boredom

In his 1995 essay “In Praise of Boredom,” Nobel Prize–winning poet Joseph Brodsky wrote: “When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.” Adds Vodanovich: “If you don’t succumb to its negative effects, boredom is a great motivational force.”
Thats taken from a Scientific American article on boredom.

So easy to say. I dont think its true. Boredom is a debilitating condition. It arises from a disconnect between what you want and what you are doing/getting, a fundamental disconnect between values and actuals. But this is not consistent with the fact that there are some people who are NEVER bored and some who are ALWAYS bored. So if its a temporary disconnect then this should not be the case...unless it has to do with self awareness. people who are self aware know what makes them bored and they avoid it? They live life according to their values?

And the self help guys say: if you are bored then stop being a boring person...if you cant be interested in the little things around then something is wrong with you. I agree but Im too bored to find out what is wrong!

Neuro enhancing drugs

This subject is fascinating to me. We can visualize a world where these drugs exist and competition between people will be dirtied by the drugs. Someone gets an AER and you say" Oh well, its the drugs, look at the size of her head (brain)! Thats not normal.." We will be like olympics athletes and before you can get an article published you would need to get a drug test?? Hows it ever gonna work?? Or are they going to announce the drugs they took and that can be published along with the article...why not? Nothing wrong if they increase your creativity! Problem is so far they only seem to increase concentration rather than creativity. Theres the ADHD drug Ritanil: you can, BTW, buy it without a prescription at:
http://www.freedom-pharmacys.com/rxdrugs/ritanil.html.

But so far apparently there is nothing that actually INCREASES creativity!

It doesn't matter though...my colleagues are working on lab experiments that show that a small happiness boost leads to an increase in "productivity". This I believe! So, heres a new advertisement for prozac: "Free yourself to be the best: happy people are successful people" or something like that!
Actually, what would I not give to be in the shoes of one of my super satisfied colleagues (SSC to keep it anonymous).. those that seem infinitely satisfied with themselves, those who interpret everything that happens to them as uniquely challenging and those who know they can overcome any challenge. It would simply be heaven. Thats all I can say....

Regret, disappointment, and learning

Been reading a lot (as usual) about this...apparently there is a huge difference in psychology between feeling regret and dissapointment. You could feel regret for various reasons, maybe you missed out on a large prize because you didn't pay attention to what you were supposed to do or because you didn't put in enough effort or you could feel it if you gave too much and you could have gotten away with "less money on the table"...Whatever. On the other hand if you simply lost something due to bad luck you just feel "disappointed" but you do not feel regret since there was nothing you could have done.
Why do we even care?? If all of these motivations led to the same behaviour then one should not care -- however it seems that thats not the case. You can learn from mistakes only if there is regret. Thats why its important to know when you have regret and when not.

Im trying to think of the last time I faced regret. Thing is it never happens like that since everything in life is a complicated combination of luck and effort...I never really know if it was my (lack) of effort or whether it would have happened anyway...most likely I think its always the latter. So the point is that two different observers (myself and an antagonist) would have different perceptions of who made the lesser effort and whether luck played a role: so its so subjective that there IS no pattern...

Finally what about the winners curse? Is it disappointment or regret? It could be regret that you overpaid given the new information revealed. But you would not have known that before anyway. So no regrets, only dissapointment?

And how can you test the difference?

Relativity and happiness

I learnt some interesting things this weekend...some of the latest research in Neuroeconomics and relativity. What do people care about? It seems they care very much if someone beats them in a game of skill but not so much when its a game of luck (Aldo Rustichini, a professor at Minnesota did this experiment using fMRI machines and Minnesota students). So, lets say someone wins a lottery, research shows that they are not very happy in the first few years as perhaps they attribute it to luck rather than skill (and it would be difficult to argue with that, unless choosing random numbers requires skill). But after some years they convince themselves that they do deserve it after all, and become happy. What are the implications of this? If you want to increase happiness, this means the state should equalize skills rather than money... i.e. what outcomes SIGNAL about skills matters more than itself. Together with the recent book by Richard Nisbett “Intelligence and How to Get It," ( see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=iq&st=cse) this suggests that equalizing educational opportunities is the key to equalizing "skills"... intrinsic talent is really not that important as was always thought...

Another interesting piece of research by Claudia Senik in Paris suggests that the inequality in levels of happiness reported by couples is a very good predictor of whether the relationship lasts or not: so the longest lived marriages are those where either both partners are equally happy or equally unhappy! You know the old saying "misery loves company"...well misery loves company but only if its equally miserable, you dont want to be with someone who is excrutiatingly happy while you are dying...
(see e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=iq&st=cse)....

Finally, I never thought there was anything good about the sex ratio imbalance in China or India (in 2006, there were 120 boys born for every 100 girls, in India 930 women to 1000 men) but a new theory and some supportive evidence claims that it is indeed the imbalance that is responsible for the high Chinese savings rate...this is how the logic works: the competition for young women to get married to, is getting harsher given the imbalance. Hence parents of boys start saving early so that they can compete in the bride price and showing high status for the boy when he gets married...at the same time, since in China the boy and his wife look after parents in old age (no social security), while girls go away, this also increases the incentives of the girls family to save more for their old age! Hence savings goes up as a whole assuming that people have children at the same rate as before: save during the first 20 years then splurge...