This was possibly my favourite email in the Cold Takes email newsletter so far. I always enjoy understanding someone’s thought process before they’ve become an expert on a topic. Once someone knows enough, I think that their views usually change too slowly to easily see or demonstrate (one new piece of information or consideration, one new data point, naturally can’t swing the holistic viewpoint quite so much when a person knows a huge amount).
It (unsurprisingly) reminded me of early Givewell material. Givewell is likely right more of the time now than in 2007. With more careful thought and knowledge built-up over time, comes better calibration. There is something lost though. How do we know that someone would change their mind in response to new evidence if we rarely see them change their minds? There is something wonderful about seeing people shift their views somewhat (or their confidence in their views) in response to transparent thinking in real-time. Anecdotally, this seems to happen a lot more in conversation than in writing (everywhere, not just in the EA community and adjacent spaces). In conversation, it is often much more acceptable to express uncertainty about conclusions while still presenting a framework for how you are thinking around an issue. It seems to happen rarely in public outside this community and adjacent ones.
My priors on the object-level question are very different to Holden’s. My worst mental health happens when I feel stagnant/ can’t contribute/am not valued. Being in physical pain with purpose has always felt much more bearable than having all the creature comforts of our modern time while feeling like what I spend my time doing is meaningless and doesn’t add value to anything I really care about. This is obviously extremely weak evidence; memory is unreliable and I am a single individual. There might already be good evidence either way on whether feeling like your day-to-day life has purpose is a better predictor of subjective wellbeing than income or health for a sample size greater than one.
If hunter-gatherer societies consistently give everyone roles that visibly contribute to the lives of the people they know and love (eg. searching for food for the tribe) my prior is that this would feel more purposeful than modern day life (on average). If purpose is a more important factor in predicting subjective wellbeing than health or material wealth, then I would expect this study (across tribes/maybe even looking at biomarkers of depression instead of a survey) to replicate.
I think that’s a great point about the value of seeing people change their opinions in real time. I do wish there were more models of this.
I’m a bit skeptical on the “purpose” idea, mostly because I think most people have a pretty clear sense that they need to (or will need to) work—and/or provide direct care—in order to support their family. This seems pretty analogous to the hunter-gatherer situation (and I wouldn’t assume that the latter feels more tangible or “direct”—my impression is that a lot of hunters can go a while without a clear, direct contribution to the hunt). If I wanted to look into this further, I might investigate hypotheses like “people in the military are especially happy” or “doctors are especially happy” or “people become less happy when they become financially able to stop working and do so” (I would guess these aren’t true and would change my mind if they turned out to be).
My guess still is that it matters how tangibly connected the activity is to the outcome. I think it matters a lot that filling out a spreadsheet for an insurance company for one’s actuarial job does not directly feed one’s children, even if the outcome is the same. This is similar to my intuition that jumping into a pond to save a drowning child probably feels more fulfilling than donating a large sum to Givewell recommended charities, even if the outcomes are fairly comparable. Even swimming around looking for drowning children and not finding them on most attempts but succeeding every now and then seems more intuitively fulfilling (but I might just be worse at simulating in my mind the long periods of failure than the brief moments of success).
I also think it matters whether one knows the people they are helping personally. I expect doctors to care less about helping their patients than a hunter-gather would care about gathering food for their family (and, to a lesser extent, their tribe). However, I would think it was more likely that your view was right than the one I expressed if doctors and social workers were less happy than other professionals in their income bracket (e.g. if actuaries were happier than doctors or accountants were happier than social workers).
The military is an interesting case and how informative I’d find military personnel happiness depends on who we’re talking about. I suspect military leaders are happier than average and would change my mind if they weren’t. I suspect lower-ranked soldiers in peacetime would be happier than the average person (I’d guess they would be unhappy during intense periods of training that are intended to simulate combat but I’d also guess that most of the time, they won’t be in combat-simulating training). I would be surprised if soldiers during combat or intense training periods that try to simulate combat were happier than the average person because the physical conditions seem so extreme (I’d guess much more extreme than the everyday experience of a hunter-gatherer).
I suspect voluntary retirees would replace work with more meaningful activities (like doing pro bono/volunteer work or spending time helping their family and friends) so I am not sure how much them being happier would change my mind. I would be surprised if voluntary retirees were happier if it was also true that they did not spend much more time helping friends and family or on altruistic endeavours.
Speaking of “I think that’s a great point about the value of seeing people change their opinions in real time,” if you don’t mind me asking, would you like to mention a sentence or two on why you no longer endorse the above paragraphs?
Hi Linch, I’m sorry for taking so long to reply to this! I mainly just noticed I was conflating several intuitions and I needed to think more to tease them out.
(my head’s no longer in this and I honestly never settled on a view/teased out the threads but I wanted to say something because I felt it was quite rude of me to have never replied)
Assuming that the high happiness reports from the Hadza are “real” (and not noise, sampling bias, etc), what might it be?
