"Hunger" makes you successful

No Right Turn didn't have comments enabled on this recent post so I decided to make a comment here, as I know it will be noticed :) NRT posted the following :

'Our findings suggest that extremely high levels of happiness might not be a desirable goal and that there is more to psychological well-being than high levels of happiness,' the study says.

Or we could conclude that wealth isn't everything, and that there's more than one way to live the good life. But that would be an anathema in a capitalist society, wouldn't it?

I'm afraid I disagree with both the conclusion made in the report and NRT.

What I believe should be draw from the described data is that those who are extremely happy see no need to try to achieve more, and therefore don't. They have found the level of weath and health that is necessary for them to be happy.

The report is wrong becasue conluding that "extremely high levels of happiness might not be a desirable goal" is invalid unless your goal is to ensure all people achieve more.

But NRT's comment is wrong also. Capitalism doesn't care how individual's live their lives, doesn't care whether people are happy or not, and doesn't care how much individuals achieve. In fact, if some people are happy at lower levels of wealth, that's a good thing for a capitalist society, because in such a society it is not expected that everyone has the same amount of health or wealth, so for the stabilty and health of such a society it is good that people are happier with less.

Also, we can't conlude from the report that "wealth isn't everything", as those "who are happy are certainly more healthy and successful than those who are angry and depressed,". All we can conclude is that the level of success and health neccesarry to make individuals extremely happy varies.

A Realistic Analysis of Wargamers

Whilst searching for something completely different, I came across an online copy of James Dunnigan's The Complete Wargames Handbook . Dunnigan, along with Redmond Simonsen is proably the wargame designer of the late twentieth century, being largely responsible for the growth of the hobby during the Seventies with the magazine Strategy & Statctics, and the publishers SPI.

Scanning it I found a very interesting analysis of who and what wargamers weere based on many years of S&T feedback forms followed by "a correlation and factor analysis". Bear in mind that this was first published in 1992, and obviously things have changed since then, and Games Workshop were hardly beginning, but I thought those on me flist who were interested in the theoretical side of gaming might find the ( following extracts fun. )

The asides on RPG's and politics are also amusing!

Passing things on

Stuff linked to by elfs, or found while following those links :

The GURPS Friendly AI Critical Failure Table. I especially like number 25.

Code comments found once the human genome is succesfully decompiled.
Yes, I know, what sort of compiler includes the comments in the object code?