I haven’t read through the whole post yet, but wanted to comment on a few points about the normative status of life satisfaction scores.
2. If life satisfaction scores lack a “privileged normative status”, why appeal to them to justify the choice of a logarithmic model of income?
They think it correlates with what matters with typical interventions, but they might think that using it directly would be vulnerable to Goodhart’s law, since it could be manipulated in ways that don’t reflect what’s normative in the right way, e.g. through wireheading or some other direct brain manipulation, the experience machine, coercion, etc.. They might also disagree with experientialism, which I think life satisfaction scores take for granted, since people can only weight what they’re aware of when they decide how satisfied they are with their lives.
3. Considering that life satisfaction looks like a credible measure of wellbeing on the desire satisfaction theory of wellbeing (see my discussion here), shouldn’t we say it does have a “privileged normative status” on that account?
4. If one accepts that life satisfaction is a good measure on desire theories, but it nevertheless lacks a “privileged normative status”, this suggests OP also reject desire satisfaction theories. If they reject both hedonism and desire theories, that leaves only the objective list. Do they reject that too? I hope not, because, if they did that would mean rejecting all of the available options!
I would say life satisfaction has privileged normative status on global desire theories in particular, as you point out, and global desire theory plausibly deserves weight in worldview diversification (although it sounds like you’d give it little weight relative to hedonism). However, it plausibly misses most of what matters on desire theories that aren’t solely concerned with global desires.
Furthermore, life satisfaction might also have to be interpreted carefully even on global desire theories, in case one wants to take some kind of “preference-affecting” approach, so that if someone changes how they think about their own life satisfaction (e.g. what things they consider, how they judge them, what subjective weights they give, and particular judgements they give to things that haven’t actually changed), then their life satisfaction scores before and after may not be comparable, or, if they are, you need to make some adjustments first, and not just compare raw scores.
Some mental health or “direct” subjective wellbeing interventions could in principle be closer to manipulating an individual’s desires than actually making things better according to the individual’s prior desires. I don’t really think this is true for typical mental health interventions, as I think treating depression is probably just very good for the person receiving treatment, when it works (and they want treatment). But maybe Open Phil thinks there’s both manipulation and actual improvement going on in mental health or SWB interventions, whereas just giving people money doesn’t involve much manipulation. If you account for the desire manipulation, mental health/SWB interventions could look worse than cash and income interventions, even if they looked better before accounting for desire manipulation.
Thanks for writing this!
I haven’t read through the whole post yet, but wanted to comment on a few points about the normative status of life satisfaction scores.
They think it correlates with what matters with typical interventions, but they might think that using it directly would be vulnerable to Goodhart’s law, since it could be manipulated in ways that don’t reflect what’s normative in the right way, e.g. through wireheading or some other direct brain manipulation, the experience machine, coercion, etc.. They might also disagree with experientialism, which I think life satisfaction scores take for granted, since people can only weight what they’re aware of when they decide how satisfied they are with their lives.
(I have a related shortform comment here.)
I would say life satisfaction has privileged normative status on global desire theories in particular, as you point out, and global desire theory plausibly deserves weight in worldview diversification (although it sounds like you’d give it little weight relative to hedonism). However, it plausibly misses most of what matters on desire theories that aren’t solely concerned with global desires.
Furthermore, life satisfaction might also have to be interpreted carefully even on global desire theories, in case one wants to take some kind of “preference-affecting” approach, so that if someone changes how they think about their own life satisfaction (e.g. what things they consider, how they judge them, what subjective weights they give, and particular judgements they give to things that haven’t actually changed), then their life satisfaction scores before and after may not be comparable, or, if they are, you need to make some adjustments first, and not just compare raw scores.
Some mental health or “direct” subjective wellbeing interventions could in principle be closer to manipulating an individual’s desires than actually making things better according to the individual’s prior desires. I don’t really think this is true for typical mental health interventions, as I think treating depression is probably just very good for the person receiving treatment, when it works (and they want treatment). But maybe Open Phil thinks there’s both manipulation and actual improvement going on in mental health or SWB interventions, whereas just giving people money doesn’t involve much manipulation. If you account for the desire manipulation, mental health/SWB interventions could look worse than cash and income interventions, even if they looked better before accounting for desire manipulation.