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timtyler comments on Utilons vs. Hedons - Less Wrong
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Re: I'm going to use "utilons" to refer to value utility units and "hedons" to refer to experiential utility units.
This seems contrary to the usage of the LessWrong Wiki:
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Utilon
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Hedon
The Wiki has the better usage - much better usage.
Then what's the difference between "pleasure unit" and "experiential utility unit"?
We can experience things other than pleasure.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my usage is entirely consistent with the wiki usage, if not basically identical.
Interesting, I'd assumed your definitions of utilon were subtly different, but perhaps I was reading too much into your wording.
The wiki definition focuses on preference: utilons are the output of a set of vNM-consistent preferences over gambles.
Your definition focuses on "values": utilons are a measure of the extent to which a given world history measures up according to your values.
These are not necessarily inconsistent, but I'd assumed (perhaps wrongly) that they differed in two respects.
I've started calling what-I-thought-you-meant "valutilons", to avoid confusion between that concept and the definition of utilons that seems more common here (and which is reflected in the wiki). We'll see how that goes.
Wiki says: hedons are "Utilons generated by fulfilling base desires".
Article says: hedons are "experiential utility units". Seems different to me.
If you are still talking about Hedons and Utilons - and if we go by the wiki, then no difference - since Hedons are a subset of Utilons, and are therefore measured in the same units.
Not true. Even according to the wiki's usage.
What the Wiki says is: "Utilons generated by fulfilling base desires are hedons". I think it follows from that that Utilons and Hedons have the same units.
I don't much like the Wiki on these issues - but I do think it a better take on the definitions than this post.
I was objecting to the subset claim, not the claim about unit equivalence. (Mainly because somebody else had just made the same incorrect claim elsewhere in the comments to this post.)
As it happens, I'm also happy to object to claim about unit equivalence, whatever the wiki says. (On what seems to be the most common interpretation of utilons around these parts, they don't even have a fixed origin or scale: the preference orderings they represent are invariant to affine transforms of the utilons.)
My original claim was about what the Wiki says. Outside that context we would have to start by stating definitions of Hedons and Utilons before there could be much in the way of sensible conversation.