There seems to be strong status quo bias and typical mind fallacy with regard to hedonic set point. This would seem to be a basically rational response since most people show lowchanges in personality factors (emotional stability, or 1/neuroticism, the big five factor most highly correlated with well being reports, though I haven’t investigated this as deeply as I would like for making any strong claims) over their lifetime. In particular, environmental effects have very transient impact, colloquially referred to as the lottery effect, though this instantiation of the effect is likely false.
After doing personal research in this area for several years one of the conclusions that helped me make sense of some of the seeming contradictions in the space was the realization that humans are more like speedrunners than well-being of the video game character maximizers. In particular the proxy measure is generally maximizing the probability of successful grandchildren rather than anything like happiness. In the same way that a speedrunner trades health points for speed and sees the health points less as the abstraction of how safe the protagonist is and more as just another resource to manage, humans treat their own well being as a just another resource to manage.
Concretely, the experience is that only people *currently* in the tails of happiness seem to be able to care about it. People in the left tail obviously want out, and people in the right tail seem to be able to hold onto an emotionally salient stance that *this might be important* (they are currently directly experiencing the fact that life can be much much better than they normally suppose). In the same way that once people exit school their motivation for school reform drops off a cliff. It has been noted that humans seem to have selective memory about past experiences of intense suffering or happiness, such as sickness or peak experiences, as some sort of adaptation. Possibly to prevent overfitting errors.
More nearby, my guess is that caring about this will be anti-selected for in EA, since it currently selects for people with above average neuroticism who use the resultant motivation structure to work on future threats and try to convince others they should worry more about future threats. Positive motivational schemas are less common. Thus I predict lots of burnout in EA over time.
RomeoStevens, thanks for this comment. I think you’re getting at something interesting, but I confess I this quite hard to follow. Do you think you could possibly restate it, but do so more simply (i.e. with less jargon)? For instance, I don’t know how to make sense of
There seems to be strong status quo bias and typical mind fallacy with regard to hedonic set point.
People observe that observed happiness doesn’t seem to respond much to interventions, so they deprioritize such interventions. This is partially due to the illegibility of variance in happiness.
More nearby, my guess is that caring about this will be anti-selected for in EA, since it currently selects for people with above average neuroticism who use the resultant motivation structure to work on future threats and try to convince others they should worry more about future threats.
I have the opposite intuition. While EA demographics contain a lot of people with above-average neuroticism, the individuals I know in EA tend to be unusually appreciative of both how bad it is to suffer and how good it is to be happy:
“Rational fiction” (quite popular in EA circles) often contains deep exploration of positive emotion.
People encourage one another to try unusual experiences (chemical, romantic, narrative) for the sake of extra happiness.
Fewer people than in the general population are satisfied with “default” options for happiness (e.g. watching TV) -- sometimes because they care less about personal happiness, but often because they really want to go beyond the default and have experiences that are on the extreme positive end of the scale, because they are very physiologically or intellectually satisfying.
Standard nonprofit messaging is often along the lines of “help people live ordinary happy lives ”. EA messaging has a lot of that, mixed with some “help people survive the worst possible outcome” but also some “help people transcend the burdens of ordinary life and move forward into a future that could be much, much better than today”.
I don’t see the future in the latter case as “everyone has a reasonably productive farm and an extra room in their small house”, but as “everyone has access to all the wealth/knowledge they want, and all their preferences are satisfied unless they interfere with others’ preferences or run afoul of Fun Theory”.
----
To put it more succinctly: people in EA tend to be nerdy optimizers, and many of us want to optimize not just “avoiding bad experiences”, but also “having good experiences”.
Fair. I may be over updating on the EAs I know who don’t seem particularly concerned that they are default stressed and unhappy. Also I think people living in high density cities underestimate how stressed and unhappy they actually are.
It’s a U shaped curve since rural folks are also unhappy. My own sense was that there was a phase shift somewhere between 100k and 250k (exact mapping to density I don’t know) related to whether the schelling points for social gathering condense or fracture. I’d recommend people find out for themselves by visiting smaller and happier places. People in SV for instance can spend time in Santa Cruz which is #2 in happiness in the nation.
