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@ Robin Hanson

In your Is Happy Far? post you concluded:

So it seems being happy makes you think far, and thinking far makes you happy, and better able to see what makes you happy. This conflicts with blue’s concept associations with unhappiness, and weakens support for blue-is-far. Color me confused. Loneliness, being the condition of being alone and wanting otherwise, is inherently vastly less subjective than happiness. Put another way, loneliness is the same for anyone who is lonely, but happiness is different for many different people. For some it may be far whereas for others is may be near and for others still it may be both depending on what kind of happiness they're measuring. Whether a person considers themselves happy will necessarily depend on what they mean by happiness.

The upshot being that you must define happiness more narrowly before you can validly asset that happy is lonely, or before you can resolve the paradox you pointed to in Is Happy Far?.

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dailyhap's avatar

"Happiness is lonely" is actually the reason I created http://www.DailyHap.com, a website that encourages the pursuit of happiness within a community of happy people, because happiness IS sometimes lonely. Particularly the pursuit of happiness, which is so hard to quantify and thus harder to feel like you've achieved.

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