Politics, Happiness and Your Mental Health

[Lennys Tap]

https://dnyuz.com/2024/05/08/the-happiness-gap-between-left-and-right-isnt-closing/

Interesting article, first appeared in The NY Times.

[Skatastrophy]

https://dnyuz.com/2024/05/08/the-happiness-gap-between-left-and-right-isnt-closing/

Interesting article, first appeared in The NY Times.

It was an Opinion piece in the NYT, so not exactly an article. Original (gift) link below

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/opinion/conservatives-liberals-depression-anxiety.html?unlocked_article_code=1.q00.O4nJ.0ZJZj6FlLGpL&smid=url-share

The top comment on the article:

The paper on this subject which linked to here (Schlenker et al 2012) is based solely on about 400 undergraduates at the University of Florida, 69% of whom were female. The does not even report what most of the questions on the questionnaire were. It does not show the raw data at all. It says that the results were controlled for age, gender and income but does not say how.

Another study cited in Edsall's early essay on the subject, Newman et al., 2018, does present the raw data, demonstrating that the effect is quite weak compared to the extremely high degree of variability in all political persuasions. The analysis is embarrassingly poor - look at the "quadratic" fit in Figure 2, you could never, ever get a way with such a visibly poor line fit in a paper in the hard sciences. The low sample number and very high variability at each point is far to great to fit any line with any confidence, it is a poor excuse for a quantitative analysis.

And where is the control data on lying and self-reporting? Maybe conservatives lie more frequently. Even when self-reporting anonymously people routinely exaggerate to put themselves in a category that they deem socially desirable (Brenner and DeLamater, 2016; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/).

Why does anyone put any weight on this nonsense?

[Plaque Lives Matter!]

It was an Opinion piece in the NYT, so not exactly an article. Original (gift) link below

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/opinion/conservatives-liberals-depression-anxiety.html?unlocked_article_code=1.q00.O4nJ.0ZJZj6FlLGpL&smid=url-share

The top comment on the article:

The paper on this subject which linked to here (Schlenker et al 2012) is based solely on about 400 undergraduates at the University of Florida, 69% of whom were female. The does not even report what most of the questions on the questionnaire were. It does not show the raw data at all. It says that the results were controlled for age, gender and income but does not say how.

Another study cited in Edsall's early essay on the subject, Newman et al., 2018, does present the raw data, demonstrating that the effect is quite weak compared to the extremely high degree of variability in all political persuasions. The analysis is embarrassingly poor - look at the "quadratic" fit in Figure 2, you could never, ever get a way with such a visibly poor line fit in a paper in the hard sciences. The low sample number and very high variability at each point is far to great to fit any line with any confidence, it is a poor excuse for a quantitative analysis.

And where is the control data on lying and self-reporting? Maybe conservatives lie more frequently. Even when self-reporting anonymously people routinely exaggerate to put themselves in a category that they deem socially desirable (Brenner and DeLamater, 2016; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5639921/).

Why does anyone put any weight on this nonsense?

I’m happiest when others are doing worse than me despite whatever my situation is

[jficke13]

I’m very interested in how dnyuz has continued to function despite being a blatant copyright violation operating in broad daylight for at least a year.