No doubt. It was kinda besides the point as i said. I was just playing devils advocate as I'm sure there's at least some situation or person where measuring neurotransmitters is more helpful than self reporting. Also it can be helpful in addition to self reporting.

But i would generally agree self reporting is much more valuable.

> Maybe you could argue machines measuring neurotransmitters can be better sometimes,

Possibly not, considering what we know of how neurotransmitter-increasing medications work. They don't cause an end to depression immediately after raising neurotransmitter levels. And, ironically, suicide risk goes up shortly after starting the meds.

I agree with you 100% im basically adding on to refuting klosnj11

Thats about as good as it gets. Maybe you could argue machines measuring neurotransmitters can be better sometimes, but the point is that you dont need access directly to someone subjective qualia to make good, helpful, meaningful scientific assessments of happiness. Meaningful inductive assessments can be made through self reporting and other assessment methods.

Klosnj11 is conflating science seeking general and useful understandings of happiness to a completely objective understanding of happiness. Just like the mustard manufacturer can study taste to improve it generally, but doesn't claim to objectively perfect taste.

She's exchanging a more subjective term with less subjective terms. Split a big question in to smaller, easier to study and quantify questions, study those, and gain insights about the big questions, perhaps allowing you to study that directly sometime in the future.

If a wall is too tall, carve steps in it.

> But i don't think people can make perfect assessments of their own happiness even with their qualia.

That is, though, about as good as it's going to get.

Presumably few would say they're unhappy when they're somehow secretly happy. Some more might say they're happy out of a belief they're supposed to be happy. Despite that, the person describing their own qualia has to be better than anyone else at knowing whether that assessment is right or not.

Easy to say that having google or Siri in your pocket. All forms of AI. And yet, we work longer hours for less pay than years past.

I think this could be used to replace an entire workforce at a big box retailer.

Hard to say, but some argue phones and other external devices are already types of augmentations. I think large language models like ChatGPT are rapidly becoming ubiquitous and this year for many it'll become normal to have an A.I. assistant handy at all times. There is a gold rush underway.

So, in so many ways we're already accepting them. We just currently don't have the tech to connect them to the brain well. I think this can surprisingly rapidly change once we can put 1000s of A.I. scientists to work.

Getting a model like GPT 3.5 there is not too difficult. Fine-tune on science papers, do reinforcement learning for math (it's not quite good at that, for the similar reasons diffusion models like Midjourney or Dall-E2 produce text-like gibberish) and give it access to the web and let it self-verify its output. That'd be a good start.

Oh nice! Thanks for sharing

This is like a light beer version of Time and its Discontents.

All of these measures need to be tied to something a little more concrete. I can imagine something along the lines of operationalising Max Neef's conception of human needs and satisfiers/unsatisfiers.

How soon does augmentation begin and how quickly would people accept it and grow it?

Really well put with the mustard analogy.

You don't need access to another person's qualia, to make reasonable judgements on happiness. Can you make perfect assessments of their happiness... No. But i don't think people can make perfect assessments of their own happiness even with their qualia.

Nobody is seeking perfect understanding of each persons subjective happiness, the same way a chef ain't seeking perfect understanding of every single persons subjective taste pallette. That doesnt mean you cant find patterns and techniques that tend to better peoples experience, and understanding the type of person it works for...And thats extremely valuable.

We can study the Qualia of others. Even if we cant experience others qualia exactly as they do, that does not mean we cannot make inductive assessments about it. This is the same mistake people make with the problem of induction... we cannot have perfect true knowledge using induction... but that does not mean we cannot possess knowledge and study things... it just means we can't have perfect knowledge, capital T truth. Yes, we cannot have perfect knowledge of someone's qualia of happiness... but thats meaningless since nothing in science claims or seeks that.

Sounds like she's exchanging one subjective term for another.

Very interesting article. Decided about halfway through I was going to remove the concept of time from my life as a way to get back to nature or a more natural way of life. Then put down the phone I was reading the article on and looked at my wrist to see what time it was. Regardless of the political tone of the article one has to admit. The hour and minute hands have made us their slaves. For better or worse.

And yet I guarantee you that chefs and condiment manufacturers alike do have ideas on how to make a good mustard.

We have one standard for measuring happiness- asking people if they're happy. It's essentially the same one we have for assessing pain. At that point, it's just a matter of figuring out what makes people, when able to freely say, say they're happy more than not.

MoWee

Yup. Nothing like pulling the pin and walking away. All done with a word. Well. 22 of them and a few directions. All handily er handy? But you need two eyes and a bit of the old greys to understand it. All those meanings. Yeah. You can’t measure unless you have a constant. We’ve been given loads. We just haven’t been told the truth of a constant and and the constant of the truth. Same for reality, really. And because we haven’t all been told the truth, we can’t handle reality. Which is why we are here. Learn to handle reality. After that, well, the universe is your oyster. And yeah, real warp travel.

We are the constant that observes. If that’s missing, well, where would life be? And if the observer informs, the rules change. For the better. You can trust me on that. Ask any quantum guy. Once a system has been observed, it has to change. If you know the possibilities, you can corner the universe at every turn. It then yields. All of her secrets.

Why?

