TL;DR I don’t think this post provides an argument that we should interpret pleasure/pain scales as logarithmic. What’s more, whether or not this is true is not necessary for post’s practical claim - which is roughly that “the best/worst things are much better/worse than most people think”.
Thanks for writing this up; sorry not to have got around to it sooner.
I think there are two claims that need be to carefully distinguished.
(A) that the relationship between actual and reported pleasure(/pain) is not linear but instead follows some other relationship, e.g. a logarithmic function where a 1-unit increase in self-reported pleasure represents a ten-fold increase in actual pleasure.
(B) whether the best/worst experiences that some people have are many times more intense than other people (who haven’t had those experiences) assume they are.
I point this out because you say
the best way to interpret pleasure and pain scales is by thinking of them as logarithmic compressions of what is truly a long-tail. The most intense pains are orders of magnitude more awful than mild pains (and symmetrically for pleasure). [...]
Since the bulk of suffering is concentrated in a small percentage of experiences, focusing our efforts on preventing cases of intense suffering likely dominates most utilitarian calculations.
The idea, I take it, is that if we thought the relationship between self-reported and actual pleasure(/pain) was linear, but it turns out it was logarithmic, then the best(/worse) experiences are much better(/worse) that we expected they were because we’d be using the wrong scale.
However, I don’t think you’ve provided (any?) evidence that (A) is true (or that it’s true but we thought it was false). What’s more, (B) is actually quite plausible by itself and you can claim (B) is true without needing (A) to be true.
Let me unpack this a bit.
(A) is a claim about how people choose to use self-reported scales. The idea is that people have experiences of a certain intensity they can distinguish for themselves in cardinal units, e.g. you can tell (roughly) how many perceivable increments of pleasure one experience gives you vs the next. A further question is how people choose to report these intensities when people give them a scale, say a 0-10 scale.
This reporting could be linear, logarithmic, etc. Indeed, people could choose to report anyway they want to. It seems most likely people use a linear reporting function because that’s the helpful way to use language to convey how you feel to the person asking you how you feel. I won’t get stuck into this here, but I say more about it in my PhD thesis at chapter 4, section 4.
Hence, on your pleasure/pain scales when you contrast ‘intuitive’ to ‘long-tailed’ scales, what I think you mean is that the intuitive scale is really ‘reported’ pleasure and the ‘long-tailed’ scale is ‘actual’ pleasure i.e. your claim is that there is a logarithmic relationship between reported and actual pleasure. I note you don’t provide evidence that people generally use scales this way. Regarding the stings scale, that just is a logarithmic scale by construction, where going from a 1 to 2 on the scale represent a 10 times increase in actual pain. That doesn’t show we have to report pleasure using log scales, or that we do, just that the guy who constructed that scale chose to build it that way. In fact, we can only use log pleasure/pain scales if we can somehow measure pain/pleasure on an arithmetic scale in the first place, and then convert from those numbers to a log scale, which requires that people are able to construct arithmetic pleasure/pain scales anyway.
(You might wonder if people can know, on an arithmetic scale, how much pleasure/pain they feel. However, if people really have no idea about this, then it follows they can’t intelligibly report their pleasure/pain at all, whatever scale they are using.)
Regarding (B), note that claims such as “the worst stings are 1000x worse than the average person expects they are” can be true without it needing to be the case that people have misunderstood how other people tend to use pleasure/pain scale. For instance, I could alternatively claim that the relationship between reported pleasure/pain and actual pain is linear, but that people’s predictions are just misinformed—e.g. torture is actually more worse than they thought. For comparison, if I claim “the heaviest building in the world weighs 1000x more than most people think it weighs” I don’t need to say anything about the relationship between reports of perceived weight and actual weight.
Hence, if you want to claim “experiences X and Y are much better/worse than we thought”, just claim that without getting into distracting stuff about reported vs actual scale use!
(P.S. The Fechner-Weber stuff is a red-herring: that’s about the relationship between increases in an objective quantity and in subjective perceptions of increases in that quantity. That’s different from talking about the relationship between a reported subjective quantity and the actually experienced subjective quantity. Plausibly the former relationship is logarithmic, but one shouldn’t directly infer from that that the latter relationship is logarithmic too).
I haven’t watched the talk, but I have just left a long comment on original article, Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain
Here’s the TL;DR of my comment:
Here’s the link to my comment. I meant to write up my thoughts 3 months ago when the original article was posted, but never got around to it.