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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

I think your taking this well outside of the 'spending disposable money to increase personal happiness’ discussion. Remember this is in reference to the idea people don't become happier as they spend money because their spending it poorly. As such is reasonable to talk about heuristics vs getting tied into specifics.

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I am questioning whether the definition of the heuristics influence the outcome. Self fulfilling prophecies and such.

Specifics are necessary because it can determine whether something is a fundamental property of a thing, how it influences the definition of a thing, how that definition influences the perception of a thing, and the relationships that thing has with other things.

A heuristic requires specifics to be defined, in order for it's definition to exist.

Maybe, but then you ventured off to outliers and special cases.

What we want the heuristic for is the average case that you dismissed, which covers the majority of us. There is indeed a thing as a large majority with mostly similar experiences and status, not just an collection of unique snowflakes.

I didn't dismiss it. My point is that theorizing over whether money leads to happiness doesn't take into account the absence of money acting as an obstacle to happiness. The heuristic is psychologically leading in that it does not make the distinction of what happiness is. Happiness can be relatively defined from personal experience. In order to analyze this any further, I'd have to examine the studies to see how the definition and interpretation of happiness is controlled.

There is plenty of research demonstrating adding money to low income people does increase happiness, but adding money to high income earners does not. So, the question is why does adding money to high income earners not increase happiness. It's generally assumed that high income earners are not spending their disposable income 'optimally'.

PS: Sure, perhaps their not measuring 'happiness' and if it makes you feel better call it fruitkerfluffle if you want. However, that does not invalidate the question.

Thank you, you have made me very fruitkerfluffle with your well-phrased response.

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