If you listen to Marty Seligman’s early talks, when positive psychology starts to become a more well defined field, his view of wellbeing is going beyond ‘the basics’ of everyday life. He’s even used numbers to say, ok if the aim of therapy is to bring a depressed person from −5 to −3 or 0, the goal of positive psychology is to take you from +3 to +5. Some wellbeing theories inherit this general thinking, and many of the basic physiological needs like having food or shelter or being safe are things seen for a requirement to be at a normal baseline. With the exception of social relations and some of the emotions work, you’re more likely to see most physiological needs in the clinical literature and some with folks who work on resilience.
helmetedhornbill
Sounds really exciting. Could you give more detail on what kind of projects or work is eligible or likely to be successful for funding? It wasn’t clear to me from the website.
I’m really greatful you’ve wrote this detailed and specific focus.
I too have worried about the perception of EA from AI Ethics Researchers, may of whom are well established and reputable scientists who sincerely care about what many EAs care about, a safe AI. I’ve felt it’s a shame more respectful common language hasn’t been found there. I think some of what is missing is a reflection on communication. I’ve seen pretty nasty spirited tweets from EAs in response to TG and folks in her research network. Of course caution should be applied when reasoning from small numbers but if there is anything done on a group or bigger community level, like adversarial collaborations, discussion panels I have missed it, though I’d be interested in learning what’s been done. It just looks at face value like a misuse of resources to not be collaborating with them or trying to find more common ground if the ultimate values are similar.
Thank you, seems like an awesome 3 days. Would you be able to share a little more on the participants’ motivation, either their own or how you motivated them? I am trying to encourage a local group to try similar short but somewhat intense sprints as a low stakes attempt to increase familiarity and confidence with different topics, or at least encourage interest and breadth of knowledge. What worked well for you?
that’s really helpful, thank you!
Promoting climate considerations within existing high priority areas of work
Water, sanitation and hygiene (“WASH”) interventions as a cause area
In Support of Paradigm Shifting
Yeah, I agree with you strongly re: broader change. The dangers of large scale misinformation cannot be understated either.
Super cool to see this write up. Broadly, it seems to me that a lot of related work here is being carried and developed already particularly within the open science movement, so thought I’d share some links for anyone interested.
PubPeer https://pubpeer.com is a great way to provide comments on any paper and this has successfully been used to raise concerns.
And there are researchers who already focus on potential research mis-firings: https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-data-thugs-out-expose-shoddy-and-questionable-research
I’m also thinking of Elisabeth Bik who transitioned from a traditional academic role to a ‘science integrity’ consultant, e.g. https://scienceintegritydigest.com/about/ (her twitter is worth having a glance at, just scroll and see some of the really appalling image manipulations: https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest)
It seems to me that more should be done to unite and fund people working on this, as well as apply more pressure to journals and editors to prioritze retractions.
Anyway, great post and I’m glad you made the case for it.
Immediate thought here was that suicidal ideation is comorbid with depression and that there’s some evidence that psychotherapy seems to be cost-effective: https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/report/psychotherapy-cost-effectiveness-analysis/
Short action you can take: proposals for the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee
Hi Vanessa, I really liked how specific and critical your comment was, which I think is ultimately how research can improve, so I’ve upvoted it :)
I’m not linked to this report but have an interest in subjective measures broadly so thought I would add a different perspective for the sake of discussion in response to the two issues your raise.
I am skeptical of using answers to questions such as “how satisfied are you with your life?” as a measure of human preferences. I suspect that the meaning of the answer might differ substantially between people in different cultures and/or be normalized w.r.t. some complicated implicit baseline, such as what a person thinks they should “expect” or “deserve”.
I think the fact that SWB measures differs across cultures is actually a good sign that these measures capture what they are supposed to capture. Cultures differ in e.g. values (collectivistic vs individualistic), social and gender norms, economic systems, ethics and moral. Surely some of these facets should influence how people see what a good life is, what happiness is, what wellbeing is. In fact, I would be more concerned if different people with different views and circumstances did not, as you say, ‘differ substantially.’
I think these differences, attributable to culture or individual variance, are not likely to be of concern for what I would imagine would be the more common ways WELLBYs could be used. Most cost effectiveness analyses rely on RCTs or comparable designs with pre and post measures. You could look at changes within the same group of people easily pre and post and compare their differences. Or even beyond such designs, controlling for different sources of variance that we think are important (like age and gender most commonly) is not that tricky. This doesn’t seem a big methodological concern to me but would be keen to hear more about how things look from your view.
I would be more optimistic of measurements based on revealed preferences, i.e. what people actually choose given several options when they are well-informed or what people think of their past choices in hindsight (or at least what they say they would choose in hypothetical situations, but this is less reliable).
What I like about the original post here is that there is caution about the uncertainties and challenges with SWB measures, e.g. comparability issues, neutral points. So I think it’s only fair to point out some of the challenges for revealed preferences. In my reading, there’s a long body of researcher suggesting these are stable, yet in practice your ‘revealed’ preference at $5 is likely to be different than at $10. Many scholars have now critiqued the notion of revealed preferences and instead suggested that we should be talking about constructed preferences. Most notably I am thinking of Itamar Simonson’s work, though this as a field can be traced back at least to Slovic in the 1950s (to my knowledge).
