Did they take into account that Utah is an outlier within the US in the Religion aspect? Not that I expect that to be influential in the slightest.
So then suicides are a strong indicator of personal unhappiness but a potential indicator of overall social happiness. That is very interesting.
I know a decent portion of people on Less Wrong are utilitarians/consequentialists what are the implications of the results of this study from that perspective?
My first thought was that if everyone with a low happiness level had already committed suicide it would bump up the average happiness. I mean, the dead don’t answer those polls.
Killing the unhappy to make sure everyone is happy is an amoral solution, is my conclusion from a utilitarian perspective. Yep. Don’t do that. Engineering peeps with higher happiness set points seems the moral counterpart, but we can’t do that yet.
Thank you for that link, it was interesting.
Did they take into account that Utah is an outlier within the US in the Religion aspect? Not that I expect that to be influential in the slightest.
So then suicides are a strong indicator of personal unhappiness but a potential indicator of overall social happiness. That is very interesting.
I know a decent portion of people on Less Wrong are utilitarians/consequentialists what are the implications of the results of this study from that perspective?
My first thought was that if everyone with a low happiness level had already committed suicide it would bump up the average happiness. I mean, the dead don’t answer those polls.
Killing the unhappy to make sure everyone is happy is an amoral solution, is my conclusion from a utilitarian perspective. Yep. Don’t do that. Engineering peeps with higher happiness set points seems the moral counterpart, but we can’t do that yet.