conchis comments on Utilons vs. Hedons - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Psychohistorian 10 August 2009 07:20PM

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Comment author: conchis 13 August 2009 11:06:21AM *  0 points [-]

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.

  1. Preferences are a simply binary relation, that does not allow degrees of intensity. (I can rank A>B, but I can't say that I prefer A twice as much as B.) In contrast, the degree to which a world measures up to our values seems capable of degrees. (It could make sense for me to say that I value A twice as much as I value B.)
  2. The preferences in question are over gambles over world histories, whereas I assumed that the values in question were over world histories directly.

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.