Mark Fabian
@markfabian
Ass-Prof of Public Policy at Warwick. Work mostly on wellbeing from an interdisciplinary perspective. Interested in *everything*. Run ePODstemology:
My Wara Wara (from Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron) arrived today. I love them so much. Kawaiiiiiiiii I can imagine them making funny sounds as they materialise out of the wall to bring me a baby. Whomp Whomp, ooohhhhwwwooo, hmmm, honto? Hare!
New Working Paper from me and @vthorrf.bsky.social: Clarifying the concept of psychological richness: Is it a dimension of subjective well-being? osf.io/preprints/ps... We think psychological richness has great potential, especially for explaining how wellbeing works, but right now it's a mess.
Yo this is f**cked up! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Don't ask bots for life advice! You learn to be human by engaging with other humans.
"because it makes them feel like things are all okay and there is racial harmony, which is what normal people want and like". This is so true. There is a deep nastiness to people like Credlin. They're incensed by efforts to even paper over inequality and just want to boil bad blood endlessly.
I should also say that the LLM makes plenty of errors in its analysis that a therapist wouldn't, like over-indexing on Lawrence Fishbourne playing the role of my shadow in a dream and interpreting this as Morpheus from the Matrix being his own unique symbol. lol.
The oil price shock of the late 1970s ushered in Neoliberalism, arguably the biggest political-economic change of the past century. One can only hope that the even bigger oil price shock of the 2020s ushers in solarpunk wellbeing states. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk
Why is it that people who take selfies against such backgrounds are always meaningfully illiterate:
Just did a 10min search of the academic literature on this and found nothing. Tiny effects in hypergonadal men over 70, even tinier effects on depression. Why are there so many grifts right now? Men, Feeling fatigue? Try drinking less, sleeping more, cutting trans fats.
We provide, I think, a fairly developed conceptual framework for how life satisfaction measures are supposed to work. If you combine this with theories of wellbeing like e.g. my own, DeYoung and Tiberius 2023, or Martela 2025, you start to get a coherentist philosophy of science for wellbeing.
Third assumption violated: intemporal comparability Major shocks change the meaning of the points on the scale such that responses before and after the shock are not straightforwardly comparable.
Second assumption violated - interpersonally comparable scale use. Among many results in this vein, respondents use widely divergent time frames when making their responses. Elderly respondents tend to interpret the question as how life went, whereas young respondents as how it is going:
First assumption violated is linear/cardinal scale use Respondents themselves don't think they use their scales linearly. Indeed, linear scale use is among the rarest way of using the scale:
After 5 years I can finally share a full WP of our project conducting cognitive interviews of life satisfaction reporting. Main findings: 1. LS scales are psychometrically valid, but... 2. Standard statistical assumptions made when analysing LS data are not credible. osf.io/gv5e3/files/...
I laughed pretty hard at this meme from Brendan Graham Dempsey here: open.substack.com/pub/brendang...? Could also apply to most of critical theory. Dempsey's blog is one of the few places to read consistently excellent analysis of metamodernism, incidentally.
December air travel means Mark writes extremely belated movie reviews of stuff he watched on the plane: open.substack.com/pub/profmark...?
Obligatory Japan trip photo booth fun times. I was genuinely too large for the machine.
Enjoyed reading this a lot but I was really hanging out for your thoughts on Bari Weiss getting her blog bought for £150mil and put in charge of a major broadcaster just because she knows how to flatter an ego.
I'm giving a seminar tomorrow (my first!) on my popular book Beyond Happy: How to rethink happiness and find fulfilment. It's with the International Society for Quality of Life Studies, register here: isqols.org/event-6357161 Unlike a podcast, here you can ask me questions!
Whenever I get a little bit of time off I always tell myself to use it napping and I always end up blogging instead: open.substack.com/pub/profmark...?
In today's episode of AI can't predict shit, my Netflix suggestions: Did you watch Oscar winning mythologist Miyazaki's solarpunk masterpiece, Castle in the Sky? Well our algorithm thinks you'll love...K-Pop Demon Hunters 😑. It's all anime, right? It is so bad at discovering stuff for me.
Here's a cute picture of me and bae wearing our all natural fibres that last 20 years to improve the mood. Low waste lifestyles are not just possible they're actually quite easy. We just need the tiniest shift away from convenience (dont take away your coffee!) and a big shift to compost.
I knew this book would depress me but my god it is soooo depressing. I dont understand what people think happens to their trash. In the bin out of mind I guess. But actually all that plastic is now in your food, water, beaches, brain. All so Shein can thrive.
I recall the latter Wittgenstein saying something like: Philosophy is a disease that purports to be its own cure. I think it's valuable to train yourself to think like this but only if you also train yourself to think in a variety of other ways. Analytical philosophy on its own is a brain worm.
That requires inventing science fiction scenarios that take you even further from the reality that birthed the intuitions in the first place. We quickly end up in the realm of "all things considered" and "all possible worlds", which is unlike the world our intuitions make sense of.
You similarly act stumped when your intuitions only work in the messy middle and not when taken to logical extremes. Analytical philosophy then typically assumes that we just need to disentangle things into even more parts.