But he thinks that “still worth cargo culting on the cheap and easy wins” which implies he believes the causation even if he’s treating the mechanism as a black box.
I took his meaning to be: it’s hard to figure out what causes what, but if X is associated with greater happiness and is easy to do, I might as well do X even though it might turn out it’s a consequence rather than a cause.
I see “Go to church”, “Don’t watch porn”, “Don’t ruminate”, “Don’t fantasize”. And WTF is “Don’t rely on marriage”?
I’ll pass.
I think that was the point: these things are correlated with higher (self-reported) happiness, but that doesn’t mean they cause it.
The link explicitly says:
Blargh.
I meant I read RomeoStevens as intending the link as an an example of some obviously correlation-not-causation cargo-cultish stuff.
But he thinks that “still worth cargo culting on the cheap and easy wins” which implies he believes the causation even if he’s treating the mechanism as a black box.
I took his meaning to be: it’s hard to figure out what causes what, but if X is associated with greater happiness and is easy to do, I might as well do X even though it might turn out it’s a consequence rather than a cause.