Because the universe WANTS you to win. No leaving till you’ve got that. You. Are your own worst enemy. Defeat yourself and you win. Doesn’t matter about anything else (although that’s terribly good fun!) beat yourself beat the universe. It’s hard. But I did it. Someone has to lead the way.

God it’s beautiful here. (I still really prefer universe) She is a thing of beauty.

I'd love to be able to pick up what you're laying down, but it feels kinda snarky. I know this because I'm quite the snarker myself. In our personal spiritual practices my partner & I joke to "Keep the normies out."

Still, your comment interests me, and in some way i see something that I like, something you've said reverberates. You've got a point, and I think it's a good one. But,

It was verbose & terse at the same time, and I didn't exactly follow. I'm a CunningLingust, but sometimes metaphor still escapes me. I'm interested in what you have to say here though. Would you explain to me?
If not here feel free to DM.

MoWee

This is giving the clock too much credit. It's just a clock. If you want me to claim that hours of unpaid homemaking are a tyranny then blame the society that didn't pay them, not the hours.

> There's always been a cycle of conjuring a theory that needs to wait for experimental advancements to catch up. And I would agrue that this strongly propels science forward. If we name these theories as "bad science," then how would we ever advance?

There's a problem, though, isn't there, with a hypothesis that can be tested in theory but not in practice until some unknown point in the future? Especially if there's a risk of the theory being tweaked if the evidence doesn't come up - "ok, we didn't find what we were looking for with this particle collider, but if we build a bigger one we will..." (I think in Lakatos' terms that would be an "auxiliary hypothesis" created protect the core hypothesis.)

As the article points out this is a problem for Lakatos' ideas, as sometimes "degenerating" science does produce good results. Maybe that theory scientists have been pushing for a half a century without being empirically tested will turn out to be correct when the technology (or funding) is there. Or maybe you'll have wasted 50 years.

Thus this kind of science is risky. More risky than science which can be tested straight away, or in the near future. The article argues for honesty about this risk and a clear assessment of it when funding or supporting science.

To pick up on /u/ShalmaneserIII's comment, there's a difference between "can be tested now" and "can't be tested yet, but we can tell you how it should be done" and "can't be tested". The middle category falls somewhere between the ideal of the first and the junk of the last.

I dont see how breaking down happiness into different kinds and metrics will allow them to make it any less subjective. We can not truly measure anothers experience of happiness any better than we can measure their experience of the taste of mustard. We can learn how to trigger the experiences, but we cant actually study the qualia from the outside.

(1) Your comment suggests (even if you didn't explicitly state it) that the author hasn't taken more than 1 undergrad physics course. However, the author has a doctorate in chemical physics, and have written textbooks on physics that are published by Oxford university press. It's highly unlikely that he haven't taken any class in physics.

(2) If you didn't meant to suggest that the author is just a "wanna be philosopher of science" with no science education, then the sudden call for (even if hyperbolic) ban on phil majors has no relevance to OP.

(3) Moreover your comment also suggest that phil. majors are somehow the problem in some unique sense (why not ask for banning anyone who haven't taken a QM course from talking about QM). But you provided no example whatsoever of phil. majors in general (discounting one or two possible exceptions) causing ruckus spreading misinformation on QM. So it's not clear if you are even thinking of phil. majors or just random people in internet who engage in philosophy and QM (without being educated in either).

Your comment, thus, seems like either making unwarranted suggestions (that could have been easily fact-checked as /u/tiredstars suggested) or completely orthogonal to the OP article and its author.

Abstract:
Many social scientists have become interested in the possibility of studying happiness (i.e. subjective well-being) scientifically. This has motivated many individual studies but also the large and much-reported World Happiness Report. This movement has been criticised by two strands of philosophers. On the one hand, there are those who criticise underlying welfarism. On the other hand, others have criticised the field for studying a topic (“happiness”) that is impossible to study rigorously.
Anna Alexandrova argues that the latter concern is justifiable, but only partially so. There is no clear reason why the kinds of measures used by “happiness scientists” could not be used rigorously (e.g. asking people about their life satisfaction). However, happiness and well-being have many meanings in different contexts, and it is problematic to collapse all these pluralistic measures under one overarching “happiness” variable. Therefore, one can support the general project of the “science of happiness” but remain sceptical about single-variable such as “world’s happiest country” or the WELBY metrics adopted by the UK government.
However, most “science of happiness” reports make the questionable assumption that all of these metrics can be used to gauge a single underlying “happiness” (e.g. “what is the happiest country in the world?”) Instead, we need a pluralistic approach, where scientists tackle more specific questions around topics that fall under the concepts of happiness and wellbeing.

> Yes and no. Classes are one of many ways to learn.

And yet I’ve never once met a person who has self-taught themselves in QM whose comprehension wasn’t riddled with misconceptions and glaring holes. Not all fields lend themselves to independent study, and I think QM is especially difficult to learn well without deliberate guidance and feedback. I suppose it is technically possible to get that outside of taking classes, but I think uncommonly enough to be safely neglected.

> Just spending at least 100-200 hours familiarizing with the materials of a field can be enough if time to find a genuine hole in scientific understanding.

That depends greatly on the field, though, and I think tends to become less and less true over time as scientific knowledge and understanding grows.