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The gains in happiness from liberal freedoms may be relatively small (they're quite large for individuals who remember living in a less free society, but that group will naturally die out), but they are definitely larger than the gains from increased wealth and ebb away more quickly as well. Liberalization of society is merely the result of a free market of ideas. It's weird that some people think that is a worthless exercise while they practically worship economic progress.

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Happiness research has lots of suggestions about how to make people happy: for example, increase their relationship satisfaction, work satisfaction, health, social activity, religiosity, level of gratitude, etc. Seems like the culture a person lives in has the potential to impact some of these.

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Some people on the left acutally see non-plastic nature of human nature as supporting their ideology. Here's Chomsky:

"A vision of a future social order is ... based on a concept of human nature. If, in fact, man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the "shaping of behavior" by the State authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community"

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I guess my point is that happiness is a poor gauge of both economic/material advance and other types of cultural change. I would not justify the former based upon happiness, nor would I attempt to justify or measure the effectiveness of re-engineering society based upon happiness surveys.

I would not use an accelerometer to measure latitude. I would use it as a procedural feedback mechanism as it reveals incremental movement in the desired direction.

Said another way, what if people weren't happier with economic progress either? Would this negate the value of prosperity?

Q "Hmm. Here we are on the North Pole and the accelerometers still read zero on average. Remind me again why we went north?"

A "Um, so half our babies would stop dying at birth, so we would not work 80 backbreaking hours a week, so we would not succumb to disease, so we could stay warm and secure, so we could pursue our own goals and aspirations, so we could....."

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I call citation needed on plasticity of happiness. The crown-jewel plasticity finding of anthropology is the variety of cultures that can stably exist at all. That doesn't imply anything about equality of happiness.

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Unfortunately, we don't know what the case is. There are various cases made. One is to improve the welfare of immigrants. That case is destroyed because the immigrants won't be much happier and in the short to intermediate term, the extant culture will be disrupted.

But another case is that the free movement of labor is economically efficient, which might remain defensible as making "our" society stronger.

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But you're ignoring the argument Robin Hanson presented. The argument is that all this apparently great cultural progress--except where it affects material well-being--is (not to put too fine a point on it) an ethnocentric conceit.

If cultural "progress" doesn't broadly serve human happiness, what's the point?

[My own doubt concerns that these reports of happiness may have little or nothing to do with happiness. New methods test happiness by asking about mood at random times, making the method closer to reality rather than—as with questions based on long-term assessments—rationalization. These methods aren't commonly applied to different cultures. However, the anthropologists' reports aren't based, either, on long-term questionnaires.]

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Yes, but it also destroys the case for closing our borders.

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No, I am suggesting using something which constantly recalibrates back toward the mean is a terrible gauge of social policy. It excuses great harm and negates great gains in human progress.

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I think people partly answer questions about happiness through the idea of "do I have a right to complain compared to other people around me". This is why people are less happy in more inequal societies and why even people women who get beat up everyday by their husband still say they can't complain when they know all the other women in the neighborhood constantly get beaten too. Access to knowledge of other cultures (ie. learning that the social elite in your own culture are lying through their teeth when they say things can only work in one certain way) then quickly brings downward changes to the happyness levels of such people. Social pariahs also show us what happens when people don't have the affirmation that others have it just as bad as them: LGBTs (2-5% of a population), atheists/agnostics (percentage of population depending on accessibility of scientific knowledge, etc... but always above zero) untouchables and slaves outright say they are unhappy in their traditional conservative societies.

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Said another way, even if one is a utilitarian, longer term happiness measures are terrible gauges because they are constantly reverting back to their baseline.

I think Robin would say they revert to baseline because happiness itself reverts. You seem to be suggesting that it's a measurement artifact. What are your reasons?

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There is probably a divide between happy, qua not depressed, and happy, qua would not have wanted things different. There seems to .ge a certain homeostasis to emotional happiness.

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People do indeed keep telling me that there is an unbridgeable is-ought gap, and I do nonetheless keep noticing that if you go into a bookshop there are books on how you ought to cook, get dates, or write software.

The idea that ethics fulfils a job is entirely compatible with the idea that there are ethical facts, ie facts about which ethics work, and you offer such a proposition in your argument about conservatism.

...which is shallow. Liberals don't have to reject the idea that ethics is social technology, and can even turn the tables on conservatives by arguing that their ethics is better adapted to modern conditions.

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Sorry, ipad user error.

I am not sure what "making your society physically stronger" means. The concept of the hedonic treadmill reveals that people tend to be attracted to a genetic baseline of happiness which is resilient against change or environmental conditions. If they routinely lost half their kids to natural causes before the age of five, or were forced into arranged weddings or forced to wear burkas and remain in the house all day, overall or average happiness wouldn't be all that different.

This just points to the folly of putting too much emphasis on happiness measures to evaluate social outcomes. Said another way, even if one is a utilitarian, longer term happiness measures are terrible gauges because they are constantly reverting back to their baseline. It's like using an accelerometer to measure latitude.

Yes people are plastic, but not totally so (blank slates). Cultures and institutions aren't totally plastic either. Path dependencies do exist and the past matters. But happiness isn't that different between the average 1930s Nazi and the current average east coast progressive liberal. Yet they reside/resided in very different cultures with very different values, habits and outcomes.

An accelerometer is useful. But only to an extent. In the end we need to discover where it is we want to go and figure out how it is to get there. This is a complex and greatly decentralized and emergent process which involves concepts which are both conservative and liberal.

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Conservatives tend to rely on the wisdom of tradition, in which one might guess that ethical rules have reasoning behind them but we don't need to relitigate the pros and cons.

It can be hard at the object level to distinguish rule utilitarianism from deontology.

Although I don't think the correlation between meta-ethics and politics is strong, conservative versus legal moral reasoning may be most transparent in the debate about torture, which Justice Scalia (an unquestionable conservative) refused in an interview to call "terrible," averting to a Jack Bauer episode. That is, his justification was clearly utilitarian. The liberals, on the other hand, have tried to have it both ways: torture is wrong on principle, but the main investigation is whether it works.

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Um... Haven't you just used the hedonic treadmill to argue for

I am not sure what "making your society physically stronger" means.

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