Following months of work by a dedicated team of volunteers, I am pleased to announce the launch of the Happier Lives Institute, a new EA organisation which seeks to answer the question: ‘What are the most effective ways we can use our resources to make others happier?’
Summary
The Happier Lives Institute is pioneering a new way of thinking about the central question of effective altruism - how can we benefit others as much as possible? We are approaching this through a ‘happiness lens’, using individuals’ reports of their subjective well-being as the measure of benefit. Adopting this approach indicates potential new priorities, notably that mental health emerges as a large and neglected problem.
Our vision is a world where everyone lives their happiest life.
Our mission is to guide the decision-making of those who want to use their resources to most effectively make lives happier.
We aim to fulfill our mission by:
1. Searching for the most effective giving opportunities in the world for improving happiness. We are starting by investigating mental health interventions in low-income countries.
2. Assessing which careers allow individuals to have the greatest counterfactual impact in terms of promoting happier lives.
Our approach
Our work is driven by three beliefs.
1) We should do the most good we can
We should use evidence and reason to determine how we can use our resources to benefit others the most. We follow the guiding principles of effective altruism: commitment to others, scientific mindset, openness, integrity, and collaborative spirit.
2) Happiness is what ultimately matters
Philosophers use the word ‘well-being’ to refer to what is ultimately good for someone. We think well-being consists in happiness, defined as a positive balance of enjoyment over suffering. Understood this way, this means that when we reduce misery, we increase happiness. Further, we believe well-being is the only thing which is intrinsically good, that is, that matters in and of itself. Other goods, such as wealth, health, justice, and equality are instrumentally valuable: they are not valuable in themselves, but because and to the extent that they increase happiness.
3) Happiness can be measured
The last few decades have seen an explosion of research into ‘subjective well-being’ (SWB), with about 170,000 books and articles published in the last 15 years. SWB is measured using self-reports of people’s emotional states and global evaluations of life satisfaction; these measures have been shown to be valid and reliable. We believe SWB scores are the best available measure of happiness; therefore, we should use these scores, rather than anything else (income, health, education, etc.) to determine what makes people happier.
Specifically, we expect to rely on life satisfaction as the primary metric. This is typically measured by asking “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” (0 - 10). While we think measures of emotional states are closer to an ideal measure of happiness, far fewer data of this type is available. A longer explanation of our approach to measuring happiness can be found here.
When we take these three beliefs together, the question: “How can we do the most good?” becomes, more specifically: “What are the most cost-effective ways to increase self-reported subjective well-being?”
Our strategy
Social scientists have collected a wealth of data on the causes and correlates of happiness. While there are now growing efforts to determine how best to increase happiness through public policy, no EA organisation has yet attempted to translate this information into recommendations about what the most effective ways are for private actors to make lives happier. The Happier Lives Institute intends to fill this gap.
In doing this, we hope to complement the rigorous and ground-breaking work undertaken by GiveWell and 80,000 Hours and to collaborate with them where feasible. To highlight the divergences, our ‘happiness lens’ approach is a different approach to assessing impact from the one GiveWell takes; GiveWell does not focus on mental health; we aim to investigate more speculative giving opportunities and those outside global health and development. 80,000 Hours primarily focuses on the long-term; we intend to provide guidance to those who careers will focus on (human) welfare-maximisation in the nearer-term.
Current work
Our work is divided into two streams.
- A research group is investigating the most promising giving opportunities among mental health interventions in lower and middle-income countries. We’ve developed a screening tool to assess a list of nearly 200 interventions stated on the Mental Health Innovation Network website. The eight members of our screening team give these individual ratings, which we then check for inter-rater reliability. Once we’ve moved through the list, we will build cost-effectiveness models for the most promising interventions.
- Individuals pursuing projects taken from our research agenda. Current projects are on positive education (Jide Alaga), careers (Teis Rasmussen), personal happiness interventions (Stephan Tegtmeier), and the nature and measurement of happiness (Michael Plant). Further information on individuals' projects can be found on our Team page.
Future plans
Our research agenda consists of three sections:
- Cause areas: explains how our six main cause areas (mental health, pain, positive education, societal change, drug policy reform, research) were identified and presents specific questions related to each.
- More general research questions: sets out further relevant research questions that are not specifically related to one of the six cause areas.
- Towards practical recommendations: identifies research questions that seem particularly relevant for determining what effective altruists should do right now. This is based on our current understanding and, naturally, is subject to change depending on the insights gained from answering the research questions stated in the preceding sections.
The research agenda is open and we welcome individuals to take topics and investigate them. If you would like to work on one of these please email [email protected] so we can provide assistance and avoid unnecessary duplication of work.
Take action
What can do if you want to contribute to our mission?
The books and articles on our reading list will help you to deepen your understanding of what happiness is, how to measure it, what affects it and what can be done to improve it.
We have not completed sufficient research to make confident recommendations about the most effective interventions for improving happiness. However, we have identified some promising organisations which we believe are doing valuable work. If you are looking for high-impact giving opportunities to increase world happiness then this is the best place to start.
As our research develops, we intend to publish detailed career profiles to guide people who want to dedicate their careers to maximising the happiness of others. In the meantime, we’ve listed some initial ideas we think are promising. If you would be interested in volunteering with us, you can find more information on that here.
Follow our work
If you would like to be kept updated about our work then please sign up to our monthly e-newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
We will also be contributing regularly to the Effective Altruism, Mental Health, and Happiness Facebook group which has over 1,000 members.
Feedback
We greatly value your feedback, particularly in this early stage of our organisational development. Please post your questions and comments below or email us directly at [email protected]. We expected to publish a Frequently Asked Questions page on our website in the next few weeks to address any areas of confusion or objections to our work.
Congratulations to launching HLI. From my outside perspective, it looks like you have quite some momentum, and I'm glad to see more diverse approaches being pursued within EA. (Even though I don't anticipate to support yours in particular.)
One thing I'm curious about is to what extent HLI's strategy or approach depend on views in population ethics (as opposed to other normative questions, including the theory of well-being), and to what extent you think the question whether maximizing consequentialisism would recommend to support HLI hinges on population ethics.
I'm partly asking because I vaguely remember you having written elsewhere that regarding population ethics you think that (i) death is not bad in itself for any individual's well-being, (ii) creating additional people is never good for the world. My impression is that (i) and (ii) have major implications for how to do 'cause prioritization', and for how to approach the question of "how to do the most good we can" more broadly. It thus would make sense to me that someone endorsing (i) and (ii) thought that, say, they need to research and provide their own career advice as it would likely differ from the one provided by 80K and popular views in EA more generally. (Whereas, without such an explanation, I would be confused why someone would start their own organization "[a]ssessing which careers allow individuals to have the greatest counterfactual impact in terms of promoting happier lives.") More broadly, it would make sense to me that people endorsing (i) and (ii) embark on their own research programme and practical projects.
However, I'm struck by what seems to me a complete absence of such explicit population ethical reasoning in your launch post. It seems to me that everything you say is consistent with (i) and (ii), and that e.g. in your vision you almost suggest a view that is neutral about 'making happy people'. But on the face of it, 'increasing the expected number of [happy] individuals living in the future, for example by reducing the risk of human extinction' seems a reasonable candidate answer to your guiding question, i.e., “What are the most cost-effective ways to increase self-reported subjective well-being?”
Put differently, I'd expect that your post raises questions such as 'How is this different from what others EA orgs are doing?' or 'How will your career advice differ from 80K's?' for many people. I appreciate there are many other reasons why one might focus to, as you put it, "welfare-maximization in the nearer-term" - most notably empirical beliefs. For example, someone might think that the risk of human extinction this century was extremely small, or that reducing that risk was extremely intractable. And perhaps an organization such as HLI is more useful as a broad tent that unites 'near-term happiness maximizers' irrespective of their reasons for why they focus on the near term. You do mention some of the differences, but it doesn't seem to me that you provide sufficient reasons for why you're taking this different approach. Instead, you stress that you take value to exclusively consist of happiness (and suffering), how you operationalize happiness etc. - but unless I'm mistaken, these points belonging to the theory of well-being don't actually provide an answer to the question that to me seems a bit like the unacknowledged elephant in the room: 'So why are you not trying to reduce existential risk?' Indeed, if you were to ask me why I'm not doing roughly the same things as you with my EA resources, I'd to a first approximation say 'because we disagree about population ethics' rather than 'because we disagree about the theory of well-being' or 'I don't care as much about happiness as you do', and my guess is this is similar for many EAs in the 'longtermist mainstream'.
To be clear, this is just something I was genuinely surprised by, and am curious to understand. The launch post currently does seem slightly misleading to me, but not more so than I'd expect posts in this reference class to generally be, and not so much that I clearly wish you'd change anything. I do think some people in your target audience will be similarly confused, and so perhaps it would make sense for you to at least mention this issue and possibly link to a page with a more in-depth explanation for readers who are interested in the details.
In any case, all the best for HLI!
Hello Max,
Thanks for this thoughtful and observant comment. Let me say a few things in reply. You raised quite a few points and my replies aren't in a particular order.
I'm sympathetic to person-affecting views (on which creating people has no value) but still a bit unsure about this (I'm also unsure what the correct response to moral uncertainty is and hence uncertain about how to respond to this uncertainty). However, this view isn't shared across all of HLI's supporters and contributors, hence it isn't true to say there is an 'HLI view'. I don't plan to insist on one either.
I expect that HLI's primary audience to be those who have decided that they want to focus on near-term human happiness maximization. However, we want to leave open the possibility of working on improving the quality of lives of humans in the longer-term, as well as non-humans in the nearer- and longer-term. If you're wondering why this might be of interest, note that one might hold a wide person-affecting view on which it's good to increase the well-being of future lives that exist, whichever those lives are (just as one might care about the well-being on one's future child, whichever child that turns out to be (i.e. de dicto rather than de re)). Or one could hold creating lives can be good but still think it's worth working on the quality of future lives, rather than just the quantity (reducing extinction risks being a clear way to increase the quantity of lives). Some of these issues are discussed in section 6 of the mental health cause profile.
