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"well-defined and poorly defined problems require completely different problem-solving skills."

Why? I didn't get that from the article. Also the article mentions Spearmans hypothesis, that people who are good at one kind of intelligence are also good at another. So I think the authors hypothesis is not really consistent.

But maybe another article "Why aren't rich people happier?" could shed some more light on the issue of happiness.





The way I see it, most, if not all, of well defined problems amount to search (maze, chess, proving Fermat's last theorem). You search carefully for a long time, and at some moment you are done. With a poorly-defined problem, you never know if you're done: you need to operationalise it in a way that "makes sense" to you and other people and then possibly reoperationalise it again based on new data or intermediate results. This kind of activity demands flexibility; search is more about rigour and exhaustivity.



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