A Happiness Manifesto: Why and How Effective Altruism Should Rethink its Approach to Maximising Human Welfare

MichaelPlant

A Happiness Manifesto: Why and How Effective Altruism Should Rethink its Approach to Maximising Human Welfare

MichaelPlant

46 min read · Oct 25, 2018

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Larks

Thanks for writing this very detailed analysis. I especially enjoyed the arguments for why we can compare LS scores between people, like the Canadian immigrant study.

The section I found most suprising was the part on Givewell using the Time-Relative Interest Account. I've always thought of some kind of egalitarianism as being relatively important to EA - the idea that all people are in some sense equally deserving of happiness/welfair/good outcomes. We might save a young person over an old person, but this is only because by doing this we're counterfactually saving more life-years.

For example, here is Giving What We Can:

People[2] are equal — everyone has an equal claim to being happy, healthy, fulfilled and free, whatever their circumstances. All people matter, wherever they live, however rich they are, and whatever their ethnicity, age, gender, ability, religious views, etc. [emphasis added]

But the TRIA explicitly goes against this. It directly weighs a year of health for a 25 year old as being inherently more valuable than a year of health for a 5 year old - or a 50 year old. This seems very perverse. Is it really acceptable to cause a large amount of pain to a child, in order to prevent a smaller amount of pain for an adult? I think the majority of people would not agree with this - if anything people prefer to prioritize the suffering of children over that of adults.

MichaelPlant

Hello Larks. Glad your found it useful. On equality, it's going to turn on how you think equality should be understood. If you think we should give equal weight to the 'time-relative-interest-adjusted' value of people's life, you might think it is correct to believing saving a 25-year-old is better for that person than saving a 2-year-old is to that person.

FWIW, intuitions seem quite split on deprivationism vs TRIA about deaths. What people find weird about deprivationism is that there is some sharp point when someone starts to matter. Say someone begins to exist after 90 days after conception. Well, saving someone after 89 days would be morally unimportant, whereas saving them after 91 days would be hugely important. TRIA, by contrast, has a more gradually approach.

Larks

It seems to me that TRIA is really stretching the definition of 'equality'. Could I not equally suggest a Citizenship-Relative-Interest-Account? This would fit well with people's nationalistic intuitions. Indeed, if we look at the list of things GWWC claimed EAs do not discriminate based on, we could circumvent all of them with cunningly crafted X-Relative-Interest-Accounts.

I agree a moral discontinuity would be very perverse. But it seems there are many better options. For example, a totalist view - that people matter even before they are conceived - avoids this issue, and doesn't suffer from the various inconsistencies that person-affecting views do. Alternatively, if you thought that we should not value people who don't exist in any way, conception provides a clear discontinuity in many ways, such that it does not seem like it would be weird if there was a moral value discontinuity there also.

But I think the biggest problem is that, even if you accept TRIA, I suspect that most people's moral intuitions would produce a very different weighting distribution. Specifically, they would be more averse to causing pain to 5 year olds than adults - especially adult men. If I have time I might look into whether there has been any empirical research on the subject; it could be a useful project.

MichaelPlant

First, I want to say that I do not endorse TRIA. This post wanted to look at applying the SWB approach given what people's moral views seem to be, rather than evaluate how good those views are. GiveWell staff and many EAs (implictly) endorse TRIA, hence I discussed it.

FWIW, I don't think the concern that TRIA ignores equality really hits the mark. If you think what matters is interest, then you weight by the strength of interest, and - adding some further theory - young children don't seem to have such strong interest in survival as older humans. I think there are deep problems with TRIA, but I don't think concerns about equality is one of them.

Jan_Kulveit

Contrary to the post, I think non-linear reporting is quite likely. The problem is not so much in "reporting" but in "perception". More about it here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Kv5cik4JWoayHYPD/nonlinear-perception-of-happiness#TMPkeCnPe85zqdZqn

Because of this, the dicussion in the direction of "Further, it is intuitively much harder for ordinary people (i.e. non-mathematicians) to report how happy/satisfied they feel on a logarithmic scale than a linear one." is mostly irrelevant - because the log() or other nonlinear transformation transformation is happening in the percepting stage, it is mostly hidden from the people themseves. (You can compare the arguments given with something like asking people to rate the star brightness on logarithmic scale)

On a positive note, I agree with 15. Having the right non-linear transformation would also probably explain away part of the results where people appear inconsistent or aggregating in wrong way. (ala Kahneman)(Their brains may be aggregating correctly the raw, untransformed quantity.)

