Twin Strangers is a website dedicated to help people find their closest doppelgängers in the world.
Here's one of the twin stranger matches, between Karen and Niamh
It sure seems like this could be done more efficiently by computers. It could just be a mobile app, or an opt-in feature built into Facebook.
James Somers wrote a Chrome extension called Draftback that allows you to play back a Google Doc so you can see every keystroke and edit that went into the writing. Chadwick Matlin spoke to Somers about Draftback for FiveThirtyEight:
Somers started all this because he thinks the way we teach writing is broken. “We know how to make a violinist better. We know how to make a pitcher better. We do not know how to make a writer better,” Somers told me. In other disciplines, the teaching happens as the student performs. A music instructor may adjust a student’s finger placement, or a pitching coach may tweak a lefty’s mechanics. But there’s no good way to look over a writer’s shoulder as she’s writing; if anything, that’ll prevent good writing.
As a result, finished work has become a writer’s currency. It’s what she hands in to her editors, what she publishes as a book, what she’s assessed on. The process of writing — the masochistic act of choosing what to put down on the page — is merely what she complains about to friends. It’s a hidden act, and self-conscious writers (as if there were any other kind) prefer it that way.
Somers wants to use Draftback to peek over somebody’s shoulder — ideally somebody really good. His personal goal is to get A.O. Scott, the film critic for The New York Times, to write a review or essay in Draftback. “He’s a beautiful prose stylist (diction, cadence, etc.), his writing is accessible and unpretentious but world-class, and he seems to always put his finger on the essence of whatever it is he’s talking about.” Somers is curious about whether all that comes naturally to Scott.
It's an interesting experiment into demystifying the craft of writing, but I tried watching a playback of Somers' writing of his post and I gave up after a few minutes. It's playback at too granular a level.
Much of good writing does occur at the editing or revision stage, call it post-production, and perhaps watching the fits and starts in Somers' piece is testament to that. Some writers sketch out the skeleton of a piece first, almost an outline, and then flesh in the actual prose. Others just dive in and start writing and find the structure later, or they have an intuitive sense of structure that just emerges sentence by sentence, like a sculpture being revealed from a block of stone.
Rather than seeing a piece played back one note at a time, I'd prefer to see a piece at a few discrete stages, perhaps the most valuable being the first rough draft, then the draft the author sends to an editor, and finally the draft marked up with the editor's proofs, especially if the editor were someone like the legendary Eleanor Gould. 1
The valuable lesson to be learned, in the end, may be the same one to be learned from watching anyone who is good at anything. Craft takes dedicated practice and lots of hard work. Sometimes viewing just the final product can hide all of that, and unearthing all the discarded drafts on the cutting room floor can be instructive.
A fundamental question in economics is whether happiness increases pari passu with improvements in material conditions or whether humans grow accustomed to better conditions over time. We rely on a large-scale experiment to examine what kind of impact the provision of housing to extremely poor populations in Latin America has on subjective measures of well-being over time. The objective is to determine whether poor populations exhibit hedonic adaptation in happiness derived from reducing the shortfall in the satisfaction of their basic needs. Our results are conclusive. We find that subjective perceptions of well-being improve substantially for recipients of better housing but that after, on average, eight months, 60% of that gain disappears.
That's the abstract of this paper (free to download).
Hedonic adaptation is a central principle of the human condition, and it's been fascinating to see more and more research on how it works, how it varies under different conditions. Is it really true that money can't buy happiness? Or does that only apply after you reach some baseline of economic well-being? The paper provides a solid overview of the current state of the thinking on the subject.
The hedonic adaptation hypothesis is that there is a psychological process that attenuates the long-term emotional impact of a favorable or unfavorable change in circumstances, such that people’s level of happiness eventually returns to a stable reference level (Frederick and Lowenstein 1999). According to the hedonic adaptation hypothesis, then, variations in happiness and unhappiness are merely short-lived reactions to changes in people’s circumstances. In other words, while people initially have strong reactions to events that change their material level of well-being, they eventually return to a baseline level of life satisfaction that is determined by their inborn temperament (Diener et al., 2006). In psychology, this idea is known as the set point theory and was labeled the hedonic treadmill in the seminal work of Brickman and Campbell (1971). Indeed, in a widely cited paper, Brickman et al. (1978) present evidence that lottery winners report life satisfaction levels that are comparable to those of people who did not win a lottery one year after the event.2
Frederick and Lowenstein (1999) hypothesized that people do not adapt to shocks in terms of basic necessities that are related to survival and reproduction. This suggests that hedonic adaptation is manifested the most in people who have achieved a certain level of basic material well-being rather than being a persistent phenomenon that is evenly distributed across all socioeconomic groups. The idea is analogous to the notion of diminishing marginal utility, where the marginal increase in happiness derived from material gain is higher at lower levels of material wealth. The analog in hedonic adaptation is that adaption is more limited at lower levels of material wealth. In essence, then, the idea is that the happiness levels of the poor do not adapt, or do not adapt completely, to shocks in terms of basic necessities.
