Yeah, re-reading my post it’s very handwave-y. However, a point you made about more good than bad / more bad than good stuck out to me. I wonder if a survey question “On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is every thing that happens to you is a bad thing, and 10 is every thing that happens to you is a good thing, what number would you give to your life?” would provide scores correlated with life satisfaction surveys. (Ideally we would simply track people and, every time a thing happened to them, ask them whether this thing was good or bad. Then we could collate the data and get a more accurate picture than self-reporting, but the gain doesn’t outweigh the sheer impracticality so I’ll be content with self-reported values).
I feel like if it correlated weakly, you would be right. And now that I think about the experiment, I’m fairly convinced it would come out correlated.
Yeah, re-reading my post it’s very handwave-y. However, a point you made about more good than bad / more bad than good stuck out to me. I wonder if a survey question “On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is every thing that happens to you is a bad thing, and 10 is every thing that happens to you is a good thing, what number would you give to your life?” would provide scores correlated with life satisfaction surveys. (Ideally we would simply track people and, every time a thing happened to them, ask them whether this thing was good or bad. Then we could collate the data and get a more accurate picture than self-reporting, but the gain doesn’t outweigh the sheer impracticality so I’ll be content with self-reported values).
I feel like if it correlated weakly, you would be right. And now that I think about the experiment, I’m fairly convinced it would come out correlated.