So that’s some reason to distrust the assertion that happiness reports accurately report something that we should consider morally weighty.
I thought we where Bayesians here? It certainly is evidence people are happy or unhappy. We generally consider people’s happiness or at least mental suffering to have moral weight.
Yes, that was a bit of loose language. I agree with you that self-reports are reasonable measures of mood—and that mood is entitled to some moral weight.
But Multi discussed some reasons to believe that reports of mood are pliable and unrepresentative.
My point was broader: There’s no particular reason to believe that positive mood is the same thing as, or even correlated with, utility. Utilitarians seek to maximize utility, not positive mood (infinite orgasms is not generally accepted as the utilitarian utopia).
Issues that you already know to poke holes in a simplistic model of “happniess”:
Stockholm Syndrome; enforced and coercive signaling games around happiness; wireheading; “forced orgasms” of various kinds; smiles painted on soul; internalized self-deception under social pressure not to betray unhappniess with the “virtuous” life; the structures of “Libidinal economy” and the assorted Freudo-Marxian stuff...
The family is the agent to which capitalist production delegates the psychological repression of the desires of the child.[41] Psychological repression is distinguished from social oppression insofar as it works unconsciously.[42] Through it, Deleuze and Guattari argue, parents transmit their angst and irrational fears to their child and bind the child’s sexual desires to feelings of shame and guilt.
Psychological repression is strongly linked with social oppression, which levers on it. It is thanks to psychological repression that individuals are transformed into docile servants of social repression who come to desire self-repression and who accept a miserable life as employees for capitalism.[43] A capitalist society needs a powerful tool to counteract the explosive force of desire, which has the potential to threaten its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy; the nuclear family is precisely the powerful tool able to counteract those forces.[44]
The action of the family not only performs a psychological repression of desire, but it disfigures it, giving rise to a consequent neurotic desire, the perversion of incestuous drives and desiring self-repression,[44] as also said by Foucault in the preface, loving power and desiring “the very thing that dominates and exploit us.”[45] The Oedipus complex arises from this double operation: “It is in one and the same movement that the repressive social production is replaced by the repressing family, and that the latter offers a displaced image of desiring-production that represents the repressed as incestuous familial drives.”
You can probably see my line of objection, ja? I think you haven’t given it as much serious consideration as I have given the far-right worldview, dude.
P.S. a quick google search also reveals that Alice Miller, a psychologist who survived Warsaw under the Nazis, has written a lot about abusive family structures from an anti-patriarchal/anti-authoritarian standpoint. Here is some anarchist (?) type ranting/blogging about the implications of Miller.
P.P.S. a paper that, in defense of Deleuze, criticizes Zizek’s critique and rejection of Anti-Oedipus.
Yes lots of other possibilities, I’m well aware of those. I wanted to emphasize it that the simple truth is, that when people say they are happy, you should take it as evidence they generally are happy or at least not suffering. I did this because if this isn’t pointed out people will avoid updating as much as they should using the possibility of different explanations as a rationalization.
Be honest, do you think you would feel the need to invoke or investigate those alternative possibilities to explain away greater self-reported happiness in nations with lower GINI coefficents? We apply different standards of discourse for different institutions without having good reason to do so.
Politics is motivated cognition all the way down my friend.
This depends not just on your definition of “happiness”, but also on your definition of “say” :) How many pre-Victorian narratives by women/queers are you able to name at all without digging into Google? Only Jane Austen… and Mary Shelley’s mom… and 1-2 others, I bet.
So, a lot of women might have, without having to worry their pretty little heads, “said” that they are happy through the testimony of their kind and caring husbands. Much like the Soviet people reported their happiness and contentment through their lawfully elected, not-at-all-rubberstamp representatives. Note that those second-hand assertions hardly ever mention sexual consent/rape or corporal punishment or other such things that we’re curious about when assessing marriage. So could you please provide me with some statistics for e.g. matrial rape in 1700s Britain, to support your likely claim that it was not a serious problem? I’d be (pleasantly!) surprised if you could.
(What I wouldn’t be surprised at is you quoting Three Worlds Collide about the space of possible attitudes to sexual consent. Well, as you can see sam0345 also has… interesting… views on consent. Isn’t this evidence of how terribly dangerous—not just promising—it might be for us to become less paranoid and more tolerant in regards to patriarchy?)
I thought we where Bayesians here? It certainly is evidence people are happy or unhappy. We generally consider people’s happiness or at least mental suffering to have moral weight.
Yes, that was a bit of loose language. I agree with you that self-reports are reasonable measures of mood—and that mood is entitled to some moral weight.
But Multi discussed some reasons to believe that reports of mood are pliable and unrepresentative.
My point was broader: There’s no particular reason to believe that positive mood is the same thing as, or even correlated with, utility. Utilitarians seek to maximize utility, not positive mood (infinite orgasms is not generally accepted as the utilitarian utopia).
Issues that you already know to poke holes in a simplistic model of “happniess”:
Stockholm Syndrome; enforced and coercive signaling games around happiness; wireheading; “forced orgasms” of various kinds; smiles painted on soul; internalized self-deception under social pressure not to betray unhappniess with the “virtuous” life; the structures of “Libidinal economy” and the assorted Freudo-Marxian stuff...
You can probably see my line of objection, ja? I think you haven’t given it as much serious consideration as I have given the far-right worldview, dude.
P.S. a quick google search also reveals that Alice Miller, a psychologist who survived Warsaw under the Nazis, has written a lot about abusive family structures from an anti-patriarchal/anti-authoritarian standpoint. Here is some anarchist (?) type ranting/blogging about the implications of Miller.
P.P.S. a paper that, in defense of Deleuze, criticizes Zizek’s critique and rejection of Anti-Oedipus.
Yes lots of other possibilities, I’m well aware of those. I wanted to emphasize it that the simple truth is, that when people say they are happy, you should take it as evidence they generally are happy or at least not suffering. I did this because if this isn’t pointed out people will avoid updating as much as they should using the possibility of different explanations as a rationalization.
Be honest, do you think you would feel the need to invoke or investigate those alternative possibilities to explain away greater self-reported happiness in nations with lower GINI coefficents? We apply different standards of discourse for different institutions without having good reason to do so.
Politics is motivated cognition all the way down my friend.
This depends not just on your definition of “happiness”, but also on your definition of “say” :) How many pre-Victorian narratives by women/queers are you able to name at all without digging into Google? Only Jane Austen… and Mary Shelley’s mom… and 1-2 others, I bet.
So, a lot of women might have, without having to worry their pretty little heads, “said” that they are happy through the testimony of their kind and caring husbands. Much like the Soviet people reported their happiness and contentment through their lawfully elected, not-at-all-rubberstamp representatives. Note that those second-hand assertions hardly ever mention sexual consent/rape or corporal punishment or other such things that we’re curious about when assessing marriage. So could you please provide me with some statistics for e.g. matrial rape in 1700s Britain, to support your likely claim that it was not a serious problem? I’d be (pleasantly!) surprised if you could.
(What I wouldn’t be surprised at is you quoting Three Worlds Collide about the space of possible attitudes to sexual consent. Well, as you can see sam0345 also has… interesting… views on consent. Isn’t this evidence of how terribly dangerous—not just promising—it might be for us to become less paranoid and more tolerant in regards to patriarchy?)