I found this extremely interesting and useful, thanks.
I am likely to be biased in favour of working in mental health, as I work on this cause now and began working in the area before I discovered EA. But nevertheless I find your arguments fairly compelling.
Three points:
On the issue of where on a life satisfaction scale might be the neutral point / equivalent to not being alive, have you looked into whether there is any data on where on this scale people typically are when they are suicidal? This is not necessarily an appropriate answer to the question, because suicide can be influenced by short-term distress, psychosis, lack of mental capacity etc. (i.e. not just life satisfaction). But if any such data exists it might provide an interesting additional reference point.
Similarly, are you aware of any cost-effectiveness estimates for mental health charities/programmes in terms of suicides averted? This would be more closely comparable to lives saved through other types of intervention.
I think there is a whole other interesting area of work wrapped up in your comments about basing policy decisions on subjective wellbeing measures. As I’m sure you (and many on this forum) are aware, there is lots of work happening on this around the world. But the field still feels in its infancy, and there are potentially quite radical implications for how we would organise our societies, economies etc. if we were to place these measures as the end-goals of policymaking. I recognise that wellbeing and mental health are not exactly the same thing, but it is interesting to consider the question of what a society would look like that structurally encouraged good mental health.
Hello Matthew and thanks for your points. I don’t think it counts as bias if favour of X if you chose to do X because you thought X was best!
On the first, I haven’t looked, but I wouldn’t consider that to be the right evidence. It seems pretty plausible people could below hedonic/satisfaction neutrality and not want to kill themselves; I’d expect our evolutionary insight is to keep living even in such circumstances—those who committed suicide easily would have their genes removed from the pool.
On the second, I haven’t, but I’d welcome someone doing that research.
On the third, I am familiar with that stuff and am in regular communication with the economists who write the big reports, e.g. the World Happiness Report. However, I tend to think that, given there are people working on the policy problem, and I don’t have much to add there, but there isn’t really anyone thinking about the EA-type questions of what the best things for individuals to do with their time and money, I do more by contributing to this latter issue.
I found this extremely interesting and useful, thanks.
I am likely to be biased in favour of working in mental health, as I work on this cause now and began working in the area before I discovered EA. But nevertheless I find your arguments fairly compelling.
Three points:
On the issue of where on a life satisfaction scale might be the neutral point / equivalent to not being alive, have you looked into whether there is any data on where on this scale people typically are when they are suicidal? This is not necessarily an appropriate answer to the question, because suicide can be influenced by short-term distress, psychosis, lack of mental capacity etc. (i.e. not just life satisfaction). But if any such data exists it might provide an interesting additional reference point.
Similarly, are you aware of any cost-effectiveness estimates for mental health charities/programmes in terms of suicides averted? This would be more closely comparable to lives saved through other types of intervention.
I think there is a whole other interesting area of work wrapped up in your comments about basing policy decisions on subjective wellbeing measures. As I’m sure you (and many on this forum) are aware, there is lots of work happening on this around the world. But the field still feels in its infancy, and there are potentially quite radical implications for how we would organise our societies, economies etc. if we were to place these measures as the end-goals of policymaking. I recognise that wellbeing and mental health are not exactly the same thing, but it is interesting to consider the question of what a society would look like that structurally encouraged good mental health.
Thanks again.
Hello Matthew and thanks for your points. I don’t think it counts as bias if favour of X if you chose to do X because you thought X was best!
On the first, I haven’t looked, but I wouldn’t consider that to be the right evidence. It seems pretty plausible people could below hedonic/satisfaction neutrality and not want to kill themselves; I’d expect our evolutionary insight is to keep living even in such circumstances—those who committed suicide easily would have their genes removed from the pool.
On the second, I haven’t, but I’d welcome someone doing that research.
On the third, I am familiar with that stuff and am in regular communication with the economists who write the big reports, e.g. the World Happiness Report. However, I tend to think that, given there are people working on the policy problem, and I don’t have much to add there, but there isn’t really anyone thinking about the EA-type questions of what the best things for individuals to do with their time and money, I do more by contributing to this latter issue.