intuitive understanding—like that finally achieved by Kuhn as he pondered Aristotle. Yet scientists often adopt a paradigm simply because it is backed by others with strong reputations or by a majority of the community.
Kuhn’s view diverged in several important respects from the philosophy of Karl Popper, who held that theories can never be proved but only disproved, or “falsified.” Like other critics of Popper, Kuhn argued that falsification is no more possible than verification; each process wrongly implies the existence of absolute standards of evidence, which transcend any individual paradigm. A new paradigm may solve puzzles better than the old one does, and it may yield more practical applications. “But you cannot simply describe the other science as false,” Kuhn said. Just because modern physics has spawned computers, nuclear power and CD players, he suggested, does not mean it is truer, in an absolute sense, than Aristotle’s physics. Similarly, Kuhn denied that science is constantly approaching the truth. At the end of Structure he asserted that science, like life on earth, does not evolve toward anything but only away from something…
“Different groups, and the same group at different times,” Kuhn told me, “can have different experiences and therefore in some sense live in different worlds.” Obviously all humans share some responses to experience, simply because of their shared biological heritage, Kuhn added. But whatever is universal in human experience, whatever transcends culture and history, is also “ineffable,” beyond the reach of language. Language, Kuhn said, “is not a universal tool. It’s not the case that you can say anything in one language that you can say in another.”
But isn’t mathematics a kind of universal language? I asked. Not really, Kuhn replied, since it has no meaning; it consists of syntactical rules without any semantic content.
…I said, the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus is either right or wrong; language and metaphysics are beside the point. Kuhn shook his head. “Whenever you get two people interpreting the same data in different ways,” he said, “that’s metaphysics.”
* He had a painful memory of sitting in on a seminar and trying to explain that the concepts of truth and falsity are perfectly valid, and even necessary—within a paradigm. “The professor finally looked at me and said, ‘Look, you don’t know how radical this book is.'” Kuhn was also upset to find that he had become the patron saint of all would-be scientific revolutionaries.
…Some fields, such as economics and other social sciences, never adhere to a paradigm because they address questions for which no paradigm will suffice. Fields that achieve consensus, or normalcy, to borrow Kuhn’s term, do so because their paradigms, or at least certain components of them, correspond to something real in nature. These paradigms—a few that come to mind are heliocentrism, the new synthesis, quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, the germ theory of infectious disease—rest not on transient, culturally constructed suppositions or inventions but on irrevocable discoveries. Why not call them true?
Posted inPhilosophy|Comments Off on What Is Post-Modernism?
I sense that much of the audience for talk radio and right-wing punditry feels emasculated. The world has changed and they don’t know how to cope. The more successful part of the audience also sees that the world has changed, but they’re not just coping, they’re thriving.
I can’t think of any right-wing pundit who is not hysterical. The left-wing pundits may be all hysterics too, I just don’t pay them as much mind.
The idea that the worldwide lockdown of virtually every country other than Sweden may have been an enormous mistake strikes many — including world leaders; most scientists, especially health officials, doctors and epidemiologists; those who work in major news media; opinion writers in those media; and the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who put their faith in these people — as so preposterous as to be immoral. Timothy Egan of The New York Times described Republicans who wish to enable their states to open up as “the party of death.”
That’s the way it is today on planet Earth, where deceit, cowardice and immaturity now dominate almost all societies because the elites are deceitful, cowardly and immature.
But for those open to reading thoughts they may differ with, here is the case for why the worldwide lockdown is not only a mistake but also, possibly, the worst mistake the world has ever made…
The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem “essential” has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in America.
The United Nations World Food Programme, or the WFP, states that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face starvation — double last year’s figures. According to WFP director David Beasley on April 21: “We could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries. … There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself” (italics added).
That would be enough to characterize the worldwide lockdown as a deathly error. But there is much more. If global GDP declines by 5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Foreign Policy magazine reports that, according to the International Monetary Fund, the global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020, marking the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and the U.S., the eurozone and Japan will contract by 5.9%, 7.5% and 5.2%, respectively. Meanwhile, across South Asia, as of a month ago, tens of millions were already “struggling to put food on the table.” Again, all because of the lockdowns, not the virus.
