I wouldn’t expect people to be able to adapt to severe pain, not when you consider the evolutionary advantages of always taking your hand out of the fire. I’d expect people to die before they got used to pain.
What is going on is that mental pain may have a bigger impact on your happiness then physical pain and more than we imagine it does. I.e. chronic depression is worse than chronic lower back pain.
(You might reply that this is unfair because mental pain and happiness are basically the same thing: i.e. it’s obvious being unhappy has a bigger impact on happiness than just being in pain, so you’ve just measured the same thing twice. What you’d really want is data which showed the impact different health states have on people’s emotional experience/moods (which is what I take happiness to be). Nevertheless given that depression/anxiety seems to be lots of negative mental states, whereas chronic pain isn’t, that’s still a point in favour of depression/anxiety being where the unhappiness is.)
And yes, so I think depression, which already looks bad on DALYs, is much worse even than that.
Also, it seems that mental health issues are all over the world in a way that, say, malaria is quite concentrated. That’s why I say it’s possible mental health interventions may be more effective in developed rather than developing countries—people have more technology are greater familiar with mental health.
I can’t tell you what the ‘in the wild’ effect size is because I don’t know it and I don’t think it’s been tried. That’s why I suggest a billionaire tests it to find out! The evidence is the CBT works (remedies about 50% of cases of depression) so I’d say the challenge is more getting it to people and getting them to use it.
Developed world happiness interventions? I’m not sure what you mean. Some people in some governments are beginning to think explicitly in terms of happiness, but it hasn’t really caught on.
On the death thing, we have different intuitions. In your parlance, I’d say you adapt totally to being dead: there’s no you after death for anything to be good or bad for! So all this analysis is very sensitive to philosophical issues.
I wouldn’t expect people to be able to adapt to severe pain, not when you consider the evolutionary advantages of always taking your hand out of the fire. I’d expect people to die before they got used to pain.
Sorry. Severe pain may have been a bad example. Other high-DALY-weight conditions do seem to show hedonic adaptation though, e.g. paraplegia (see my response to Lila for sources).
Hello Ben.
A couple of comments:
I wouldn’t expect people to be able to adapt to severe pain, not when you consider the evolutionary advantages of always taking your hand out of the fire. I’d expect people to die before they got used to pain.
What is going on is that mental pain may have a bigger impact on your happiness then physical pain and more than we imagine it does. I.e. chronic depression is worse than chronic lower back pain.
(You might reply that this is unfair because mental pain and happiness are basically the same thing: i.e. it’s obvious being unhappy has a bigger impact on happiness than just being in pain, so you’ve just measured the same thing twice. What you’d really want is data which showed the impact different health states have on people’s emotional experience/moods (which is what I take happiness to be). Nevertheless given that depression/anxiety seems to be lots of negative mental states, whereas chronic pain isn’t, that’s still a point in favour of depression/anxiety being where the unhappiness is.)
And yes, so I think depression, which already looks bad on DALYs, is much worse even than that.
Also, it seems that mental health issues are all over the world in a way that, say, malaria is quite concentrated. That’s why I say it’s possible mental health interventions may be more effective in developed rather than developing countries—people have more technology are greater familiar with mental health.
I can’t tell you what the ‘in the wild’ effect size is because I don’t know it and I don’t think it’s been tried. That’s why I suggest a billionaire tests it to find out! The evidence is the CBT works (remedies about 50% of cases of depression) so I’d say the challenge is more getting it to people and getting them to use it.
Developed world happiness interventions? I’m not sure what you mean. Some people in some governments are beginning to think explicitly in terms of happiness, but it hasn’t really caught on.
On the death thing, we have different intuitions. In your parlance, I’d say you adapt totally to being dead: there’s no you after death for anything to be good or bad for! So all this analysis is very sensitive to philosophical issues.
Sorry. Severe pain may have been a bad example. Other high-DALY-weight conditions do seem to show hedonic adaptation though, e.g. paraplegia (see my response to Lila for sources).