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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

You know its going to be pure garbage when the title is 'Doing X makes you happy!! '.

Fuck these studies that can never be reproduced even under the exact circumstances. These charlatans continue to be allocated funds instead of going to jail; despite being exposed as frauds countless times.

Just because reading stuff like this gives us good vibes doesn't mean we should continue wasting money on these "studies". Time to say enough is enough and put these "professors" behind bars for wasting public money.

This pointless scientific approach to human behavior and society has distracted us from any genuine discussion about our own internal and external conflicts . A Human being to these people is a machine which when given input X produces output Y.

Why do we continue to accept this?

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I think the article answered that, oddly enough - the liars may not have done any actual science, but they told a great story. Apparently that's enough!

It may have made them happier in life and in love, but what about the rest of us? Does it make you happy to see funds wasted on "research" like this?

Ha, not really. I think they ought to be ridiculed in a court of their peers.

I think "jail the professors" is too extreme. There needs to be a more constructive solution.

I completely agree with your assessment of the problem.

(Careful, heard this "story" about dcposch, he might send you to jail too.)

On more factual note, it's a known issue that as you move from hard to soft sciences that positive results increase:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Fields studying topics like "happiness" tend to validate their hypothesis over 90% of the time; which means something fishy is going on.

Or they just chose to test something fairly obvious, like that people that are good at things are considered more attractive than people who aren't.

... or negative results are a lot less likely to be accepted for publication.

The better solution is to stop funding them, although I wouldn't know how to locate the source.

> Why do we continue to accept this?

If you really want to change things for the better, you should stop asking questions that have no reasonable answer. All you are doing is amplifying the dissonance of the article with your comments.

Happiness is a relative term. Everyone experience suffering, but it's how we deal with that suffering that defines our overall state of well being. If one holds onto something that causes suffering to long, it becomes inefficienct. If one lets go of suffering to early, it's an indication there is a lack of sacredness.

I don't think the problem is that it's unreproducible or fraud so much as it's mostly testing the obvious. People will probably find good storytellers more attractive than terrible ones in the same way that they will find people who dress better, sing better, cook better etc. more attractive than the opposite. Not sure testing it does much harm apart from maybe as you say wasting public money. But then lots of things do that.

At this point I think people are just trolling Hackernews for the traffic.

don't feed the trolls

Ya know, if you would just learn to be a better story teller...

What should I read to learn more about "our internal and external conflicts"? Genuinely interested

I've become a huge fan of Jiddu Krishnamurthi over the last year. A bunch of his talks on youtube.

I find it difficult to reconcile the rageface you display in your original comment on this thread with your being a Krishnamurthi fan.

How so? I am not an expert on his work by any means but I am curious about what makes you say that.

Well, for the obvious starter, because K was all about accepting things as they are with equanimity, and not getting tangled up in the stories we have in our heads about how things "should" or "shouldn't" be.

It's my understanding that equanimity and rageface are kinda, you know, mutually exclusive.

So you don't like charlatans with poorly supported explanations of human behavior... but you're a fan of Jiddu Krishnamurti?

you are the second person saying this, really curious what the negative sentiment is about . Why do you think he is a charlatan?

I chanced upon his talks via youtube recommendation.

Nassim Taleb, is this you? ;-)

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