In one particularly incomprehensible act, the government of India, a poor country of 1.3 billion people, locked down its people. As Quartz India reported on April 22, “Coronavirus has killed only around 700 Indians … a small number still compared to the 450,000 TB and 10,000-odd malaria deaths recorded every year.”
One of the thousands of unpaid garment workers protesting the lockdown in Bangladesh understands the situation better than almost any health official in the world: “We are starving. If we don’t have food in our stomach, what’s the use of observing this lockdown?” But concern for that Bangladeshi worker among the world’s elites seems nonexistent.
The lockdown is “possibly even more catastrophic (than the virus) in its outcome: the collapse of global food-supply systems and widespread human starvation” (italics added). That was published in the left-wing The Nation, which, nevertheless, enthusiastically supports lockdowns. But the American left cares as much about the millions of non-Americans reduced to hunger and starvation because of the lockdown as it does about the people of upstate New York who have no incomes, despite the minuscule number of coronavirus deaths there. Or about the citizens of Oregon, whose governor has just announced the state will remain locked down until July 6. As of this writing, a total of 109 people have died of the coronavirus in Oregon.
When you enrage, you engage. That’s the winning formula for talk radio. I’m not aware of any viable business model for non-hysterical punditry (except for a few elite Substacks and Steve Sailer).
The published data point to two related conclusions: First, lockdowns played a significant role in reducing infection rates. Second, they had a very modest role in producing economic damage. Conversely, lifting lockdowns has done very little to spur economic resurgence.
Some of the evidence for both propositions has been expertly compiled by Noah Smith, a former finance professor now writing economic commentary for Bloomberg…
A team of UCLA researchers, in a paper first published in May 2020 and updated later, found that “likely Trump voters” reduced their movements by 9% following a local stay-at-home order, “compared to a 21% reduction among their Clinton-voting neighbors, who face similar exposure risks and identical government orders.”
Hostility to social measures short of a lockdown, such as social distancing and masks, bears the same partisan coloration.
It makes sense, therefore to examine the evidence — or rather, gather ammunition for the coming debate.
Numerous studies from across the world have found that lockdowns succeeded in suppressing transmission rates. An Italian team found that lockdowns start to reduce the number of COVID infections about 10 days after they start, and keep reducing the case rate for as long as 20 days following initiation.
French researchers, in a paper published in January, compared the experience in countries that imposed stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and lifted the restrictions gradually — New Zealand, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain— to that of Sweden, which imposed no lockdown, and the U.S., which had (and still has) a patchwork of state policies often involving late orders followed by abrupt and premature lifting.
The first group saw rapid reductions in infections and a rapid economic recovery, compared to the second. “Early-onset lockdown with gradual deconfinement allowed shortening the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and reducing contaminations,” the researchers concluded. “Lockdown should be considered as an effective public health intervention to halt epidemic progression.”
The UCLA researchers, meanwhile, estimated that reductions in movement resulting from stay-at-home orders reduced transmission in the hardest-hit communities, such as Seattle, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles by 50% or more.
All these findings point to savings of millions of lives globally. None of it is especially surprising. Compliance with stay-at-home orders meant reducing one’s exposure to strangers whose viral conditions were unknown. That was especially crucial in locations where COVID was raging and therefore the prospect of coming into close contact with an infected individual was relatively high.
That leaves the economic question. Critics of lockdowns typically advocate balancing the public health gains from stay-at-home orders against the economic losses from keeping bars, restaurants, hair salons, and other small businesses closed. They argue, as has DeSantis and other red-state governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas, that concerns about the latter should take primacy over the benefits of the former.
The problem with this argument is that there’s very little evidence that lockdowns themselves damaged local economies more than individual behavior that would have happened anyway, lockdowns or not. Nor is there much evidence that lifting lockdowns produced a faster recovery.
Those who have studied the course of the pandemic in the U.S. and Europe understand why the lockdowns have less economic impact than one might expect. The reason is that people made their own choices to stay at home or to patronize only businesses where they felt relatively safe.
As Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syversen of the University of Chicago said of their study of the economic slump during the pandemic, “The vast majority of the decline was due to consumers choosing of their own volition to avoid commercial activity.”
