Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Actions speak louder than words, and so drug overdoses must speak louder than a poll. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy in the USA was stagnant or falling because of the upsurge in "deaths of despair". This is pre covid:

https://www.newsweek.com/what-so-called-deaths-despair-exper...

A poll has limited value and people are famously bad at self-reported happiness. There have simply been too many cases of people saying they are happy with their lives and two years later they commit suicide, or kill their spouse. Some researchers have argued that self reported happiness is worthless.

Instead, look at actions. After the collapse of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union men over the age of 40 engaged in one of history's greatest alcoholic binges, such that life expectancy in Russia dropped for men during the 1990s. Actions speak loudly. Killing oneself with alcohol communicates how one really feels about the future.

We've seen something similar in the USA since the crash of 2008.

Until such time as we see real evidence of people acting in the way that we might expect happy people to behave, including planning for the future and taking care of one's health, don't believe a poll that says Americans are happy.

But still, in 1945, on VE day or VJ day, if you asked Americans "Are you happy?" obviously everyone would have said "Yes". This is well known. But what they were feeling was relief.

The same is true now. People feel relief, thinking the pandemic might be coming under control. Such relief is fickle. It could be different next month. It does not signal long term happiness.

Why was this downvoted? Does anyone disagree with the basic idea here? People's actions are more meaningful than what they say to a pollster. This should be obvious.

There are entire fields of medicine, including psychiatry and psychology, that believe surveying people on how depressed, anxious, etc. they feel is the scientific basis of research, diagnosis, and treatment.

Your idea to just ignore what people say is just totally out there...

Likewise, the literature that argues that these self-reports are worthless is also quite extensive:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-015-9710-0

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cant-buy-happiness/2...

Just spend 15 minutes researching the literature that argues against the value of self-reported happiness.

This has been discussed on Hacker News many times.

I don't disagree that self-reported happiness may be meaningless, but I strongly disagree with any implication that experts have some reference point to evaluate objective truth about mental states.

Psychiatric drugs are developed by surveying how patients feel. If there was some source of objective truth, based on understanding the mechanisms behind illness and medications, they'd use that.

Common sense tells you people are complex and unreliable, but that difficulty doesn't give experts a crystal ball to replace self-reporting.

You're raising a point that has no relevance to the conversation. Neither economists nor epidemiologists rely on self reporting. In the face of a large scale disaster, such as the rise in drug overdoses, self-reporting is meaningless and can be ignored. Economists have other ways of estimating the overall experience of the public, mostly looking at aggregate numbers that point back to some real experience.

Put a bit differently, if you know someone is an alcoholic, and they tell you that they are happy, you would be a complete idiot to believe them.

A poll saying that Americans are happy has a certain limited value that needs to be balanced against all of the other behaviors that Americans are currently exhibiting. If the average life span is falling because of excess "deaths of despair" that is a very large fact that you would be foolish to ignore.

"that difficulty doesn't give experts a crystal ball to replace self-reporting"

The entire profession of economics has devoted the last century to developing various aggregate numbers that give some reliable picture of the mood of the country -- reliable in the sense that investors can make actual decisions based on those numbers, with the results being good more often that bad.

Americans telling a pollster that they are happy is a fact that needs to be balanced against other facts, such as the decline in the formation of new firms, the spike in gun violence, the spike in drug overdoses, etc. Compared to people's real actions, a poll means very little.

It's amazing to me that such an obvious point should get so much push back on Hacker News.

>You're raising a point that has no relevance to the conversation. Neither economists nor epidemiologists rely on self reporting.

Your links were to stuff from psychologists, not economists or epidemiologists.

On the contrary, psychiatry and psychology measured very well how much people lie to themselves (in good faith) when answering questions.

That's why good psychological assessments have long lists of questions, poking at the same aspects from many different angles.

I think you might be uneducated on this issue. For starters, read the Wikipedia page on this subject:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_study

I just posted this for further discussion on a Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27953746

> people are famously bad at self-reported happiness

...especially in cultures where describing yourself as unhappy is seen as a personal failure.

Or expressing worries about climate change / soil depletion / ocean depletion / plastic pollution / deforestation is shunned as "being negative".

The amount of downvotes only proves the point.

Exactly. And even though this issue is sometimes discussed on Hacker News, I suspect that the people who are down voting me don’t know anything about this issue. For them, as a basic primer, I’d point them to the Wikipedia page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-report_study

Oh they are downvoting me as well. I guess the topic of happiness is touchy...

It’s a sad example of how much Hacker News has gone downhill. I can remember Hacker News 10 years ago, it was a beacon of rational thinking. But nowadays there is a lot more groupthink.

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