Conclusion: IMO the possibility of nonlinear perception of happiness is a crucial consideration for this whole business and should be given research priority. I'm probably quite bad at explaining it (eg the above LW post which was probably incomprehensible for most readers)

alintz

I tend to agree with you that it is still unclear whether the relationship between 'raw' happiness (as mentioned in your post) and perceived happiness is linear or not. Log makes intuitive sense in some ways but the implication that happiness increases linearly with wealth is extremely counterintuitive to me.

I tend think something akin to prospect theory's weighting happiness relative to some set point may be plausible. I also think there will be some odd effects near the boundaries (0&10).

For me the project we're trying to push forward with this manifesto is in large part about trying to figure out satisfactory answers to questions like these, so I agree it's a priority.

Despite these open questions I tend to think it's useful to proceed as if it were linear for now as that seems to be status quo in the field and to me it seems more intuitive. Even if we're wrong about linearity this measurement system should lead to more accurate approximations of 'raw' happiness than, say, QALYs

MichaelPlant

Hello Jan.

I don't think I follow your post. One idea is that happiness functions like sound, where it takes twice as much of an increase in sound to cause the same increase in perceived loudness. This seems confused if we extend it to happiness. What are we supposed to say: it takes twice as much of increase in happiness to cause the same increase in perceived happiness? That would be crazy, because we only have one item, happiness, rather than two. If we labelled this on a graph, the axis would be the same.

An alternative is that it takes twice as much of an increase in brain activity (of a certain kind) to cause the same increase in perceived happiness. Okay. But people are reported their perceived happiness (or life satisfaction), not the brain states.

Jan_Kulveit

Imagine, for example, there exist some "S1 happiness" which is actually important for humans, and they are making decisions based on it, and some "S2 perception of happiness" which people report. People are incorrectly assuming (a) this is the same, and (b) you have good introspective access to it.

For more direct comparison than sound, imagine there isn't such thing as money, and you ask people to report their percieved wealth on a scale 1 to 10. Now introduce money, and compare how the 1..10 rating relate to monetary wealth. I would bet you would get nonlinear relationship in this case.

Dave Cortright 🔸

Great topic, and hopefully I'm not coming off as pedantic when I say that we really need to make a distinction between happiness (which I argue is one of the fleeting emotions no different than fear or anger or embarrassment) and fulfillment (aka serenity, inner peace, contentment). People who are fulfilled embrace all of their emotions (including happiness) without judgement or an attempt to control, and they process them by connecting with themselves and others in healthy ways, which further leads to fulfillment. We are social, emotional apes, and all of the higher order emotions exist in order to bring the social group closer together.

So when it comes to measuring good, we should be measuring fulfillment, which itself is just a proxy for healthy emotional connections with other people. See the Harvard Longitudinal Study, Blue Zones, and Awakened Ape and even what it means to be a prosocial ape as some sources that point towards this theory.

Dave Cortright 🔸

I do feel the need to clarify that I'm talking about people who have already met Maslow's first and second levels. I do agree that there are people out there who lack in basic food/water, clothing, shelter, hygiene, health and safety. What I'm talking about here is essentially levels 3 and 4.

bfinn

Very good article. Re marriage, and also the Easterlin Paradox:

Re fig 1, marriage, more recent research shows the apparent reversion of satisfaction to singlehood level (or less) a few years after marriage actually just results from not controlling for age properly. Specifically, from the U-shaped happiness curve during the life course - people tend to marry before middle age, so get less happy as they approach middle age, not because of the marriage. (I think this may be mentioned in the recent Origins of Happiness book.)

Re fig 3 for UK, actually if you look at a longer time-series e.g. Eurobarometer (since 1973), UK life satisfaction has gone up significantly - from around 7.1 in the 1970s to 7.7/10 in 2018 (after transforming to 0-10 scale); and rather more since the only older survey I could find, 5.7/10 in 1948.

