I guess I don’t find your conclusion intuitive. I’m sure there are a range of preference questions you could ask these extreme sufferers. For example, whether they, at a 5⁄10 life satisfaction, would trade places with someone in a low-income country with a life satisfaction of 2⁄10 who does not have their condition.
If you believe that they would make this trade, then surely there is something that their life satisfaction score is simply failing to capture
If you believe that they wouldn’t make this trade, then either that preference game isn’t eliciting some true value of suffering, or otherwise, why should we allocate hypothetical marginal dollars to their suffering and not that of those with lower life satisfaction?
My hunch is that the former is true, that there is something you can elicit from these people that isn’t being captured in the Cantril Ladder. (In my work, we’ve found the Cantril Ladder to be unreliable in other ways). But on the other side of this, I do worry about rejecting people’s own accounts of their experiences—it may literally be true that these people are somewhat happy with their lives, and that we should focus our resources on those who report that they aren’t!
I agree it would be interesting to gather specific data on such questions by asking people. A lot depends on the actual life of someone who evaluates their life satisfaction at 2⁄10. Do they experience a great deal of suffering, though not extreme/ unbearable? Or are they reasonably happy much of the time, but see no hope of improving their material wellbeing, especially when they see the kinds of lives people have in richer countries? 2⁄10 may mean different things to different people. The life satisfaction measure is just a momentary cognitive assessment, whereas strong negative affect, experienced over long durations, is in a sense more real. Trying to eliminate the very worst, literally unbearable experiences – in humans and in animals – seems to me very reasonable.
You could also ask the person with 2⁄10 life satisfaction whether they would agree to live in a rich country but have excruciating attacks for several hours a day for at least 2-3 months/year. And for the preferences elicited with such questions to really be meaningful, the respondent would have to know what it’s really like, and to be able to compare stretches of both experiences. Brian Tomasik has referred to different utility functions of people imagining and even consenting to experience extreme suffering, and people actually experiencing it. I doubt many people would choose cluster headaches after experiencing them, regardless of the rest of their life circumstances.
In practice, of course, it isn’t a binary choice anyways, and we can devote resources to improving access to effective treatment for cluster headache while trying to alleviate global poverty.
I guess I don’t find your conclusion intuitive. I’m sure there are a range of preference questions you could ask these extreme sufferers. For example, whether they, at a 5⁄10 life satisfaction, would trade places with someone in a low-income country with a life satisfaction of 2⁄10 who does not have their condition.
If you believe that they would make this trade, then surely there is something that their life satisfaction score is simply failing to capture
If you believe that they wouldn’t make this trade, then either that preference game isn’t eliciting some true value of suffering, or otherwise, why should we allocate hypothetical marginal dollars to their suffering and not that of those with lower life satisfaction?
My hunch is that the former is true, that there is something you can elicit from these people that isn’t being captured in the Cantril Ladder. (In my work, we’ve found the Cantril Ladder to be unreliable in other ways). But on the other side of this, I do worry about rejecting people’s own accounts of their experiences—it may literally be true that these people are somewhat happy with their lives, and that we should focus our resources on those who report that they aren’t!
I agree it would be interesting to gather specific data on such questions by asking people. A lot depends on the actual life of someone who evaluates their life satisfaction at 2⁄10. Do they experience a great deal of suffering, though not extreme/ unbearable? Or are they reasonably happy much of the time, but see no hope of improving their material wellbeing, especially when they see the kinds of lives people have in richer countries? 2⁄10 may mean different things to different people. The life satisfaction measure is just a momentary cognitive assessment, whereas strong negative affect, experienced over long durations, is in a sense more real. Trying to eliminate the very worst, literally unbearable experiences – in humans and in animals – seems to me very reasonable.
You could also ask the person with 2⁄10 life satisfaction whether they would agree to live in a rich country but have excruciating attacks for several hours a day for at least 2-3 months/year. And for the preferences elicited with such questions to really be meaningful, the respondent would have to know what it’s really like, and to be able to compare stretches of both experiences. Brian Tomasik has referred to different utility functions of people imagining and even consenting to experience extreme suffering, and people actually experiencing it. I doubt many people would choose cluster headaches after experiencing them, regardless of the rest of their life circumstances.
In practice, of course, it isn’t a binary choice anyways, and we can devote resources to improving access to effective treatment for cluster headache while trying to alleviate global poverty.
(Yep, I’m not having a go at the mission here, more at the nuances of measurement)