Constructed preferences are seen as constructed in the process of making a choice—different tasks and contexts highlight different aspects of the available options, thus focusing decision-makers on different considerations that lead to seemingly inconsistent decisions (Bettman, Luce, and Payne 1998). And I think there is an argument to be made that your wellbeing can influence your constructed preferences. For instance, negative appraisals and rumination are common for low levels of wellbeing, and there is evidence to suggest that perceived choice difficulty is linked to variances for preferences (Dhar and Simonson 2003; Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1992). Further, there is evidence broader metacognitive process influence constructed preferences, and those too can shift depending on your (lack of) happiness. So I wouldn’t be surprised that your preferences vary at e.g. low vs high SWB, in fact it sounds to me like it would be important to know SWB and be able to account for it.
Thanks so much for replying, I learned a lot from your response and its clarity helped me update my thinking.
My claim is, I suspect that cultural factors cause people to choose different numbers for reasons orthogonal to what they actually want.
Thanks, the specificity here helped me understand your view better. I suppose with the examples you give—I would expect these to be exceptions rather than norms (because if e.g. wanting to have a career was the norm, over enough time, that would tend to become culturally normative and even in the process of it becoming a more normative view the difference with a SWB measure should diminish). And more broadly, interventions that have large samples and aim for generalizability should be reasonably representative and also diminish this as a concern.
I suppose I’m also thinking about the potential difference in specific SWB scales. Something like the SWLS scale or the single item measures would not be very domain specific but scales based around the e.g. Wheel of Life tradition tell you a lot more different facets of your life (e.g. you can see high overall scale but low for job satisfaction), so it seems to me that with the right scales and enough items you can address culture or other variance even further.
I’m guessing you are not talking about things like, how much free time you would exchange for an additional $1? Because that’s consistent with constant preferences? So, Alice has $5 and Bob has $10, they are asked to choose between X and Y, and they have predictably different preferences despite the fact that post-X-Alice has the same wealth (and other circumstances) and post-X-Bob and the same for Y? And this despite somehow controlling for confounders are correlated both with the causes for Alice’s and Bob’s wealth and with their preferences?
Thanks again for responding with such precision. What I was unable to articulate well is that your individual preferences are not stable (or I suppose: per person, rather than across people), i.e. Alice when she has $5 will exchange a different amount of free time for an extra $1 then when Alice has $10.
I agree with everything else you’ve said and especially with:
I would still rely more on asking people directly how much this intervention helped them / how much their life improved over this period (as opposed to comparing numbers reported at different points of time)
I think this is a hugely underappreciated point. I think some of the SWB measures target this issue somewhat but in a limited fashion. I’d love to see more qualitative interviews and participatory / or co-production interventions. I am always surprised by how many interventions say they cannot ascertain a causal mechanism quantitatively and so do not attempt to… well, ask people what worked and didn’t.
Why not make ordinary attendees pay a little extra, and subsidize even more travel reimbursements?
I think more tweaking might be needed in terms of reimbursements. I’m based in an area that has a large EA student hub. Most EAs are very connected and most of the people I interact with go to each single EAxWherever and apply for reimbursements. They’ve told me it’s not that hard to get money for expenses based on the prestige of the university and the fact that they’re students. It seems a partial motivation is also travel and time off. It sounds to me that people who don’t live near such hubs and are less connected to other people and resources will benefit more.
Thanks, that’s a helpful clarification. Upvoted.
Other than the first Guardian article you reference, I would also recommend this piece and the book it is about: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/01/chums-how-a-tiny-caste-of-oxford-tories-took-over-the-uk-by-simon-kuper-review
It made the potential political impact of the Oxford Union much more salient and clearer to me. Talks about a range of things like the history of the Union, political connections, debating styles, the inception of Brexit.
Maybe it should also be mentioned both Student Unions are also likely high impact opportunities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Students%27_Union#Former_Officers
My first thought was also David Eagleman (How to Slow Down Time) but really most of his lectures and ted/google talks are fascinating, even those outside time perception.
Seems that sorting by top posts somewhat tracks with the highest % forecasted (right now the top 3 top posts are the highest %).
Really great and clear write-up.
For feedback: I wouldn’t say this isn’t a meta-analysis in the technical sense and it doesn’t seem like a systematic synthesis either. I think it’s a great intro to some prominent ideas with a more descriptive slant overall, though the places where you do evaluate evidence (e.g. Maslow re: lack of empirical evidence) are where the highest value would come for a reader who doesn’t know the literature. I think if you were to frame this differently and draw out a little more why we should care about wellbeing, you’d get more punch.
In the EA space, you may want to reach out to Happier Lives: https://www.happierlivesinstitute.org/key-ideas/
For flourishing, I think you’re missing some of the context with Barbara Fredrickson’s work, particularly broaden and build theory, which many people view as a major early contributor to this field .
Other important theories that come to mind withing positive psych or wellbeing:
Flow—notably the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Grit—Angela Duckworth (although some folks think grit is basicaly conscientiousness repackaged)
Beyond PERMA, there are now a lot more mini-theories dealing with disposition, attitudes, character, gratitude. Sonja Lyubomirsky comes to mind with her theories on happiness. I guess it depends what you want to capture.
And more broadly for anyone wanting to read more into this literature, I think there are good recommendations for reading in these syllabi:
https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/resources/course-syllabi-teachers