That’s hardly a surprising result. The bigger question is, what did lockdown do to the economy? Most people make the natural assumption that lockdown hurts the economy — if you ban people from going out to restaurants, that stops people from spending money on restaurants, right? Obviously. Many economists made this assumption when they tried to model pandemic policy. In fact, some people go so far as to blame all the economic costs of the pandemic on lockdowns…
The fact is, even without lockdowns, plenty of people will avoid restaurants and other crowded spaces during a pandemic simply out of fear of catching the virus. And that will hurt the economy.
And lo and behold, when we look at evidence, we find that lockdowns accounted for only a small percent of the economic slowdown. For example, economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson looked at the state border between Illinois and Iowa. On the Illinois side, the towns issued stay-at-home orders, whereas on the Iowa side they did not. And guess what — economic activity fell almost as much on the Iowa side as on the Illinois side!
This is very similar to the results of a comparison of Sweden and Denmark. Denmark locked down and saw its economic activity decline by 29%; Sweden chose not to lock down, and saw its economic activity decline by 25%. The biggest economic destroyer by far was not government policy; it was fear of COVID.
In fact, states that didn’t issue stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020 saw just about the same amount of economic devastation as states that did issue those orders:
How did lockdowns save lives without hurting the economy?
At this point you may be scratching your head (or, if you’re a lockdown hater, seething with rage). How the heck could lockdowns have a big effect on the transmission of the virus, but only a small effect on the economy? Shouldn’t the tradeoff basically be one for one? Doesn’t every infection you stop mean one less meal in a restaurant, one less drink at the bar, one less trip to the store, etc.?
Well, no. That’s not how it works. As the evidence above shows, it’s fear of the virus that was the big economic killer. And if fear is proportional to actual infection rates, then by suppressing the virus, lockdowns reduced fear.
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose in City A, they lock down. People stay home. The economy gets hurt, but the virus gets suppressed and infections go to a low level. Eventually, they can start to reopen safely, and they don’t immediately get another wave of COVID because there just aren’t that many sick people in town. But in City B, they don’t lock down. 80% of people stay home because of fear, so the economy gets clobbered anyway. But the 20% who go out end up spreading the virus, raising the infection rate to a high level. That causes more fear, and eventually even the 20% who were going out get scared enough to stay home. But now it’s too late — infection has a higher baseline, and takes much longer to go down. So the fear lasts longer, and so does the economic pain.
In fact, this is why in the long run, lockdowns might even have helped the economy. Countries that don’t lock down will have higher infection rates, thus prolonging the fear and keeping people in their house for longer (on top of having to pay higher medical costs). In its World Economic Outlook in October 2020, the IMF notes this possibility:
The effectiveness of lockdowns in reducing infections suggests that lockdowns may pave the way to a faster economic recovery if they succeed in containing the epidemic and thus limit the extent of voluntary social distancing. Therefore, the short-term economic costs of lockdowns could be compensated by stronger medium-term growth, possibly leading to positive overall effects on the economy.
And an analysis by some folks at the Institute for New Economic Thinking found that countries that tried to sacrifice lives to save their economies ended up hurting their economies anyway.
In fact, historical evidence shows that something very similar happened in the Spanish Flu, the eerily similar pandemic that hit us almost exactly 100 years ago. A March 2020 study by economists Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner found that cities that enacted stricter social distancing restrictions in response to the Spanish Flu saw their economies recover faster.
In other words, we were warned. This isn’t just a case of — pardon the pun — 20/20 hindsight.
In the summer of 2020, right-wing pundits pointed out the hypocrisy of the Left in advocating lockdowns and street protests. Now it is clear that there were virtually no cases of outdoor transmission of covid, so the Left wasn’t so hypocritical after all.
So what’s the solution for emasculation? Number one, accept reality. Reality keeps changing and we can’t change reality. We can only change ourselves to adjust to reality. Number two, develop a life of love and service. When you seek to be helpful to others, you stop feeling emasculated. You only feel emasculated when you focus on what you’re not getting. In other words, you only feel emasculated when you have a selfish attitude. Change your attitude and you change your life. Change your attitude and your rage goes away. Change your attitude, and instead of focusing on what you’re not getting, you look for where you can help others.
A friend says:
All of these persons writing about how the lockdowns saved lives are idiots, or else they are unaware of the fatality rate associated with contracting Covid and actually becoming ill with it. Better than most I can talk about that since I became ill with the disease.
