The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 35 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Santos: Depriving Kids of Failure Drives Rising College Student Anxiety
“I mean, I think that's right, and I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing so much more anxiety in our college students today, right, is that they've never had a chance to mess up. They've never had a chance to do it on their own, and so when they final…”
Santos: Time Famine Harms Well-Being More Than Lack of Money
“A lot of the unhappiness hit that comes with poverty isn't necessarily a not having money hit, it's a not having time hit. You know, so she argues that time famine comes with, you know, being low income, and it's actually the time famine that's a real hit on w…”
Santos: Over-Intervention by Parents Causes Children to Give Up Faster
“What she finds is that when you give kids a very different puzzle later on, kids who've had that taking over condition, where the parents give the answer, give up much more quickly. And if you find ways to survey them about what they believe, like, they probab…”
Santos: Altruistic Actions Generate More Happiness Than Self-Care Luxuries
“Happiness is about achieving these accolades. It's not. We often think happiness is about self-care and treating ourselves and giving ourselves these luxuries. It's not. In fact, if anything, it's about doing nice things for others. That gives you more of a ki…”
Santos: Religious Happiness Comes From Behaviors, Not Theological Beliefs
“When you really do that work, what you find is that the effect of the correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors. So going to church, doing nice things for other people, you know, taking part in al…”
Santos: Feeling Time-Famished Damages Well-Being as Much as Unemployment
“In fact, some work by Ashley Willans shows that if you self-report being time famished, that's as big a hit on your wellbeing as if you self-report being unemployed.”
Santos: Genetics Accounts for Only 30% to 40% of Happiness Variance
“You know, even the heritability of happiness is, is lower than you might expect. You know, estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around, you know, 40%, 30%. Like, it's not that all the variants and the happy people that you see out there in the world is li…”
Santos: Children Mirror Their Parents' Anxiety Through Emotional Contagion
“I think one thing that's useful for parents to remember is about the science of emotional contagion, that like, you know, we naturally catch other people's emotions. If you're embodying calm, and this is going to be fine, and everything's okay, then kids are g…”
Santos: External Milestones Provide Only a Temporary Happiness Boost
“You know, there's studies that look at people who get those wonderful things, and yeah, you get a little happiness boost for a little while, but it doesn't seem to last. Lasting happiness comes from something else.”
Santos: Wealthy People Share the Exact Same Delusions About Money
“But what's funny is even if you look at incredibly wealthy people, they have the same mistaken intuitions about money.”
Santos: People Instinctively Pick Reference Points That Make Them Feel Inadequate
“The comparison point you pick is always somebody that's going to make you feel like crap. And that makes sense. You know, we want to have something to shoot for, but it means we never feel good with what we have. We're always finding reference points that make…”
Santos: Human Minds Evolved for Survival and Reproduction, Not Happiness
“We are products of natural selection, which is a blind process that, you know, if you kind of intentionalize it, it's kind of going for anything that will get you to survive and reproduce into the next generation. So natural selection is like double down on al…”
Santos: Over 40% of College Students Report Severe Functional Depression
“National statistics report that now, nowadays, over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Over 60% say that they're overwhelmingly anxious. Another over 60% report feeling lonely, extremely lonely most of the time. Over 80% …”
Santos: Canceling Extracurriculars Reduced College Students' Anxiety and FOMO
“Just not having as much stuff to do wound up making students feel less FOMO, less anxious, less time famished.”
Santos: Every Single Study Shows Happy People Are More Social
“Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. They prioritize time with their friends and family members, but they're also just, like, around other people more often.”
Santos: Talking to Strangers During Commutes Significantly Improves Mood
“There's some lovely work by Nick Epley and his colleagues showing that if you force somebody to talk to a stranger on the train on their commute to work, for example, they wind up in a happier mood.”
Santos: People Smile 30% Less When a Smartphone Is Merely Nearby
“She finds things like we smile 30% less when we have our phone near us, even if you're not using your phone, right?”
Santos: Writing Gratitude Lists for Two Weeks Significantly Boosts Well-Being
“There's evidence that in as little as two weeks, the simple act of writing three to five things you're grateful for down on a piece of paper can improve your well-being, like significantly improve your well-being.”
