This does sound like an interesting set of data. If the amount of smiling is
as good an indicator for happiness as it seems to be, one could track it
over the years and watch the effects of new habits, exercise plans and other
changes. No more “I’m feeling up/down lately, wonder why”.
Instead, you could spot the smile in/decrease in your graph, see the
correlation with, for example, a stressful new volunteer role and make
better decisions.
In that case, I think beeminding smiles could be a very bad idea: Now the
amount of smiles depends not only on your happiness, but also on your
willpower to fake smiles when you are unhappy and on your financial
situation (can you afford to loose this contract?). The data is more noisy
and less useful. Besides, a duty to smile on penalty of monetary loss
strikes me as somewhat dystopian, but maybe I’m overthinking that.
Personally I’m rather for determining what makes you smile, for example a
good book or time with certain nice people, and beemind that.
Do you know if fake smiling still increases happiness if it has become a
habit? Could you link the research you mentioned?
Moritz
Am 15.02.2013 15:07, schrieb laurie reeves:
Ooh, I love that idea, Danny. I mean, it’s like the research that often
gets done on these things but you’re taking the research/science directly to
users. It’s not like a drug that’s still being tested. Smiling sure can’t
hurt (though if I stretch my imagination I can come up with scenarios where
it might, come to think of it. Like you’re standing there grinning as you
hear that your pet just got run over by a car – grinning because you only
have till midnight to get in x more smiles before you derail) 
I guess
one could be interpreted strangely by others. In fact I have a personal
memory of something like this and it always bugged me. It’s this:
When Steven was about seven, I guess? and had just been to the dentist where
his permanent front teeth were perfect and cleaned and completely grown in,
he fell on the gym floor running a race and, you may remember, broke off
both front teeth half way up and angled. Horrible. Well, as you know, he
has the composites to this day but here’s the part I remember: This was a
church function he’d been invited to (where it happened) and the mother of
his friend who dealt with me about the incident (church insurance, whatever)
was calmly smiling when she spoke to me about it and this was in the minutes
immediately following the accident. I was a little distraught, though calm,
but she just grinned and grinned. I’ll never forget that. It seemed
inappropriate. And it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth for this
particular woman and her church, which was a fairly zealous, fundamental
church. Sorry if this offends anyone but it made me think these people were
really weird – that she was trying to convey something along the lines of
“Don’t worry, God has a plan for everything.” Her husband, who worked in
some capacity like treasurer for the church, also did the over-smiling thing
when he spoke to me days later. Never once said anything like “so sorry
that happened to Steven.” No, just grinned and grinned. Weird!
So, sorry to bother you with that anecdotal evidence for why the smiling
thing could possibly come off strange but still I like the idea of it being
captured on beeminder! For a lot of people this would be really helpful, I
think.
lauriemom
On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:
This is really interesting. I just remembered a previous discussion
about beeminding things like how often you smile:
Bethany:
random idea: software that tracks when you’re smiling and when you’re
not, hooked into beeminder to make a smiles graph. research shows that
making your face physically smile makes your brain (at least a little
bit) happier.
Me:
I like it. I mean, it has a small but non-zero chance of being a
powerful force for good.
I’ve seen other apps that try to get data on your mood over time but
the data entry aspect is [too much friction for me].
It just feels way too arbitrary to try to put a number on it and the
frequency with which you need to do so makes it too cumbersome.
Getting the percentage of white pixels (your teeth) from your face pic
would be ridiculously noisy but with enough data meaningful signals
may appear.
And then, as you say, if you beemind it and that causes you to do more
fake smiling, all the better.
I’m reminded of a quote from somewhere:
“Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the
only specification is that it should run noiselessly.”
PS: Our friend Reto Stamm is working on beeminding posture using
lumoback.com
On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Alys lady.alys@gmail.com wrote:
This might be of interest to anyone who would like to, for example,
have a Beeminder graph for something that is not intrinsically easy to
quantify:
“How To Measure Anything, Even Intangibles”
How To Measure Anything, Even Intangibles - Quantified Self
“… how does one go about measuring happiness? What about compassion,
or public influence, or creativity? These are more intangible, harder
to pin down to a number that means anything. Douglas Hubbard has
written an impressive work called “How To Measure Anything: Finding
the Value of Intangibles in Business.” …”
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http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com
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