FWIW, I suspect RP’s DALY conversions are too low for the badness of pain assuming hedonism.
Here’s what RP wrote about the weights (from here, extending what you quoted in your post):
I used the following conversion factors to translate the duration of each of the four types of pain into DALY equivalents:
1 year of annoying pain = 0.01 to 0.02 DALYs
1 year of hurtful pain = 0.1 to 0.25 DALYs
1 year of disabling pain = 2 to 10 DALYs
1 year of excruciating pain = 60 to 150 DALYs
I arrived at these intensity-to-DALY conversions by looking at the descriptions of and disability weights assigned to various conditions assessed by the Global Burden of Disease Study in 2019 and comparing these to the descriptions of each type of pain tracked by the Welfare Footprint Project.
Reasoning about the weights directly: DALYs are normalized to reflect the life of a typical person in perfect health (DALY weight 0). Such a life still contains some suffering, frustration, boredom, and I’d guess the joys only reach an intensity similar to disabling pain for brief periods at a time (e.g. laughter) or basically never at all. As a result, I’d put 1 year of hurtful pain close to 1 DALY at a minimum, and possibly higher. And disabling pain seems at least 5x as bad/intense as hurtful pain to me, so 1 year of disabling pain should be at least around 5 DALYs.
The report also doesn’t explain the exact process for getting these numbers, but some potential sources of bias worth flagging:
DALY weights in the literature do not (I’d guess) reflect being in such pain every (waking) hour of your life in a year, but 1 year of X pain does, by assumption.
DALY weights in the literature don’t assume hedonism at all, and probably reflect what’s at stake non-hedonically for someone if they were to die early or other things they care about, because the responses used to estimate them come from people who are not usually hedonists. They therefore overestimate the hedonic value of life in full health.
These could both lead to underestimating the badness of pain.
The report might have accounted for these, but I can’t tell.
Also, for comparisons to global health in particular, we should be thinking about what a life in full health for the potential beneficiaries of the relevant charities would be like. They still live in poverty and spend a lot of time working, which are sources of frustration, stress and discomfort. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out their lives are (mildly) net negative hedonically, even if they prefer to live on the whole and judge their lives as positive.
Saving their lives could still be good under hedonism even if their lives turn out to be net negative hedonically, if and because it increases the hedonic welfare of others enough. Losing a child is traumatic and horrible. And there are economic benefits to saving lives, which should reduce the stressors of poverty.
“It wouldn’t surprise me to find out their lives are (mildly) net negative hedonically, even if they prefer to live on the whole and judge their lives as positive”
Can you explain this a bit more? I would be surprised based on subjective well-being studies at least if very many people’s lives we all are “net negative hedonically”
“beneficiaries of the relevant charities would be like. They still live in poverty and spend a lot of time working, which are sources of frustration, stress and discomfort”
Poverty and working can be sources of stress and discomfort, but going from that to net negative seems like a large leap?
Subjective well-being studies are usually not assessing hedonic well-being, but life satisfaction. People can be satisfied with their lives because they have things important to them that are going well (family, friends, other goals), or by comparing their lives to others’ around them, and these can be more important to them than their own average hedonic wellbeing when they judge their own lives.
If you have particular studies in mind that get at hedonic well-being (“affect” in the literature, sometimes via experience sampling) specifically, I’d be interested in them, though. I haven’t really looked into this myself. I’m just doing the accounting intuitively by imagining how people spend their time. And a lot of that is work (including housework, cooking), and probably more so for poor people in low-income countries.
Subjective well-being studies are usually not assessing hedonic well-being, but life satisfaction. People can be satisfied with their lives because they have things important to them that are going well (family, friends, other goals), or by comparing their lives to others’ around them, and these can be more important to them than their own average hedonic wellbeing when they judge their own lives.
I agree, but I would go further and say that I don’t think we have good reason to think that people have a reliable sense of the hedonic balance of their lives, even if we suppose they have good introspective access to the valence of their discrete experiences.
Thanks David I do definitely agree with this. How can we as complex beings have a reliable sense of the “hedonic balance” of our lives, if we can even comprehend what that means exactly to us (I certainly can’t)
I would bet though regardless that most of my friends, many of whom you @MichaelStJules might consider very poor, stressed and living in discomfort have extremely net positive lives even just looking straight hedonically. The joy of their families, cooking, time with friends. The joy they find from the non-hedonic meaning itself. From hope for the future of their kids lives (who have more education than they do). Etc. etc.
The frustration and the pain is there, but apart from maybe people here with severe illness or severe depression (a minority), it seems very net positive to me on any metric?
