Are People Happier or Sadder?

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Happiness has been going down for a long year, since about two thousand 15. The last e last year, it's beeng sort of slowly going up. Two thousand and 20 was the first time we saw anything that i would call collective troma. And yo, your listeners will have all their own specific ind of feelings how things maybe two thousand 14 was the worst year,. But we're trying to get out the whole picture an by collective trom of what i mean is a the advent of, you know, the world kind of understanding.

A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on understanding the structure of stories and other strings of words (including Twitter) by analyzing the valence of individual words, then studying how they are strung together in different kinds of stories. Understanding these structures offers powerful insight into how people communicate and how to reach them. As Peter says, “Never bring statistics to a story fight.”

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Peter Dodds received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Vermont and Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center. He has won multiple teaching awards, and was elected a Fellow of the Network Science Society.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.