Book Choices for Group Oral Presentation. First Assignment

Timing: The presentations will be during the 6 classes from Monday, January xx, through Friday, February xx.

Six Books for Six Teams:

  1. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

  2. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg

  3. Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, by Charles Duhigg

  4. The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

  5. The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End, by Neil Howe

  6. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

First Assignment, Due 11 PM, January xx

1. Write a few sentences about what drew you to this class and what you hope to learn and get out of it. 

2. List in order your 1st, 2d and 3d choices for the additional book you want to read and do a group presentation on. 

3. Write a few sentences on why you are particularly interested in reading your 1st choice. (Optional: you can write about your 2d and 3d choices, too if you want to.)

Self-Care

Dating coach James Bauer writes:

Psychologists call it “self-care.” I have seven super-easy suggestions[3] for injecting some self-care into your daily routine.

1. Know your no’s.

Make a literal list of things you don’t like to do. It might include optional activities you don’t enjoy (like seeing horror movies), or limiting when you do some things (like not checking work email at night). Then don’t do those things.

2. Don’t skimp on sleep.

Sleep can help keep your appetite in check, boost cognitive ability, lift your mood, help your body heal, and even lower your blood pressure.[4]

3. Workouts help you work stuff out.

Besides burning calories and toning muscle, exercise improves your mood, super-charges your energy levels, and helps you get better sleep.[5]

4. Give meditation a try.

Mediation keeps your brain young, works as a natural antidepressant, helps you concentrate, and reduces anxiety.[6]

5. Do the family thing.

Time with family can be very rewarding. Who doesn’t like to feel loved? And if you’re not on the best of terms with your biological family, consider adjusting your definition of “family” to include what I call “chosen family” – your friends that are like family.

6. Be completely chill at least once a day.

Every day, spend at least a few minutes doing something completely relaxing. Take a bath, go for a short walk, or just veg on the couch without trying to accomplish anything.

7. Be completely selfish at least once a day.

Every day, do something purely for your own pleasure. Hang out with a friend, read fiction for fun, or treat yourself to a really good meal.

Term Paper

Due by 11 PM Friday, May 5, 2023.

Your term paper should incorporate a revised version of what you wrote for your Analysis Task and be 4-6 pages longer than that revision of what you wrote for your Analysis Task. That is, the rest of your paper beyond what you wrote for the Analysis Task should be 4-6 pages.

Here are some of the main things I’ll look for in your term paper:

  1. Write well: have a thesis statement and a theme that you follow through

  2. Critique a paper in the academic literature on topics related to things we have discussed in class. Don’t choose one of my papers. But the references lists in my papers on happiness and of the other papers listed below are good places to find a paper.

  3. (Drilling down on point 2.) Assume that the paper has flawed statistical interpretation. (In particular, results are typically overinterpreted to make them sound more exciting.) Do better on the statistical interpretation front. Use all of the things you learned about statistical interpretation in class that are relevant. (I’ll subtract points if a statistical interpretation principle was clearly relevant to what you are critiquing or to your own analysis and you don’t discuss it and add points if you do a great job discussing an issue.) The goal is not to solve everything but to show your awareness of the issues and do what can readily be done to think about what the issue implies. (For example, it is great if you can say which direction a bias is.)

  4. Weave in a revision of your analysis task. The integration of this with your critique of a paper in the literature doesn’t have to be perfect, but it is a plus if you can make the critique of a paper in the literature and your own statistical analysis fit together with a theme.

  5. Be timely: because of the exigencies of making grades for this and my other course, it is especially important that I get these term papers by the due date. However, I will still accept them, but with some points off, up to two days late.

The main idea for the term paper is to discuss an academic journal article on well-being skeptically. (I’ll add suggestions for academic journal articles to write about to this post when I get a chance.)

Here are some ways you might want to be skeptical:

  1. Scale-use differences might be creating an illusion. (How?)

  2. There is likely to be statistical bias relative to what the author or authors seem to be claiming or implying. (Make sure to explain which direction you think any story of possible statistical bias would bias things. Is the estimate in the paper likely to be higher than the truth or lower than the truth? What does that say about the truth?)

  3. A result that has a nominal p-value of 5% (t-statistic of 2 or so) really has about a 50% chance of being spurious, as indicated by replication studies. (By contrast, a result with a nominal p-value of 1/2 % (t-statistic of 3 or more) has only about a 5% chance of being spurious, and so is relatively trustworthy. Here though, “trustworthy” had to be taken in a narrow sense. Something is probably going on with that coefficient, but what is going on may be very different from what the authors claim. (See for example the rest of this list of reasons to be skeptical!)

