We don’t really have access to unfiltered information about lives of other people. No matter if that’s someone we know, or someone famous people bother to write about, the information we get is filtered and distorted by people’s idea of what it should be like so many times, it has nothing to do with reality.
And from great amount of data you will focus on things you think are supposed to affect happiness. Observation without theory is blind, and we don’t have good theories.
you will focus on things you think are supposed to affect happiness
I think it would be more productive to focus on activities that are different from what one is already doing. If my non-akratic roomie and I are both doing activity A, then even if activity A is helping my roomie, it won’t help me—it’s already failing at the task. Things that my roomie does that I don’t, whether they seem intuitively likely to affect happiness or not, would be the targets of investigation.
We don’t really have access to unfiltered information about lives of other people. No matter if that’s someone we know, or someone famous people bother to write about, the information we get is filtered and distorted by people’s idea of what it should be like so many times, it has nothing to do with reality.
Well, if, say, you had a spouse, you might have a good idea of what (s)he did during downtime. Or a roommate or very close friend.
And from great amount of data you will focus on things you think are supposed to affect happiness. Observation without theory is blind, and we don’t have good theories.
I think it would be more productive to focus on activities that are different from what one is already doing. If my non-akratic roomie and I are both doing activity A, then even if activity A is helping my roomie, it won’t help me—it’s already failing at the task. Things that my roomie does that I don’t, whether they seem intuitively likely to affect happiness or not, would be the targets of investigation.