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taw comments on Expected futility for humans - Less Wrong
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I don't agree with your arguments. First, nobody is proposing infinitely accurate utility function, just that a rough utility function is a good approximation of human behaviour descriptively and prescriptively.
As for your particular examples:
None of them is terribly convincing.
And arguing from consequences - the entire field of economics in pretty much all its forms is based on assumption that utility maximization is a good approximation of human behaviour. If utility funcitons aren't even that much, then the entire economics is worthless almost automatically. It doesn't seem to be entirely worthless, so utility functions seem to have some meaning.
Aggregation wouldn't really work unless utility function was a pretty decent approximation, and its errors were reasonably random.
Good point, especially when it comes to markets. You can have a lot of people acting in predictably irrational ways, and a few people who see an inefficiency and make large sums of money off of it, and the net result is a quite rational market.
Average of large number of functions that look nothing like U has little reason to look much like U. The fact that something like U turns out repetitively needs an explanation.
It's true that usually only a small portion of human behaviour is usually modeled at time, but utility maximization is composable, so you can take every single domain where utility maximization works, and compose it into one big utility maximization model - mathematically it should work (with some standard assumptions about types of error we have in small domain models, assumptions which might be false).
What I was trying to do was more trying to figure out rough approximation of my utility function descriptively, to see if any of my actions are extremely irrational - like wasting too much time/money on something I care about very little, or not spending some time/money on something I care about a lot.
Approximation is likely to be a list of "I value event X relative to default state at Y utilons", following economic tradition of focusing on the marginal. Skipping events from this list doesn't affect comparisons between events on the list.