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wedrifid comments on The utility curve of the human population - Less Wrong
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This isn't clear. Preferences of any actual human seem to form a directed graph, but it's incomplete and can contain cycles. Any way to transform it into a complete acyclic graph (any pair of situations comparable, no preference loops) must differ from the original graph somewhere. Different algorithms will destroy different facets of actual human preference, but there's certainly no algorithm that can preserve all of it; that much we can consider already proven beyond reasonable doubt. It's not obvious to me that there's a single, well-defined, canonical way to perform this surgery.
And it's not at all obvious that going from a single human to an aggregate of all humanity will mitigate the problem (see Torture vs Specks). That's just too many leaps of faith.
I agree/upvoted your point. Human preferences are cyclic. I'd go further and say that without at least having a preference graph that is acyclic it is not possible to optimise a decision at all. The very thought seems meaningless.
Assuming one can establish coherent preferences the question of whether one should optimise for expected utility encounters a further complication. Many human preferences are refer to our actions and not outcomes. An agent could in fact decide to optimise for making 'Right' choices and to hell with the consequences. They could choose not to optimise for expected utility. Of course, it seems like that choice was the one with the highest expected value in their rather wacky utility function.
It's not an observation that warrants much more than those three words and the comma but it seems to me that either you are optimising a decision for expected utility or you are doing some other thing than optimising. 'Expected utility' just happens to be the name given to value in the function you use if you are optimising a decision.