New Podcast release: Daniel Kahneman

The second episode of "Lives Well Lived", the new podcast I am releasing with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, is now live.

In this episode, Kasia and I speak with Daniel Kahneman.  The interview was recorded just 4 days before, sadly, he died.  To give you a taste of what he said, here is some of the transcript, lightly edited for clarity.  You can listen to the full episode now, live on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.

On Wellbeing

Kasia de Lazari-Radek

What does it make to have a good life?

Daniel Kahneman

Well, in terms of the well-being of people, when you compare experienced well-being with evaluative well-being, with what people think about their lives, the most striking difference is that evaluative well-being is quite conventional. That is, success, education, having income are much more important to evaluative utility than to experienced utility. The experienced well-being depends primarily on how much time you spend with people you love. I mean, you know, if you had to choose one major determinant of happiness, that would be it. And if you were a full utilitarian, the less people spend with people they dislike, like their boss, for example, the better.  For some working people, working closely with the boss they dislike, is torture, many hours a day.

Peter Singer

Right. Yeah, we all know people with that experience.

Daniel Kahneman

So if you want to affect experience, that's important. But evaluation is something quite different.  So I became agnostic between valuing experienced utility and evaluative utility, that is, how people thing about their lives.  When it comes to evaluative utility, first, it is conventional success. Second, the ending has a big effect on the quality of the story

Peter Singer

as Hollywood knows.

Daniel Kahneman

In a talk I gave, I described an experience that I found very striking, that somebody was telling me after my talk that he had an experience. And the experience was of listening to a piece of music on a record, and at the end of the symphony there was a terrible screeching sound and, he added, it ruined the whole experience. And I told him, no, you had the experience. You'd had 20 minutes of very good music, but it ruined the memory of the experience which is really separate. So separating those two, that's my only contribution to the study of well-being is to try to go along between those two.

Kasia de Lazari-Radek

It's a huge contribution.

Peter Singer

One of the things we're interested in exploring in this podcast series is the extent to which feeling that you have contributed something to the world in various ways is a part of that story. And that might be because you helped people in some ways, that you were concerned, you worked for some cause, in which you maybe made some progress or...perhaps that you contributed to knowledge, in the case of a scientist. Do you find this is true for ordinary people, and not only for people who have had exceptional lives.

Daniel Kahneman

You pick that up actually very little. And that's the whole issue of meaningful life. And we ran a study on this. I don't even remember whether it was published or not. But we asked people at the end of a day what were the best moments of their day. And we were thinking that if meaning is very important, then when people would tell you the best moment of my day would be a meaningful moment. It was actually really mostly a social moment. It was a moment they spent with somebody else, and happily.

it wasn't that there were no mentions of transcendental experiences, but they're very rare. I have a friend and former post-doc who does experience sampling studies where you measure actual experience and he measures meaning. He asked people was it a meaningful experience… So when you stop to think about it... putting diapers on a baby is a meaningful experience. But when you're doing it, most of the time it's not a meaningful experience. So meaning is something that comes up when people ask themselves about meaning. That is my view. Now, it is disproportionately important when you evaluate your life. So when you evaluate your life, for many people, not everybody - not in particular for me, I think - the question of whether your life has meaning looms quite large. So people who have been involved in causes and have contributed and have made a difference to individuals or to society, who have tried to make a difference and were deliberate about it, will have a better view of their own life than people who have dedicated themselves to their own pleasure.