the real trick is ..

“Below 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I’ve rarely seen lines so flat.”

“Clearly… money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery,” he said. But the real trick, Kahneman said, is to spend time with people you like.

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

do this we can build perfect system

I have no problems with your project. In similar vein, nor do I have problems with a secularist program of the betterment of India or of humanity.

You need to play with a toy example. Any company is in marketplace to increase their capital. You have to read Marxian economics, and do some critical thinking of how the capital works.

What is money? The best answer that can be had is Marxian: his theory of labor value and money. But there are problems with the formulation that a commodity is an emobodiment of labor. This embodiment is loaded term, which smacks of a particular conception of human, a conception that can't be defended on rational grounds.

There are problems with true communist system: in which sense are we equal? Equal access? or Equal salary or equal status: if every one wants to be a manager, who will be the worker? And so on. In other words, for the sake of communism, everybody has to accomodate himself in such a way that such a system works: but this accomodating oneself is indefensible on both empirical and theoretical grounds.

Can humans work without the existence of money. Sure, they can. Herein lies the problem of intentionality. Is intentionality illusory the way stick appearing bent when immersed in water? If so, why are we all succumbed to this illusion? Why such illusion is necessary. Most importantly, how to get rid of this illusion. The day we have answers for these questions, that day a perfect system can be built. Herein lies the strength of Indian traditions. There was a discussion abt this on the board. Most of the discussants on that board have no clues abt the mechanism of the capital. The thread has died out, anyway.

Here my having said that I am useless to many projects put forward by great many indians makes great sense. Not that I am envious of those projects. But because you can't lure people by things like "do this, we can build perfect system"

That, for every human seeks happiness in different ways, sees it in different things. This happiness and its contra are related to this intentionality problem as well.

mimick others status quo

feng: you assume that once you help someone, the latter will help others
thats wrong
11:57 AM me: yeah
feng: because the guy is trying to help himself to maintain/mimick (others) status quo
me: hmm
feng: Just drawing graphs, with bunch of equations, is useless
11:58 AM the way these rational choice economists do
with all computing power
me: its not just true for the pullampet idiots... everyone of us have something alone the lines... "My aim is....", "I like to....."
hmm
feng: I said, pullampet
because you want to uplift pullampet citizens;)
me: lol sorry
11:59 AM yeah:)
feng: you can't really uplift anyone
people can survive
heard of millets?
sajja, raagi, bariga
they are called millets
me: yeah
feng: pearl millet, barnyard millet, etc
you dont need bore wells
a person can survive in India
12:00 PM me: hmm
feng: the notion of the aims have changed
me: hmm
12:01 PM feng: thats why, one should start debunking common sense phychology, and the theories of human psychologies associated with capitalism and communism
Even though marx theories are betetr than today's theories
but his psychology is bunk
Everybody wants to be manager
everybody wants to be ceo
12:02 PM instead of just work and survive
you shuda slapped that guy who said money is mithya
robbed his money
then he knows whether it is mithya

intentions and actions

Lets consider two ends of the spectrum: a Bill Gates and the poorest (in terms of financial worth) man. Indian traditions 'say' (scare quotes for different reasons) that we are not happy, *not* because some projects (desires, intentions, etc) that are pursued are failed, *but* because such projects are *ours/mine*. Here, both Gates and the poorest man are not any exceptions! There exist natural regularities that interfere our intentions, no matter how rich one is (for instance, I intended to drink milk to quench my thirst, and in fact I did, but my stomach got upset, which I didn't intend. One can imagine countless examples that way). Many do agree that natural regularities affect our intentions, but everybody thinks that there is some *relationship* between intentions and results. Indian traditions claim that there is no relationship between intentions and actions; they further say that the appearance that such relationship obtains is illusion the way that our experience of Sun's movement around Earth--which is our daily experience--is. Just knowing the claim that we are not happy not because of projects being pursued but because those projects are ours, does not make one happy! Something more is required: to experiment, problematize, the very notion of 'self'. Some Indian traditions claim that self is illusory as well. In intentional psychology, which is a product of Semitic theologies and which mgmt gurus sell, self is taken for granted: that our actions are instantiations of intentions of such a self! That's why we hear slogans like 'be positive', 'believe in what you do'!

What Indian traditions say that one can achieve happiness, which is *independent of* what one has, of what one is, of what one attained, etc. One doesn't need to become ascetic, one doesn't need to become renounce family, in order to attain happiness; this doesn't foreclose the possibilities of ascetics becoming enlightened.

Well, there are no requirements for one to become happy. In other words, it is wrong to say that those who go to temple and offer pooja-s don't attain happiness. Of course, some paths are better for some, but not for others: tantriks engage in 'sexual practices', which offend sensibilities of many indians, in order to get enlightened.

There is no eternal quest. It is a goal of every human being, a goal that manifests in different ways: from getting admission, to jobs, to get married, and so on. So, this is amenable to any scientific investigation; in this sense, Indian traditions contributed to human knowledge. Our native languages are laden with such things: people say, one is to die without having any desires, so that one doesn't take another birth; and so on. Here, these junk swami-s, half-baked Indians give scientific gloss to rebirth and karma as though they are dependent on causality, without telling that what causality is. In actual fact, there is no punarjanma, but it is a cognitive strategy, a heuristic. Because we have lost the theoretical framework of our folk psychology because of Islamic and British colonizations, we have taken over intentional psychology, and the other discourses. We think that we know what intentional psychology is, but we are ignorant of both intentional psychology, and our folk psychology; and our folk psychology beats any western psychology that exists in the market: in fact, our folk psychology is true of human nature.

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, "You get what you pay for."

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford's business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.