They have dramatically worse health and nutrition. Also worse “creature comforts” like cozy beds, Netflix and mulled wine. But maybe some combination of the following could be overcoming those drawbacks.
In the category of lifestyle/how you spend your time:
Social structure (small communities, much stronger social connection, more social time)
Work structure (more cooperation, more “meaning” in work due to knowing you’re supporting your family directly / avoiding starvation for yourself and your loved ones)
Non-social leisure structure (no Reddit, no TV; no street noise; you’re always out in nature)
Or internal experience:
Perhaps you’d have different dreams or fantasies?
No Instagram, no “keeping up with the Joneses” or social-status stress beyond your immediate community
Climate change, nuclear war, and x-risk presumably aren’t a worry
Could sexual and romantic relationships be more fulfilling related to the small community?
You already expressed skepticism on the survey of Hadza happiness, but Kat Woods offers more on why such a survey might give inaccurate results. From the intro:
I think the biggest takeaway I had from my experience is that I am even more skeptical of survey methodologies than I was before, and I started off pretty intensely skeptical. The reasons for this is that I think that misunderstandings caused by translation, education levels, and just normal human-to-human communication errors are not only common, but the rule.
The four major issues she notes are:
Not understanding hypotheticals.
Not understanding in general.
People giving inconsistent answers.
Refusing to rate happiness.
This is from surveying in Rwanda and Uganda, which will certainly have many of the same difficulties as surveying Hadza. (It also surprised me article that the US and Mexico would have much higher self-reported happiness than, for example, Italy. I wonder if this is a real effect or if happiness surveying is fraught with cultural issues in general.)
Because ‘how the question is interpreted’ makes comparing subjective happiness survey results hard to compare, one other way to approach the question of ‘are hunter-gatherer societies happier’ is to look at the people who move between hunter-gatherer and modern societies and study their happiness and outcomes. On the one hand, lots of hunter-gatherer peoples who switched into living in modern societies (e.g. Inuit in Greenland) have fairly bad outcomes ( to my limited knowledge, further study obviously needed here), on the other hand, few seem to opt to return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, potentially suggesting modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gather lifestyles.
Is there a significant cohort of people who’ve gone from living in modern societies and moved to live in hunter-gatherer societies? If yes, they’d be a useful group to survey. If not, is this evidence that modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gatherer ones, because no one ‘votes with their feet’ and moves from modern societies into hunter-gatherer ones?
I agree that “voting with one’s feet” is an interesting angle. Some discussion of this angle is here (search for “Certainly, the part closest to my area of expertise raises questions”).
Comments for Hunter-gatherer happiness will go here.
This was possibly my favourite email in the Cold Takes email newsletter so far. I always enjoy understanding someone’s thought process before they’ve become an expert on a topic. Once someone knows enough, I think that their views usually change too slowly to easily see or demonstrate (one new piece of information or consideration, one new data point, naturally can’t swing the holistic viewpoint quite so much when a person knows a huge amount).
It (unsurprisingly) reminded me of early Givewell material. Givewell is likely right more of the time now than in 2007. With more careful thought and knowledge built-up over time, comes better calibration. There is something lost though. How do we know that someone would change their mind in response to new evidence if we rarely see them change their minds? There is something wonderful about seeing people shift their views somewhat (or their confidence in their views) in response to transparent thinking in real-time. Anecdotally, this seems to happen a lot more in conversation than in writing (everywhere, not just in the EA community and adjacent spaces). In conversation, it is often much more acceptable to express uncertainty about conclusions while still presenting a framework for how you are thinking around an issue. It seems to happen rarely in public outside this community and adjacent ones.
My priors on the object-level question are very different to Holden’s. My worst mental health happens when I feel stagnant/ can’t contribute/am not valued. Being in physical pain with purpose has always felt much more bearable than having all the creature comforts of our modern time while feeling like what I spend my time doing is meaningless and doesn’t add value to anything I really care about. This is obviously extremely weak evidence; memory is unreliable and I am a single individual. There might already be good evidence either way on whether feeling like your day-to-day life has purpose is a better predictor of subjective wellbeing than income or health for a sample size greater than one.
If hunter-gatherer societies consistently give everyone roles that visibly contribute to the lives of the people they know and love (eg. searching for food for the tribe) my prior is that this would feel more purposeful than modern day life (on average). If purpose is a more important factor in predicting subjective wellbeing than health or material wealth, then I would expect this study (across tribes/maybe even looking at biomarkers of depression instead of a survey) to replicate.
I think that’s a great point about the value of seeing people change their opinions in real time. I do wish there were more models of this.
I’m a bit skeptical on the “purpose” idea, mostly because I think most people have a pretty clear sense that they need to (or will need to) work—and/or provide direct care—in order to support their family. This seems pretty analogous to the hunter-gatherer situation (and I wouldn’t assume that the latter feels more tangible or “direct”—my impression is that a lot of hunters can go a while without a clear, direct contribution to the hunt). If I wanted to look into this further, I might investigate hypotheses like “people in the military are especially happy” or “doctors are especially happy” or “people become less happy when they become financially able to stop working and do so” (I would guess these aren’t true and would change my mind if they turned out to be).