In this paper, we present the first piece of experimental evidence on hedonic adaptation among the poor to improvements in the satisfaction of their basic necessities, specifically shelter.
I'm no expert on the subject, but in my experience this holds true: being rich doesn't guarantee happiness, but being really poor is almost certain to make you unhappy. Even if hedonic adaptation affects the poor, even if those who are well-off are unhappy if their neighbors are more well-off (a common Silicon Valley disease), I still think the greatest human welfare gains to be made in the world come from bringing those in poverty up to some baseline of economic self-sufficiency and good health. Reducing unhappiness is often undervalued in comparison to creating happiness.
So much brainpower devoted to trying to create so many consumer behaviors, but someday someone will figure out how to make philanthropy addictive and habitual, and that will change the world.
FiveThirtyEight crunches the data and identifies what players consider to be the worst board games.
The outliers have a relatively large number of user ratings — people actually play them — and a relatively low average rating — people do not like to play them. This hall of shame includes War (the card game), tic-tac-toe, Snakes and Ladders, Candy Land, The Game of Life and Monopoly.
The worst games, for the most part, have one thing in common: luck. They’re driven by it, often exclusively. Candy Land, Snakes and Ladders (also called Chutes and Ladders) and War are driven purely by chance. The Game of Life is close. It’s heavily chance-based, but one can make some decisions.4Overreliance on luck makes a game boring or frustrating or both. Good games are driven by skill, or, like Twilight Struggle, a healthy mix of skill and luck.
Luck is the reason I always hated playing Candy Land. It teaches you nothing at all, except perhaps to endure the random arrows of misfortune. At least some games of chance like blackjack teach you some basic probability theory.
I finally received my copy of what is considered the best board game, Twilight Struggle. Looking forward to cracking it open soon, though the manual is intimidating in its length.
Fantasy sports are underrated as a game in their cognitive lessons. Fantasy baseball, in particular, is a good teacher of statistics and asset management because of the predictability of player performance. Fantasy basketball is deterministic enough to be a useful teacher as well. Fantasy football, by virtue of all the injuries and extreme variance in game to game performance, is much too random to be as instructive, but playing is a great hack for upping your enjoyment of any random game if that's your goal.
Let’s start with the fundamentals. The basic unit of written laughter, which we’ve long known from books and comics, is “ha.” The “ha” is like a Lego, a building block, with which we can construct more elaborate hilarity. It sounds like a real laugh. Ha! The “ha” is transparent, like “said.” If you’re chatting or texting, a single “ha” means that a joke has occurred, and you’re respectfully tipping your hat to it, but that’s all it deserves. If I say something hilarious and I get one “ha,” it’s a real kick in the teeth. If I make a mild observation, a “ha” is just great.
The feel-good standard in chat laughter is the simple, classic “haha”: a respectful laugh. “Haha” means you’re genuinely amused, and that maybe you laughed a little in real life. (The singsong Nelson Muntz-style “ha ha,” of course, is completely different—we don’t do this to our friends. There’s also the sarcastic “ha ha,” a British colleague reminded me: he’s used to reading “ha ha” as “Oh, ha ha,” as in, Aren’t you a wag. “But I’m learning to read it as good,” he said. Poor guy.) “Hahaha” means that you’re really amused: now you’re cooking. More than three “ha”s are where joy takes flight. When you’re doing this, you’re laughing at your desk and your co-workers can hear you, or you’re texting with both hands, clacking and laughing away. Somebody has been naughty and fun: a scandalous remark, a zinger, a gut laugh, the high-grade stuff. If things get totally bananas, you might throw a few “j”s in there, because you’re too incapacitated by joy to type properly.
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Then there’s the mysterious “hehe.” “Hehe” is a younger person’s e-laugh. My stepsister has used it, and she’s a person who also says “hiiii”—but, reassuringly to me, she’s also one of the best hahahahaha-ers in the business. A friend who’s in his thirties and savvy, with friends of all ages, uses “hehe.” I find it charming—he’s a perfect speller, and he’s a lively, tidy writer, and his “hehe”s are a strange mystery. I know what they mean: friendly, somewhat sneaky giggling at a shared joke. But why the single “e”?
I consider “hehe” to be the “woah” of laughter—an odd but common enough misspelling of a common term of social communication. I think it’s “hee hee,” our conspiratorial buddy, sweetly shortened to “haha” length in a slightly bizarre way. Is it more a masculine “hee hee”—literally a bunch of “he”s? Is it a squished-up “heh,” with some filigree? Is it a cross between “haha,” “hee hee,” and “heh”?
Sarah Larson breaks down hahaha vs hehehe.
Hahahe! Wait, is that allowed?