Whoever posted this article they way they did at Slashdot should be ashamed to call themself a nerd.
First, there is no mention of isolating the causes of unhappiness -- just the most broad kind of correlation.
Second, math is work. Achievement in math is hard work. Anyone expecting short term happiness (happiness achieved during the school years) from hard work is just plain unrealistic. But, the study doesn't even answer the question as to whether or not those math students are happier later in life. I've personally always believed that smart people face tougher childhoods and easier adulthoods, and that the tradeoff of the effort is worth it.
Why promote this article the way you're promoting it here? It's terrible science and headlined in much the way newspapers headline studies in ways that get people to read the headline, say "uh huh", then never read the article or think about whether or not there's something to the story. A better headline would have been "Another Researcher Gets Paid for Useless Study". This whole mess would have made a better Onion article.
Not only is the idea flawed (unless they get a lot more users), but the metric by which they claim to rank is not properly implemented. They claim to multiply the reach and page view numbers (well, they say it's the geometric mean, but the ordering is the same), but reach clearly gets weighted higher. I've compared their numbers against their rankings and found this to be true in all cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever posted this article they way they did at Slashdot should be ashamed to call themself a nerd. First, there is no mention of isolating the causes of unhappiness -- just the most broad kind of correlation. Second, math is work. Achievement in math is hard work. Anyone expecting short term happiness (happiness achieved during the school years) from hard work is just plain unrealistic. But, the study doesn't even answer the question as to whether or not those math students are happier later in life. I've personally always believed that smart people face tougher childhoods and easier adulthoods, and that the tradeoff of the effort is worth it. Why promote this article the way you're promoting it here? It's terrible science and headlined in much the way newspapers headline studies in ways that get people to read the headline, say "uh huh", then never read the article or think about whether or not there's something to the story. A better headline would have been "Another Researcher Gets Paid for Useless Study". This whole mess would have made a better Onion article.
Not only is the idea flawed (unless they get a lot more users), but the metric by which they claim to rank is not properly implemented. They claim to multiply the reach and page view numbers (well, they say it's the geometric mean, but the ordering is the same), but reach clearly gets weighted higher. I've compared their numbers against their rankings and found this to be true in all cases.