There are a lot of misunderstandings about (1) how transmissible the disease is (2) who gets it (3) how to prevent its transmission and (4) the medical outcomes for those who get it.
The key is to prevent those who are most at risk from the disease from getting it. I am the classic example of someone who is at risk, but not at the severest risk, once I contracted covid. It almost exclusively kills the elderly obese, and poses a risk to non elderly obese with other co morbidities. Everyone else is at a statistically non existent risk of fatality.
The emphasis should have been on isolating those most at risk and letting the rest of the population roam freely. As an example children are not at risk and except for the most elderly and fattest teachers they are not at risk yet schools were closed out of ostensible fear by teachers that somehow or other they would be exposed to children who would give them the virus. This is non sense and no scientific evidence supports that.
Then once one looks at the factors I have set out, you have to do a cost benefit analysis to locking down. Its important to note that some of the original projections were that this is such a virulent disease and we had not therapeutic means of dealing with it that up to 5% of persons who contracted the disease would die from it. In other words it was a modern day bubonic plague. That turned out to be wildly off the mark.
All the statistics cited by Hiltzik and others are based on worst case projections, none of which came anywhere close to be being accurate. We have never before treated a disease which has a specific victim profile, by locking down everyone including those to whom the disease is harmless.
Through that prism, its clear that lockdowns had little effect on mortality rates and what little effect they had was greatly outweighed by the negative aspects of the lockdown.
What conservatives said was hypocritical was the criticism by liberals of college kids frolicking in close range during spring break in Florida and Texas and criticizing the Trump rallies during the closing days of the campaign as well as the outdoor events at the white house while not objecting to (and in some cases encouraging) protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The reality is that none of these outdoor activities carried any risk. The best evidence is that only one case (in China) was transmitted outdoors.
00:00 Zoe Strimpel talks about Love and Sex, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al0BZMmEtUw
03:00 Why are young men so scared of sex?, https://spectator.us/topic/young-men-scared-sex-sexting/
17:00 Why crypto currency is a fraud, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is-a-giant-fraud
18:00 How Baseball Cards Explain What Bitcoin Really Is, https://jabberwocking.com/how-baseball-cards-explain-what-bitcoin-really-is/
20:00 The Best Bitcoin Debate Ever Recorded (Anthony Pompliano vs Mike Green),
23:00 Startup series on Netflix, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StartUp_(TV_series)
25:00 Column: Coinbase had a great public stock offering. That doesn’t make bitcoin legit, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-04-27/bitcoin-coinbase-investment
26:00 Pro Palestinian mob attacks Jews in Los Angeles
35:00 Youtube reverses my latest strike
38:20 This crypto analyst is still bullish on bitcoin’s future amid sell-off, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS9eaABGWPw
42:00 BITCOIN MAKE Or BREAK MOMENT, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pB9QM-Ylt8
46:00 Washington is rushing to regulate crypto. It’s a mess., https://www.protocol.com/fintech/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-regulations
53:50 Sargon of Akkad: Posh Feminist Zoe Strimpel Outraged Poor People Have Free Speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1T4-Wu4BqA
1:02:40 Zoe Strimpel: This House Believes Sex Has Lost All Meaning (Comedy Debate), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dLDnwhPQoU
1:09:00 Karen Owen’s Duke Grad Student Sex Power Point?
1:15:00 There Is Life After Campus Infamy – How five people recovered — or vanished — after intense scrutiny at an early age, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/style/campus-sex-women-exposure.html
1:37:30 Howard Stern Comes Again, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139464
1:38:00 Howard Stern on what he learned in therapy, abandoning ‘pure id’ persona, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxKRy8hm2pU
1:56:00 Stuttering John addresses the article that tears into Howard Stern, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzbHGM5yylI
2:02:00 Army Recruitment Ads: China vs Russia vs USA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe6d6MzeLM
2:11:00 Tommy Robinson: Chinese Military Recruitment Ad Puts British Army to Shame, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcoDJB2kP7w
2:15:40 Gregg Henriques: A framework to integrate objective view & personal view, https://www.relationalimplicit.com/henriques/
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Why are young men so scared of sex? (5-20-21)
When I go to bed happy and feel happy even when I wake up and would rather be sleeping, I sleep better. On the other hand, the more angry I get about my lack of sleep or my life circumstances, the worse I sleep.
