self-reported happiness over a short period (like 1 day)
Not exactly what you meant, but you may be interested in Jeff Kaufman’s notes on his year-long happiness logging self-experiment. My main takeaway was to be mildly more bearish of happiness logging than when I first came across the idea, based on his
Overall my experience with logging has made me put less trust in “how happy are you right now” surveys of happiness. Aside from the practical issues like logging unexpected night wake-time, I mostly don’t feel like the numbers I’m recording are very meaningful. I would rather spend more time in situations I label higher than lower on average, so there is some signal there, but I don’t actually have the introspection to accurately report to myself how I’m feeling.
Scattered quotes that made me go “huh”:
When I first started rating my happiness on a 1-10 scale I didn’t feel like I was very good at it. At the time I thought I might get better with practice, but I think I’m actually getting worse at it. Instead of really thinking “how do I feel right now?” it’s really hard not to just think “in past situations like this I’ve put down ‘6’ so I should put down ‘6’ now”.
Being honest to myself like this can also make me less happy. Normally if I’m negative about something I try not to dwell on it. I don’t think about it, and soon I’m thinking about other things and not so negative. Logging that I’m unhappy makes me own up to being unhappy, which I think doesn’t help. Though it’s hard to know because any other sort of measurement would seem to have the same problem.
Thanks for sharing, Mo! Very interesting. That makes me more pessimistic about finding the relationship between biological indicators and self-reported human welfare. I still think tracking more objective metrics would be helpful such that is is harder to game the system. If welfare surveys became widespread, and consistently used to make decisions, people could try to give answers which benefit them the most instead of reporting their welfare as accurately as possible. I like the assumption that welfare per human-year is proportional to the logarithm of annual consumption because this is hard to game.
Not exactly what you meant, but you may be interested in Jeff Kaufman’s notes on his year-long happiness logging self-experiment. My main takeaway was to be mildly more bearish of happiness logging than when I first came across the idea, based on his
Scattered quotes that made me go “huh”:
Thanks for sharing, Mo! Very interesting. That makes me more pessimistic about finding the relationship between biological indicators and self-reported human welfare. I still think tracking more objective metrics would be helpful such that is is harder to game the system. If welfare surveys became widespread, and consistently used to make decisions, people could try to give answers which benefit them the most instead of reporting their welfare as accurately as possible. I like the assumption that welfare per human-year is proportional to the logarithm of annual consumption because this is hard to game.
Thanks, this is interesting. I wonder if this sort of individual-level noise might be smoothed out by large-n experience sampling.