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DanielLC comments on If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help - Less Wrong
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True, but eyesight is awesome whether or not I explicitly think about it. I'm happy because I have eyesight. It's just that there's a somewhat longer chain of causality than if I'm happy that I have eyesight. I have eyesight, therefore I can use a monitor, therefore I can use the internet, therefore I can do fun stuff on the internet, therefore I am happy.
It follows that blind people are, as a class, less happy than sighted people.
How confident are you of that?
I'm not sure that's true. They'l just have to support their happiness in other ways. And how many blind people would really be unhappy to gain the ability to see? I don't know that there's a 'blind culture' in the same way there is a 'deaf culture' which advocates deafness.
I don't assert that there are many blind people who would be unhappy if they gained the ability to see. Possibly there are none at all.
If blind people and sighted people are equally happy (albeit for different reasons), I suppose DanielLC's comment can still be true, so fair enough: you're right. My conclusion doesn't strictly follow, I was making inferences about their model. (I suspect they were true inferences, but I was still overconfident.)
Coming in late, but... This is a matter of debate among the blind people I've encountered.
There are generally three groups: those who had sight but lost it, who would be eager to get their sight back, and come across as less happy in some ways, though there are some who adjust well enough that it isn't soul-crushing outside of certain situations.
There are people blind from near birth who think gaining sight would solve lots of problems, like finding employment or being taken seriously by others. These people seem to be imagining magic, and not how sight restoration and adapting to a new sense work in the real world.
And there are people who are blind from near birth, and are relatively happy like they are, and wouldn't want to deal with inserting a completely new sense into their brain when they function well enough already.
It isn't clear how these map to happiness, but it generally seems that people blind from near birth are on average happier than people who lost their sight after developing substantial visual memory. (I haven't actually sought after statistics; this is just based on my observations).