Stumbling on HAPPINESS----撞上快乐
Stumbling on HAPPINESS----撞上快乐DANIEL GILBERT One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a luck hour, at the world's end some-where, and hold fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.
Willa Cather, "Le Lavandou," 1902
一种既不能神化，也不能预测的情景会带来快乐；那仅仅是一种偶然撞上，在某一个幸运的时刻，在世界尽头的某处，而且短暂停留于时日的快乐，例如关于财富和名誉。
威拉 卡瑟 "Le Lavandou," 1902
船长，孙参，你们来吧。
建议
spring3网友，我建议您先贴出此书的序言、主要目录、后记、名家的书评，让我们知道究竟是一本什么书，作者论述的主题是什么。否则，一些关键词都可能会翻译错误，因为英语词汇一词多义现象很普遍。 :) 顶一下回复：建议
最初由[海船长]发布建议
spring3网友，我建议您先贴出此书的序言、主要目录、后记、名家的书评，让我们知道究竟是一本什么书，作者论述的主题是什么。否则，一些关键词都可能会翻译错误，因为英语词汇一词多义现象很普遍。 :)
对。这段引言是在序言之前。 最初由[孙参甲]发布
顶一下
孙先生，不但是要你顶。旨在抛砖引玉。 FOREWORD
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child.
Shakespeare, King Lear
WHAT WOULD YOU DO right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you've been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford adminstration? Would you waltz into your boss's office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol? Hard to say, of course, but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today. 最初由发布
回复：建议
对。这段引言是在序言之前。
我的意思是，您先把此书的引言、序言、主要目录、后记、名家的书评之类的英文原文一次性贴出来，我们先浏览一下，便于知道究竟是一本什么书，作者论述的主题是什么。然后再来一段一段地翻译。否则，很难把握词汇含义的取舍。 :) 最初由[海船长]发布
我的意思是，您先把此书的引言、序言、主要目录、后记、名家的书评之类的英文原文一次性贴出来，我们先浏览一下，便于知道究竟是一本什么书，作者论述的主题是什么。然后再来一段一段地翻译。否则，很难把握词汇含义的取舍。 :)
也有此想法。只是家里还没有扫描机，打字不快。好吧，给我几天时间。或者我可以把一篇中文的介绍性短文打出来。
“我们以为考完试就会有大把节目，会好开心；我们以为在内地买了间HOUSE之后，就个个星期上去过天堂般的生活。。。。。。到其时却发现不外如此，没有什么特别，得不到期待中的快乐。为什么会这样？
哈佛大学心理学教授DANIEL GILERT 解释给我们听；这是因为人在预期未来时，脑袋会有好几个不足和错误。而这些不足或错误，几乎人人相同，甚少例外。
这些不足或错误，包括了：一，人对未来的想象，是基于现在情况来考虑；现在何未来的差异，人脑往往忽略了而没考虑。二，人脑在想象时，有些空白的地方，会自动加上〔填充〕往往不准确。三，人往往深信自己想象的事是必然的，真确会发生的事，实际并非如此。四，人对时间的想像，是模拟到线性方向去想像的，这无法处理较复杂的时间性想像。。。。。。
你会说：‘我与其他人不同，当我想像未来时，我不会像其他人一样犯同样的错误。’你错了，DANIEL GILERT 引出无数学术研究例证，都证明人在思想和想像上会犯错误，而且人人在犯相同的错。由于有上述这莫多错误和不足，人在想象和设计未来时，会出现很大误差，快乐失落了，你到时找不到快乐。
这书是杰作，将会是近代心理/科学经典著作。这书不教你如何寻得快乐，但已告诉了我们人为何感受到快乐，又告诉了我们思想上的失误如何令我们找不到快乐，这等于教了我们如何才能找到快乐，而这方法，是科学化的，有根据的。灵性上，宗教上寻求快乐的方法，我们读得多了，科学上的APPROACH, 这本顶级。”
－－－冯礼慈
《星岛日报》
搜到一些信息
http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/gilbert/img/danielgilbert.jpg
About The Author
Daniel Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research with Tim Wilson on "affective forecasting" investigates how and how well people can make predictions about the emotional impact of future events.
