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Comment by kashyapc | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason why Kahneman famously gave up[1] on happiness research, because of our muddled thinking about it.

Instead, he argues (which I fully agree with) that we should focus on reducing misery. As a society it is far more difficult to agree on "maximizing well-being", but "minimizing suffering" is an objective we can all agree on as a measure of policy.

And he says, setting "reduction of misery" as an objective for policy would result in very different activities.

[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-no...

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This goes by "negative utilitarianism" and I love David Pearce's writings on the subject, including The Hedonistic Imperative.

[1] https://www.hedweb.com/negutil.htm

[2] https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/tabconhi.htm

That’s interesting, Schopenhauer (and, to my knowledge, the Vedantic tradition) define suffering to be the positive aspect (not as in good, but as in known or evident) and what we experience as happiness to be a negation of that.

I’d be interested on exploring this further, is it an active avenue of research?

For current work, Paul Bloom comes to mind: "The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering ..." Probably there are others too.

From about 50 years ago, I'd also highly recommend "Toward a Psychology of Being" by Abraham Maslow. What a writer!

That said, ideas about "graceful suffering" go back to the Greek and Roman Stoics from more 2000 years ago. Read some Seneca and Epictetus, I'd say. FWIW, I've written a detailed list of high-quality English translations here[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990579

This is the essence of Buddhism as well

Reduction of misery may also entail reduction of happiness

Could you elaborate how?

I think the reference might be that some versions of suffering focused ethics entails positions like antinatalism in the short term, and the extinction of suffering capable life as a great good in the long term.

considering the great amount of miserable, unworthy lives (factory farmed animals, heavily abused and tortured humans, etc) that exist and will likely exist even in some amount in even the "utopian" far future, it's reasonable for someone who doesn't think this all this can be counterweighed by any amount of pleasurable lives to consider permanent extinction as good.

and of course in the short term, suffering focused ethics may entail antinatalism as your children can't suffer, be abused, abuse animals, eat factory farmed meat if you just don't have children.

i.e. I'll never have to come down from meth if I don't get high on it.

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