Title (work in progress)
Happiness Maximization Protocol
Teammates
- Michael Stroe (execution & experimentation)& Andrew Hristescu (operations and data crunching)
Short summary of your improvement idea
Happiness might not be a ‘state’, it’s rather more of a perceptual move.
People think happiness derives from achieving certain goals and that it is an object in experience.
(credit for picture to Lars Vogt, link to paper here)
While in fact, it simply derives from understanding certain layers of direct experience and it’s illusory aspects or better said-- the shape of experience.
Ours is a protocol to become acquainted with the shape of your experience and, in that, learning how to lean towards more pleasant experience shapes.
By coupling protocols from phenomenology, rationalism and somatic therapies, we’ve been able to improve our own subjective happiness levels via changing the processing of moment-to-moment experience.
We’ve iterated a bit on this in a smaller 1-1 setting the alpha version (as a hobby project in personal time, there are 10 people currently that I, Michael, guide through the unpolished version) and we’re quite certain the practice generalises enough to be able to either guide others through the same protocols or have them follow the protocol on their own for similar results.
<<< Q&A >>>
What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance? Eg: hand-washing, traffic system, connector standards, carbon trading.
- We’re working to improve the basal sense-making and experience-processing protocol, which has downstream effects into personal effectiveness & productivity at all of an individual’s levels-- career, family, meaning.
Simply said, moving the average person’s experience from one of 1st Layer - Abstraction into a 1st Layer - Perception.
(credit to my friend https://twitter.com/nosilverv)
What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?
- individual’s subjective satisfaction can increase through improving their perceptual models/protocols and slightly changing their default mode network to perceptions from abstractions
What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol?
We’ll be diving into existing protocols, using self-experimentation, expert interviews and of course improvements will come from field observation and field testing with participants
**In what form will you prototype your improvement idea?
- Draft proposal shared with experts & people who practice similar protocols (priori research doc, which is shared below already had a couple hundred people check it and 10-20 independently started using it even in it’s unfinished form)
How will you field-test your improvement idea? Eg: run a restricted pilot at an event, simulation, workshop, etc.
We will do the following:
- enroll 20-25 beta-testers in the protocol through a 1-1 guided setting, interviewed before and after starting
- 1-3 online group workshops (10-20+ people)
- gather daily data points on happiness and stress levels to baseline and gauge improvements over the period of the protocol for testers
- NPS scores of protocol testers and workshop attendees
Who will be able to judge the quality of your output? Ideally name a few suitable judges.
- Frank Yang, Johnny Miller, we’ll brainstorm 1-2 more being open to judging
How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea? Eg: Submit proposal to a standards body, publish open-source code, produce and release a software development kit etc.
We will do the following:
- publish the protocol blueprint on it’s own website for free public use/reproduction (similar to https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/, we already have v0.5, which are some of the directions I, Michael already used to make permanent changes and Andrew just started, but it’s minimally edited for reader’s clarity for now)
- showcasing the protocol on Twitter, on personal and protocol’s accounts
- collaborate with existing creators in the mental health space to organize events for their audience
- create a Youtube Series of 10-15 explanatory videos
What is the success vision for your idea?
- The successful vision is to have a blueprint that can be self-directed, at least 10 - 15 beta-testers who can attest to permanently improved levels of wellbeing and 5-10 with noticeable and reduced level of stress. More so, we aim for a NPS participant-score >=7 & to create the mentioned content pieces.