Categoría: Sentience in Humans

In Simon Knutsson‘s words:

That happiness and suffering are measurable, in principle, to the extent that is required to talk about the net balance among several individuals is highly controversial and widely rejected. That is, it is controversial that they are (in principle) measurable to the required degree in an objective, non-arbitrary, scientific way that does not involve value judgements on the part of the person doing the measurement. One could say «I assign number –10 to Ann’s suffering and +5 to Ben’s happiness, and then I add them together. These numbers are intertwined with my values, and others might assign different numbers depending on their values.» Although that might be the best we can do, it does not count as measurement in the objective sense that we are concerned with […].

Economist Yew-Kwang Ng says that the following statement is representative of the typical economics textbook view: «Today, no one really believes that we can actually measure utils.» He continues that the probably most widely used textbook says that «economists today generally reject the notion of a cardinal, measurable, utility.» For the kinds of claims discussed above, we would need utilities to be measurable on a strong kind of interpersonal cardinal scale (an interpersonally additive ratio scale), which is widely rejected by economists.
Ng adds that this skepticism about measurability is also «very common» among «sociologists and psychologists who study happiness.»

Some history is interesting here. The early utilitarians of the 19th century, such as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, did not seem worried by interpersonal comparisons of utility. But as Bergström points out, «in the 20th century, things have changed a great deal. Now the dominant view — at least among economists — seems to be that interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible or necessarily subjective and unscientific.»

Of course, there is not complete consensus on the matter; some believe that happiness and suffering (or utility) can be measured to the extent required to talk about the net balance or amounts among several individuals. Philosophers generally seem to be somewhat more optimistic than economists.

Source: https://foundational-research.org/measuring-happiness-and-suffering/

I’ve never had a kidney stone. Thank God. According to Quora responses to the question «How painful are kidney stones?» they are about as painful as it gets. They’re the most painful thing a person can experience naturally, leaving aside torture and violent body-dismembering events. Many say they often get to be «10/10 pain». That’s clearly an ethical catastrophe given that 10% of people experience them at least once during their lifetime.

Someone described the experience of having a kidney stone as «indistinguishable from being stabbed with a white-hot-glowing knife that’s twisted into your insides non-stop for hours».

I wonder whether from a compassionate (utilitarian/consequentialist) point of view, it would *really* pay off to have as a priority «adopt a life-style that minimizes the chances of kidney stones».

It’s likely that the reason why we do not hear about this is because (1) trauma often leads to suppressed memories, (2) people don’t like sharing their most vulnerable moments, and (3) memory is state-dependent (you cannot easily recall the pain of kidney stones for the same reason you can’t recall the qualia of your LSD trip: you’ve lost a tether/handle/trigger for it, as it is an alien state-space on a wholly different scale of intensity than everyday life). If so, maybe that’s to our detriment. Perhaps it’s worth taking these reports *very* seriously, lest we become victims ourselves.

—Andres Gomez Emilsson

Read more

Two hundred ninety-one lay persons and 10 forensic pathologists rated the lethality, time, and agony for 28 methods of suicide for 4117 cases of completed suicide in Los Angeles County in the period 1988-1991. Whereas pathologists provided consistent ratings, lay persons demonstrated extreme variability and a tendency to inflate ratings of all three dimensions. Significant gender differences emerged, with females rating frequently used suicide methods more similarly to pathologists than the males did. Males who suicided used the most lethal and quickest methods whereas females selected methods varying in lethality, duration, and agony. African Americans were overrepresented in the use of the most lethal and quickest methods.

Read more

Graph of causes of death in humans by Mike Huemer

Text by Mike Huemer:

What’s killing us? I made the following graph. I include the top ten causes of death in the U.S., plus homicide and illegal drug overdoses, because the latter two are actually discussed in political discourse.

Observations:

1. The top causes of death almost never appear in political discourse or discussions of social problems. They’re almost all diseases, and there is almost no debate about what should be done about them. This is despite that they are killing vastly more people than even the most destructive of the social problems that we do talk about. (Illegal drugs account for 0.7% of the death rate; murder, about 0.6%.)

2. This is not because there is nothing to be done about the leading causes of death. Changes in diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes can make very large differences to your risk of heart disease, cancer, and other major diseases, and this is well-known.

3. It’s also not because it’s uncontroversial what we should do about them, or because everybody already knows. The government could, for example, try to discourage tobacco smoking, alcohol use, and overeating, and encourage exercise. There are many ways this could be attempted. Perhaps the government could spend more money on trying to cure the leading diseases. There obviously are policies that could attempt to address these problems, and it would certainly not be uncontroversial which ones, if any, should be adopted. Those who support social engineering by the government might be expected to be campaigning for the government to address the things that are killing most of us.

4. Most of these leading killers are themselves mainly caused by old age. If “Old Age” were a category, it would be causing by far the majority of deaths. Again, it’s not the case that nothing could be done about this. We could be doing much more medical research on aging.

5. It’s also not that we just don’t care about diseases. *Some* diseases are treated as political issues, such that there are activists campaigning for more attention and more money to cure them. There are AIDS activists, but there aren’t any nephritis activists. There are breast cancer walks, but there aren’t any colon cancer walks.

6. Hypothesis: We don’t much care about the good of society. Refinement: Love of the social good is not the main motivation for (i) political action, and (ii) political discourse. We don’t talk about what’s good for society because we want to help our fellow humans. We talk about society because we want to align ourselves with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself *against*, and you don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.

In conclusion, this sucks. Because we actually have real problems that require attention. If we won’t pay attention to a problem just because it kills a million people, but we need it also to invoke some ideological feeling of righteousness, then the biggest problems will continue to kill us. And by the way, the smaller problems that we actually pay attention to probably won’t be solved either, because all our ‘solutions’ will be designed to flatter us and express our ideologies, rather than to actually solve the problems.

— Mike Huemer