Hmm, interesting!
My guess still is that it matters how tangibly connected the activity is to the outcome. I think it matters a lot that filling out a spreadsheet for an insurance company for one’s actuarial job does not directly feed one’s children, even if the outcome is the same. This is similar to my intuition that jumping into a pond to save a drowning child probably feels more fulfilling than donating a large sum to Givewell recommended charities, even if the outcomes are fairly comparable. Even swimming around looking for drowning children and not finding them on most attempts but succeeding every now and then seems more intuitively fulfilling (but I might just be worse at simulating in my mind the long periods of failure than the brief moments of success).
I also think it matters whether one knows the people they are helping personally. I expect doctors to care less about helping their patients than a hunter-gather would care about gathering food for their family (and, to a lesser extent, their tribe). However, I would think it was more likely that your view was right than the one I expressed if doctors and social workers were less happy than other professionals in their income bracket (e.g. if actuaries were happier than doctors or accountants were happier than social workers).
The military is an interesting case and how informative I’d find military personnel happiness depends on who we’re talking about. I suspect military leaders are happier than average and would change my mind if they weren’t. I suspect lower-ranked soldiers in peacetime would be happier than the average person (I’d guess they would be unhappy during intense periods of training that are intended to simulate combat but I’d also guess that most of the time, they won’t be in combat-simulating training). I would be surprised if soldiers during combat or intense training periods that try to simulate combat were happier than the average person because the physical conditions seem so extreme (I’d guess much more extreme than the everyday experience of a hunter-gatherer).
I suspect voluntary retirees would replace work with more meaningful activities (like doing pro bono/volunteer work or spending time helping their family and friends) so I am not sure how much them being happier would change my mind. I would be surprised if voluntary retirees were happier if it was also true that they did not spend much more time helping friends and family or on altruistic endeavours.
Speaking of “I think that’s a great point about the value of seeing people change their opinions in real time,” if you don’t mind me asking, would you like to mention a sentence or two on why you no longer endorse the above paragraphs?
Hi Linch, I’m sorry for taking so long to reply to this! I mainly just noticed I was conflating several intuitions and I needed to think more to tease them out.
(my head’s no longer in this and I honestly never settled on a view/teased out the threads but I wanted to say something because I felt it was quite rude of me to have never replied)
Hi Sophia. Don’t sweat it. :)
😅🙏😊
Assuming that the high happiness reports from the Hadza are “real” (and not noise, sampling bias, etc), what might it be?
They have dramatically worse health and nutrition. Also worse “creature comforts” like cozy beds, Netflix and mulled wine. But maybe some combination of the following could be overcoming those drawbacks.
In the category of lifestyle/how you spend your time:
Social structure (small communities, much stronger social connection, more social time)
Work structure (more cooperation, more “meaning” in work due to knowing you’re supporting your family directly / avoiding starvation for yourself and your loved ones)
Non-social leisure structure (no Reddit, no TV; no street noise; you’re always out in nature)
Or internal experience:
Perhaps you’d have different dreams or fantasies?
No Instagram, no “keeping up with the Joneses” or social-status stress beyond your immediate community
Climate change, nuclear war, and x-risk presumably aren’t a worry
Could sexual and romantic relationships be more fulfilling related to the small community?
Other ideas?
You already expressed skepticism on the survey of Hadza happiness, but Kat Woods offers more on why such a survey might give inaccurate results. From the intro:
The four major issues she notes are:
Not understanding hypotheticals.
Not understanding in general.
People giving inconsistent answers.
Refusing to rate happiness.
This is from surveying in Rwanda and Uganda, which will certainly have many of the same difficulties as surveying Hadza. (It also surprised me article that the US and Mexico would have much higher self-reported happiness than, for example, Italy. I wonder if this is a real effect or if happiness surveying is fraught with cultural issues in general.)
Because ‘how the question is interpreted’ makes comparing subjective happiness survey results hard to compare, one other way to approach the question of ‘are hunter-gatherer societies happier’ is to look at the people who move between hunter-gatherer and modern societies and study their happiness and outcomes. On the one hand, lots of hunter-gatherer peoples who switched into living in modern societies (e.g. Inuit in Greenland) have fairly bad outcomes ( to my limited knowledge, further study obviously needed here), on the other hand, few seem to opt to return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, potentially suggesting modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gather lifestyles.
Is there a significant cohort of people who’ve gone from living in modern societies and moved to live in hunter-gatherer societies? If yes, they’d be a useful group to survey. If not, is this evidence that modern lifestyles are preferable to hunter-gatherer ones, because no one ‘votes with their feet’ and moves from modern societies into hunter-gatherer ones?
I agree that “voting with one’s feet” is an interesting angle. Some discussion of this angle is here (search for “Certainly, the part closest to my area of expertise raises questions”).