I don’t think this post provides an argument that we should interpret pleasure/pain scales as logarithmic. What’s more, whether or not this is true is not necessary for post’s practical claim—which is roughly that “the best/worst things are much better/worse than most people think”.
Here’s the link to my comment. I meant to write up my thoughts 3 months ago when the original article was posted, but never got around to it.
Thank you! I just left a reply to your comment. Here’s a summary of the core claim:
In this account, the fact that people would naturally and spontaneously use a logarithmic scale to report their level of pain is a simple implication of the fact that you can only definitively tell that “the pain got worse” when it got 10% worse and not when it became 1 unit worse (which soon becomes hard to notice when you talk about experiences with e.g. 1000 pain units per second).
I haven’t watched the talk, but I have just left a long comment on original article, Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain
Here’s the TL;DR of my comment:
Here’s the link to my comment. I meant to write up my thoughts 3 months ago when the original article was posted, but never got around to it.
Thank you! I just left a reply to your comment. Here’s a summary of the core claim: