'If I had to point to the thing most likely to be meaningful [trimmed] I would pick the conscious experience of pleasure.' - Eliezer Yudkowsky

Scientists, in particular, psychologists, study happiness in a disciplined manner. Could they advise on how to live a more pleasurable life? Firstly, there are several kinds of psychologists with different kinds of training. Happiness in the mentally unhealthy is studied by clinical psychologists and happiness in the general population is studied by positive psychologists. Although the effective of positive psychology interventions is often exaggerated and, there is underwhelming evidence for typical clinical psychology interventions in improving traits associated with greater well-being in general populations, these psychological specializations are entirely relevant in unraveling the science of well-being.

Scientifically, the empirical determinants of subjective well-being are established. The PERMA framework describes a theoretical route to happiness: positive emotions (p), engagement (e), relationships ®, meaning (m) and achievements (a). In practice, the problem space remains large.

What is pleasure?  Terms such as well-being, satisfaction, flourishing, welfare, wellness, happiness, and pleasure have yet to be consistently disambiguated in common parlance or across relevant academic disciplines such as psychology, economics and philosophy. Even when each term is used consistently, the research protocols that measure them may or may not be meaningfully different.

There are some meaningful differences that I will disambiguate here. Consider the following claim: People typically claim that a good weather or climate make them and others happier, but they, in fact, do not. Could that be true?

Greg Henriques writes for Psychology Today:

‘Nobel Prize winning researcher, Daniel Kahneman, explores what he calls, “objective happiness”. Kahneman has discovered that there really are two systems of mentation that relate to feeling good. The first is the actual here-and-now experiencing of the feeling. The second is the remembering, reflecting, narrating system that decides how satisfied we are with the experience and uses that reflection to decide what was good for us. Psychological researchers have documented that these two systems are quite different from one another.’

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) pages on wellbeing and happiness confirm that conceptional differences between different kinds of happiness are yet to be established, In addition to differences between reflective and moment-to-moment evaluations of one’s happiness, well-being can be differentially reported:

• by oneself, or another person

• inferred from neuroimaging,

• from sensory input (pain, pleasure),

• inferred from cognitive structure (dysfunctional thinking, delusion),

• inferred from virtue (is prayer inherently instrumental to well-being?),

• duration of the experience,

• impact on other factors (e.g. personal agency, power),

• repetitiveness (is pleasure derived from addiction incompatible with happiness?),

• objectivity (is ‘healthy eating’ or ‘sex’ ‘always’ pleasurable?),

• whether that experience is altruistic or egoistic, whether happiness reflects an emotional state (affect-based account),

• or a cognitive judgement (life satisfaction account), describable and indescribable

Are these differences meaningful? Yes, for instance, SEP reports that the affective and life satisfaction views of happiness differ meaningfully on important questions, as in the case of income and happiness:

'Surveying large numbers of Americans in one case, and what is claimed to be the first globally representative sample of humanity in the other, these studies found that income does indeed correlate substantially (.44 in the global sample), at all levels, with life satisfaction—strictly speaking, a “life evaluation” measure that asks respondents to rate their lives without saying whether they are satisfied. Yet the correlation of household income with the affect measures is far weaker: globally, .17 for positive affect, –.09 for negative affect; and in the United States, essentially zero above $75,000 (though quite strong at low income levels). If the results hold up, the upshot appears to be that income is pretty strongly related to life satisfaction, but weakly related to emotional well-being, at least above a certain threshold.'

I believe the affective view, rather than the life satisfaction view is the most proximate to that unit of utility that individuals are driven to optimise for.  Could the affective view of happiness be more reliable than the life satisfaction view, due to greater propensity for cognitive bias in the later? While, well-being related cognitions affect well-being related emotions, as cognitive-behavioural therapies demonstrate, I expect that is less so than than their propensity to affect other well-being related cognitions.

'One possible source of error is that this study might exaggerate the relationship between life satisfaction and material attainments through the use of a “ladder” scale for life evaluation, ladders being associated with material aspirations'.

Since I am partial to the affective view of happiness, one may assume I am partial to its typical method of elicitation which is self-report. However,  I am uncertain of this approach:

The lay conception of emotions (affect) is that they are discrete. It is typical, in everyday language, just as in research, to use research protocols that accept answers such as: "I am happy, or I am sad, but not both simultaneously", or 'I am 7 on a 1-10 scale of happiness (likert)'. This does not reflect the complexity of my own judgments about my emotional satisfaction at a given moment. On the other hand, I am writing on the topic, and may be more prone to psychologist’s fallacy (or as it is called on LessWrong: ‘typical mind fallacy’, of which it is a subset)

One may object that experiences such as pain are unpleasant but are not necessarily emotional. I say that if a pain does not reflect in an emotional register, perceived as aversive, or desirable, then, tautologically, it is not inherently undesirable. One may feel a sore muscle while exercising and feel proud. One may associate the experience of pain with death which in turn arouses an aversive emotion, but that does not define pain, even if it may be its default mode of operation.  

Finally, the awareness of a valenced emotion is important. This may reflect in longevity (someone who experiences a pleasurable emotion for a longer time may be meaningfully happier), but may also reflect in a subjective feeling (someone who experiences hours of pain on a bad hallucinogenic trip that truly lasted 5 minutes may be unhappier than someone who’s experience of pain on a comparable trip lasted 5 subjective minutes).

My understanding of well-being, in turn, informs my preferences about different metrics such as 'DALY's' and 'QALY's'. I am so uncertain about how my personal theory of value relates to philanthropic opportunities. Can anyone recommend a suitable metric based on my understanding of well-being? Perhaps you can point out some weaknesses in my understanding so that I reform my opinion, or perhaps you have learned something?

It has been suggested that the revealed preferences of individuals are an adequate resolution to this problem. That is, the idea that when someone is free to choose what to do, what they do is what gives them happiness. While I do believe happiness is subjective, I am skeptical that preferences are necessarily revealed by action, due to the instances of ego-dystonic actions like smoking cigarettes. Furthermore, the level of one’s anticipation isn’t a reliable indication of the ultimate level of gratification. On the other hand, the effectiveness of GiveDirectly's unconditional cash transfers, which give recipients considerable freedom of choice, is demonstrated with participants reporting lower levels of psychological distress. From memory, they use the K10 or another KSomething tool, which screens for anxiety and depression.

Thank you!