Comment by snet0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snet0 | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself somewhat sympathetic to the view being put forward, but this is just lazy writing.

> How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can’t use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale.

All scales are arbitrary. We measure length in meters for no reason other than the meter is a nicely human-sized measurement. I'd maybe even argue that the definition of a scale is that it's arbitrary, a mapping of /something/ onto the number line chosen in a way that the numbers are within "human" range.

The real difference being highlighted isn't anything to do with measurement, it's just a difference in dimensions. It's very obvious how we can compare 2 things in space-time dimensions, either they happened at different times that we can map onto our time scale, or they occupy different sizes in space that we can map onto our space scale. Emotions aren't quantifiable in these dimensions, but that doesn't mean we cannot create a space in which they are.

If the author would argue that happiness isn't a "thing" in the way "this piece of paper" or "1945" is, I think that argument can be had, and has been taking place over thousands of years of philosophy. To not even raise the question, but (in my eyes) to assume the answer as obvious, is, as I said, lazy writing.

To add to your point, any psychology/sociology researcher trained in quantitative methods will immediately recognize that “happiness” is a latent variable.

Quantitative psych people are well versed in how to think about and model latent variables. They don’t go “oh shit! can’t measure happiness, I guess we’d better just make stuff up.”

I’m plenty critical of the research coming out of psych, but to pretend that the field remains naive to even the most basic principles of modeling is a bit ridiculous (and like you said, lazy)

Reproducibility in social psychology is less than 50% [1].

So yes I do think the majority of psych researchers are making stuff up (through p-hacking and other nefarious means) in order to get funding and tenure

1. https://replicationindex.com/2018/11/20/how-replicable-is-ps...

They could be fooling themselves too, not knowingly spreading falsehoods. A lot of of what we call p-hacking can happen by accident by somebody who isn't very good at statistics or just isn't being careful.

We do have replicable, quantifiable, social psychology. Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are infamous for that. Unfortunately whenever experiments are carried out, you get end up with an uproar over issues of privacy, accountability, and informed consent.

Spying and manipulation are not necessarily reproducible hypotheses. In case of FB and CA, external conditions changed.

You may be assigning more intent than is necessary to explain the (very real) reproducibility problem in psych.

Not to belabor this but to note the irony here: there is probably a similar psychological (ehem) phenomenon that happens to a psyc grad student who lets their presumptions bleed into their interpretation of a measurement.

> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

R. Feynman

> Reproducibility in social psychology is less than 50%.

That doesn't seem particularly terrible in comparison to scientific reproducibility in other fields. What am I missing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

People usually underestimate how difficult it is to do experiments, especially when you want to get quantitatively consistent results. Physics experiments sound easier than human experiments, but if you really do it and be serious with the numbers, you will find even high school physics experiments are really hard. For example, try to confirm F=ma, or measure local gravity to the third digit.

50% is reproducibility of experimental studies. There are fields don't even do experiment. There are fields don't even run statistics. There are fields don't even use logic.....

A question the 50% figure raises is - what is the reproducibility rate for “real” science? This is difficult to estimate. Considering the dramatic improvements in cancer therapy, one might argue that cancer research is a “real” science, but there are reproducibility issues in that field as well. [https://www.nature.com/news/cancer-reproducibility-project-r...] And the link to the replication index site connects us to an article about John Iaonnidis, who suggests that most medical research results are wrong. (The article concludes that perhaps only 27% are false discoveries.) So what is the threshold? As others have pointed out, it’s probably more about process than reproducibility, though reproducible results are certainly preferred.

I think that would depend on how much intersection there is between the sort of scientists doing non-replicable research (mostly in academia, it seems) and the sorts of scientists developing working cancer therapies (mostly in pharma?).

I don't know if arguments about "real" science are especially useful. The nature of science has changed a lot of over time and will presumably keep changing. It takes us into questions of whether fields that can't do experiments are "real" science, for example. It also assumes replicability is the only way science can't be "real" but there are some fields (e.g. COVID research!) where papers are usually replicable but that is meaningless because the methodology is unsound in other ways, i.e. you'd just be replicating their mistakes.

The biggest problems driving non-replicable research are the fact that so much "science" is now really just data analysis, and finding some spurious correlation that just about nudges over some arbitrary and very weak threshold for significance can be considered "science", even without anyone doing any kind of double check or followup. No real world experiment needs to be done at any point. And in some fields the connection to reality has been completely lost - public health is filled with papers that make predictions about the future trends in public data, and nobody ever follows up with papers that compute the correlation between the predictions and measured values. It would be easy, but they generally don't do it.

