How to Find Out How a Condition Affects Your Life

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It seems really tricky to ask just regular people, you know, how much is one year of healthy life worth in terms of years of blind life or years of disabled life? And with different disabilities, et cetera. Like, I don't understand how people would know that unless they have experienced those states. Are there attempts to do this with people who, let's say, had gone blind and then they actually have the ability to compare and then you can ask them? Yeah. There are these differences between what when you ask individuals themselves and then when you ask the other people to imagine.

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Researchers in the Effective Altruism movement often view their work through a utilitarian lens, so why haven't they traditionally paid much attention to the psychological research into subjective wellbeing (i.e., people's self-reported levels of happiness, life satisfaction, feelings of purpose and meaning in life, etc.)? Are such subjective measures reliable and accurate? Or rather, which such measures are the most reliable and accurate? What are the pros and cons of using QALYs and DALYs to quantify wellbeing? Why is there sometimes a disconnect between the projected level of subjective wellbeing of a health condition and its actual level (e.g., some people can learn to manage and cope with "major" diseases, but some people with "minor" conditions like depression or anxiety might be in a constant state of agony)? What are some new and promising approaches to quantifying wellbeing? The EA movement typically uses the criteria of scale, neglectedness, and tractability for prioritizing cause areas; is that framework still relevant and useful? How do those criteria apply on a personal level? And how do those criteria taken together differ conceptually from cost-effectiveness? How effective are psychological interventions at improving subjective wellbeing? How well do such interventions work in different cultures? How can subjective wellbeing measures be improved? How can philosophers help us do good better?

Michael Plant is the Founder and Director of the Happier Lives Institute, a non-profit research institute that searches for the most cost-effective ways to increase global well-being. Michael is also a Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, Oxford. He has a PhD in Philosophy from Oxford, and his thesis, entitled Doing Good Badly? Philosophical Issues Related to Effective Altruism, was supervised by Peter Singer and Hilary Greaves.

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