I can’t read the “hedony meters” of those around me here, but I would take their subjective wellbeing as a better approximation of it than almost any other measure I could imagine (and I’m aware there are others).
FWIW I don’t begrudge any of these opinions and think this is a very reasonable conversation :)
FWIW, I suspect RP’s DALY conversions are too low for the badness of pain assuming hedonism.
Here’s what RP wrote about the weights (from here, extending what you quoted in your post):
Reasoning about the weights directly: DALYs are normalized to reflect the life of a typical person in perfect health (DALY weight 0). Such a life still contains some suffering, frustration, boredom, and I’d guess the joys only reach an intensity similar to disabling pain for brief periods at a time (e.g. laughter) or basically never at all. As a result, I’d put 1 year of hurtful pain close to 1 DALY at a minimum, and possibly higher. And disabling pain seems at least 5x as bad/intense as hurtful pain to me, so 1 year of disabling pain should be at least around 5 DALYs.
I’m personally more sympathetic to disabling pain being ~50x more intense than hurtful pain (or higher), which would give something like 50 DALYs per year of disabling pain.
The report also doesn’t explain the exact process for getting these numbers, but some potential sources of bias worth flagging:
DALY weights in the literature do not (I’d guess) reflect being in such pain every (waking) hour of your life in a year, but 1 year of X pain does, by assumption.
DALY weights in the literature don’t assume hedonism at all, and probably reflect what’s at stake non-hedonically for someone if they were to die early or other things they care about, because the responses used to estimate them come from people who are not usually hedonists. They therefore overestimate the hedonic value of life in full health.
These could both lead to underestimating the badness of pain.
The report might have accounted for these, but I can’t tell.
Also, for comparisons to global health in particular, we should be thinking about what a life in full health for the potential beneficiaries of the relevant charities would be like. They still live in poverty and spend a lot of time working, which are sources of frustration, stress and discomfort. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out their lives are (mildly) net negative hedonically, even if they prefer to live on the whole and judge their lives as positive.
Saving their lives could still be good under hedonism even if their lives turn out to be net negative hedonically, if and because it increases the hedonic welfare of others enough. Losing a child is traumatic and horrible. And there are economic benefits to saving lives, which should reduce the stressors of poverty.
“It wouldn’t surprise me to find out their lives are (mildly) net negative hedonically, even if they prefer to live on the whole and judge their lives as positive”
Can you explain this a bit more? I would be surprised based on subjective well-being studies at least if very many people’s lives we all are “net negative hedonically”
“beneficiaries of the relevant charities would be like. They still live in poverty and spend a lot of time working, which are sources of frustration, stress and discomfort”
Poverty and working can be sources of stress and discomfort, but going from that to net negative seems like a large leap?
I wouldn’t say I’m confident either way.
Subjective well-being studies are usually not assessing hedonic well-being, but life satisfaction. People can be satisfied with their lives because they have things important to them that are going well (family, friends, other goals), or by comparing their lives to others’ around them, and these can be more important to them than their own average hedonic wellbeing when they judge their own lives.
If you have particular studies in mind that get at hedonic well-being (“affect” in the literature, sometimes via experience sampling) specifically, I’d be interested in them, though. I haven’t really looked into this myself. I’m just doing the accounting intuitively by imagining how people spend their time. And a lot of that is work (including housework, cooking), and probably more so for poor people in low-income countries.
(FWIW, I’m not a hedonist.)
I agree, but I would go further and say that I don’t think we have good reason to think that people have a reliable sense of the hedonic balance of their lives, even if we suppose they have good introspective access to the valence of their discrete experiences.
Thanks David I do definitely agree with this. How can we as complex beings have a reliable sense of the “hedonic balance” of our lives, if we can even comprehend what that means exactly to us (I certainly can’t)
I would bet though regardless that most of my friends, many of whom you @MichaelStJules might consider very poor, stressed and living in discomfort have extremely net positive lives even just looking straight hedonically. The joy of their families, cooking, time with friends. The joy they find from the non-hedonic meaning itself. From hope for the future of their kids lives (who have more education than they do). Etc. etc.
The frustration and the pain is there, but apart from maybe people here with severe illness or severe depression (a minority), it seems very net positive to me on any metric?
I can’t read the “hedony meters” of those around me here, but I would take their subjective wellbeing as a better approximation of it than almost any other measure I could imagine (and I’m aware there are others).
FWIW I don’t begrudge any of these opinions and think this is a very reasonable conversation :)