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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: quinn]
    #12752462 -

quinn said:
SillyBilly said:
Those breeds are redundant, obviously. If they tried to survive in the wild without humans they would die...


lol are humans then redundant as well?


Yes. Why do you think there is such alarm for devolution? This is exactly what the thread is about if you read the first few posts.
There is a constant flux between humans in the literal and figurative bipolar function of society's absolutism in which one view is either completely wrong or completely right. It's the difference between human made diamonds and naturally occurring ones.


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By the livin' Gawd that made you,
    You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Epigallo]
    #12753444 -

Thanks much for the link. I browsed through briefly the abstracts on their measures and thought some of it was very interesting.

Quote:
All the data reported here are based on indicators that successfully passed a test for face-validity.



Face-validity... what appears on the surface. They left out anything that didn't match up with the face-validity. IMO that's important because there are a lot of studies that suggest the face is the facade we artificially inflate and present. Like the old stores that would build a facade that made the building look much larger than it really was, we too build fronts to make ourselves look much better off than we really are. And the weirdest part of this process is that in building these fronts, we convince ourselves of their reality. We are too closely connected with them to realize that we are actually building them. We fail to separate ourselves and see the enhancing quality. Unlike a building, too few of us actually step back and look at our actions and reactions from a distance. We're too busy being entwined in them.

The rest of the methodology was too vague for me to really get a good sense of.


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Kickle]
    #12754232 -

Yeah, who knows how honest people are being, but you have to accept that most of the "miserable" nations score pretty low, and most of the more affluent nations score quite well. And there are other factors that indicate a degree of honesty, like the results from Qatar, a country mired in luxury filled with people who vociferously espouse their own way of life, but which does not rank as well as most other well-off countries (most Qataris would be loathe to admit their devotion to Allah doesn't bring supreme happiness).

Besides that, regardless of how honest or dishonest the results are, you would expect any degree of falsity to be relatively constant over time. So if the results show that people are happier than 20, 30, and 50 years ago, there seems like ample reason to trust that indication.

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Epigallo]
    #12754253 -

And there are other factors that indicate a degree of honesty, like the results from Qatar, a country mired in luxury filled with people who vociferously espouse their own way of life, but which does not rank as well as most other well-off countries (most Qataris would be loathe to admit their devotion to Allah doesn't bring supreme happiness).

Can you explain this more? How does this indicate honesty?


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Kickle]
    #12754297 -

Most (or at least many) of the citizens espouse Islam as the supreme road to happiness. Therefore, it seems if subjects generally lied to make themselves look better, this would be a prime example.

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Epigallo]
    #12754322 -

I dunno about that. Buddhism is the route to the cessation of suffering. But part of this route is acknowledging that the world is suffering. Acknowledging suffering means that you realize you're not as happy as you desire to be. This would drag scores down, and really, make it more realistic. Life is not all sunshine. It is also rain.

If everyone else is inflating their scores, a country that does not would appear less happy... even if the reality is there is no difference. Humans suffer and are not always happy. The theory of positive illusions discusses this in depth. Depressed individuals are more realistic in their assessments of the world, but when pushed against the measuring stick of our society, they appear overly negative. That's because everyone else is inflating their views of the world.

It gets more complicated than what I'm describing of course. Depressed individuals do suffer from negative thought loops. But there are links the whole way along from an individual who doesn't enhance their view of the world, who sees it as it really is, and the eventual development of depression in our society. Those who don't develop depression are those who enhance their views. That is the norm in our society, that is what keeps us happy... on the surface.


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Kickle]
    #12754356 -

I don't mean to be rude, but your thought process seems convoluted to me. If a nation would like itself to be seen as happy, the score should rise.

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Epigallo]
    #12754369 -

Not rude at all. I'm not offended by disagreement.

Why would it rise if it has been happening all along? For example Buddhism is thousands of years old but its emphasis on practicing observation in order to see reality is just as relevant today as ever.


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Kickle]
    #12754415 -

Oh, sorry, that was ambiguous. It should "rise above other nations". I don't mean over time, it should simply be higher at any point in time.

Buddhism ebbs and wanes within different areas and I suspect many of the practitioners simply go through the motions or turn it into dogma like Christianity. It is one of many factors which should get evened out with large sample sizes.

I think by mentioning Buddhism you mean to show that people who are more conscious of their internal states will report lower happiness. But I do not think that is necessarily true. But even if it is, do you mean to say that the higher scores over time are caused by a drop in self awareness over the years?