There seems to be strong status quo bias and typical mind fallacy with regard to hedonic set point. This would seem to be a basically rational response since most people show low changes in personality factors (emotional stability, or 1/neuroticism, the big five factor most highly correlated with well being reports, though I haven’t investigated this as deeply as I would like for making any strong claims) over their lifetime. In particular, environmental effects have very transient impact, colloquially referred to as the lottery effect, though this instantiation of the effect is likely false.
After doing personal research in this area for several years one of the conclusions that helped me make sense of some of the seeming contradictions in the space was the realization that humans are more like speedrunners than well-being of the video game character maximizers. In particular the proxy measure is generally maximizing the probability of successful grandchildren rather than anything like happiness. In the same way that a speedrunner trades health points for speed and sees the health points less as the abstraction of how safe the protagonist is and more as just another resource to manage, humans treat their own well being as a just another resource to manage.
Concretely, the experience is that only people *currently* in the tails of happiness seem to be able to care about it. People in the left tail obviously want out, and people in the right tail seem to be able to hold onto an emotionally salient stance that *this might be important* (they are currently directly experiencing the fact that life can be much much better than they normally suppose). In the same way that once people exit school their motivation for school reform drops off a cliff. It has been noted that humans seem to have selective memory about past experiences of intense suffering or happiness, such as sickness or peak experiences, as some sort of adaptation. Possibly to prevent overfitting errors.
More nearby, my guess is that caring about this will be anti-selected for in EA, since it currently selects for people with above average neuroticism who use the resultant motivation structure to work on future threats and try to convince others they should worry more about future threats. Positive motivational schemas are less common. Thus I predict lots of burnout in EA over time.
RomeoStevens, thanks for this comment. I think you’re getting at something interesting, but I confess I this quite hard to follow. Do you think you could possibly restate it, but do so more simply (i.e. with less jargon)? For instance, I don’t know how to make sense of
People observe that observed happiness doesn’t seem to respond much to interventions, so they deprioritize such interventions. This is partially due to the illegibility of variance in happiness.
I have the opposite intuition. While EA demographics contain a lot of people with above-average neuroticism, the individuals I know in EA tend to be unusually appreciative of both how bad it is to suffer and how good it is to be happy:
“Rational fiction” (quite popular in EA circles) often contains deep exploration of positive emotion.
People encourage one another to try unusual experiences (chemical, romantic, narrative) for the sake of extra happiness.
Fewer people than in the general population are satisfied with “default” options for happiness (e.g. watching TV) -- sometimes because they care less about personal happiness, but often because they really want to go beyond the default and have experiences that are on the extreme positive end of the scale, because they are very physiologically or intellectually satisfying.
Standard nonprofit messaging is often along the lines of “help people live ordinary happy lives ”. EA messaging has a lot of that, mixed with some “help people survive the worst possible outcome” but also some “help people transcend the burdens of ordinary life and move forward into a future that could be much, much better than today”.
I don’t see the future in the latter case as “everyone has a reasonably productive farm and an extra room in their small house”, but as “everyone has access to all the wealth/knowledge they want, and all their preferences are satisfied unless they interfere with others’ preferences or run afoul of Fun Theory”.
----
To put it more succinctly: people in EA tend to be nerdy optimizers, and many of us want to optimize not just “avoiding bad experiences”, but also “having good experiences”.
Fair. I may be over updating on the EAs I know who don’t seem particularly concerned that they are default stressed and unhappy. Also I think people living in high density cities underestimate how stressed and unhappy they actually are.
Can you say more about this?
I think there were some previous links in a debate about this on FB that I’m not finding now.
https://www.sciencealert.com/where-you-live-has-a-drastic-effect-on-your-happiness-levels
It’s a U shaped curve since rural folks are also unhappy. My own sense was that there was a phase shift somewhere between 100k and 250k (exact mapping to density I don’t know) related to whether the schelling points for social gathering condense or fracture. I’d recommend people find out for themselves by visiting smaller and happier places. People in SV for instance can spend time in Santa Cruz which is #2 in happiness in the nation.
[Made this into a top-level comment]