Internally, we did discuss whether we should make this explicit or not. I was leaning towards doing so and saying that our fourth belief was something about prioritising making people happy rather than making people happy. In the end, we decided not to mention this. One reason is that, as noted above, it's not (yet) totally clear what HLI will focus on, hence we don't know what our colours are so as to be able to nail them to the mast, so to speak.
Another reason is that we assumed it would be confusing to many of our readers if we launched into an explanation of why we were making people happier as opposed to making happy people (or preventing the making of unhappy animals). We hope to attract the interest of non-EAs to our project; outside EA we doubt many people will have these alternatives to making people happier in mind. Working on the principle you shouldn't raise objections to your argument your opponent wouldn't consider, it seemed questionably useful to bring up the topic. To illustrate, if I explain what HLI is working on to a stranger I met in the pub, I would say 'we're focused on finding the best ways to make people happier' rather than 'we're focused on near-term human happiness maximisation', even though the latter is more accurate, as it will cause less confusion.
More generally, it's unclear how much work HLI should put into defending a stance in population ethics vs assuming one and then seeing what follows if one applies new metrics for well-being. I lean towards the latter. Saliently, I don't recall GiveWell taking a stance on population ethics so much as assuming its donors already care about global health and development and want to give to the best things in that category.
Much of the above equally applies to discussing the value of saving lives . I'm sympathetic to (although, again, not certain about) Epicureanism, on which living longer has no value, but I'm not sure anyone else in HLI shares that view (I haven't asked around, actually). In the cause profile of mental health, section 5 I do a cost-effectiveness comparison of saving lives to improving lives that using the 'standard' view of the badness of death, deprivationism (the badness of your death is the ammount of well-being you would have had if you lived, hence saving 2-year-olds is better than saving 20-year-olds, all other things equal). I imagine we'll set out how different views about the value of saving lives give you different priorities without committing, as an organisation, to a view, and leave readers to make up their own minds.
I don't see why this is confusing. Holding one's views on population ethics or the badness of death fixed, if one has a different view of what value is, or how it should be measured (or how it should be aggregated) that is clearly opens up scope for a new approach to prioritisation. The motivation to set up HLI came from the fact if we use self-reported subjective well-being scores are the measure of well-being, that does indicate potentially different priorities.
Thanks for your comments and engaging on this topic. If quite a few people flag similar concerns over time we may need to make a more explicit statement about such matters.
Hi Michael, thank you for your thoughtful reply. This all makes a lot of sense to me.
FWIW, my own guess is that explicitly defending or even mentioning a specific population ethical view would be net bad - because of the downsides you mention - for almost any audience other than EAs and academic philosophers. However, I anticipate my reaction being somewhat common among, say, readers of the EA Forum specifically. (Though I appreciate that maybe you didn't write that post specifically for this Forum, and that maybe it just isn't worth the effort to do so.) Waiting and checking if other people flag similar concerns seems like a very sensible response to me.
One quick reply:
I agree I didn't make intelligible why this would be confusing to me. I think my thought was roughly:
(i) Contingently, we can have an outsized impact on the expected size of the total future population (e.g. by reducing specific extinction risks).
(ii) If you endorse totalism in population ethics (or a sufficiently similar aggregative and non-person-affecting view), then whatever your theory of well-being, because of (i) you should think that we can have an outsized impact on total future well-being by affecting the expected size of the total future population.
Here, I take "outsized" to mean something like "plausibly larger than through any other type of intervention, and in particular larger than through any intervention that optimized for any measure of near-term well-being". Thus, loosely speaking, I have some sense that agreeing with totalism in population ethics would "screen off" questions about the theory of well-being, or how to measure well-being - that is, my guess is that reducing existential risk would be (contingently!) a convergent priority (at least on the axiological, even though not necessarily normative level) of all bundles of ethical views that include totalism, in particular irrespective of their theory of well-being. [Of course, taken literally this claim would probably be falsified by some freak theory of well-being or other ethical view optimized for making it false, I'm just gesturing at a suitably qualified version I might actually be willing to defend.]
However, I agree that there is nothing conceptually confusing about the assumption that a different theory of well-being would imply different career priorities. I also concede that my case isn't decisive - for example, one might disagree with the empirical premise (i), and I can also think of other at least plausible defeaters such as claims that improving near-term happiness correlates with improving long-term happiness (in fact, some past GiveWell blog posts on flow-through effects seem to endorse such a view).
Yes, this seems a sensible conclusion to me. I think we're basically in agreement: varying one's account of the good could lead to a new approach to prioritisation, but probably won't make a practical difference given totalism and some further plausible empirical assumptions.
That said, I suspect doing research into how to improve the quality of lives long-term would be valuable and is potentially worth funding (even from a totalist viewpoint, assuming you think we have or will hit diminishing returns to X-risk research eventually).
Oh I'm glad you agree - I don't really want to tangle with all this on the HLI website. I thought about giving more details on the EA forum than were on the website itself, but that struck me as having the downside of looking sneaky and was a reason against doing so.