Santos: Writing One Gratitude Letter Elevates Well-Being for Over a Month
“There's also evidence that expressing gratitude to other people, like writing a, you know, a detailed thank you note to someone that you've always wanted to thank but never gotten a chance to. The act of doing that, at least in Marty Seligman and others' data,…”
Santos: The Genetic Heritability of Happiness Is Roughly 30% to 40%
“Estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around, you know, 40%, 30%. Like, it's not that all the variants and the happy people that you see out there in the world is like, well, some people are genetically happy and some people aren't. That's just simply not …”
Santos: Toddlers Give Up Faster When Parents Solve Puzzles for Them
“What she finds is that when you give kids a very different puzzle later on, kids who've had that taking over condition, where the parents give the answer, give up much more quickly. And if you find ways to survey them about what they believe, like, they probab…”
Santos: Emotion Regulation Requires Proactively Avoiding Triggering Situations
“Emotion regulation and finding ways to control your emotions are sometimes about you experience that emotion. You've gotta control it and regulate it in the moment, but you can also be smart enough about, like, trying not to get yourself into that situation in…”
Santos: Burnout Stems From Work Becoming Your Identity, Not Apathy
“Oftentimes it's not because your work, you didn't care about your work, or your work is boring, or it sucked. Oftentimes it's because you got so involved in your work is really your identity right now.”
Santos: Seeking Solitude During Burnout Cuts Off Restorative Social Connection
“Solitude, I think when you're experiencing this, the depersonalization, which is like rich cynicism, you know, I get it. It's like, I don't want to deal with people anymore. But ultimately that's allowing us, that's forcing us to lose out on this one mechanism…”
Santos: People Need Leisure That Is Challenging and Flow-Inducing
“So it's like, we don't want to be at work, but we forget in some ways the, like, good things that work does for our psychology, which is that sometimes Kind of puts us in challenge mode, puts us into flow, and I think the answer is that we kind of all need, we…”
Santos: Reframing Everyday Purchases as Time-Saving Investments Boosts Happiness
“If you make those purchases, you're happier, but if you reframe the purchases you're already making as time-saving, it can make you happier.”
Santos: Writing Gratitude Lists Significantly Boosts Well-Being Within Two Weeks
“There's evidence that in as little as two weeks, the simple act of writing three to five things you're grateful for down on a piece of paper can improve your well-being, like significantly improve your well-being.”
Santos: Sending a Thank-You Letter Boosts Well-Being for Over a Month
“There's also evidence that expressing gratitude to other people, like writing a, you know, a detailed thank you note to someone that you've always wanted to thank but never gotten a chance to. The act of doing that, at least in Marty Seligman and others' data,…”
Santos: People Systematically Overestimate the Impact of Future Achievements
“You know, you get a new house, and like, yeah, that feels good, but it doesn't feel as good as you're going to think, and it doesn't feel good for as long as you're going to think. These are errors in what we call affective forecasting. You're forecasting that…”
Santos: Over 1,000 Yale Students Enrolled in Inaugural Happiness Course
“We had over a thousand students shopping the class, so they took, like, bump, bump the whole mechanism up by, like, an order of magnitude and in the end, the only room that where we could fit the class on campus was in the concert hall and so over a thousand s…”
Santos: Mind-Wandering Significantly Decreases Human Happiness
“There's so much evidence that when we're mind wandering, when we're not fully present, that that's a time when we're also not very happy.”
Santos: Negative Visualization Halts Hedonic Adaptation and Resets Expectations
“Just by feeling what it might feel like To have something negative happen, it resets your reference point. It also kind of, like, stops your hedonic adaptation for a second, where you're like, oh my gosh, like, there are good things about having my spouse, and…”
Santos: Why I Took a One-Year Leave From Yale Over Burnout
“Recently I announced that I'm taking a year off from my role at Yale as a head of college and taking a year off from Yale, and it was in part because I was noticing The seeds of some of these things, right?”
Santos: Relationship Success Can Be Predicted by Responses to Attention Bids
“There's some evidence that you can make predictions about how a relationship is going based on just the number of those so-called bids that a partner responds to positively. Like when you're asked for attention, you kind of attend back.”
Santos: Teaching the Happiness Class Raised My Own Well-Being Slightly
“I take a lot of these self-report surveys over time, and I found that, you know, on average, since teaching this class, my well-being has gone up, you know, in a small but significant way, probably about a single point on, like, a ten-point happiness scale”