Comment by jkhdigital | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkhdigital | Hacker News Reader

> It seems that there’s very high variation in how people respond to sleep deprivation.

There you go. It's the tyranny of averages: when variation between humans is greater than the effect of the intervention.

This reminds me of reading The How of Happiness and learning that happiness is basically 50% genetics, 10% circumstances and 40% behavior. The author frames that 40% as a really big number, but I thought about it the other way around: if you're unlucky enough to be born into the bottom decile of genetic happiness, then you could do everything right and still be less happy than someone with really good happiness genes who does everything wrong.

Some people get smashed by any lack of sleep, and some people (most notably short sleepers) are totally fine with as little as 4 hours a night. There is no advice that works for both kinds, and formulating advice based on averages is committing a grave fallacy.

I suppose the world of health research is plagued by this erroneous assumption that humans are more or less the same. In some ways sure, but in many ways we are profoundly different.

> I suppose the world of health research is plagued by this erroneous assumption that humans are more or less the same. In some ways sure, but in many ways we are profoundly different.

Sidenote: I came to the conclusion, that this is the crux of all generalizations when it comes to humans. Not all policies will be good for all people. The ideal country might be very different for you and me. Also our diets, the way we build relationships, how we should train our bodies or what constitutes moral lives.

I ain't no fancy pants happiness author but I'd posit that happiness is 70% stupidity and 30% circumstance.

You can be poor and happy or rich and happy, but the smarter you are the less likely either of those are true. Though being rich certainly helps.

Why would it be less likely to be rich and happy the smarter you are?

If you're smarter, it means you can learn more efficiently. If you learn more efficiently, you get a deeper understanding of the world.

If you understand how something works, you stop having the wrong expectations, so you're less likely to be unhappy.

Perhaps understanding how things work is leading to the unhappiness.

There are lots of big problems in the world, too big to be fixed by a single person. Dwelling on these can be depressing, they don't say that ignorance is bliss without a reason.

> If you learn more efficiently, you get a deeper understanding of the world.

This is often a problem. Some say ignorance is bliss, and I am not sure they are wrong.

> If you understand how something works, you stop having the wrong expectations, so you're less likely to be unhappy.

While one may not have the wrong expectations, it can be painful sometimes to see how deep the rot goes and how that rot impacts people’s lives deeply (often negatively).

Additionally, changing the rot may be outside of your sphere of influence, so feelings of helplessness are possible.

> you stop having the wrong expectations, so you're less likely to be unhappy

This seems like a big leap in logic.

Can you point out how?

Here's an exaggerated example: are you upset because you can't fly like a bird? Probably not, because you know that the world doesn't work that way.

A more subtle example: If you understand why people act the way they act, you stop being angry when they act in a way that is harmful to others or themselves. It doesn't mean you just let them do it. You stop them if you can. But it doesn't make you unhappy. Just like it doesn't make you unhappy if a wild animal attacks you when go into its cage, for example.

If my dog or friend or family member would die, I'd be unhappy. Understanding that death is natural wouldn't do much to that unhappiness. Maybe someday I'd get over it, or maybe not, but either way, it wouldn't be because I gained some deeper understanding of life and death.

> it doesn't make you unhappy if a wild animal attacks you when go into its cage

Maybe we have different definitions of unhappiness at play here, because being attacked by an animal would definitely make me unhappy. I mean at the moment it would mostly make me fear for my life, but afterward when dealing with the damages I got, I think I would be quite unhappy, and understanding that really I'm the one to blame wouldn't help. It could make me more unhappy, leaving me kicking myself for doing something so stupid.

I wouldn't blame the animal if that's what you mean, but that's different from happiness/unhappiness.

> are you upset because you can't fly like a bird

I think that's more because my hopes and dreams are shaped by the environment that I've grown up in and, living amongst other humans that can't fly like a bird, the possibility of doing that has never occurred to me, at least not for seriously enough to become an issue of happiness.

Had I been a born an elephant with huge ears that all my so-called elephant friends would torment me for... yeah it would make me pretty unhappy if those ears wouldn't at least give me the ability to fly.

Research in general pretty much has to work this way. You're trying to identify "laws" or rules that govern reality. Outliers are interesting, but in general we expect to find many instances of some phenomenon—which means that by default we're looking for cause-and-effect relationships that apply in "most cases."

It's also worth mentioning that it's very easy for people to convince themselves that they're special or different when they actually aren't. Our own psychology is very unreliable. So while your point is well taken, people should also not assume they're the exception to the rule, even if they might be.

You're absolutely right, and I agree that the default assumption should be that humans are exactly the same. We aren't, of course, but abstracting away those details has worked quite well for centuries of scientific progress in medicine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com