Stumbling on happiness

Here is a review I have written about the book "Stumbling on happiness" some 2-3 years ago. I wrote it on a facebook application, but I though I'd better write it also here ...

The book handles many aspects of happiness. It shows the difficulty of defining something so abstract like happiness, and tries to alleviate this by identifying different types of happiness. It then goes on showing the shortcomings of our imagination, or rationalization, in short, our great expectations which turn out to be irrationally based.

At the end, the author concludes that instead of depending on our imperfect imagination, we can depend on others' experiences. He says that each one of us thinks he/she is so unique, when actually he/she is not. He says that science has provided lots of information about the average person that it's possible to predict how he will behave. If we depend on the experience of others, we can save ourselves the trouble, because it will also fit us.

Now to my opinion about the book. The author has done lots of effort to prove his point with scientific evidence. I wouldn't refute most of what he said. I have to say that there wasn't much new in this. That we make irrational and unwise future decisions based on incomplete information or defective imagination or biased rationalization is something that one knows, either from experience or reading.

However, the idea that we can use the experience of others as surrogate is not really quite convincing. Human beings are different, with different tastes, experiences and mental paradigms. It is not sufficient that a certain test shows that the majority of human beings would do something, because it is simply not ALL. And, if a group of human beings is tested for a group of different things, I don't think that you will find the same persons doing the same things in every test. if the majority is doing something in one test, it will not be the same majority in each test.

The author once mentioned that bad scientists use biased experiemnts to come up with the results they originally forecasted. I'm afraid he also resorted to bad science when he used the fact that when the majority of people behave in a certain manner in one situation, that this alone is a good reason to use this previous information for future decisions.