By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging — one with higher subjective well-being for men.

“The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.

From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse—and now well into retirement—the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews. The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries.”

And the lead researcher, Geroge Vaillant’s conclusion, based on this exhaustive research?

“Happiness isn’t about me.  Try being funny.  Try falling in love.  Try forgiving someone … Happiness is love.  Full stop.”

I’ve always been bothered by the advice “make it relevant to the students", for two reasons.  First, it often feels to me that it doesn;t apply.  Is the Epic of Gilgamesh relevant to the students in any way they understand right now?  Is trigonometry?  Making these topics relevant to students’ lives will be a strain, and students will probably think it’s phony.  Second, if I can;t convince students that some material is relevant, does that mean I shouldn’t teach it?  If I’m continually trying to build bridges between students’ daily lives and their school subjects, the students may get the message that school is always about them, whereas I think their is value, interest and beauty in learning about things that don’t have much to do with me.  What I’m suggesting is that students should not be the main force of lesson planning.  Rather, they might be used as initial points of contact that help students understand the main ideas you want them to consider, rather than as the reason or motivation for them to consider these ideas.

1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick
2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion
4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story
5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy
6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desparate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee

“What happens when people who share a belief get together to discuss it?  Psychologists know the answer to that and it’s not pretty.  They call it group polarisation.

It seems reasonable to think that when like-minded people get together to discuss a proposed hazardous waste site, or the breast implants they believe are making them sick, or some other risk, their views will tend to coalesce around the average within the group.  But they don’t.  Decades of research has proved that groups usually come to conclusions that are more extreme than the average view of the individuals who make up the group.  When opponents of a hazardous waste site gather to talk about it, they will become convinced the site is more dangerous than originally believed.  When a woman who believes breast implants are a threat gets together with women who feel the same way, she and all the women in the meeting are likely to leave believing they had previously underestimated the danger.  The dynamic is always the same.”

Hence the value of diverse teams, presumably.

In Dan Gardner’s book Risk, he recounts an experiment done to show this that was conducted by Peter Watson.

The challenge is pretty simple: given 3 numbers in sequence, can you figure out what the rule is?  Participants were allowed to write down 3 different numbers to see whether they followed the rule, and try this as many times as they wanted.

So here are the numbers: 2, 4 and 6.

It seems pretty normal, so most would then ask the researchers whether these numbers fitted the rule:

8, 10, and 12.  And yes, they do.

And if they wanted more vigorous testing, they would ask whether the following sets of numbers followed the rule:

14, 16, 18 or 100, 102, 104.  And yes, both do follow the rule

So what’s the rule?  Well most said that it was “any 3 even numbers ascending by 2 each time”.  And they were wrong.  That’s not the rule.  The correct rule is: “any 3 numbers in ascending order”.

What had happened, it seems, is that people didn’t try to disconfirm the rule.  They didn’t ask, for example, whether “3,4,5” followed the rule.

As Dan Gardner says,

“most people do not try to disconfirm.  They do the opposite, trying to confirm the rule by looking for examples that fit it.  That’s a futile strategy.  No matter how many examples are piled up, they can never prove that the belief is correct.  Confirmation doesn’t work”

Something I need to bear in mind while trawling the myriad posts on Everything 2.0.  It seems it’s better to look for indications that I’m wrong rather than bask in the warm webby-goodness of confirmed 2.0 successes.  And intuitively that makes sense.  Rigour is surely preferable to comfort.

“For every problem there is a solution that is simple, clean and wrong.”

- H.L.Mencken