There are several high visibility papers on lack of reproducibility in drug development by Pharma, so I don't think there is a particular bias in less reproducible research. Indeed, since life sciences research in academia is almost all funded by the NIH, with grant reviews/renewals every 3-5 years, there is probably more scrutiny of academic research than commercial.

And they are basically the only field funding replication studies. That makes them more rigorous than many alternatives.

The happiness scale is arbitrary because it lacks reproducibility. The metric system is standardized such that every time you measure the length of something in the physical world that measurement is reproducible.

The problem there is that subject well-being is time-variant. Of course when I ask you at 3 week intervals "how are you feeling?", I'm going to get different answers. If I ask you 3 seconds apart, though (ignoring you getting annoyed at the question), would you not expect consistent results?

> The problem there is that subject well-being is time-variant.

> If I ask you 3 seconds apart, though [...] would you not expect consistent results?

I completely agree with your original comments about lazy writing by the OP. But these all seem besides the point.

Our bodies and minds go through all sorts of states, some cognitively introspectable, some not.

"Happiness", whatever it may be, is what it is and need not conform to your presumptions. That's the point of studying it. Nothing about its fluctuations or the way these are felt by an individual are a problem per se with the research. It just means it's hard to do, and we may not know a whole bunch about it.

I think this points more to the issue. "How are you feeling" is subjective.

As far as I am aware, there is no psychological measure/test which is not subjective. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

To me, this is why neurology is hard science and psychology is soft science.

Of course it's subjective -- this is the very point, to measure subjective experience.

This point seems to slip through these types of discussions, because people want to keep changing the focus of the research. When you change the topic from subjective experience to, say, neural properties, you're not studying the same thing anymore.

There are plenty of measures of subjective experience of happiness. We can debate the merits of these measures, but they exist. They're reproducible and you can scale them over time or across people.

If someone says they are miserable, and rates themself a 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, this has to be subjective. Are they lying? Perhaps, but then too maybe that radio signal you obtained is a microwave next door.

Units on many psychological measures could be obtained (see test equating) but there's not enough agreement on which measures to use, and in fact, use of multiple measures is encouraged because of variation in what might be an appropriate target of study (hedonic versus eudaimonic well-being for instance). Units in psychology are somewhat similar to where units of temperature were in the 18th or maybe 19th century.

Agree that "arbitrary" was a poor word choice, but it seems as though he meant something like "subjective", which is consonant with the rest of the article. I think differentiating subjective scales from objective scales isn't terribly fraught, and treating subjective measures as less rigorous than objective measures seems correct to me.

Calling happiness subjective feels weird to me. It's not like "How would you rate The Avengers?", I think asking "How would you rate how you feel at this moment?" is asking the subject to measure something objective about their well-being, no? Maybe I'm oversimplifying it.

I mean, all observations involve a subject. The question is whether there are other subjects that can observe an object and reach consensus about the object. If yes, then, in my view, it's objective. If not, then it's purely subjective.

I go for a run most days and my watch asks me how I feel afterward. I don't answer, because I really have no idea whether my "Good" answer one day corresponds to a "Good" answer on another day. Often, it probably doesn't. In my view, talking about subjective well-being is anything but simple.

> Calling happiness subjective feels weird to me.

It’s subjective because it cannot be universally and independently measured.

It’s not possible to measure the happiness of two individuals such that I can compare them against each other quantitatively and define who of the two is happier.

I can do that, however, with basically every physical measurement.

> a mapping of /something/ onto the number line chosen in a way that the numbers are within "human" range.

Can you even do this with happiness? What is a unit of happiness?

What is a unit of wealth? Took us a while but we figured out fiat currency.

Ok sure, so what is it then? The point is you need that unit before you can measure.

I’m not sure, I’m not a psychologist. I’m only arguing that such a unit could exist (either now or at some point in the future).

(If you’re asking about the units for wealth: USD, Euros, etc)

Ok I see, to clarify, I mean at the individual, concrete level, as oppose to statistical, and indirect measures of it. I really doubt there is anything, since it's subjective and we also don't know the underlying mechanisms of the mind which produce it.

Subjective well being (SWB) comes to mind but not sure if that fits your definition. There are many other similar measures, like the ladder question.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_well-being

That looks statistical analysis of some kind, it gives this example: > the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, lowered emotional well-being by 74%.