I find that my happiness corresponds almost exactly with my competence and progress in life. When I break something significant or lose something or damage something or someone in my carelessness, I experience a substantial decrease in my happiness that can last for weeks. On the other hand, when I save more money than I spend, when I take care of aches and pains and other problems, when I keep my stuff clean, organized and in good working order, when I connect with people I like, when I stay appropriate and realistic in various social interactions, when I ask for help when appropriate, when I see that I am contributing to the happiness of others, I feel happy.
Carelessness is the single biggest cause of my unhappiness so for me to build a life that works, I have to consistently take care with everything that is important to me including people, finances, time, and things.
Sleep, although a vital aspect of human functioning, has received scant attention in happiness research. This research examines the effect of sleep quality on life satisfaction, and one possible mechanism that bridges the two. One cognitive factor that might tie the relationship between sleep and life satisfaction is a belief about the (in) finite nature of happiness (zero-sum belief about happiness; ZBH), a mindset that occurs more under conditions of scarcity. Given the interconnections among experiences prompted by various types of scarcity (e.g., financial and calorie), we predicted that deprived cognitive resource caused by poor sleep may activate the ZBH, thereby hurting one’s life satisfaction. As expected, we found that sleep quality predicted the participants’ life satisfaction, even controlling for baseline variables. More importantly, this relationship was partially mediated by ZBH. This study opens interesting questions on a relatively unexamined role of non-social predictors, such as sleep, in well-being.
As highly social beings, humans are wired to connect with others. Not surprisingly, social experience is one of the most heavily studied topics in happiness research (Diener and Seligman, 2002; Diener et al., 2018). However, no human beings are constantly with others. For example, the average person spends about one third of her time not interacting with others, sleeping. Although a significant portion of time is spent on sleeping, few have examined how this experience relates to happiness (however, see Paunio et al., 2008; Sonnentag et al., 2008; Steptoe et al., 2008). The purpose of this study is to verify the association between sleep and life satisfaction, and investigate one possible cognitive belief that may bridge the two.
Various personal beliefs about happiness affect the actual level of happiness experienced by the person. For instance, those who consider happiness as more relational (Bojanowska and Zalewska, 2016; Shin et al., 2018), controllable (Joshanloo, 2017), and incremental (Tamir et al., 2007) are happier than others. Here we focused on a potentially important, yet unexamined mediating belief – whether happiness exists as a zero-sum state (zero-sum belief about happiness; ZBH). Zero-sum beliefs in general (cf. Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944) are based on the assumption that a finite amount of goods exists in the world, in which one’s gain is possible only at the expense of others. Viewed in this way, those with high ZBH are presumed to consider the amount of happiness as fixed (vs. unlimited), amongst people (i.e., if someone gets happier, somebody else might become less happy) as well as across time (i.e., if one is happy now, he or she might become less happy in the future). Such zero-sum beliefs about happiness predict low well-being (Koo and Suh, 2007; Różycka-Tran et al., 2015).
One condition that activates such zero-sum thinking is resource scarcity (Różycka-Tran et al., 2015). The authors noted that resource-deprived mindset may lead individuals to perceive the world as competitive, becoming more prone to zero-sum beliefs. Although scarcity arises in various domains (e.g., financial and calorie), there is a common overlap among the diverse experiences of scarcity (Muraven and Baumeister, 2000; Briers et al., 2006). Sleep replenishes depleted resource (Saper et al., 2005). Conversely, impaired sleep may trigger a sense of scarcity (especially, cognitive), leading people to perceive happiness more in a zero-sum manner. In other words, ZBH would be driven in part by low sleep quality and, consequently lead to a temporary drop in life satisfaction…
A significant portion of daily time is spent on sleep. Yet, much remains to be known about how sleep relates to life satisfaction. In this research, we found that those who sleep well are more satisfied with life, controlling for individual characteristics such as personality. Although social relationships are essential for well-being (Diener and Seligman, 2002; Sandstrom and Dunn, 2014), social activity is costly and energy-consuming (Baumeister et al., 2000). This is perhaps why people need a certain amount of time alone, which serves a restorative function (Coplan and Bowker, 2014). Sleep, although far less studied than social experiences, needs more research attention in future happiness research.
