wedrifid comments on The Difference Between Utility and Utility - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Matt_Simpson 02 December 2009 06:16AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (16)
Tags: metaethics

Comments (16)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 December 2009 02:33:51AM *  0 points [-]

That is really immaterial though and computationally moot. Ok so his "utility function" is negative. Is that it, is that the difference? Besides, I would argue that reevaluating it on those terms does a poor job of actually describing motivation in a coherent set.

No. His utility from murder is greater than his utility from not-murder. Cops describe this as 'motive'.

One cannot successfully separate economics from ethics ( I would argue for all but the explicitly classifying sciences (Chemistry, Cladistics etc...) this holds true).

Yes one can. It is much like chemistry. We can say "GDP should be increased" just was we can say "electricity should be produced". But it is better to just let chemistry say "if you put a plate of lead peroxide and a plate of lead metal in sulfuric acid you can generate electricity" and much the same for economics.

If we are simply talking about mathematical notation, then feel free to slap a negative sign on the expected utility portion for terrorists in the "aggregate worldwide utility" formula.

If you want to. But if your intention is to understand or predict the behaviours of terrorists you don't want to consider that 'aggregate worldwide utility formula'. That's useless. You want to consider the utility of the terrorists, at the appropriate level of detail.

It still won't make any sense in practice.

Huh? Yes it will. You mean "you will still find it undesirable and or hard for you to understand".

Comment author: AndrewKemendo 05 December 2009 05:18:35AM *  1 point [-]

See my response here

You want to consider the utility of the terrorists, at the appropriate level of detail.

Huh? Yes it will. You mean "you will still find it undesirable and or hard for you to understand".

What are the units for expected utility? How do you measure them? Can you graph my utility function?

I can look at behaviors of people and say that on this day Joe bought 5 apples and 4 oranges, on this day he bought 2 kiwis, 2 apples and no oranges etc...but that data doesn't reliably forecast expected utility for oranges. There are so many exogenous variables that the data is reliably unreliable.

I have yet to see a researcher give a practical empirical formula mapping the utility of a person or group. I argue it is because it is impossible (currently), thus trying to do so doesn't make sense in practice. I have however, as demonstrated in the link previously, seen formulas which imply weighted preference set's. Those aren't any more useful or descriptive than saying that Joe prefers apples to oranges.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit