Happiness Engineering
On the same day that Lukeprog posted How to be happy, Scott Adams made a similar post on the Dilbert Blog, Happiness Engineering.
I’m always skeptical when receiving life advice from successful people, because their advice is biased towards taking too much risk, because successful people are selected for having been lucky. But Scott’s list doesn’t raise any red flags with me, and is admirably concise.
I’d prefer to see this in discussion, as it’s pretty much just a link to a post somewhere else with no significant insight or analysis.
If it were not for the fact posting a link to a post elsewhere is a more efficient way to gain karma than writing a post with significant insight or analysis, would you still prefer posts like this not to be on the frontpage? I am curious as to why.
Yes—in fact, I did not even consider this aspect when I made that comment. My bare minimum standard for main as opposed to discussion is “would I actually link this to a friend, describing it as a helpful, reliable source of information?” (Other posts are helpful sources of information and discussions, but this is my lowest possible standard.) Furthermore, I personally think karma should be a reflection of the user’s impact on the site, not the impact on the site of the awesome blogs that the user follows.
On a related note, I’m also against meetup threads being on the main page, though I haven’t had opportunity to mention that before as I feel it would be destructive to mention it on any given meetup page. Those are often not viewed by the majority of the site to whom the meetup location makes the post irrelevant, and it’d just kill the meetup mood for me to flame about them “not deserving” a place on main. It gets ridiculous when half the front page is meetups. Posts like “How to be Happy” and “Being a Teacher” should be the first thing visitors see, not just external links and the sixteenth freaky meatosphere interaction this week, especially since there are editors so caution in spam prevention shouldn’t be an issue.
Conveying that people from this website meet in real life is as important to visitors as anything else.
In that case, couldn’t the meetups have a separate section? They get onto the main page by default, which I find abrasive to anyone not looking for them.
Also note the reason Scott Adams gives for disregarding the advice of successful people. :)
What about those successful people that failed many times to get where they are?