Also re China, you say elsewhere 'it’s SWB seems to have gone down been 1990 and 2015, even though per capita GDP increased by 5 times'. I haven't read the report you refer to, but I the World Value Survey on happiness (as opposed to life satisfaction) shows the proportion of Chinese who are happy rising from 67% in 1993 to 85% in 2014. (You can check it on the second chart here: https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction# )

So maybe the Easterlin paradox does not exist, or at least, is limited.

mako yass

I am really puzzled by those graphs, mm. But as to the Easterlin paradox, it's still alive: http://repec.iza.org/dp7234.pdf Happiness has been increasing, and so has GDP, but the rates of increase still don't seem to have much of a relationship.

bfinn

Thanks for this. There's been quite a bit more research since that paper, including by Easterlin, so not sure how relevant it is now. The latest I know FWIW is from last year's book by Richard Layard, Can We Be Happier?, which says it's unclear but maybe economic growth often increases happiness but not always.

[anonymous]

Diener et al. (2019) makes some statements that suggest that life satisfaction isn't a great proxy for subjective well-being:

In the current article, we review evidence from the first representative sample of humanity, the Gallup World Poll, and include many more nations that are very poor and troubled. We find that the majority of people are above neutral in affect balance but not life satisfaction.

people around the globe are more likely to score in the negative zone on judgment measures of life satisfaction than on experiential measures—life satisfaction versus affect balance. We found more negative scores for life satisfaction than for affect balance. This might be because affect balance tends to depend more on the meeting of universal needs, such as for social support, and societies on the whole have developed reasonably good methods for meeting these needs, even when poverty or even conflict are present. In contrast, life satisfaction depends on comparing one’s life to standards that change to some degree with culture and expectancies. Thus, many people in our sample might have scored low on life satisfaction because they desire the material life they perceive in wealthy nations, and conclude that they fall far short of this standard. It could be that life satisfaction is more influenced by movable standards compared with affect, and this means that even after substantial progress, people may believe that they fall short of their goals (Graham & Pettinato, 2006). The divergent patterns of the results for life satisfaction and for affect balance highlight the importance of measuring multiple aspects of SWB (Diener, 1984).

It also suggests that lacking material needs and lacking social support have a large impact on happiness, so it might be worthwhile to look into improving that in addition to working on mental illness:

Are there circumstances in which most people are no longer happy? To answer this question, we selected the respondents who had experienced five adverse events during the past year: (a) had been assaulted, (b) had property or money stolen, (c) had health problems, (d) did not have enough money for food, and (e) did not have enough money for shelter. In this group, only 26% of respondents (n = 796) evaluated their life as above 5, and only 51% (n = 1,567) reported more positive than negative affect. Thus, life circumstances may override the natural coping responses that most mentally healthy people possess. Finally, we examined people who had the above five adverse life events but also two other negative social circumstances—(a) nobody they could call on for support in an emergency and (b) feeling that they were not respected.4 Thus, this group had experienced physical and material problems during the past year as well as lack of social support. In this group of unfortunate individuals, only 20% had a positive affect-balance score (n = 72), 10% had a neutral score (i.e., they experienced the same number of positive and negative feelings, n = 37), and 70% had a negative score (n = 257).

For life satisfaction, only 12% (n = 43) had a score above neutral, 14% (n = 51) were at the neutral point, and 74% (n = 271) were below the neutral point. Thus, we found that most individuals who experienced very negative life events and lacked social support were far from happy. Although most people in the globe were happy, those who experienced physical, financial, and interpersonal problems were not.

Diener, E., Diener, C., Choi, H., & Oishi, S. (2018). Revisiting “Most People Are Happy”—And Discovering When They Are Not. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 166–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618765111

guzey

Have you seen Bond & Lang 2018? Their abstract:

We replicate nine key results from the happiness literature: the Easterlin Paradox, the ‘U-shaped’ relation between happiness and age, the happiness trade-off between inflation and unemployment, cross-country comparisons of happiness, the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program on happiness, the impact of marriage and children on happiness, the ‘paradox’ of declining female happiness, and the effect of disability on happiness. We show that none of the findings can be obtained relying only on nonparametric identification. The findings in the literature are highly dependent on one's beliefs about the underlying distribution of happiness in society, or the social welfare function one chooses to adopt. Furthermore, any conclusions reached from these parametric approaches rely on the assumption that all individuals report their happiness in the same way. When the data permit, we test for equal reporting functions, conditional on the existence of a common cardinalization from the normal family. We reject this assumption in all cases in which we test it.