Dan has won numerous awards for his teaching and research—from the Guggenheim Fellowship to the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. However, he says that his greatest accomplishment is that he appears just before Dizzie Gillespie on the list of Most Famous High School Dropouts.
Dan's research has been covered by The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Money, CNN, U.S. News & World Report, The New Yorker, Scientific American, Oprah Magazine, Psychology Today, and many others.
He lives in Cambridge Massachusetts with his wife and a lack of pets.
About This Book
Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had presumed. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward.
Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks, and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was.
Smart, witty, accessible, and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human endeavor to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.
http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/gilbert/img/cherry.gif
Foreword
What would you do right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes? Would you race upstairs and light that Marlboro you've been hiding in your sock drawer since the Ford administration? Would you waltz into your boss's office and present him with a detailed description of his personal defects? Would you drive out to that steakhouse near the new mall and order a T-bone, medium rare, with an extra side of the really bad cholesterol? Hard to say, of course, but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today.
Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice. The things we do when we expect our lives to continue are naturally and properly different than the things we might do if we expected them to end abruptly. We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor's witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become. We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves, squirreling away portions of our paychecks each month so they can enjoy their retirements on a putting green, jogging and flossing with some regularity so they can avoid coronaries and gum grafts, enduring dirty diapers and mind-numbing repetitions of The Cat in the Hat so that someday they will have fatcheeked grandchildren to bounce on their laps. Even plunking down a dollar at the convenience store is an act of charity intended to ensure that the person we are about to become will enjoy the Twinkie we are paying for now. In fact, just about any time we want something—a promotion, a marriage, an automobile, a cheeseburger—we are expecting that if we get it, then the person who has our fingerprints a second, minute, day, or decade from now will enjoy the world they inherit from us, honoring our sacrifices as they reap the harvest of our shrewd investment decisions and dietary forbearance.
Yeah, yeah. Don't hold your breath. Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan. Even that person who takes a bite of the Twinkie we purchased a few minutes earlier may make a sour face and accuse us of having bought the wrong snack. No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking. They may recognize our good intentions and begrudgingly acknowledge that we did the best we could, but they will inevitably whine to their therapists about how our best just wasn't good enough for them.
How can this happen? Shouldn’t we know the tastes, preferences, needs, and desires of the people we will be next year—or at least later this afternoon? Shouldn't we understand our future selves well enough to shape their lives—to find careers and lovers whom they will cherish, to buy slipcovers for the sofa that they will treasure for years to come? So why do they end up with attics and lives that are full of stuff that we considered indispensable and that they consider painful, embarrassing, or useless? Why do they criticize our choice of romantic partners, second-guess our strategies for professional advancement, and pay good money to remove the tattoos that we paid good money to get? Why do they experience regret and relief when they think about us, rather than pride and appreciation? We might understand all this if we had neglected them, ignored them, mistreated them in some fundamental way—but damn it, we gave them the best years of our lives! How can they be disappointed when we accomplish our coveted goals, and why are they so damned giddy when they end up in precisely the spot that we worked so hard to steer them clear of? Is there something wrong with them?
Or is there something wrong with us?
When I was ten years old, the most magical object in my house was a book on optical illusions. Its pages introduced me to the Müller-Lyer lines whose arrow-tipped ends made them appear as though they were different lengths even though a ruler showed them to be identical, the Necker cube that appeared to have an open side one moment and then an open top the next, the drawing of a chalice that suddenly became a pair of silhouetted faces before flickering back into a chalice again (see figure 1). I would sit on the floor in my father's study and stare at that book for hours, mesmerized by the fact that these simple drawings could force my brain to believe things that it knew with utter certainty to be wrong. This is when I learned that mistakes are interesting and began planning a life that contained several of them. But an optical illusion is not interesting simply because it causes everyone to make a mistake; rather, it is interesting because it causes everyone to make the same mistake. If I saw a chalice, you saw Elvis, and a friend of ours saw a paper carton of moo goo gai pan, then the object we were looking at would be a very fine inkblot but a lousy optical illusion. What is so compelling about optical illusions is that everyone sees the chalice first, the faces next, and then—flicker flicker—there's that chalice again. The errors that optical illusions induce in our perceptions are lawful, regular, and systematic. They are not dumb mistakes but smart mistakes—mistakes that allow those who understand them to glimpse the elegant design and inner workings of the visual system.