More research is needed to clarify how sleep predicts life satisfaction, but we uncovered one possibility. Those who sleep poorly were more likely to view happiness as a zero-sum game. A zero-sum mindset leads people to engage in more social comparison and savor positive experiences less, which eventually lead to less happiness (Koo and Suh, 2007). As many societies become more competitive and market-oriented, sleep is easily regarded as a waste of time (and money). However, sacrificed sleep may create a vicious cycle of making the world appear as a zero-sum competition, which aggravates interpersonal stress. Increasing public awareness of the importance of sleep might have greater societal benefits than most assume.
The link between sleep quality and life satisfaction highlighted in this paper might be bidirectional. A satisfied mindset about life may increase sleep quality, but as our findings imply, a good sleep may also affect how positively one evaluates his/her life. More conclusive statement about causal direction should be derived from additional longitudinal work. One notable finding is that the zero-sum belief mediates sleep quality and life satisfaction, even controlling for traits known to strongly influence happiness (e.g., neuroticism). It implies that believing happiness as a fixed, predetermined experience is psychologically deflating, above and beyond the predisposition to experience negative affect. Finally, replicating current finding with more sophisticated sleep measures (e.g., polysomnography) and with diverse samples will be desirable.
What constitutes a good life? Many people in modern society may shove a “good sleep” below other priorities, such as high status or income. However, our study suggests that this inconspicuous daily routine not only restores the body, but also elevates the mind’s view of life.
Posted inHappiness|Comments Off on Sleep & Happiness
00:00 Political Hysterias Of The Right & Left, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139452
03:00 Covid Cover-Up: Did It Come From A Lab?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LgGPygFHh4
05:00 As New Evidence Emerges For COVID “Lab-Leak” Theory, Journalists Who Screamed “Conspiracy” Humiliate Themselves, https://mtracey.substack.com/p/as-new-evidence-emerges-for-covid
11:00 WP: Congress is finally investigating the lab accident covid-19 origin theory, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/congress-is-finally-investigating-the-lab-accident-covid-19-origin-theory/2021/05/06/d7bfb0e4-aeaf-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html
13:00 Column: The evidence is clear — COVID lockdowns saved lives without harming economies, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-05-19/covid-lockdowns-worked
26:00 Breakdown of the Pentagon UFO videos with Mick West, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8
47:00 Attack on Jewish diners by members of pro-Palestinian caravan in Beverly Grove investigated as possible hate crime, https://ktla.com/news/local-news/jewish-men-allegedly-attacked-by-members-of-pro-palestinian-caravan-outside-beverly-grove-restaurant/
57:00 What to do about Woke Capital, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvAB5alv6wo
58:00 Christopher Rufo on fighting critical race theory brainwashing, https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo
1:14:40 Michael Anton on fighting woke business
1:21:00 Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance Invest in Rumble Video Platform Popular on Political Right, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-j-d-vance-invest-in-rumble-video-platform-popular-on-political-right-11621447661
1:35:00 Listening In: Radio And The American Imagination, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139448
1:38:00 The late radio host Bob Grant, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL9ECthEeVo
1:50:00 Liberal media forced to backtrack on the origins of Covid
1:57:30 Crypto Mega-Crash with JF Gariepy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7bazTQsGAw
2:22:50 Dennis Prager says conservatives should come out of the closet
2:26:00 Chicago mayor prioritizes non-white journos
2:27:30 Google docs go PC
2:33:00 Cold War II—Just How Dangerous Is China? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E12r-37GZI0
2:35:00 Why is Tim Tebow getting a second shot?
2:36:20 A critical view of Bitcoin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoWIejPF_tc
2:46:00 Tucker Carlson on equity
Column: Is Elon Musk trying to destroy bitcoin over environmental concerns?,
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-05-17/elon-musk-destroying-bitcoin
Coinbase had a great public stock offering. That doesn’t make bitcoin legit,
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-04-27/bitcoin-coinbase-investment
How Baseball Cards Explain What Bitcoin Really Is, https://jabberwocking.com/how-baseball-cards-explain-what-bitcoin-really-is/
Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/why-cryptocurrency-is-a-giant-fraud
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
