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I consider myself somewhat sympathetic to the view being put forward, but this is just lazy writing. > How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can’t use
by snet0 5y ago
I consider myself somewhat sympathetic to the view being put forward, but this is just lazy writing.
> How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can’t use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale.
All scales are arbitrary. We measure length in meters for no reason other than the meter is a nicely human-sized measurement. I'd maybe even argue that the definition of a scale is that it's arbitrary, a mapping of /something/ onto the number line chosen in a way that the numbers are within "human" range.
The real difference being highlighted isn't anything to do with measurement, it's just a difference in dimensions. It's very obvious how we can compare 2 things in space-time dimensions, either they happened at different times that we can map onto our time scale, or they occupy different sizes in space that we can map onto our space scale. Emotions aren't quantifiable in these dimensions, but that doesn't mean we cannot create a space in which they are.
If the author would argue that happiness isn't a "thing" in the way "this piece of paper" or "1945" is, I think that argument can be had, and has been taking place over thousands of years of philosophy. To not even raise the question, but (in my eyes) to assume the answer as obvious, is, as I said, lazy writing.
- aaron-santos 5y agoI'm disappointed that the author didn't at least address his issues with operationalization. Leaving it out makes the peice read like a freshman essay.
- peterthehacker 5y agoThe happiness scale is arbitrary because it lacks reproducibility. The metric system is standardized such that every time you measure the length of something in the physical world that measurement is reproducible.
- snet0 5y agoThe problem there is that subject well-being is time-variant. Of course when I ask you at 3 week intervals "how are you feeling?", I'm going to get different answers. If I ask you 3 seconds apart, though (ignoring you getting annoyed at the question), would you not expect consistent results?
- amirkdv 5y ago> The problem there is that subject well-being is time-variant. > If I ask you 3 seconds apart, though [...] would you not expect consistent results? I completely agree with your original comments about lazy writing by the OP. But these all seem besides the point. Our bodies and minds go through all sorts of states, some cognitively introspectable, some not. "Happiness", whatever it may be, is what it is and need not conform to your presumptions. That's the point of studying it. Nothing about its fluctuations or the way these are felt by an individual are a problem per se with the research. It just means it's hard to do, and we may not know a whole bunch about it.
- pedalpete 5y agoI think this points more to the issue. "How are you feeling" is subjective. As far as I am aware, there is no psychological measure/test which is not subjective. Please correct me if I'm wrong. To me, this is why neurology is hard science and psychology is soft science.
- derbOac 5y agoOf course it's subjective -- this is the very point, to measure subjective experience. This point seems to slip through these types of discussions, because people want to keep changing the focus of the research. When you change the topic from subjective experience to, say, neural properties, you're not studying the same thing anymore. There are plenty of measures of subjective experience of happiness. We can debate the merits of these measures, but they exist. They're reproducible and you can scale them over time or across people. If someone says they are miserable, and rates themself a 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, this has to be subjective. Are they lying? Perhaps, but then too maybe that radio signal you obtained is a microwave next door. Units on many psychological measures could be obtained (see test equating) but there's not enough agreement on which measures to use, and in fact, use of multiple measures is encouraged because of variation in what might be an appropriate target of study (hedonic versus eudaimonic well-being for instance). Units in psychology are somewhat similar to where units of temperature were in the 18th or maybe 19th century.
- proc0 5y ago> a mapping of /something/ onto the number line chosen in a way that the numbers are within "human" range. Can you even do this with happiness? What is a unit of happiness?
- ExtraE 5y agoWhat is a unit of wealth? Took us a while but we figured out fiat currency.
- proc0 5y agoOk sure, so what is it then? The point is you need that unit before you can measure.
- ExtraE 5y agoI’m not sure, I’m not a psychologist. I’m only arguing that such a unit could exist (either now or at some point in the future). (If you’re asking about the units for wealth: USD, Euros, etc)
- proc0 5y agoOk I see, to clarify, I mean at the individual, concrete level, as oppose to statistical, and indirect measures of it. I really doubt there is anything, since it's subjective and we also don't know the underlying mechanisms of the mind which produce it.
- ewestern 5y agoAgree that "arbitrary" was a poor word choice, but it seems as though he meant something like "subjective", which is consonant with the rest of the article. I think differentiating subjective scales from objective scales isn't terribly fraught, and treating subjective measures as less rigorous than objective measures seems correct to me.
- snet0 5y agoCalling happiness subjective feels weird to me. It's not like "How would you rate The Avengers?", I think asking "How would you rate how you feel at this moment?" is asking the subject to measure something objective about their well-being, no? Maybe I'm oversimplifying it.
- ewestern 5y agoI mean, all observations involve a subject. The question is whether there are other subjects that can observe an object and reach consensus about the object. If yes, then, in my view, it's objective. If not, then it's purely subjective. I go for a run most days and my watch asks me how I feel afterward. I don't answer, because I really have no idea whether my "Good" answer one day corresponds to a "Good" answer on another day. Often, it probably doesn't. In my view, talking about subjective well-being is anything but simple.
- cbmuser 5y ago> Calling happiness subjective feels weird to me. It’s subjective because it cannot be universally and independently measured. It’s not possible to measure the happiness of two individuals such that I can compare them against each other quantitatively and define who of the two is happier. I can do that, however, with basically every physical measurement.
- baron_harkonnen 5y agoTo add to your point, any psychology/sociology researcher trained in quantitative methods will immediately recognize that “happiness” is a latent variable. Quantitative psych people are well versed in how to think about and model latent variables. They don’t go “oh shit! can’t measure happiness, I guess we’d better just make stuff up.” I’m plenty critical of the research coming out of psych, but to pretend that the field remains naive to even the most basic principles of modeling is a bit ridiculous (and like you said, lazy)
- andreilys 5y agoReproducibility in social psychology is less than 50% [1]. So yes I do think the majority of psych researchers are making stuff up (through p-hacking and other nefarious means) in order to get funding and tenure 1. https://replicationindex.com/2018/11/20/how-replicable-is-psychological-science/ https://replicationindex.com/2018/11/20/how-replicable-is-ps...
- amirkdv 5y agoYou may be assigning more intent than is necessary to explain the (very real) reproducibility problem in psych. Not to belabor this but to note the irony here: there is probably a similar psychological (ehem) phenomenon that happens to a psyc grad student who lets their presumptions bleed into their interpretation of a measurement. > The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. R. Feynman
- CharlesW 5y ago> Reproducibility in social psychology is less than 50%. That doesn't seem particularly terrible in comparison to scientific reproducibility in other fields. What am I missing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- temp8964 5y agoPeople usually underestimate how difficult it is to do experiments, especially when you want to get quantitatively consistent results. Physics experiments sound easier than human experiments, but if you really do it and be serious with the numbers, you will find even high school physics experiments are really hard. For example, try to confirm F=ma, or measure local gravity to the third digit.
- tuismuggler 5y agoThe meter - while arbitrary as a UNIT of measurement - is defined. It is the length light will travel in a vacuum in 3.33ns ish. Whereas the unit of happiness has no such definition and varies from person to person.
- skj 5y agoHow close are we to a black hole?
- snet0 5y agoIt's defined in terms of other units.
- snet0 5y agoOf course, once you get to the second, we are now just measuring something, and our unit is based on counting a thing. But how do you measure something that can't be counted?
- cbmuser 5y agoIt’s an SI unit and directly defined through the speed of light which is a universal constant number. While you need „second“ to define the „meter“, the former is not derived from other units but from an observation of nuclear reactions in Caesium.
- alentist 5y agoSI units are now defined directly in terms of physical laws (no prototypes needed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_base_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...