The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic. They too have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight. That's what this book is all about. Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you've bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why. Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy. This book is about a puzzle that many thinkers have pondered over the last two millennia, and it uses their ideas (and a few of my own) to explain why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become. The story is a bit like a river that crosses borders without benefit of passport because no single science has ever produced a compelling solution to the puzzle. Weaving together facts and theories from psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, this book allows an account to emerge that I personally find convincing but whose merits you will have to judge for yourself.
STUDY GUIDE
Introduction 00
Journey to Elsewhen 01
The View from in Here 02
Outside Looking 03
In the Blindspot of the Mind's Eye 04
The Hound of Silence 05
The Future Is Now 06
Time Bombs 07
Paradise Glossed 08
Immune to Reality 09
Once Bitten 10
Reporting Live from Tomorrow 11
Afterword 12
Introduction
So here's a question that you're probably dying to ask me: Why does Stumbling on Happiness have twelve chapters? Does it have something to do with the number of days of Christmas, the number of tribes in Israel, the number of Apostles, monkeys, eggs, or angry men?
No. But as it happens, twelve is the number of weeks that a seminar at Harvard University typically meets, which means that my book is ideal for teaching. This year I designed and taught a seminar in which my students read one chapter from my book every week (plus a few other readings) and then met to discuss it. I taught one version of the seminar for graduate students and one for undergraduate students, and both seminars were great fun for me. The students seemed to like them, too. At least no one passed out.
In the syllabus, I've described the main idea that each chapter of my book raises, and included a few key points for discussion and references to some supplemental readings that might inform it. Copyright law prohibits me from posting the readings themselves, but you should be able to find them in a library. Feel free to copy this syllabus—use it, change it, rearrange it, or sell it on eBay.
One thing you'll notice about these readings is that they are primarily psychology articles because I am, in point of fact, a psychologist. That's why I say things like "in point of fact." I hope that those of you who read my book will send me suggestions for relevant readings in other fields—such as economics, biology, philosophy, business, the arts—to be included in future seminars.
If you do, I'll post your suggestions here on this website, and together we can build the world's longest reading list, thereby keeping several generations of promising young people from ever finishing college.
Happy stumbling!
Afterword
This is the chapter in which we hug, say goodbye to each other, and promise to stay in touch but never really do.
But seriously, this chapter is a brief, closing meditation on the book's main theme. It doesn't present new information as much as it attempts to rise up above the old information and see it from a distance. This is the meeting in which I ask students to talk about what they've learned, why they should care about what they've learned, and most importantly, what they didn't learn but wish they had.
录音介绍
http://www1.yunbbs.com/gany/flash/B1/b23.swf
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/mm/audio/4s_9780739332221.mp3
Praise
"Stumbling on Happiness is an absolutely fantastic book that will shatter your most deeply held convictions about how your own mind works. Ceaselessly entertaining, Gilbert is the perfect guide to some of the most interesting psychological research ever performed. Think you know what makes you happy? You won't know for sure until you have read this book." —Steven D. Levitt, author of Freakonomics
"This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me."—Malcolm Gladwell, Amazon.com
"A fascinating new book that explores our sometimes misguided attempts to find happiness."—Time Magazine
"A lucid, charmingly written argument for why our expectations don't pan out."—Psychology Today
"A witty, insightful and superbly entertaining trek through the foibles of human imagination."—New Scientist
"Gilbert’s book has no subtitle, allowing you to invent your own. I’d call it ‘The Only Truly Useful Book on Psychology I’ve Ever Read."—James Pressley, Bloomberg News
"Gilbert's elbow-in-the-ribs social-science humor is actually funny.... But underneath the goofball brilliance, has a serious argument to make about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy." —Scott Stossel, The New York Times Book Review
"A leader in the burgeoning study of affective forecasting, Mr. Gilbert's new book... is already getting good reviews for its lucid explanations of the latest scientific research." —The Wall Street Journal
