Spring 2011 Happiness Class Class Notes 2

3/1/2011

de Botton, "Expectation" and "Meritocracy"

• Image of Nixon and Khruschev facing off on the value of material wealth.
• Consider profound changes in standard of living from end of medieval times to present.
• FDR recommending the Sears catalogue as one book to show Soviet people the advantages of American life.

Expectation

• de Botton implies that our "social comparison" abilities might have been jolted by the great increases in wealth from the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. Result might be increased "Status Anxiety".

• Shift from Medieval Christianity, quote p. 28.
• Traces the growth of idea of government being "justified" by its performance in the social contract. Rise of meritocratic thinking.
• Alexis de Tocqueville and American's "strange melancholy" -- an unexpected consequence of lifting barriers of aristocratic society is that members of society may experience more adverse social comparison and anxiousness about success.
• James on self-esteem: quotient of Success and Pretentions.
• Given de Botton's argument, it makes sense that myth of the self-made man would be prominent in Am. Culture.

"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."

Meritocracy

• Three Old Stories about Failure

Gilbert, Chapters 4-6

Chapter 4: In the Blind Spot of the Mind's Eye

• Comparions of Adolph Fisher & George Eastman. Point: Need to 2nd guess how we impose seemingly objective criteria on others' lives.
• Brain reweaves experience: study with cars and stop signs/yield signs. Information acquired after the event alters memory of the event.
• Two highly confirmed results: Memory fills in. We don't typically notice it happening.
• Model of Mind (84) Prior to 19th century:

"philosophers had thought of the senses as conduits that allowed information about the properties of objects in the world to travel from the object and into the mind. The mind was like a movie screen in which the object was rebroadcast. The operation broke down on occasion, hence people occasionally saw things as they were not. But when the senses were working properly, they showed what was there. This theory of realism was described in 1690 by the philosopher John Locke: brains "believe" they don't "make believe" .

• Model of Mind brought in with Kant at beginning of 1800's:

Kant's idealism: "Kant's new theory of idealism claimed that our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality. "

• Still, we act like realists: truck moving study
• We fill in details: imagine a plate of spaghetti.

Chapter 5: The Hound of Silence

• We don't train on what's not there: pigeons, detecting pattern change in trigrams.

Why do non-describer sports fans overestimate impact of losing a big game? They don't thing about the whole picture -- what's going to happen after the game, etc. Details the describers fill in. (Interesting practical lesson here.)

Time frame matters: example of agreeing to baby sit in a month vs. tomorrow night.

Chapter 6: The Future is Now

• Being wrong about the future: possibility of heavy planes flying. 112
• 113: Examples of current experience displacing past experience: dating couples, worries about exams, memories of Perot supporters.
• Examples of how we fail to predict how future selves will feel. 115: Volunteers choosing candy bars or knowing answers.
• We fail to account for the way future experience will change future preferences.
• Sneak Prefeel -- evidence suggests brain can have emotional responses to imaginings of the future. We simulate future events, we don't just experience them reflectively.
• How to Select Posters: In poster selection study, the "thinkers" are less satisfied with their choices.
• Limits of Prefeeling: "We can't see or feel two things at once, and the brain has strict priorities about what it will see, hear, and feel and what it will ignore. ... For instance, if we try to imagine a penguin while we are looking at an ostrich, the brain's policy won't allow it."122
• Read cartoon on bottom of p. 125 "Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running. We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we'll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often response to what's happening in the present."