The paper seems extremely relevant to section 4.

Also, in contrast to your experience in trying to think of happiness nonlinearly, I find it quite easy to do. Intuitively, the difference between 1 (maximal unhappiness) and 2 is much bigger than between 2 and 3. Same for 8 vs 9 and 9 vs 10.

MichaelPlant

Hello Guzey. Yes, this paper has caused quite a stir. It's very hard to understand (at least as a non economist) what the paper is saying as it's filled with jargon and formulae, and the argument seems to turn on statistical considerations that are outside my scope of expertise. I had to ask a couple of economists to explain it to me.

As I now understand it, the authors' main objection is to the use of 3-point scales. What you can infer from such scales depends on what you think the underlying distribution of the data is that's being allocated into those three categories. If you make very different assumptions (e.g. utility is unbounded and the points on the scale are not 'equal-interval', i.e. the same distance apart) you can reverse the results. Such a reminder is useful and it's important to examine these assumptions. That said, their argument is not specifically about happiness measures, but about the use of scales with only a few points, so it's somewhat confusing that that's where they've leveled their critique. It's increasing thought that 3-point measures are unreliable and the modern literature predominantly uses 10-point scales. The authors don't test the robustness of their claims against 10-point scales (where, I gather, they would be less plausible).

I don't think I've update my views on the basis of this article. I still don't fully get what the paper is doing, so I'm relying on those I consider my epistemic superiors in this domain - the economists I've spoken to - and they don't think this poses a problem (relies on odd assumptions, doesn't apply elsewhere, etc.).

Michael St Jules 🔸

I think that the evidence you present in section 4, e.g. that people interpret scales as equal-interval and that immigrants have similar SWB, could be a good response to this paper, though, because it suggests that we can interpret the discrete life satisfaction scale as cardinal and just aggregate it instead.

Michael St Jules 🔸

The theoretical results don't depend on the scale being 3-point. Their argument deals directly with the assumed underlying normal distributions and transforms them into log-normal distributions with the order of the expected values reversed, so it doesn't matter how you've estimated the parameters of the normal distributions or if you've even done it at all.

In the case of life satisfaction scales, is there any empirical evidence we could use to decide the form of the underlying continuous distribution?

They do suggest that you could "use objective measures to calibrate cardinalizations of happiness", e.g. with incidence of mental illness, or frequencies of moods, as the authors have done something similar here https://www.nber.org/papers/w19243.

MichaelPlant

Well, I confess I don't fully understand the paper and a further social scientist I've since spoken to had a different take on what the paper said altogether. I'll try to bring this up with a few more people.

RomeoStevens

When considering observer moments, as in analysis of immune neglect, I suspect chronic pain shoots to the top pretty fast. My guess is that testing mental health Interventions along with a gold standard checklist of intervention strategies would be a potential top charity.

MichaelPlant

This could be true, but needs much more analysis. I've spoken about increasing opiates for pain relief elsewhere (e.g. my EAG 2017 talk, forum posts here on drug policy reform). It's not easy to compare systemic change - which is what opiate reform would be - to micro-interventions in general. Also I'm not aware of there being any data on the badness of chronic pain on a 1-10 LS scale to be able to make comparisons anyway.

ben.smith

I was a bit worried about some possible methodological issues with the GiveWell measures of life satisfaction. I looked into the data, and the issue doesn't completely undermine the result, but I think having looked closely I am now moderately less convinced that the negative spillover effect observed is a real problem.

Some measures of "life evaluation" use a technique like the Cantril Ladder; this is often used as a measure of happiness or subjective well-being (e.g., in the World Happiness Report 2021). In the words of that report, the Cantril ladder question "asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale".

When measuring the "negative spillover" effects discussed above in Section 6, the Cantril would be an inappropriate measure to use. That's because, when respondents think of the ladder and imagine the "best possible life" and the "worst possible life", many are likely to anchor on to exemplars that are salient/at hand, like, for instance, the distribution of people in their local community.

