Whether or not it’s completely true, we strongly feel that dogs look at us with love and awe. Our dogs make us feel like we are important and deserving of love, even when we don’t feel that from people in our lives. I like the vague, demigod feeling I get from a dog’s attention. It’s something to live up to. But a dog’s love is big on heart and short on specifics. This book is about the specifics.
In this book I’m going to talk about what you can do to make yourself better in three major areas that people care about: personal productivity, happiness, and moral goodness.
I’m a scientist, and I’m going to shed light on these issues and our ultimate goal of improving both ourselves and the world around us through a scientific lens. Science is often numerical in nature, and the wonderful thing about numbers it that you can look at two of them and know which one is bigger than the other. Isn’t that exciting?
It is, when you consider that many qualitative analyses don’t enjoy this benefit. If having a bit more income makes you happier, and spending a bit more time with your friends makes you happier, too, without numbers you can’t tell their relative importance.
Even more fundamentally, maybe one of them doesn’t really do any good at all. You can read all kinds of things telling you that this or that will make your life better, but without numbers it’s hard to tell if it actually does. If it does, it matters. And some things matter much more than others.
Numbers can tell you if something is ineffectual, or has an effect so small that it’s not worth concerning yourself with—these things unmatter.
Then there are things that are supposed to help, but actually hurt. These things antimatter. Of course, the word “antimatter” has another meaning, in physics, but I’m using it differently here because there is no word in English that means “something that appears to make things better but actually makes things worse.”
Sometimes there are things that matter a little bit. Sometimes it might make sense to focus on these things. This is the idea behind the idiom that “every little bit helps.” But unfortunately, focusing on things that matter only a little bit has a hidden cost. The resources (energy, money, attention, time, or whatever else) you’re putting into things that matter only little bit are not going toward something that matters more. Furthermore, everyone has in their minds a bunch of equilibria that they are trying to maintain, that we can think of as psychological thermostats. For example, you don’t want to be too hungry or too full, so you eat when the hunger thermostat gets too low, and you stop eating when it gets too high. We also have these thermostats for happiness, productivity, and morality.
Let’s take a look at climate change as an example. Nowadays lots of people acknowledge that climate change is a real problem and that something should be done about it. One way that people often talk about how they can help reduce climate change is to reduce their energy consumption. And indeed, in many places, reducing your energy consumption does have an effect on reducing climate change. But how much can you really do for the climate by changing the way you live in your own household? Governmental laws and regulations have the potential to have far bigger effects, because they will effectively force many, many people into changing their energy consumption habits. So maybe you should advocate for policy changes instead of taking short showers.
You might be thinking: why not do what you can in your own home, and support policies in your government as well? Unfortunately, because of the nature of these equilibria that we are constantly maintaining in our brains, focus on one thing will crowd out the other. One study introduced people to a potential carbon tax as well as a suggested governmental intervention to then help people protect the climate through their own actions. Merely exposing them to the “nudge” idea reduced their support for a carbon tax.1 There seems to be a trade-off going on. Focusing on something that matters very little, even though it does actually matter, can have negative side effects. People already feel they’ve done “something.” This is how things that appear at first glance to matter might in practice antimatter, as they draw attentional and time resources away from more important things.
This effect is more relevant for morality than for the other things I’m going to be talking about in this book. Because when it comes to your own productivity and happiness, it is precisely those things you do in your life that matter the most. (What are you going to do, support a sadness tax?) But morality involves more than just you. It involves the entire universe, until the end of time. You can find calculations, errata, and other materials at http://www.jimdavies.org/science-of-better/.
These cutesy words that I’m using very unconventionally are intended to draw interest, but also to frame the whole book. Science can help guide us to focus on the things that matter, ignore things that unmatter, and oppose things that antimatter.
Let’s get started.