On the 8 Spot

How did these purchases affect people’s overall sense of happiness? By looking at the data in more detail, the authors found that these purchases affected people’s satisfaction with the area of their lives that were affected by the purchase. People who spent money on experiences related to their social life saw an improvement in their satisfaction with their social life. People who spent money on experiences related to fitness saw an improvement in their satisfaction with their health. These increases in satisfaction with a particular area of their lives also affected people’s overall sense of well-being and happiness.

So if you spend your money on experiences, you can increase your happiness. There are a two key ground rules, though. First, stay within your budget. Spending more money than you have creates stress and lowers happiness. Second, don’t blow all of your money on one great event. You are better off sitting in the cheap seats for a number of sporting events than sitting courtside at one. Spread those good experiences out over time.

via Money can buy happiness if you spent it right | Psychology Today.

Must forward the linked study to the boss. harharhar

# A comprehensive study by Ernst & Young showed that the longer the vacation their employees took, the better they performed. Yet more than half of all Americans now fail to take all of their vacation days and 30 per cent of Americans use less than half their allotted vacation time.

via The Productivity Myth – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.

This is probably one of the top 5 posts I’ve read about the Philippines this year.

Marketman’s Running Survey

In the survey I am running (or if you read this later, survey that I ran), it seems some 40% of readers actually think the Philippines is POORER than it is, in other words, a fairly negative sentiment. Some 24% of you got it right, with roughly 86-88% of the families earning less than PHP25,000 per month for a family of 5. But approximately 36% of you were varying degrees of being overly optimistic, and believed that many more families earned more than they actually do. Okay, so hold this thought for a moment. Roughly 87% of all families in the Philippines, representing 75.7 million people, are living on less than PHP5,000 (USD110) per month per person on average in income.

via Market Manila – Income Levels / Poverty in the Philippines – General.

Okay a little too over the top. but I really wanted you to read this!!!

Uber useful!!!

Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet

by John on March 30, 2010

Suppose you’re proofreading a book. If you’ve read 20 pages and found 7 typos, you might reasonably estimate that the chances of a page having a typo are 7/20. But what if you’ve read 20 pages and found no typos. Are you willing to conclude that the chances of a page having a typo are 0/20, i.e. the book has absolutely no typos?

To take another example, suppose you are testing children for perfect pitch. You’ve tested 100 children so far and haven’t found any with perfect pitch. Do you conclude that children don’t have perfect pitch? You know that some do because you’ve heard of instances before. But your data suggest perfect pitch in children is at least rare. But how rare?

The rule of three gives a quick and dirty way to estimate these kinds of probabilities. It says that if you’ve tested N cases and haven’t found what you’re looking for, a reasonable estimate is that the probability is less than 3/N. So in our proofreading example, if you haven’t found any typos in 20 pages, you could estimate that the probability of a page having a typo is less than 15%. In the perfect pitch example, you could conclude that fewer than 3% of children have perfect pitch.

via Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet — The Endeavour.

Automatic, unconscious self-control

The results showed that, when participants were thinking concretely, they tended to unconsciously see candy bars in a positive light and apples in a negative light. But this was reversed when participants were thinking abstractly. Just as predicted, abstract thinking automatically made people unconsciously think of candy bars as the devil’s own food.

To back this up they asked participants in the two conditions whether they would like an apple or a candy bar, right now. They found that when participants were thinking in a concrete low-level way, they chose the apple over the candy bar only 50% of the time. But when they were thinking abstractly this percentage shot up to 76%. Not bad for such a simple manipulation.

via How to Increase Your Self-Control Without Really Trying | PsyBlog.

Very interesting, very curious what effect alcohol would have on my actions.

Alcohol myopia

According to a growing body of evidence collected over the last three or more decades, people’s Jekyll and Hyde behaviour while drinking can be understood by a simple idea which has some intriguing ramifications.

The alcohol myopia model says that drink makes our attentional system short-sighted and the more we drink, the more short-sighted it becomes. With more alcohol our brains become less and less able to process peripheral cues and more focused on what is right in front of us. It’s this balance between what is right in front of us and what we don’t notice around the edges that determines how alcohol affects us in different situations.

Here are a few effects which imbibers will recognise immediately:

• An ego boost: when people drink, they often feel better about themselves. This may be because the attentional short-sightedness induced by alcohol makes all our shortcomings float away and so we feel closer to our ideal selves. This is probably one of the reasons it is so potentially addictive, it is self-actualisation in bottle form.
• Real worries can get worse: if we’ve had a bad day and we sit quietly with a drink, alcohol can make it worse because all the peripheral cues which are potential distractors are cut out and all we see are our problems.
• Pleasure in the moment: the flip-side of this attentional focus is that if, while drinking, we are doing something enjoyable, we find it easier to ignore any nagging doubts or stray worries wandering through our minds. We can be totally in the moment listening to music, watching sports or talking with a good friend.
• In the zone: it’s even possible that for some types of task it may increase performance as we let go of our insecurities. Perhaps that’s why so many writers wrote with a glass of whisky at their side.

via What Alcohol Does to Your Mind: Attentional Myopia | PsyBlog.

What this means for me would be drink coffee while coding and don’t drink it while thinking about design and while trying to study the requirement documents.

So:

Use caffeine for short-term performance on a focused task (such as an exam).

Avoid caffeine for tasks that require broad creativity and long-term learning.

(Disclaimer: The greater altertness, larger short-term memory capacity, and eased recall might make the memories you do make of higher quality.)

via Less Wrong: Coffee: When it helps, when it hurts.

I know I’m demand resistant. yikes.

A person who is “demand resistant” has a negative response to expectations, pressure, or obligations. They don’t respond well to demands or to being told that they “should” do something – sometimes, even when they’re trying to place those demands on themselves.

via The Happiness Project: Do You Hate to Hear “No,” “Don’t,” or “Stop”? Plus the Weekly Video..

This is why I love the saying the plural of anecdotes is not data.

In other words,

1. In a popular area there’s more temptation to fiddle with the data or analysis until you get what you expect.

2. The more people who test an idea, the more likely someone is going to find data in support of it by chance.

The authors produce evidence of the two effects above in the context of papers written about protein interactions in yeast. They conclude that “The second effect is about 10 times larger than the first one.”

via Popular research areas produce more false results — The Endeavour.

can you train yourself to see this change? I think I’m too slow or absent minded to notice this.

The researchers used an infrared eye-tracking device to measure the diameter of the participants’ left pupils up to 2,000 times per second while they performed the tasks. They found that pupil dilation was tightly coupled with the time at which the decisions were made, and betrayed the participants’ decisions before they were openly revealed. In the first experiment, maximum pupil dilation was observed during the 2-second interval in which the button was pressed. In the second, where there was a delay between the choice and the participants’ report of which number they had chosen, their pupils were maximally dilated during the interval at which they chose the digit. During task three, maximum dilation was again observed during the time at which the participants “chose” the underlined number.

via Your eyes betray the timing of your decisions : Neurophilosophy.