So it's not like it can assess this number for an individual, at least not without first comparing and contrasting it with every other person in some sample group.

In other words, a true unit of happiness, would allow a completely independent measure of any one individual's current state of happiness. Imagine something like a thermometer for happiness, you point it at someone and it reads out the units of happiness (over-simplifying the application to make the point). Therefore we're not even close to knowing what this is or how to measure it, and the way we really communicate around it is by using our own subjectivity of it and making correlations.

I think that is more like saying the average height.

The ladder question (a common tool for measuring SWB) is this:

    Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.
    The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
    On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (ladder-present)

https://news.gallup.com/poll/122453/understanding-gallup-use... On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? (ladder-future)

Most wealthy people do not feel wealthy though. This includes millionaires.

Assuming this is true: And...? Wealth in this context isn’t a feeling.

That's a pretty shitty unit. Using those units, it's nontrivial to even compare two measurements made in the same country with the same currency, only one generation apart in time. When dealing with a decent unit like meters, you don't need to choose from one of several competing models of distance-inflation to account for the difference in a meter in 2001 and 2021.

I didn’t say it was a good unit, just that it was one.

That being said, I’d argue “2001 dollars” is a unit, not “dollars”. You’ll often see data in econ journals cite something in that type of unit.

Another angle on this is that comparing wealth across time is nontrivial (and the money isn’t to blame). How do you compare the value of a iPhone in 2020 to a landline in 1980? It’s possible, but nontrivial. Our units (in some messy imperfect way) reflect that (and other factors).

> I’d argue “2001 dollars” is a unit,

Why though? Why dollars in a particular year, rather than dollars in general? Sure the value of a dollar changes from year to year, but the value of a dollar also changes constantly in any given year too. Over the past year, the value of a US dollar relative to a Euro has fluctuated by more than 10 cents. In fact the relative values of currencies fluctuate constantly, near-enough to instantaneously. But this isn't reflected in the pricing of most consumer goods; the price of common household goods in a grocery store might vary a few times a week, but not thousands of times an hour. So in one context the value of a dollar seems to vary constantly, but in another context the value of a dollar is substantially more stable. So a dollar doesn't even have a set particular value at any instant in time; it depends on what kind of store you're standing in.

If happiness is a metric with units even worse than this, then I see little hope for any scientific study of happiness.

There's no global reference frame for distance or wealth. You can't point to a spot in space and say "the Earth was here 1000 years ago". All you can say is that A is x meters from B, right now. And likewise you can't compare wealth now with wealth 50 years ago - it's not a coherent concept, when you could buy a house on a blue collar wage, but not a smartphone at any price. What you can do is say that person A is twice as wealthy as person B.

But as I describe in my other comment, the value of a dollar varies not only with time but also with location and context. There are places in America today where $200 a month from a blue collar job will keep a roof over your head. In other parts of the country, $200 is worth substantially less for the same purpose.

Say what you want about stellar kinematics, but measuring meters simply is not so fraught as this.

It is whatever the scale decides it is. A unit of mass isn't anything, either, unless you decide to use Planck units. But we have myriad units of emergent phenomena. This is just on a higher level of abstraction, and so it is harder, but I don't believe it's impossible.

Typically, you'd do Measurement System Analysis (MSA)[1] which includes things like repeatability, reproducibility, drift and linearity. A standard traceable to an authority such as NIST is needed to do this.

For length, MSA can be easily conducted. For happiness, what metrology system are you going to use? What's the proposed measurement method?

[1] MSA: https://www.metrology-journal.org/articles/ijmqe/pdf/2010/02...

I'm disappointed that the author didn't at least address his issues with operationalization. Leaving it out makes the peice read like a freshman essay.

The meter - while arbitrary as a UNIT of measurement - is defined. It is the length light will travel in a vacuum in 3.33ns ish. Whereas the unit of happiness has no such definition and varies from person to person.

How close are we to a black hole?

It's defined in terms of other units.

Of course, once you get to the second, we are now just measuring something, and our unit is based on counting a thing. But how do you measure something that can't be counted?

It’s an SI unit and directly defined through the speed of light which is a universal constant number.

While you need „second“ to define the „meter“, the former is not derived from other units but from an observation of nuclear reactions in Caesium.

SI units are now defined directly in terms of physical laws (no prototypes needed).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...

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