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Epigallo]
    #12754494 -

It should be highest in countries with the most material wealth IME. Those countries that feed on more, more, more. These are the places that will have the greatest pull towards believing they should be happy, even when they're not. That more happiness is better... more, more, more. This will lead to the artificial creation of happiness to satiate the desire.

As for why I drew in Buddhism, it was because I have the most knowledge of its philosophy. And also because it lends itself nicely to psychological research and so parallels can be easily drawn. If I had just referenced psychology, I wouldn't have been able to speak of the existence of these ideas even thousands of years ago.

IMO those who don't change their internal states to reflect an inner desire but rather just observe will always be closer to a score of sometimes happy, sometimes sad on a rating scale of happiness. There is no such thing as always happy. There is no such thing as always sad. The world gives you a mix of both. Anyone who observes the world for much time at all will see this. Clinging to happiness because it feels good is a natural tendency. But it doesn't make happiness exist any more in reality.

The exception to this centering is those who don't even have their basic needs met. The proportion of suffering that they will experience is disproportionate to someone who does have their basic needs met. Beyond the basic needs, material goods don't influence how much happiness we have. Any study of those who fall into money can show this.

But even if it is, do you mean to say that the higher scores over time are caused by a drop in self awareness over the years?

Yeah, and on the other side of the coin this increases the amount of depression. Those who are aware and in a society that values enhancement will quickly find themselves at odds with the culture. The more enhancement that is required to maintain the illusion, the less awareness that is required to become depressed.


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Kickle]
    #12754798 -

Quote:
It should be highest in countries with the most material wealth IME. Those countries that feed on more, more, more. These are the places that will have the greatest pull towards believing they should be happy, even when they're not. That more happiness is better... more, more, more. This will lead to the artificial creation of happiness to satiate the desire.



This is true, but again, there is variation between nations of relatively equal wealth, showing that there are factors in their responses other than how happy they believe they "should" be.

Quote:
IMO those who don't change their internal states to reflect an inner desire but rather just observe will always be closer to a score of sometimes happy, sometimes sad on a rating scale of happiness. There is no such thing as always happy. There is no such thing as always sad. The world gives you a mix of both. Anyone who observes the world for much time at all will see this. Clinging to happiness because it feels good is a natural tendency. But it doesn't make happiness exist any more in reality.


Perhaps "satisfied with life" is a more fitting metric. But a general air of happiness, some underlying sense of well being, can last for years and years. It is not hard to assign a rating to your overall well-being. Depressed people generally recognize they are as such, and those living shallow lives who keep up an appearance of being happy don't really fool themselves that much. I really doubt it. You can't convince yourself that you are profoundly overjoyed. As soon as you would have convinced yourself, you would have become as such. I think you are over-complicating the issue, and that surveys about internal states can give useful demographic info.

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Re: The Antidepressant Age [Re: Epigallo]
    #12754887 -

:shrug:

I'm just stating what we can observe. Give 100 people a survey of positive traits and ask them to rate themselves on each trait using a scale from 1-10. Sample questions would be "I am organized" or "I am intelligent" where 1 is not at all and 10 is extremely. Make the questionnaire as many questions as you can think of. At the end of it, average up the scores. You will quickly see that no one believes they have an average or below average amount of positive traits. Most likely the scores will average around 7 or 8.

This is clearly not reality. If people were accurately rating themselves, the average for the group should be 5. Some people should have worse organization or lower intelligence and some people better. But if you do this experiment, everyone thinks they're far above average on the vast majority of traits. Even depressed individuals will rate themselves higher than average, but lower than the masses. That's why they are considered to be more realistic -- they will at least approach 5 :lol:

Believing something doesn't make it so. Believing I am happy doesn't make me happy. We selectively remember positive memories while ignoring negative ones. We have unrealistic beliefs about our degree of control. We believe that the future is better than what past and current events suggest. We create an illusion to make ourselves feel happy, even if our bodies and the events that occur to us do not agree with the illusion. Happy only as long as we can maintain the illusion. It is a happiness created within the mind using selective attention. The mind receives the focus while the rest gets ignored. I think I'm happy therefore I must be happy, even if I really feel sadness. I don't feel it because I'm too busy looking at what I think I should be feeling.

Edited by Kickle (06/16/10 09:19 PM)

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