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Comment by redsummer | Hacker News Reader

The Amish are happier than almost all Americans: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/03/16/happiness-wealth-a...

You want those communities to collapse, because you see no other solutions except more tech, more greed, more 'progress'. That's the hamster wheel you've been given. What other life could there be?

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I knew briefly a woman who had ran away from everything she knew at 17, to avoid a marriage. The stories of what counted as "normal" was horrific, especially with regards to daughters. Between the corporal punishment, starvation-as-punishment and strict-to-consequence-of-abandonment gender roles, it mapped closely to the popular conception of young women's lives in radical Islam. They also have a greater prevalence of genetic diseases due to inbreeding.

The study linked in that blog post makes no reference to the Amish, whose happiness is entirely conjecture from the blogger.

Making people happy is surprisingly easy; all it takes is a couple of electrodes inserted into the brain. So if that's the only bar that you have, the Amish are way overthinking it.

In theory yes; in practice, it's beyond our technological capabilities at the moment. A better alternative would be drugs. And honestly, it's our "universal culture" that's more susceptible to this failure mode.

I recall reading about such experiments done on rats, and that was at least a couple decades ago. Is it really beyond our technological capabilities? Note, I'm not talking about electrodes to induce dreams or some such; just a simple direct electric stimulation of the pleasure centers. Presumably, the resulting sensation is that you wouldn't know why you're happy - you're just happy.

Direct electric stimulation of brain (implanting electrodes) is simple only if you don't care if the subject has a risk of fatal infection, and if performing literal brain surgery is cheap and routine, as it is for mice/rats (again, because a risk of death or brain damage is acceptable).

Yes, we can do that, but that would be complicated to do it safely on humans - compared to that, a lifetime supply of drugs is cheap and simple.

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