Imagine two people in a community, Andrew and Bob. You give Andrew $100 and Bob $0, and then ask Bob to rate his own life on a 0 to 10 scale. Bob might think of Andrew, who just got $100 for nothing, and think of that as particularly good. His idea of how good life can get just got a little bit higher. (If you think this is silly, rather than imagining, I don't know, Elon Musk or some other fantastically privileged person, keep in mind that respondents probably have a few seconds to answer this questionnaire and what is salient is very important. for more discussion on the importance of salience in questionnaire respondents, consult the work of psychologist Norbert Schwarz at USC.) So Bob would be relatively lower on the ladder and he'd give himself a lower life evaluation score. But it isn't clear this really reflects any of Bob's subjective experience of happiness from day to day, other than times when he's asked to rate himself on Cantril ladders. That would depend on him actually making those subjective comparisons and feeling bad about them on a regular basis.

Fortunately, the GiveWell study did not use a Cantril Ladder. As explained by Haushofer, Reisinger, and Shapiro (2015), they used four well-being measures:

the “happiness” and “life satisfaction” questions from the World Values
Survey; the total score on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CESD) (Radloff
1977); and total score on the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)(Cohen, Kamarck, and Mermelstein 1983).

The happiness and life satisfaction from the World Values Survey can be viewed here and are:

"Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?"
"All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days? Using this card on which 1 means you are “completely dissatisfied” and 10 means you are “completely satisfied” where would you put your satisfaction with your life as a whole?"

Of the four well-being measures, the negative spillover result relates to the Life Satisfaction question specifically. It is possible that when answering (2) a respondent might use the same kind of social comparison processes that Bob used in the example above. But importantly, these weren't suggested to the respondent by the surveyer. If the respondent had used social comparison, they did so unprompted, and it's not so hard to imagine they do that often in their life in a way that affects their emotional affect.

Nevertheless, I'd be even more convinced if an effect on the happiness question had been observed, and the fact that the study observed a negative spillover result on Life Satisfaction and not Happiness does suggest that perhaps social comparison is occurring for Life Satisfaction in a way that doesn't seem to impact on the Happiness measure. If you think that Life Satisfaction tells us something additional to the Happiness measure about basic intrinsic hedonic utils, you should probably still be concerned about the negative spillover. If you think that Life Satisfaction is only important to the extent that it affects self-reported happiness, you should be cautious about interpreting the result of the negative spillover.

What the survey didn't do, because it's very expensive and hard, and require respondents to at least be able to text on a cellphone, is to measure basic momentary positive and negative affect through a method like Ecological Momentary Assessment. I'd be interested in a future study looking at that and seeing whether we observe (1) any effect of the GiveWell intervention on momentary positive and negative affect and (2) whether there are negative spillover effects there.

Jasper Synowski

First of all, to Michael and team: Thanks a lot for writing this. I am very happy that this topic is now receiving more attention.

A couple of thoughts on two parts of the manifesto:

1) “The evaluative and experience measures do correlate, suggesting evaluative judgements are, in part if not in whole, determined by how happy people are. “ (OECD 2013, p32-34).

Looking into the source for this claim reveals that the correlation between life satisfaction and positive/negative affect is actually fairly low (r=(-)0.25). Also, this does not tell us much about which determines which (as a matter of causality). This suggests to me that relying only on life satisfaction as a proxy might be potentially misleading if we want to measure happiness as an affective component of SWB. On the other hand, as most studies to date have not measured this component, there does not seem to be a viable alternative (or is anyone aware of other potential proxies?). In any way, (as stated) we will need to be very cautious in interpreting LS outcomes.

2) "Let’s suppose instead the neutral point is 4. If this is so, saving the child is worth 0.4 life satisfaction points a year for 60 years, thus 24 LSPs (0.4 x 60)."

This calculation does not account for potential changes in the happiness of people in Kenya in the future. The WHR (https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2018/WHR_web.pdf; p.24) shows that happiness in Kenya has increased by 0.27 points between 2008-2010 and 2015-2017 . This indicates that LS is actually increasing and saving lives might thus do more good than initially calculated. However, I am currently unaware of more data to come up with a reasonable proposal for an alternative calculation. Does anyone know more?

MichaelPlant

Hello Jasper, thanks for these.

On 1), I agree the correlation is only partial, which is why I said that we should use the LS data cautiously, keeping in mind when the two measures come apart. I think it would be worth writing up where they conflict and diverge.

