Happiness is more like poetry than algorithms

by cryptozeus • 6 years ago

75 26 6 years ago

allovernow• 6 years ago

I’m going to conflate happiness, pleasure, peace, joy, bliss, contentment, well-being and more. I don’t do it deliberately.
But at the same time, this is not math. We cannot clearly bound these words. They mean different things in different contexts to different people. So try and get into the spirit of what I’m saying, rather than getting hung up on specific words and details.

Well, acktually... there's a trivial mathematical representation. Represent happiness as a vector. Then you can customize thresholds for each person.

astrea• 6 years ago

Not to be a Negative Nellie here, but when I read the title I expected a bit more substance to the article than a couple sentences rehashing the same idea.

darkerside• 6 years ago

Yeah disappointingly trite. Seems obvious on the surface, but also worthy of, dare I say, deeper analysis.

planetzero• 6 years ago

Aren't most human emotions more like poetry than algorithms?

52-6F-62• 6 years ago

I think that’s the right question.

More like? Not sure. The cause of? Surely. Best explained or represented by? Probably.

symplee• 6 years ago

Almost.

Laziness = minimum spanning tree

Love = merge sort

Sadness = reversing a linked list

But yes, all other emotions are iambic pentameter poetry.

vga805• 6 years ago

This is one of my favorite hn comments ever.

joe_the_user2• 6 years ago

Why can't poetry be algorithms?

Why can't algorithms be poetry, for that matter?

The potential of algorithms hasn't been fully explored imo. And perhaps the potential of poetry hasn't either.

pc2g4d• 6 years ago

http://code-poetry.com/

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_poetry

blueadept111• 6 years ago

Algorithms is more like Happiness than Poetry.

just think about it... wow.

taneq• 6 years ago

I dunno, I think a really elegant algorithm is poetry.

emersonrsantos• 6 years ago

I always thought of happiness to be in these final passages of Walter Pater’s book, The Renaissance:

“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us - for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.”

nsomaru• 6 years ago

In a similar vein, with regards action:

“He who does his bounden duty without attachment to the fruit of action, he is a yogi, he is a sanyasi” — Bhagavad Gita VI/1

joe_the_user2• 6 years ago

Well, I think the big question is "why can't it be both?"

It seems like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has done a lot of research on happiness and related qualities as a kind of "flow" [1]. And this entire, overall process seems reasonably close to the qualities of fractals, which are highly mathematical objects that also have a multitude of rich qualities similar to complex systems in the world[2].

I wouldn't assert that there's a full characterization of happiness as fractals or other math object available now. But it seems like something worth of research, "taking the question seriously" rather than dismissal. It seems like such dismissals often given stunted characterizations of what either happiness or math involves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal

pyuser5832• 6 years ago

Lol. Poetry can be very analytical.

Good poems are meant to be memorized. Good poets often have a very precise methodology.

Reviewers often use the phrase “technical accuracy.”

To quote many poets, “Hear this, and pass on.”

libertine• 6 years ago

The odd thing is that in school they teach us to dissect poems, going specifically through some authors.

Yet pretty much no poetry resonates with us as students.

It's true that we're young, and we don't have enough life experience to find meaning in those words... but shouldn't the reality be that we should see the world through others eyes? Aren't we empathetic enough at that age, or is that analytical approach that ends up being pointless?

jfengel• 6 years ago

Literature teachers try, somewhat haphazardly, to expose students to material that they aren't really ready for. There's no one correct route that will connect with all students. Some will get it immediately; others will connect years later; others will never find it resonates with them at all.

I think the most common approaches aren't very effective. They're taught to treat a poem as a puzzle to be decrypted, as if the poet could have spoken more plainly but chose not to. You're taught to look for "symbolism", because a one-to-one matching of symbols to the real world is easy to talk about. But it didn't help me connect with anything, and I suspect for many others.

A better approach, at least for me, is to take a piece that already connects and then examine why it works. You already know, for example, that popular song lyrics are easy to memorize. Why? What is the structure they're using, and how does that pattern build up more than the same concept expressed in different words? Why did you like Film X and hate Film Y, even when they're superficially similar?

