>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

>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).