MattMaroon.com

Neat article in Newsweek about whether or not money buys happiness. While I don’t totally disagree with its conclusions, I also don’t totally agree with them, and I definitely don’t agree with their methodology.

They measured people’s happiness by asking them, on a scale of 1-10, how happy they are. That’s probably the worst method possible. People have no more ability to judge their own happiness than they do their own looks, or their ability to drive. Hell, if you want to do a fun experiment I invented long ago, go around and ask people to merely define happiness. Pretty much everyone starts stammering.

I definitely believe that money must have declining marginal utility. Having been through it, I can say that going from a negative income to a positive one is a pretty big jump, and getting to the point where money ceases to be a concern is a smaller but still noticeable increase as well. And I can only posit that both are far larger than the happiness gained by an increase from a few million in the bank to a few billion.

But I’d still wager that, by any objective measure, your average billionaire is a little happier than your average millionaire. If not, they would simply give away money until they were just a millionaire (who just gave a ridiculously large sum to the needy, which certainly has to make one feel better than a millionaire who didn’t) and you never see any of them do that.

The fact that guys like Bill Gates often give massive amounts to charity (him more than most of course) would seem to indicate that the indirect joy of making life better for others greatly outweighs the joy of having a few extra billion dollars. But the fact that none of them ever do so to the point of poverty, or even to the point of mere upper middle classness, would seem to indicate that there is some nontrivial amount of happiness in that extra money.

A much better methodology would be to find some objective measures of happiness and then compare. For instance, do a survey to see if rich people are less likely to take anti-depressants than the middle class. That particular one is probably bad measure, since they’re more able to afford that sort of thing, but there has to be some such quantifiable, objective metric or group of metrics that is much more accurate than asking people how happy they are.

A friend introduced me to YubNub today. At first I installed the plugin into Firefox and thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Want to search Google Images for Britney Spears? Just type “gim britney spears”. Amazon for a screwdriver? “am screwdriver”. It is, as it says, a command line for the web.

But I quickly ran into a couple usability problems. For one, there’s no customizability. The command “a” takes me to answers.com. I never, ever want to go to that site. Who the hell does? It’s like Wikipedia for retards. I do, however, visit Amazon daily. According to compete.com Amazon has over 4 times the traffic of Answers. Shouldn’t “a” default there?

Second, anyone can create a command, presumably as long as the command’s key combo doesn’t exist. This is both good (in that pretty much any site you’d want to use is covered) and bad in that a lot of three letter words are taken. That’s a problem because the default command, if you don’t use one, is to Google for whatever you type into the box. That’s good because 95% of the time you use that box, it’s for Google.

But after installing YubNub weird things start happening. For instance type in “Rad Rails”. Turns out rad is the command for the weather channel. So you now have to type in “g rad rails” just to Google for it. In maybe twenty queries something like this happened to me three times, and since I hadn’t wanted to query anything but Google on any of them, and each time cost me a few clicks, it was a large amount of wasted effort.

The biggest problem though is that it’s useless. Most of the things you’d search for you can just find easily on Google anyway. For instance when my friend Russ was showing it to us, he wanted to demonstrate it by searching IMDB for Last Action Hero, which was just “i last action hero”. But if you just Google for Last Action Hero what’s number 1 on the list? The IMDB entry. I imagine that’s true for almost any movie you’d ever want to search for.

In fact, I find that to be the case with almost any search. If I want to find something on Wikipedia, it’s almost always the first entry on Google. So if, instead of YubNub, someone just made a plugin that made a hotkey for doing an I’m Feeling Lucky search in the box that’s already there, it would save tons of clicks relative to YubNub, and even a few to just the Google box that’s already there.

Can someone make that please?

Unscientific arguments in favor of MySpace:

1. I signed up for MySpace, searched for people from my high school, found at least 20 (out of a class of under 100). Same search on Facebook turned up 4. Every friend I’ve talked to has had similar experiences.
2. People always say stupid things like “most MySpace accounts are spam”. Here’s a picture of my inbox, which hasn’t been touched in a month:

   

   There’s definitely some spam there, in fact, that’s all there is since I don’t really use the site. You can see that every message (including one from 4 days ago) but the latest one (which came in a couple hours before I took the picture) comes from a profile that MySpace has since shut down. It seems virtually unlikely that, if MySpace is that good at shutting down spammers, any significant number of active accounts are spam.

3. The top 3 apps on Facebook are Top Friends, FunWall, and Super Wall, all of which merely replicate MySpace functionality. Top Friends has 2.8 million users.
4. Another complaint people have about comparing users is that tons of comedians, rock stars, actors, individual movies, businesses, TV shows, and other pop culture organizations have MySpace accounts and will be your friend. Lots of them use it as a blog and promote it at their shows, and many of them aren’t real people. You might argue this has no value, and that you don’t want to friend people you don’t know, and therefore they shouldn’t count. I totally agree about the first part, but millions of donkeys actually do want to be Dane Cook’s virtual buddy, or have Snakes on a Plane show up in their top friends list. They might not be actual people or friends, but they definitely count.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate MySpace and actually use Facebook. I like it much better for about 100 different reasons. But I’m in the minority and always will be. I’ve also never spent a cent on Facebook or clicked an ad, and can’t think of any reason why I’d be compelled to do either in the future. On that I’m in the vast majority and always will be.

It’s no Google.