  4. Happiness is not the same as utility. As my coauthored papers “Utility and Happiness,” “What Do You Think Would Make You Happier? What Do You Think You Would Choose?” “Can Marginal Rates of Substitution Be Inferred from Happiness Data? Evidence from Residency Choices” and “Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference” suggest, there are many distinct meaning of happiness. Among them are:

    • utility

    • feeling happy

    • what people report on a survey about their happiness, life satisfaction or position on the ladder of life (all of which have a lot of data available)

    • Aristotelian noble happiness, often called “eudaimonia” or “eudaemonic well-being” in the literature

  5. Other theoretical issues

Papers with References Lists in which You Can Find a Paper to Critique (Note: Don’t Critique a Paper with Miles as a Coauthor—those papers are only included because they have highly relevant references lists):

Quiz #2 (Wednesday, April 26, 2023)

Blog Posts and Articles to Read to Prepare for the Quiz

Statistical Interpretation Principles to be Tested on the Quiz

Steps for Applying the Benjamini-Hochberg "False-Discovery-Rate" (FDR) Procedure for Multiple-Hypothesis-Test Correction

  1. Identify a group of hypotheses among which you would shift emphasis according to how good the results look. Note: anything that you would want to talk about if it had strong statistical results counts!

  2. How do you identify groupings of hypotheses? Groups of hypotheses can be handled separately if you will keep the same level of emphasis between groups. For example, you will focus in on Group A and focus in on Group B and discuss them equally regardless of what the results are.

  3. Now, focusing in on one particular group, call the number of hypotheses in this set n. Multiply all reported p-values by n. Let’s call these “adjusted p-values.”

  4. Order all the hypotheses from the smallest adjusted p-value at the top to the largest adjusted p-value at the bottom. (Note that having the numbers in Excel makes this easy to do and then later restore your original order.) Call the hypothesis with the smallest adjusted p-value #1, the one with the second-smallest adjusted p-value #2, etc. And call the m with the smallest adjusted p-values the “top m hypotheses.”

  5. The conventional significant level for a False Discovery Rate is .1 (=10%). Let’s go with that, although it is easy to use other values.

  6. If the #m hypothesis has an adjusted p-value less than .1 m, then the top m hypotheses are all significant at a false discovery rate (FDR) threshold of 10%.

  7. Find the largest m for which the #m hypothesis had an adjusted p-value less than .1 m. This gives you the set of hypotheses within this group that are significant at the FDR 10% level.

Reflections on Your Meditation App Experience (11 PM Tuesday, April 18)

Due 11 PM Tuesday, April 18

Refer to the earlier post for the assignment itself.

For this report, write less than a page about what your experience was like in using the meditation app. What did you notice about what was going on in your head (in your consciousness)?

(I’ll set this up on Canvas well before the time. Don’t worry if it isn’t there yet.)

Reflections on What You Learned from JP's Big 5 Assessment (11 PM Tuesday April 11)

Report Due 11 PM Tuesday, April 11

Take the Big 5 assessment you will find at this link (https://www.understandmyself.com/)

(Let me know if you have trouble paying the $10. We can work something out.)

Note that there may be a little delay in getting your report back, so don’t wait until the last minute.

Write less than a page about the most interesting things you learned from the report.

(I’ll set this up on Canvas well before the time. Don’t worry if it isn’t there yet.)

Your essay on what you learned from this Big 5 assessment can be much shorter, but you can think of this post of mine as me doing this assignment:

Miles's Personality in 10 Facets of the Big Five

Paper on "Positive Intelligence" by Shirzad Chamine

Due: 11 PM Tuesday April 4, 2023

3-5 Pages

In addition to reading the book, this assignment asks you to do the saboteur assessment at this link and read the report you are sent about your own saboteurs. DO THIS RIGHT AWAY: IT MIGHT TAKE A DAY TO GET YOUR REPORT BACK.

As usual, provide evidence in your paper that you have read the whole book, and if you use ChatGPT, follow the clear citation rules for ChatGPT that I set out early on in the class. (See “Ideas for Using ChatGPT.” Using ChatGPT is optional, but it is an interesting thing to try.)

For your paper, think about the following questions:

  1. What did you learn from reading the report on your Saboteur assessment? Focus only on the things that resonated with you; ignore things you thought were off-track for you personally.

  2. What Sage strengths do you have that are associated with the Saboteurs you have? Here are examples of Sage strengths associated with each Saboteur. (There are more sage strengths associated with Saboteurs than these.) Below I have it notated as (bad: good). Saboteurs are often a strength going overboard, and going bad as a result:

    • Judge: blameless discernment

    • Pleaser: empathy

    • Avoider: peacefulness, peacemaking, flexibility

    • Stickler: meticulousness

    • Victim: self-knowledge, especially knowledge of what you want

    • Controller: leadership, making things happen

    • Restless: fun, creativity

    • Hyper-Achiever: achievement

    • Hyper-Rational: rationality

    • Hyper-Vigilant: vigilance

  3. In your own religious or non-religious background, how was what Shirzad calls “The Sage Perspective” taught or expressed? Reading my post “'Everything Happens for a Reason' for Nonsupernaturalists” will help clarify what I mean by this. This post is my personal answer to this question.

  4. What do you want to do in the area of developing the five Sage Powers to a greater extent?

  5. What role do you think Shirzad’s bag of psychological tricks and techniques could have in society in general?

Positive Intelligence Training

I do free positive intelligence training for economists. I am extending that invitation all those who have completed my Economics 4060 class, once you have a bachelor’s degree. Take a look at the description in these two posts:

If you are interested, just send me an email after you graduate.

In the meanwhile, I highly recommend the book Positive Intelligence, by Shirzad Chamine. And I think you will find taking this “saboteur assessment” interesting, you’ll get a report describing what your results mean.

2023 Quiz #1 (Wednesday, March 15)