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Comment by ewestern | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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