The mathematics-abuse aside, I don’t think it’s a completely ridiculous idea. It seems obviously true that somebody experiencing negative emotions in a ratio of 1000 against every positive emotion cannot be described as “flourishing”, whereas someone experiencing the reverse is probably permanently high on what must be a supremely lucrative designer drug.
But to be as precise as even a single order of magnitude in your range of flourishing ratios implies a degree of experimental rigour that I’ve never, ever heard of in psychology apart from arguably in IQ testing.
There’s also a causation/corellation issue which must be quite challenging to disentangle.
In their pursuit of precision and the trappings of scienticity they’ve perhaps done at least as much to damage their idea as to nurture it. Think there’s a lesson in there.
The mathematics-abuse aside, I don’t think it’s a completely ridiculous idea. It seems obviously true that somebody experiencing negative emotions in a ratio of 1000 against every positive emotion cannot be described as “flourishing”, whereas someone experiencing the reverse is probably permanently high on what must be a supremely lucrative designer drug.
But to be as precise as even a single order of magnitude in your range of flourishing ratios implies a degree of experimental rigour that I’ve never, ever heard of in psychology apart from arguably in IQ testing.
There’s also a causation/corellation issue which must be quite challenging to disentangle.
In their pursuit of precision and the trappings of scienticity they’ve perhaps done at least as much to damage their idea as to nurture it. Think there’s a lesson in there.