In the case of mental health vs poverty, I think moving to affect measures from life satisfaction would would leave the priority ranking unchanged: Dolan and Metcalfe (2012) indicate mental health has a bigger impact on affect than LS, and Kahneman and Deaton (2008) that income has a bigger impact on LS than affect, hence if we ignore the negative externalities of the income transfers on LS, given StrongMinds seems 4x more cost-effective, this would only increase the comparative cost-effectiveness of mental health. I accept this is somewhat complication, and should be written up in greater depth.

It's also unfortunate that my claim here is hypothetical rather than based on actually affect measure of poverty alleviate vs mental health treatment. I'm currently talking to a couple of economists in the hope we can actually find this out!

2) You're quite right. I thought about getting into that but reckoned it was too complicated for an already long piece. I agree it would be worth thinking about someone's LS would arc of the course of their whole life. Another worthy research questions!

Michael St Jules 🔸

Regarding interpersonal comparisons,

So long as these differences are randomly distributed, they will wash out as ‘noise’ across large numbers of people

I think this is a crucial assumption that may not hold when comparing groups, i.e. there could be group differences (which could involve the same people, but before and after some event) in interpretations of the scales, due to differences in experiences between the two groups, e.g. a disability.

That immigrants to Canada seem to use the scales similarly to Canadians doesn't mean they weren't using the scales differently before they came to Canada. I think we actually discussed scale issues with life satisfaction on Facebook before (prompted by you?), and differences after adjusting for item responses seem to suggest different interpretations of the scale (or the items), or different relationships between the items. Two examples (cited in one of the papers in your reading list, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230603396_Theory_and_Validity_of_Life_Satisfaction_Scales):

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Biswas-Diener/publication/225502271_The_Divergent_Meanings_of_Life_Satisfaction_Item_Response_Modeling_of_the_Satisfaction_with_Life_Scale_in_Greenland_and_Norway/links/570184a808aea6b7746a7df9.pdf?origin=publication_list

http://www.people.virginia.edu/~so5x/IRT%20JRP%20revision%202.pdf

But there's an obvious response here: we should use IRT to adjust for different scale interpretations.

Lila

It looks like there might be confounders in the time series because there is a negative "effect" on life satisfaction prior to becoming disabled or unemployed. (With divorce and widowhood it's plausible that some people would see it coming years in advance.)

alintz

Good point.

I think it does make some sense for unemployment though as at least some proportion of people will forsee becoming unemployed either because they think they'll get fired or because they are dissatisfied with their jobs to the point they want to quit.

The data on being disabled it is a bit more troubling, but (without having read the report) one reason might be that this was official registration (or even official diagnosis) for disability which, for disabilities with slow onset (arthritis, some disabling diseases like MS, etc..), there would perhaps be a period of discomfort and pain before becoming officially disabled. Keep in mind that only some proportion of subjects need to have slow onset conditions to skew the average toward a negative dip before diagnosis (governmental or medical)

MichaelPlant

FWIW, some disabilities you might seen coming - if you have a worsening health state, say - and I think the analysis didn't have data on what was causing the disability, so it's a bit hard to say.

Manuherran

I think that the article promotes two misunderstandings that would be easy to avoid.

The article is about human happiness and introduces the subject of study giving the wrong impression that Effective Altruism it's only concerned about human beings, and also gives the wrong impression that GiveWell represents all Effective Altruism.

I think this is clear just reading the title: "A Happiness Manifesto: Why and How Effective Altruism Should Rethink its Approach to Maximising Human Welfare" and the abstract: "I argue effective altruists can and should use happiness surveys to determine cost-effectiveness and show how doing this generates some substantially different charity recommendations from those given by GiveWell."

If there are doubts about that the article is only about human welfare, you can jump to this part, in the body:

"...(2) concerns about under- or overpopulation; (3) the meat eater problem, the impact saving lives has on increasing animal suffering due to meat consumption. (2) and (3) are important but too much a diversion to our discussion here on using LS measures..."

So, the article is about LS measures and other stuff and does not take into account the welfare of beings that are not humans (like other sentient beings classified as other animals species).

In the definitions of "effective altruism" there's no mention to humans but "others":

"Effective altruism is about answering one simple question: how can we use our resources to help others the most?" [1].

