Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Update from the Happier Lives Institute, published by ClareDonaldson, MichaelPlant on the AI Alignment Forum.
Summary
This post is an update on the progress and plans of the Happier Lives Institute (HLI), particularly focussing on our ongoing research and projects for the rest of 2020. Our last post on the forum was in June 2019, and our strategy has changed enough since then to warrant a new post. We welcome feedback on our plans.
We are a research organisation searching for the most effective methods to improve global well-being. We are doing this by using subjective well-being (SWB) - self-reported happiness and life satisfaction - as the key measure of value in impact evaluation. We think there's a strong theoretical case that SWB is the best way to measure how people's lives go. As effective altruists haven't made much use of this approach, or the existing social science evidence on it, we are exploring what it would look like to do cause prioritisation in terms of SWB.
Currently, our two main research projects are: (1) theoretical research into SWB and its measurement, (2) evaluating various life-improving interventions, e.g. cash transfers, in terms of SWB.
Our secondary projects explore promising areas when viewed through the SWB lens: (3) evaluating promising mental health programmes, and (4) broad but shallow cause reports into pain, mental health, and positive education.
While HLI is interested in mental health, we do not see ourselves as "the EA mental health org”, but as conducting global priorities research.
Our three staff members are conducting projects 1 and 2; volunteers are working on projects 3 and 4. We have room for more funding in 2020.
Our motivation
Many people aligned with effective altruism (EA) aim to maximise well-being. A common approach in impact evaluation is to measure the changes in people’s health or wealth and use these as proxies for well-being. For example: the use of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) is fairly routine; GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness model converts outcomes into the equivalent of doubling consumption and averting the deaths of under-5s.
While health and wealth clearly contribute to well-being, few would accept they are, in the end, what ultimately matters (i.e. are intrinsically valuable). Hence, the further challenge is to determine how much impact those, as well as other goods, directly have on well-being, so we can make trade-offs between them.
To do this, we could rely on the hypothetical or actual choices that either decision-makers or members of the public make (see some of GiveWell’s recent discussion). However, there are several reasons to believe that human biases may lead individuals to make poor assessments (e.g. Wikipedia article on affective forecasting). We do not clearly choose what is best for us.
An alternative is to ask people about their lives as they live them. Subjective well-being (SWB) is an umbrella term that includes self-reported life satisfaction and happiness data. We expect most readers would agree that well-being consists in happiness or life satisfaction, at least in part. Research into SWB is rising quickly in academia; over 170,000 books and articles have been published on the topic in the last 15 years (Diener et al., 2018).
EA organisations have not (yet) made much use of the existing work on SWB to determine the priorities, and this may lead us to different and surprising conclusions. Therefore, we think that exploring the use of SWB in determining our priorities is a project with high expected value.
At HLI, we plan to spend the bulk of our research time over the next year on projects that show how and why subjective well-being can be used to evaluate impact in areas already of interest to EAs, for instance, the effect on SWB from ca...
view more