I just read the book "Ten Philosophical Mistakes" by Mortimer J. Adler. One of its chapters is about Happiness. My impression (which could be wrong) about the chapter is that it is important to distinguish contentment and happiness (I did not have the chance to read the chapter in full because I had to return the book to the library). What I understand from my partially reading the chapter is that we are content when we get what we want; but this is not happiness. Happiness is achieved when we know we live responsibly according to our moral values.
This sounds just like Dan Gilbert's point in his TED Talk. Gilbert says that statistically, a person who fails an exam now will be just as happy in 3 months as another person who wins a lottery now. His point is similar to (if not the same as) Adler's: when you get what you want, you are not necessarily happy. Gilbert went further by saying that we can synthesize happiness; that accepting what is happening to us will bring us a happiness as real as that we got from winning a lottery.
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The second part of this post is about the question I automatically asked when I realized this: "So did Dan Gilbert actually say nothing new in his talk? How can he justify his talk?"
Then I realized that we are not living in an academic world (and Gilbert did have an additional point after all; though I'm sure someone else has come up with it). It is not necessary for all talks, books, and articles to contain a completely new idea (one thing constantly demanded in an academic publication; even a survey paper has to have a new way to structure past ideas). In real world, getting a concept popular is one serious business.
There is definitely a benefit in redundancy. Different writing styles suit different kind of people; the more writings there are on a subject, the more likely it is for that subject to be known. The more people know about a concept, the more likely it is for the concept to be useful.
This is one thing that I do not like about the current state of academic world: there is little motivation for its members to make new concepts popular, especially in computer science. Performance is usually measured by number of papers published, weighted by the importance of conference/journal in which it appears. Book chapters might actually be weighted less than a paper in a first-tier conference even though a chapter takes more time to prepare. Note that this is a chapter for a technical book that is more or less regarded as "important" or "prestigious". What is the chance that an academic is willing to take the time to write a book accessible to the public?
To me personally, it seems that the generally accepted "solution" is letting the public know about new discoveries when they in the form of a product. Even then, the explanation is usually vague, something like "the computer software will try to process the recording to understand what the speaker is saying." Sounds simple enough, so why did it take speech processing research so long and still not solve the problem of robust speech recognition? True, writing a full-fledged technical details on stochastic methods used to solve the problem will probably turn readers off; but is there not a way to reveal just enough technicality for the public to appreciate the difficulty (and frustrations) in such a research problem?
I am especially concerned about this because personally I am reading books that lightly touches on foreign topics I have never learned before, like philosophy (I studied computer science). I do not want to read philosophy text books; they will take too much of my time just to know what philosophy is. What I want is a book that I can read in around 2 weeks and will give me a reasonable overview. It does not matter that it is not deep enough, I will read more on topics I find interesting. It does not matter that it is not completely correct nor completely complete; I only want a reasonable overview.
And remember, readers who are interested enough about a subject are willing to endure a reasonable amount of unfamiliar technicality. It is alright to include a few equations in your book.
(Edited on 5 March 2015)
