2arrs, 2ells - dailymeh: This is the frequency of the “happy”...

6th April 2009

Photo reblogged from Enthusiasms with 8 notes

dailymeh:

This is the frequency of the “happy” and “happiness” keywords on Tumblr, from Tumblr’s trends interface. Interestingly, there are significant peaks on March 17 and April 1. Let’s hopscotch over the methodological errors and assume that this means people, or at least people on Tumblr, are actually significantly happier on those days. What does that mean?
Well, as far as I can tell, the most significant thing about those days is that they’re St. Patrick’s Day and April Fool’s Day, respectively. If you compare with Google trends, there are also peaks at these days, but they are local peaks, they’re not as significant as on Tumblr, and they are overtaken by larger peaks on other days. I think happy people are more likely to write blog posts with “happy” as a keyword than they are to google “happy” — after all, they shouldn’t have to, when they’re already happy, but they might very well want to share that with their blog readers — so let’s ignore that inconvenient nugget. With overconfidence to match the silliness of this whole exercise, what can we conclude? Well, it appears that to make the world a happier place, we need more informal holidays. Nothing like a day of drinking or pulling pranks on your friends to lift the global mood, at least among tumblrs.
Before making that proposition to your favorite politician, though, consider this: isn’t it true that too many holidays would diminish their value? If you have ten days a year dedicated to having fun, chances are you will. But if every other day was a Fun Day, then — even without considering the practical consequences of spending that much time on hedonistic pursuits — you’d just end up sweating it and overlaboring and getting bored, not having fun at all.
Clearly, as our anecdotal evidence scientifically valid trend data suggest, there’s a causal arrow Informal Holiday → Happiness. But what’s the optimal number and spacing of informal holidays?

I love this analysis. A few random thoughts I had:

Assuming that holidays do increase happiness (or average utility), do they diminish productivity? I know absenteeism is rampant on St. Patrick’s day (not to mention Guiness pushing to make it a national holiday) — and we could probably think of cases where April Fools’ Day causes distractions as well. What sort of a GDP hit would we tolerate for a happiness boost? Is this a more or less efficient than mandatory vacations or enforcing shorter workweeks?
Is it possible that the optimal amount of happiness comes with zero holidays? Maybe without short bursts of happiness from external forces, we’ll all come to find happiness in our daily routine? (Or maybe my Buddhism class is just causing me to spout incoherent thoughts?)
It seems that Tumblr Trends is pretty intelligent (or really stupid, but my money is on the former). Check out a search for happy, sad, happiness, sadness. It seems like the lines for “happy” and “happiness” are the same — Tumblr is combining synonyms (or similar words) in its searches.
On a similar, but stranger note, the graph I’m getting for “happiness” isn’t the same as dailymeh’s - mine shows a hangover effect after March 17th that makes it seem like St. Patricks’ day is happiness-decreasing net on net. April Fools Day doesn’t have the same problem.

This is the frequency of the “happy” and “happiness” keywords on Tumblr, from Tumblr’s trends interface. Interestingly, there are significant peaks on March 17 and April 1. Let’s hopscotch over the methodological errors and assume that this means people, or at least people on Tumblr, are actually significantly happier on those days. What does that mean?

Well, as far as I can tell, the most significant thing about those days is that they’re St. Patrick’s Day and April Fool’s Day, respectively. If you compare with Google trends, there are also peaks at these days, but they are local peaks, they’re not as significant as on Tumblr, and they are overtaken by larger peaks on other days. I think happy people are more likely to write blog posts with “happy” as a keyword than they are to google “happy” — after all, they shouldn’t have to, when they’re already happy, but they might very well want to share that with their blog readers — so let’s ignore that inconvenient nugget. With overconfidence to match the silliness of this whole exercise, what can we conclude? Well, it appears that to make the world a happier place, we need more informal holidays. Nothing like a day of drinking or pulling pranks on your friends to lift the global mood, at least among tumblrs.

Before making that proposition to your favorite politician, though, consider this: isn’t it true that too many holidays would diminish their value? If you have ten days a year dedicated to having fun, chances are you will. But if every other day was a Fun Day, then — even without considering the practical consequences of spending that much time on hedonistic pursuits — you’d just end up sweating it and overlaboring and getting bored, not having fun at all.

Clearly, as our ~~anecdotal evidence~~ scientifically valid trend data suggest, there’s a causal arrow Informal Holiday → Happiness. But what’s the optimal number and spacing of informal holidays?

I love this analysis. A few random thoughts I had:

Assuming that holidays do increase happiness (or average utility), do they diminish productivity? I know absenteeism is rampant on St. Patrick’s day (not to mention Guiness pushing to make it a national holiday) — and we could probably think of cases where April Fools’ Day causes distractions as well. What sort of a GDP hit would we tolerate for a happiness boost? Is this a more or less efficient than mandatory vacations or enforcing shorter workweeks?
Is it possible that the optimal amount of happiness comes with zero holidays? Maybe without short bursts of happiness from external forces, we’ll all come to find happiness in our daily routine? (Or maybe my Buddhism class is just causing me to spout incoherent thoughts?)
It seems that Tumblr Trends is pretty intelligent (or really stupid, but my money is on the former). Check out a search for happy, sad, happiness, sadness. It seems like the lines for “happy” and “happiness” are the same — Tumblr is combining synonyms (or similar words) in its searches.
On a similar, but stranger note, the graph I’m getting for “happiness” isn’t the same as dailymeh’s - mine shows a hangover effect after March 17th that makes it seem like St. Patricks’ day is happiness-decreasing net on net. April Fools Day doesn’t have the same problem.

Tagged: content

Source: dailymeh