There's no right answer, and that's hard to teach. Especially to students like me, who think of school as "Science and a bunch of classes for students not smart enough to take science." (I suspect that rings bells for many.) I eventually learned that I enjoyed things that were created by those "not smart enough for science", and became interested in how those things worked -- even though there's still no right answer.

I just now have a way to talk about it, lessons that my English teachers tried and failed to get to me. I believe they could have done it better, though what would have worked for me would have failed other people differently.

pyuser5832• 6 years ago

We don’t teach poetry very well.

Students used to memorize poems starting in elementary school. That was a big part of early education- memorizing poems.

Lots of older folks still remember them. How many older Americans can still recite “Ride of Paul Revere?” Lots.

Many modern poems assume familiarity with the poetic “canon.”

Poetry is getting more and more estranged from “common people.”

Think of the role poetry played in the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s: Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baracka, etc.

Hard to find any recent poets with the same effect.

tmerr• 6 years ago

This post makes a good point about taking another person's idea of happiness too literally. The same could be said for other words describing internal experiences, like "consciousness". Where I lose the author is where he implies that thinking about it poetically will help get at the truth. It may be that when reading about a happy person's thought process you will absorb bits and pieces to make you happy as well. But it's not obvious at first glance. Is there evidence that reading self-help increases happiness in the long term (for some measure of happiness)? And how does that compare to spending your time reading studies about happiness?

bravoetch• 6 years ago

Article summary "man, happiness is a vibe".

thomk2• 6 years ago

Not a fan of poetry, or, happiness.

Happiness, for lack of a better word, is boring.

Happiness is boring in the same way being angry al the time is boring; people evolved to notice change. Every single one of our senses only works by detecting change.

Take smell for example. Your nose detects a difference in the smell of the air. When I burn things in the oven, I get used to the smell after a while but when my wife comes home she says: 'Ahh, cooking again earlier?'

Taste is the most obvious one. Fast for a month then eat a corn chip. You will taste that simple food so deeply you could pinpoint the field the corn was grown in. Now eat a million corn chips. You quite literally won't even taste the last one.

Put a fan on in your office, you'll forget its on. Randomly have someone turn it off and the difference will be a bit painful that change is so obvious.

Gain 100 pounds, you get used to the feeling of it. Lose the 100 pounds, you'll get used to that feeling too. If you didn't, people who were obese would strive to be out of pain. There is pain in being heavy, but you get used to the feeling of your body.

I have heard a version of "Humans adapt" for my whole life. I think it's more than that. I think it's more like 'Humans ride the wave of change." We are so symbiotic with change we don't even notice that change is the thing we both fight and enjoy.

Why do I rewatch episodes of MASH? Because it's both the same and different each time. I watch all eleven seasons over and over and what happens? I notice nuance. That's me detecting change. It's hard to exhaust the nuance because there is just so much of it. I see patterns, like how Hawkeye acts drunk or how Hot Lips manages her hair.

What is hard is FORCING change. That's the tricky bit. Lose the weight, win the lotto, date your dream girl. Now that evolution that has kept you safe by detecting change fights you because you are way outside your comfort zone and what you are used to.

Subconsciously, many of us, would do the things that will help us get back to safe harbor: stifle and defend against self imposed change.

I think focusing on happiness is a poorly defined goal. I'd say to enjoy happiness but strive to have peace.

webkike• 6 years ago

I think this is twisting the definition of “happiness” to make a lifestyle that you don’t enjoy seem more palatable. Being content is great. Highly recommended

anonytrary2• 6 years ago

I think focusing on happiness is a poorly defined goal.

If you think happiness is boring or somehow implies not being able to grieve or feel angry, then you are most likely using the wrong definition of happiness. I think happiness a poorly defined word, allowing you to collapse it into a definition that you saw fit enough to justify ranting about change and evolution.

thomk2• 6 years ago

I think you misunderstood what I said so you could accuse me of ranting.

dag11• 6 years ago

What if what makes me happy is change with a base of general contentment? I'm pretty happy all the time, and I attribute it to often trying new things.

Therefore happiness isn't boring if what makes you happy is being not-boring. Just abstract one level up :)

Happiness is more like poetry than algorithms

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