Blueberry comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong

58 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 January 2010 07:08PM

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

Comments (930)

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

Comment author: Blueberry 26 January 2010 07:27:27PM 0 points [-]

Right, which is why I was saying that some ethical theories can't be expressed by a utility function. And there could be many such incomparable qualities: even adding in infinity and negative infinity may not be enough (though the transfinite ordinals, or the surreal numbers, might be).

I'm surprised at that +b, because that doesn't preserve utility ratios.

Comment author: komponisto 26 January 2010 07:48:11PM *  1 point [-]

Right, which is why I was saying that some ethical theories can't be expressed by a utility function.

Ah, I see. But I'm still not actually sure that's true, though...see below.

I'm surprised at that +b, because that doesn't preserve utility ratios.

Indeed not; utilities are measured on an interval scale, not a ratio scale. There's no "absolute zero". (I believe Eliezer made a youthful mistake along these lines, IIRC.) This expresses the fact that utility functions are just (scaled) preference orderings.