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It’s really hard to form these arguments and hypotheses rigorously, and I rarely see anyone try to do so. What does it mean to ask “were we happier before the a

by baddox 9y ago

It’s really hard to form these arguments and hypotheses rigorously, and I rarely see anyone try to do so. What does it mean to ask “were we happier before the agricultural revolution than we are now?” Are we talking about the mean happiness of all humans at one instant? If that’s our only goal, maybe we can achieve it by killing or sterilizing everyone below a certain level of happiness, but obviously that goes against most people’s moral beliefs. Or are we talking about maximizing the sum of all humans’ happiness? If that’s our only goal, maybe we can achieve it by maximizing birth rates and thus maximizing the human population regardless of each human’s quality of life, but obviously that also goes against most of our moral beliefs. Perhaps we can get around this reductio ad absurdum by allowing for negative happiness values, e.g. for people born into starvation or poverty, but calculating an absolute utility value for each human is difficult or impossible anyway (which affects all of these proposals). Or how about Pareto efficiency? If our only goal is to achieve a state wherein no one’s happiness can be increased without decreasing someone else’s happiness, that could perhaps be achieved by having one rich despot on whom everyone else is dependent, which again goes against most people’s moral beliefs.

baddox 9y ago
One thought experiment occurs to me: would you rather be born to a random pair of parents in the world now, or a random pair of parents 15,000 years ago? This seems like a very personal way to phrase the central question: do you believe that humans were happier then or now? Granted, I suspect most people reading this would have the same gut reaction as me: to choose being born to random parents now. But how much of that is influenced by our experiences with and dependence on modern society? Most readers of this comment are probably well above the current global average of quality of life according to any plausible definition. Perhaps people currently living in poverty would have different gut reactions to the proposal. It’s outside the scope of this article, but the question could be extended into the future, where we have even less data (none). Would you rather be born to random parents now, or random parents some period in the future?
tomxor 9y ago
>It’s really hard to form these arguments and hypotheses rigorously, and I rarely see anyone try to do so. What does it mean to ask “were we happier before the agricultural revolution than we are now?” >Are we talking about the mean happiness of all humans at one instant? If that’s our only goal, maybe we can achieve it by killing or sterilizing everyone below a certain level of happiness, but obviously that goes against most people’s moral beliefs. While the interviewer was clearly pushing for comparisons of happiness in modern civilisation, I don't feel that either participant in the conversation were attempting to rigorously quantify it... That would seem as fruitless an endeavour as attempting to quantify broad intelligence. The details are not only subjective, but in this case likely to group quite disparate "wants" for happiness due to experiencing an entirely different lifestyles. They are not all (or hardly at all) directly comparable, but it's interesting to contemplate the differences to see what we have gained and lost. In relation to happiness: the most interesting "correction" discussed is how the transition to agriculture clearly and quantifiably did _not_ provide an immediate improvement in quality of life (and most likely by proxy happiness), bone records show that undernourishment was an effect of becoming an early member of agricultural society. We tend to think of hunter gathers as we used to think about neanderthals (as being obsolete, rather than simply different). Civilisation clearly has many advantages that are not possible in a hunter gatherer society, but even in it's evolved form mostly void of the initial malnutrition and disease has many side effects which are not present in hunter gatherer society that are not necessarily advantages. Likewise hunter gatherer lifestyles have advantages that are not practically possible in modern civilisation. I guess my point is, they are different, and it's important to think of them as different rather than obsolete and degenerate as most people do... even trying to compare them in terms of crude quantifiers such as "happiness" seems wrong in this sense (for better or worse).

by baddox 9y ago

baddox 9y ago

One thought experiment occurs to me: would you rather be born to a random pair of parents in the world now, or a random pair of parents 15,000 years ago? This seems like a very personal way to phrase the central question: do you believe that humans were happier then or now? Granted, I suspect most people reading this would have the same gut reaction as me: to choose being born to random parents now. But how much of that is influenced by our experiences with and dependence on modern society? Most readers of this comment are probably well above the current global average of quality of life according to any plausible definition. Perhaps people currently living in poverty would have different gut reactions to the proposal. It’s outside the scope of this article, but the question could be extended into the future, where we have even less data (none). Would you rather be born to random parents now, or random parents some period in the future?

tomxor 9y ago

>It’s really hard to form these arguments and hypotheses rigorously, and I rarely see anyone try to do so. What does it mean to ask “were we happier before the agricultural revolution than we are now?” >Are we talking about the mean happiness of all humans at one instant? If that’s our only goal, maybe we can achieve it by killing or sterilizing everyone below a certain level of happiness, but obviously that goes against most people’s moral beliefs. While the interviewer was clearly pushing for comparisons of happiness in modern civilisation, I don't feel that either participant in the conversation were attempting to rigorously quantify it... That would seem as fruitless an endeavour as attempting to quantify broad intelligence. The details are not only subjective, but in this case likely to group quite disparate "wants" for happiness due to experiencing an entirely different lifestyles. They are not all (or hardly at all) directly comparable, but it's interesting to contemplate the differences to see what we have gained and lost. In relation to happiness: the most interesting "correction" discussed is how the transition to agriculture clearly and quantifiably did _not_ provide an immediate improvement in quality of life (and most likely by proxy happiness), bone records show that undernourishment was an effect of becoming an early member of agricultural society. We tend to think of hunter gathers as we used to think about neanderthals (as being obsolete, rather than simply different). Civilisation clearly has many advantages that are not possible in a hunter gatherer society, but even in it's evolved form mostly void of the initial malnutrition and disease has many side effects which are not present in hunter gatherer society that are not necessarily advantages. Likewise hunter gatherer lifestyles have advantages that are not practically possible in modern civilisation. I guess my point is, they are different, and it's important to think of them as different rather than obsolete and degenerate as most people do... even trying to compare them in terms of crude quantifiers such as "happiness" seems wrong in this sense (for better or worse).