Saturday, April 29, 2023

Adversarial Collaboration

Thanks to Astral Star Codex for picking up on this research. 

Really excellent adversarial collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Killingsworth on the relationship between income and happiness. Kahneman previously found that more money didn’t make people happier past about $100K/year. Killingsworth previously found it did. They worked together and found that Kahneman was right for the least happy 20% of the population and Killingsworth was right for everyone else. This is a rare but welcome example of going from a failed replication to an actual understanding of what went wrong and what the truth is - well-written and highly-recommended.

2 comments:

  1. Given the huge costs of living differences among different US areas, I'd think that income number would have needed to be normalized accordingly.

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  2. A poor man is someone who has only one goat, while his neighbor has two.

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