happiness in The Knight

maru · 19 Mar 2005, 23:14 · from 2005-March.txt.gz

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From: marudubshinki at gmail.com (maru)
Date: Sat Mar 19 23:14:40 2005
Subject: (urth) happiness in The Knight
In-Reply-To: <000d01c5180d$b8dd9ce0$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>
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	<000d01c5180d$b8dd9ce0$4c1e4b0a at vcorp.ad.vrsn.com>
Message-ID: <423D22D9.6090502 at gmail.com>

James Wynn wrote:

>>Ah! Finally, someone wonders whether I was playing word-games.
>>The answer is: I don't think so.
>>[...]
>>Do well-adjusted people molest and bully others?
>>    
>>
>
>What is your definition of "well-adjusted"? The word implies an objective
>goal to which one would "adjust". Depending on one's criteria, a
>well-adjusted person might bully and molest. Saddam seems to have adjusted
>Uday and Qusay to do that.
>
>It is difficult for me to see how the happiness of tsunami victims on the
>other side of the planet sharing few of my genes would affect my happiness
>in an evolutionary sense.
>
>~ Crush
>  
>
You wish an objective goal? Very well, I can supply one.

Consider that happiness has a very strong correlation to
the concentrations of certain chemicals in the human species
brain, which is objectively measurable; consider further that
there are brain wave patterns which have a very strong correlation
with happiness, and are equally objectively measurable.  These two
tests can be concatenated for a measurement of high confidence.

Find out of the set of all physical behaivours
which are selectable by a particular human, the action which results in 
a  global maxima
of a scalar quantity of happiness, measured dimensionlessly, with every 
homo sapien
weighted equally.  This would be the ideal well-adjusted, but undoubtedly
is computationally intractable to find, so practically it can be reduced to
optimum behaivour findable in a certain finite time.
This pseudo-definition give you a decent start for what 'well-adjusted' is?
It isn't that it can't be well-defined, its that no one bothers since we 
all know it intuitively.

~Maru
$ mount /world /proc | ps -aux | grep *.hs | sort -d  >> happiness.txt 
&& more happiness.txt
unix tomfoolery :) probably should grep for last line, and echo as 
suggested 'well-adjusted'
person, but that'd need variabless and is no fun.

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