{"items": [{"author": "David Chudzicki", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891357405492", "anchor": "fb-891357405492", "service": "fb", "text": "(\"conversations inspiring this post\" doesn't mean I agree. Habituation seems much less important to me than it does to Jeff.)", "timestamp": "1501617184"}, {"author": "Michael", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891404131852", "anchor": "fb-891404131852", "service": "fb", "text": "Hi Jeff,
It's a tough problem. I think your observations are reasonable, although it may be difficult to cleanly apply all predictions. E.g., on your points about inequality, social mobility, and raising living standards, I think it would be important to focus on the *perception* or 'lived experience' of inequality, social mobility, etc in various societies. How much more the rich have in their bank accounts may not be as relevant as how differences in wealth & social status manifest themselves in day-to-day life. For instance, it's possible that more egalitarian societies with instagram might be less happy than less egalitarian societies without it, due to constant exposure to others' glamorous highlight reels leading to Fear Of Missing Out.
I'd also raise a devil's advocate position on inequality, that constant jostling for social status may be more stressful and socially harmful than having a relatively lower but also more stable position in society.
Re: your core model,
>We have a sense of how good things could be. We're probably born with some genetically informed priors, but mostly we develop this sense based on experience. When a good thing happens to us our sense of what's possible goes up, as when we observe good things happening to others. If you think of something as inaccessible to you, it doesn't affect your sense of how good things could be. Happiness is having how things are going be closer to how you think things could be going.
There are some interesting attempts to formalize this expectations-model of happiness. Here's an excerpt from Principia Qualia's literature review:
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One of the most common views of valence is that it\u2019s the way the brain encodes value:
>Emotional feelings (affects) are intrinsic values that inform animals how they are faring in the quest to survive. The various positive affects indicate that animals are returning to \u201ccomfort zones\u201d that support survival, and negative affects reflect \u201cdiscomfort zones\u201d that indicate that animals are in situations that may impair survival. They are ancestral tools for living - evolutionary memories of such importance that they were coded into the genome in rough form (as primary brain processes), which are refined by basic learning mechanisms (secondary processes) as well as by higher-order cognitions/thoughts (tertiary processes). (Panksepp 2010).
Similarly, valence seems to be a mechanism the brain uses to determine or label salience, or phenomena worth paying attention to (J. C. Cooper and Knutson 2008), and to drive reinforcement learning (Bischoff-Grethe et al. 2009).
A common thread in these theories is that valence is entangled with, and perhaps caused by, an appraisal of a situation. Frijda describes this idea as the law of situated meaning: \u2018\u2018Input some event with its particular meaning; out comes an emotion of a particular kind\u2019\u2019 (Frijda 1988). Similarly, Clore et al. phrase this in terms of \u201cThe Information Principle\u201d, where \u201c[e]motional feelings provide conscious information from unconscious appraisals of situations.\u201d (Clore, Gasper, and Garvin 2001) Within this framework, positive valence is generally modeled as the result of an outcome being better than expected (Schultz 2015), or a surprising decrease in \u2018reward prediction errors\u2019 (RPEs) (Joffily and Coricelli 2013).
Computational affective neuroscience is a relatively new subdiscipline which attempts to formalize this appraisal framework into a unified model of cognitive-emotional-behavioral dynamics. A good example is \u201cMood as Representation of Momentum\u201d (Eldar et al. 2016), where moods (and valence states) are understood as pre-packaged behavioral and epistemic biases which can be applied to different strategies depending on what kind of \u2018reward prediction errors\u2019 are occurring. E.g., if things are going surprisingly well, the brain tries to take advantage of this momentum by shifting into a happier state that is more suited to exploration & exploitation. On the other hand, if things are going surprisingly poorly, the brain shifts into a \u201chunker-down\u201d mode which conserves resources and options.
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The Joffily and Coricelli paper is essentially an attempt to mathematically formalize your hypothesis in terms of prediction errors / Free Energy. It's a bit technical (building off prior work by Friston), but has some neat graphs: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article...", "timestamp": "1501631243"}, {"author": "Frederic", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891420668712", "anchor": "fb-891420668712", "service": "fb", "text": "Are very poor people who watch TV (and therefore have a better sense of how the wealthy live) less happy than those who don't? I would be surprised.
I think people have a very fine-grained sense of status like all primates and they don't want to have their relative status reduced. So if all of your peers are equally poor it may not matter if you are aware of the trappings of wealth but if you are the poorest in the neighborhood you will feel it keenly.", "timestamp": "1501637440"}, {"author": "opted out", "source_link": "#", "anchor": "unknown", "service": "unknown", "text": "→ this user has requested that their comments not be shown here", "timestamp": "1501643048"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891420668712&reply_comment_id=891480254302", "anchor": "fb-891420668712_891480254302", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I'd expect that if we (silently) prevented the introduction of TV to a poor culture the people would be less happy. TV has at least two roles here: it's enjoyable and it makes you more aware of inequality. I think the first aspect is stronger.", "timestamp": "1501677580"}, {"author": "Frederic", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891420668712&reply_comment_id=891482070662", "anchor": "fb-891420668712_891482070662", "service": "fb", "text": "→ There are also studies that ask people which of the following they would prefer: they and their peers both get $x, or they get $1.2x and their peers get $2x. People prefer the idea of a smaller absolute gain if they remain at the same relative level. That fits with the idea that people are primarily concerned with their status when making these calculations and doesn't really fit your imagination theory.", "timestamp": "1501678753"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891420668712&reply_comment_id=891482285232", "anchor": "fb-891420668712_891482285232", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Frederic: people definitely do care about status / positional goods, but there are cases that this can't explain. For example, if the cocoa tree goes extinct then I would expect there to be less happiness than if it had never existed.
(Seems like this ties in with loss aversion.)", "timestamp": "1501678966"}, {"author": "Frederic", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891420668712&reply_comment_id=891493003752", "anchor": "fb-891420668712_891493003752", "service": "fb", "text": "→ I'm less interested in the positive case than the negative case. That is where I was going with the tv idea. Your theory is if there are things that you know about but can't have that will make you less happy. My theory is that it only matters if people you consider your peers have these things and you don't. If no one around you has them then they don't matter.", "timestamp": "1501682920"}, {"author": "Frederic", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891420668712&reply_comment_id=891494760232", "anchor": "fb-891420668712_891494760232", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Also, would you predict thar, other factors being equal, smarter people would be unhappier, since they are more aware of what they don't have?", "timestamp": "1501683400"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891420668712&reply_comment_id=891497539662", "anchor": "fb-891420668712_891497539662", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Not sure, partly because I'm not sure what \"other factors being equal\" means here. Intelligence seems like it has effects on many aspects of people's lives.", "timestamp": "1501684562"}, {"author": "Frederic", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891420668712&reply_comment_id=891502794132", "anchor": "fb-891420668712_891502794132", "service": "fb", "text": "→ All right. What factors do you think would lead people to imagine themselves with better things and therefore be less happy than another comparable population?", "timestamp": "1501686891"}, {"author": "Xuan", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/891354431452?comment_id=891564071332", "anchor": "fb-891564071332", "service": "fb", "text": "This sounds rather like both anti-frustrationism / Buddhist notions of well-being! (except that the Buddhist recommendation is to practice not generating new preferences altogether (forgoing desire/aversion) and to learn to drop preferences when you lose something important (forgoing attachment)).", "timestamp": "1501706518"}]}