"Effective altruism is a philosophy and social movement that uses evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others." [2].

Maybe GiveWell it's only focused on human beings [3], but it's very confusing and unfair to identify "GiveWell" with "Effective altruism". Effective Altruism is not only about human beings [4].

My first suggestion is to clarify that the article is about Human Welfare, without suggesting in the article that Effective Altruism it's only focused on human beings.

The second misunderstandings that I think would be easy to avoid is:

Even if we focus only in humans beings, the article suggests that Human Welfare can be measured by surveys.

Unfortunately, there are some situations in human beings in which we can't survey human beings, and those situations are linked with the most abominable cases of deepest and terrible intense suffering.

Sadly, we can't easily survey (or we just can't survey at all) [5] suffering in very young humans, humans in oppressive cultural situations, humans with some cognitive impairment, and humans who do not survive the experience of suffering. For instance, we can’t survey:

Suffering in fetuses, newborns and small kids.
Suffering in girls and woman in cultures where they are almost properties.
Suffering in young boys in some complicated family environments.
Rape in small kids (not easy to survey)
People being tortured and then killed.
Individuals with cognitive impairment or dementia (not easy to survey)
Individuals dying without palliative care.
Individuals who die drowned.
Individuals starved to death.
Individuals who die burned.
Individuals who die frozen.

Therefore, my second suggestion is to clarify that the article is about Human Welfare but restricted on experiences of human beings that can be surveyed, leaving out situations in which Human Welfare can't be surveyed.

Or maybe the article works with the assumption that some kind of situations that can't be surveyed may be extrapolated by other situations that can be surveyed. I think is necessary to clarify It.

It would be very nice to recognize in the article that precisely those situations that can't be surveyed are linked with some of the most intensely undesirable situations.

Some of us (people who support Effective altruism) think it would be good to prioritize reducing extreme suffering, such as extreme suffering that can't be surveyed, and this article is ignoring those situations giving the impression that they do not exist.

[1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

[3] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

[4] https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/animal-welfare/

[5] http://manuherran.com/types-of-suffering-based-on-their-uncertainty/

Naryan

Hi Michael and team,

Thanks for thinking about this topic - I agree that this is an important update for the community, and I think you gave it the treatment it required.

I think the puzzle of wealth/income vs SWB is an interesting one. The finding that relative wealth plays a role in SWB made sense - and leads me to hypothesize that countries with lower inequality would be happier.

I found a meta-analysis on the topic which couldn't find a strong correlation. "The association between income inequality and SWB is weak, complex and moderated by the country economic development." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29067589

It is interesting to think about the reduction in happiness due to a neighbour getting a cash transfer (the spillover effect mentioned in source 21).

Could this be due to jealousy decreasing one's happiness? Do we need secret cash transfers?
Does the reverse also hold true - if your neighbours become poorer, does that make one happier? Seems dangerous to generalize these findings, but this area of research would be quite applicable to the conversations on basic income.

It's a bit of a rabbit-hole, but wondering if you've seen any research that speaks to this?

MichaelPlant

Indeed, many people are surprised the relationship with inequality is complicated. I don't work on this, but my understanding it matters whether you see inequality in your society as a sign of unfairness and the system being broken (Europe) or you see it as a sign of opportunity to succeed (developing world). I've heard researchers say that don't find such an affect of inequality in the US because really believe in the American Dream and thus don't mind it. As I say, I'm no expert on this but I'd be keen for someone to look into it in more detail.

On your questions 1) the effect will be due to social comparison. Unclear if secret cash transfers would be possible - people buying new roofs for their houses - and whether this would then reduce the increase to the recipients if they can't 'show off'.

2) there is evidence on unemployment. In areas where unemployment is really high (20+%), individuals who are unemployed don't show such a reduction in life satisfaction -there's not such a social penalty if everyone else is unemployed.

I'm pretty sceptical on basic income. I would rather use that money - which would be huge - to provide mental health treatment to everyone who needed it. People are atrocious as converting money into happiness.

Comments

Manuherran

I think that the article promotes two misunderstandings that would be easy to avoid.

The article is about human happiness and introduces the subject of study giving the wrong impression that Effective Altruism it's only concerned about human beings, and also gives the wrong impression that GiveWell represents all Effective Altruism.