Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Utilitarianism, prioritarianism and other varieties of consequentialism.
DanielLC
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby DanielLC » Tue Oct 20, 2009 1:26 am

Is there any other way of telling if people are happy? From what I can tell, your opinion of the average person's happiness only tells of how happy you are. We can't easily give someone a brain scan and use that information to calculate their utility. If this is the only way we can guess, we are equally likely to be overly optimistic as overly pessimistic, and we have no choice but to accept this value.
Consequentialism: The belief that doing the right thing makes the world a better place.

RobertWiblin
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby RobertWiblin » Tue Oct 20, 2009 11:30 am

What makes you confident that your perception, which is biased hugely by projection and availability bias, is better than the general concensus of happiness research? How else would you suggest resolving our disagreement about the happiness of most people?

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Arepo
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby Arepo » Tue Oct 20, 2009 5:15 pm

Partly that I think I'm more intelligent, and better at honest self-reflection than the majority of people they surveyed (or if I'm not, they can't have surveyed a very representative sample), partly that I can think of numerous reasons why such surveys would be very likely to overrepresent people's happiness (people overstating their happiness level, precisely because of the reason Geoffrey Miller gives - that it's evolutionarily advantageous to do so, and also their being more likely to take part in such a questionnaire if they're happy) and few incentives for bias in the other direction.

And partly that I'm not aware of any such consensus. Judging by this graph, there's a wide variance between countries. A few random clicks around countries on this survey suggest less variation but an average vote of about 6/10, where 5 is net zero. I have no idea how anyone could infer that 'almost everyone is near the maximum on the happiness dimension' from such data. I'm not sure what that would even mean. What is 'the maximum' and why is it relevant to anything? It's either an obviously false claim about the impossibility of one entity having >N hedons where N is roughly what most modern humans have, or it's a claim that we're rarely much happier than our resting point of happiness - which would imply nothing about whether our resting point was roughly positive, neutral or even strongly negative.

At this point I'd like to mention that I'm not alone in contradicting him :P

Geoffrey Miller wrote:the happiness research shows that increases in numbers of sexual partners and social status do not boost overall long-term happiness


RobertWiblin wrote:Most of the impact on happiness amongst the people I know is dependent on whether they have good reliable friends who respect them, are getting sexually satisfied, and whether they get exercise


As for how I'd suggest resolving our disagreement, I think someone should find a forum populated by people with an interest in happiness and start a thread proposing that we look for a way to assess it, perhaps by coming up with a simple method of comparison that would allow us to compare our preference for certain states, to see if we can find a consensus about which states are net positive/negative, and perhaps by how much.

If anyone were to do that, though, it would only work if the other forummers actually responded to the proposed method by either applying it or proposing a better one, rather than having orthogonal discussions about how many people report being happy ;)

If we can reach a rough consensus about everyday situations then we could get a much more accurate picture of happiness by multiplying the situations by the plausible quantity we might expect to experience them in an average year. I think it could be a very interesting and useful serious research project tbh, and not one I can hope to cover comprehensively here - but there's no reason we couldn't make a start.
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RobertWiblin
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby RobertWiblin » Sat Oct 24, 2009 2:51 am

"few incentives for bias in the other direction."

Desire for sympathy and assistance among certain groups perhaps? I imagine that availability bias pushes out estimates down - simple everyday pleasures like listening to music and eating nice food don't spring to mind when we are asked to think about our lives. Catastrophes and depression tend to be more memorable events.

"more intelligent, and better at honest self-reflection than the majority of people they surveyed"

How does intelligence help with this? From what I've read it negatively impacts happiness which might help to explain your negativity. Even perfect self-reflection here would only give you a single data point.

The method you suggest sounds good.

Not sure how to mesh that database with Miller's statement.
Last edited by RobertWiblin on Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

DanielLC
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby DanielLC » Sat Oct 24, 2009 3:47 pm

Arepo, you are also less happy than most people. That kind of ruins any advantage you have. Also, how do you know you're better at self-reflection? Also, how do you know that they didn't survey a representative sample?
Consequentialism: The belief that doing the right thing makes the world a better place.

Jesper Östman
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby Jesper Östman » Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:34 am

Regarding the original question:

One useful way of thinking about where to draw the line for utility 0 is Tännsjö's test. When having a total experience at a certain time, ask yourself if you'd prefer being unconscious at that time or not (everything else equal).

Regarding the surveys (the standard method for measuring cognitive measures of happiness such as Life Satisfaction, LS):

Some indicators that the method is (at least somewhat) reliable:
-Very high response rate (about 99%)
-The results correlate well with estimates by friends and family of the happiness of the respondee
-Correlations between measured happiness and frequency of laughter and smiles
-Some fMRI studies finding correlation with activation in "pleasure centers" in the brain
-Correlations with things like good sleep and lenght of life (a difference of 8 years between happiest and unhappiest, in one study)


Regarding the causes of unhappiness for some of Rob's friends:

The qoutes may not be incompatible, it depends on the correlation between number of sex-partners. Since (I take it) someone who has a stable partner is more likely to have sex more often than most people who are single and have several partners over time more partners need not imply more sex.

Furthermore, in the classic study of 900 women in Texas, measuring affective happiness (by the measure affect
balance, using the Day Reconstruction Method, DRM) happiness was clearly highest during sex.

Unfortunately, the further DRM studies included in Kahneman and Kreuger's National Time Accounting (2009) do not include the activity sex. However they do include exercise, which ranks among the highest activities for affect balance (and which plausible also has positive long term effects.).


"How does intelligence help with this? From what I've read it negatively impacts happiness which might help to explain your negativity."

Interesting. Have you seen studies finding specifically a negative correlation between happiness and *intelligence*? How strong? I've seen some which have found a fairly weak negative correlation with education.

RobertWiblin
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby RobertWiblin » Mon Oct 26, 2009 6:57 am

Thanks for the info Jesper. These surveys are problematic, but some method for asking people how they feel still seems to be the best thing we have at the moment.

Definitely recall seeing reported second hand that controlling for everything else IQ reduces happiness. Possibly the intelligent have higher expectations for their lives, and may also find it hard to 'zone out'.

Don't know the paper though.

RobertWiblin
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby RobertWiblin » Mon Oct 26, 2009 7:01 am

Seems it might have no effect:

http://mahalanobis.twoday.net/stories/876383/

www2.eur.nl/fsw/research/veenhoven/.../Intelligence&Happiness7.rtf

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong and it was education.

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RyanCarey
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Re: Total utilitarians - what would a real net 0 day look like?

Postby RyanCarey » Mon Oct 26, 2009 12:45 pm

One useful way of thinking about where to draw the line for utility 0 is Tännsjö's test. When having a total experience at a certain time, ask yourself if you'd prefer being unconscious at that time or not (everything else equal).

This seems to make sense.

Some indicators that the method is (at least somewhat) reliable:
-Very high response rate (about 99%)
-The results correlate well with estimates by friends and family of the happiness of the respondee
-Correlations between measured happiness and frequency of laughter and smiles
-Some fMRI studies finding correlation with activation in "pleasure centers" in the brain
-Correlations with things like good sleep and lenght of life (a difference of 8 years between happiest and unhappiest, in one study)

Yes, although these only indicate the reliability of the survey in making comparative judgements of happiness. They don't allow us to fix our zero point.
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