The core here is about whether groups like the Sentinelese who do not have the same levels of development as others would give similar levels of SWB. I think the other comments here have done a great job at pointing out possible explanations.
if Sentinelese have ⇒ wellbeing
maybe their lifestyle works really well for their wellbeing (as Charlie mentions, we might not want to be too quick to dismiss this possibility). It would be a cool area to research.
maybe there are issues of interpersonal comparability in scale use, which is what we are exploring with our pilot.
maybe they have access to factors (e.g., social ties) that improve wellbeing without being affected as much by reference frames (e.g., the benefit I get from a higher income is relative to other people) or hedonic adaptation (as pointed out by Alex).
if Sentinelese have < wellbeing
As Nick pointed out, countries with lower levels of development tend to have lower levels of LS. [edit: adding this figure here because it represents this well and supports the validity of SWB scales]
It might be well worth the investment (especially as Vasco pointed out, it can increase the number of humans and life expectancy)
It is possible that whilst our development reached a point where we have higher wellbeing, it did so through inefficient periods and our task now is to think more carefully about how to do (and whether there are adverse consequences like climate change, x-risks, etc.)
Some briefs answers / pointers. Many of these things have been discussed in more details elsewhere.
The estimate for grief is shallow [edit: I want to make this point a bit stronger—this was a quick estimate and it is a tad unfair to compare it to the SM estimate which represents hundreds of hours of work and meta-analyses] but important in making the difficult work of live-saving vs life-improving accurate. You can see some discussion about it from my colleague. I, personally, wouldn’t be too surprised if we found a higher estimate in the future but there is some reasoning as to why this might not be as big.
I don’t think there are ‘objective’ measures of health widely used. DALYs and QALYs are not objective, they rely on humans reports—and contrary to SWB, these are reports about things humans are know to struggle to report on. In DALYs it is people (who do not have the conditions!) making binary judgements about which conditions are more or less healthy. In QALYs it generally involves people forecasting how their life will be in the future. See To WELLBY or not to WELLBY where we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of SWB.
health, wealth, education, are all instrumental. Why do we want these? Because they contribute to what we believe is ultimately good for humans. Most charity evaluators give there answer in some form of wellbeing / good, either by measuring SWB as directly as possible (HLI) or converting lives and income into the moral weights of the evaluators (GW).
There is extensive debate about the relationship between SWB and growth through the lens of the Easterlin Paradox
Hello Henry,
Thank you for presenting this thought experiment.
The core here is about whether groups like the Sentinelese who do not have the same levels of development as others would give similar levels of SWB. I think the other comments here have done a great job at pointing out possible explanations.
if Sentinelese have ⇒ wellbeing
maybe their lifestyle works really well for their wellbeing (as Charlie mentions, we might not want to be too quick to dismiss this possibility). It would be a cool area to research.
maybe there are issues of interpersonal comparability in scale use, which is what we are exploring with our pilot.
maybe they have access to factors (e.g., social ties) that improve wellbeing without being affected as much by reference frames (e.g., the benefit I get from a higher income is relative to other people) or hedonic adaptation (as pointed out by Alex).
if Sentinelese have < wellbeing
As Nick pointed out, countries with lower levels of development tend to have lower levels of LS. [edit: adding this figure here because it represents this well and supports the validity of SWB scales]
It might be well worth the investment (especially as Vasco pointed out, it can increase the number of humans and life expectancy)
It is possible that whilst our development reached a point where we have higher wellbeing, it did so through inefficient periods and our task now is to think more carefully about how to do (and whether there are adverse consequences like climate change, x-risks, etc.)
Some briefs answers / pointers. Many of these things have been discussed in more details elsewhere.
The estimate for grief is shallow [edit: I want to make this point a bit stronger—this was a quick estimate and it is a tad unfair to compare it to the SM estimate which represents hundreds of hours of work and meta-analyses] but important in making the difficult work of live-saving vs life-improving accurate. You can see some discussion about it from my colleague. I, personally, wouldn’t be too surprised if we found a higher estimate in the future but there is some reasoning as to why this might not be as big.
I don’t think there are ‘objective’ measures of health widely used. DALYs and QALYs are not objective, they rely on humans reports—and contrary to SWB, these are reports about things humans are know to struggle to report on. In DALYs it is people (who do not have the conditions!) making binary judgements about which conditions are more or less healthy. In QALYs it generally involves people forecasting how their life will be in the future. See To WELLBY or not to WELLBY where we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of SWB.
health, wealth, education, are all instrumental. Why do we want these? Because they contribute to what we believe is ultimately good for humans. Most charity evaluators give there answer in some form of wellbeing / good, either by measuring SWB as directly as possible (HLI) or converting lives and income into the moral weights of the evaluators (GW).
There is extensive debate about the relationship between SWB and growth through the lens of the Easterlin Paradox