"Everyone will enjoy reading this book, and some of us will wish we could have written it. You will rarely have a chance to learn so much about so important a topic while having so much fun." —Professor Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University, Winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics
"This is a brilliant book, a useful book, and a book that could quite possibly change the way you look at just about everything. And as a bonus, Gilbert writes like a cross between Malcolm Gladwell and David Sedaris." —Seth Godin, author of All Marketers Are Liars
"In a book that is as deep as it is delightful, Daniel Gilbert reveals the powerful and often surprising connections between our experience of happiness and how we think about the future. Drawing on cutting edge psychological research and his own sharp insights into everyday events, Gilbert manages to have considerable fun while expertly illuminating some of the most profound mysteries of the human mind. I confidently predict that your future will be happier if you read this pathbreaking volume." —Daniel L. Schacter, author of The Seven Sins of Memory
"In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert shares his brilliant insights into our quirks of mind, and steers us toward happiness in the most delightful, engaging ways. If you stumble on this book, you're guaranteed many doses of joy." —Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence
"Gilbert's playful tone and use of commonplace examples render a potentially academic topic accessible and educational." —Publisher's Weekly
"Gilbert examines what sciences has discovered about how well the human brain can predict future enjoyment... the ideas may be disconcerting, but they're backed by solid research and presented with persuasive charm and wit." —Kirkus
"With some loopy humor, lively wit and panache, Gilbert explores why the most important decisions of our lives are so often made so poorly."—Kirkus Reviews 2006 Health & Living
"As fascinating and engaging as Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Stumbling on Happiness is the perfect antidote to those self-help tomes that claim to offer the secret to a fulfilling life... A book full of complex ideas written in an utterly accessible style."—Powells.com, Staff Pick
"This witty and fascinating book explores the uniquely human ability to imagine the future... a vibrant and accessible book that explains why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become." —StrandBooks.com
"Have you ever finished a book, then started right in reading it again from the start? Was it so satisfying you couldn't bear to let it end? Or so deep you couldn't understand parts until you read it over again? Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert has both those qualities... I learned a great deal from this book... I predict you will be happy you read it. And you may even want to read it from the start again. I did." —Words on Books
"This book is brilliant. It's a book that will be talked about by people everywhere. Trust me on that." —800-CEO-Read
都是船长脑袋转得快，刚回来准备叫你去网上搜索一下，或方便的话索先去图书馆借回来看看。可你已经贴上了，GREAT!
谢谢你。
顺祝：中秋节快乐！
Stumbling on Happiness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaStumbling on Happiness is a non-fiction book by Daniel Gilbert. It was published in the US and Canada in 2006 by Knopf, and has been translated into 20 languages. It is a New York Times bestseller.
Gilbert's central thesis is that people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy. He argues that imagination fails in three ways:
1. Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.
2. Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).
3. Imagination fails to realize that things will feel differently once they actually happen -- most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.
The advice Gilbert offers is to use other people's experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it. It is surprising how similar people are in much of their experiences, he says. He does not expect too many people to heed this advice, as our culture, accompanied by various thinking tendencies, is against this method of decision making.
The book is written in easy to understand language despite its deep roots in scientific research. Many points in the book are supported by explanations of simple experiments that illustrate common quirks of reasoning. These stories enable the reader to grasp the concept with ease.
In 2007, the book was awarded the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books general prize for the best science writing for a non-specialist audience.
也祝各位中秋节快乐！
好吧，咱们先看看这些内容再说。您们的意见呢？ :)回复：也祝各位中秋节快乐！
最初由[海船长]发布也祝各位中秋节快乐！
好吧，咱们先看看这些内容再说。您们的意见呢？ :)
有劳船长。如果只作为提高英文的途径而去翻译，功夫似乎太大。也许我可以找个中译本对照着看。
不过，如果船长和孙参坚持参与，我将受益匪浅。 最初由发布
One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a luck hour, at the world's end some-where, and hold fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.
Willa Cather, "Le Lavandou," 1902
一种既不能神化，也不能预测的情景会带来快乐；那仅仅是一种偶然撞上，在某一个幸运的时刻，在世界尽头的某处，而且短暂停留于时日的快乐，例如关于财富和名誉。
威拉 卡瑟 "Le Lavandou," 1902
船长，孙参，你们来吧。